This is a very quick post, before I dash to the airport. I'll be in Singapore for the rest of this week at Telco 2.0's New Digital Economics event, speaking on both Mobile Broadband, and also on the telco-world implications of HTML5. More to follow on that topic another time.
I was out with a friend last night, and he bemoaned the fact that he can't easily adjust the number of rings his phone does before it diverts to voicemail. (He's using an Android handset on a major operator). He said he'd been able to do something via some obscure code like *7529# , but it had taken him ages to find it - and he's a serious geek as well.
It struck me that this is the sort of thing that should be done via an app, linked to the voicemail server. (I don't know if Apple's visual voicemail allows this, or 3rd-party consumer options like ON VoiceFeed, but this is just about the normal operator-provided vmail).
More broadly, there's a ton of supplementary services and other legacy IN stuff around in the telephony space that never really gets properly thought about, except how much of a pain it is in terms of ensuring backward-compatiblity. Why? Why isn't there a decent operator-provided app for voicemail, 3-way calling or whatever other features they've got? Who cares if it only works on some people's phones - and who cares if it emulates *# codes or hooks directly into the server?
It's this type of thing that Martin Geddes and I mean when we say that the basic telephony service hasn't evolved. You don't need to go to HD Voice or even application-embedded voice to make a difference - nobody seems to have sat back and thought "how can we make telephony 1.0 work better, given the tools we've got at our disposal?". Yes, I'm sure there are security issues - but sort them!
Anyone got an answer to why there's no easy "configure my voicemail" app? Or even a web interface through the operator self-care portal?
[or maybe there are examples, but I'm not aware of them. In which case, an alternative question is "why don't you tell anyone about this?"]
I was out with a friend last night, and he bemoaned the fact that he can't easily adjust the number of rings his phone does before it diverts to voicemail. (He's using an Android handset on a major operator). He said he'd been able to do something via some obscure code like *7529# , but it had taken him ages to find it - and he's a serious geek as well.
It struck me that this is the sort of thing that should be done via an app, linked to the voicemail server. (I don't know if Apple's visual voicemail allows this, or 3rd-party consumer options like ON VoiceFeed, but this is just about the normal operator-provided vmail).
More broadly, there's a ton of supplementary services and other legacy IN stuff around in the telephony space that never really gets properly thought about, except how much of a pain it is in terms of ensuring backward-compatiblity. Why? Why isn't there a decent operator-provided app for voicemail, 3-way calling or whatever other features they've got? Who cares if it only works on some people's phones - and who cares if it emulates *# codes or hooks directly into the server?
It's this type of thing that Martin Geddes and I mean when we say that the basic telephony service hasn't evolved. You don't need to go to HD Voice or even application-embedded voice to make a difference - nobody seems to have sat back and thought "how can we make telephony 1.0 work better, given the tools we've got at our disposal?". Yes, I'm sure there are security issues - but sort them!
Anyone got an answer to why there's no easy "configure my voicemail" app? Or even a web interface through the operator self-care portal?
[or maybe there are examples, but I'm not aware of them. In which case, an alternative question is "why don't you tell anyone about this?"]
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