Author: Kevin Fitchard

Few mobile carrier press conferences attract the attention of an Apple or Samsung event, but there are a lot of expectations building around T-Mobile USA’s “Uncarrier” shindig taking place Tuesday morning. T-Mobile hasn’t officially revealed any specifics about what it will announce at 11 a.m. ET at New York’s Art + Technology Center, but there have been a lot of hints, leaks and speculation.

I don’t know for certain what will emerge at the event tomorrow, but I expect we’ll hear at least one, if not all, of the following three revelations:

T-Mobile finally gets the iPhone

The build-up to this single handset announcement has been endless, but tomorrow may well be the day that T-Mobile officially becomes an iPhone retailer. T-Mobile has confirmed the iPhone is coming. It just hadn’t set a date.

According to CNET’s sources, the iPhone will play a prominent role at tomorrow’s event. That’s sweet, but T-Mobile really needs to give specifics on availability and pricing tomorrow or it really shouldn’t even bother mentioning the iconic Apple device. Practically every discussion about T-Mobile USA for the last two years has revolved around when or if it would get the iPhone. As T-Mo has made abundantly clear, it’s getting the iPhone. The only thing we want to know is when we can buy it.

LTE goes live

This one is almost a given. T-Mobile has promised we’ll see a live LTE network this month, and there are only a few more days left in March. We’ve already seen a big spike in LTE testing activity in eight major cities across the country, and TMoNews has obtained internal documents indicating T-Mobile will launch in seven markets this week.

Either way, the carrier is well ahead of schedule. After its planned merger with AT&T flopped, T-Mobile launched an ambitious spectrum-refarming project designed to give it an LTE network in the second half of 2013. The impending launch of the iPhone, however, gives its LTE rollout new urgency since it wants to support the iPhone 5’s full radio capabilities as soon as it goes on sale.

Death to all device subsidies

New CEO John Legere has promised T-Mobile will remake the mobile industry by ending its long practice of heavily discounting devices in exchange for long-term pricey service contracts.

We’ve already seen the basic framework of that strategy emerge over the last year in T-Mobile’s Value plans, which still require contracts but offer much lower voice and data rates. Over the weekend, T-Mobile revamped its Value plans once again, making unlimited voice and SMS standard on all pricing tiers.

What we’re still waiting to hear about are the specifics of T-Mobile’s big strategy – to see whether it can truly separate service from the handset. Many operators have complained about the subsidy system in the past, but so far T-Mobile is the only major U.S. carrier to do anything about it.

What I’m waiting to see is whether T-Mobile truly follows through on its commitment to eliminating subsidies completely or if it just maintains its current policy of offering unsubsidized plans as an option. If it’s the former, T-Mo would take a huge risk, but it could change the U.S. mobile industry for the better.

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Oracle isn’t quite done shopping in the telecom market. On Monday it announced it is acquiring Tekelec, a company that specializes in controlling the flow of data throughout mobile and wireline networks.

In February, Oracle announced it would buy VoIP signaling vendor Acme Packet for $1.7 billion. The terms of the Tekelec deal weren’t disclosed. Once it closes on both investments, Oracle is set to become a signaling powerhouse.

Tekelec specializes in the signaling protocols and load balancing technologies that prevent mobile networks from getting overloaded. For instance, the outages Verizon experienced on its LTE network in late 2011 were partially attributable to signaling overload. Meanwhile, Acme Packet makes session border controllers (SBCs), which manages VoIP and multimedia control traffic that pass between carrier and enterprise networks.

Oracle, however, will get more out of Tekelec than just signaling expertise. Tekelec is also a big player in the traffic-shaping world. Mobile operators use its policy servers to prioritize bits from certain type of applications – and certain subscribers’ – over others. The result is a bunch of things most of you don’t often find pleasant, such as throttling back your data speeds when you exceed your monthly cap or detecting when you use your phone as a mobile hotspot and charging you extra for it.

But eventually those same policy management features will be used for a much broader range of features and tailored data plans. Jasper Wireless is using Tekelec traffic shaping technology to make data flow more smoothly in the internet of things, for example. And operators are weighing new types of tiered data plans that allow customers to customize their network connections based on the types of apps they use.

“Oracle has in the past partnered to provide these capabilities, but by bringing them in-house it will have more opportunity to shape the roadmap and combine the capabilities in a more tightly-coupled solution,” Ovum Principal Analyst Dana Cooperson said in a research note. “Expect Oracle’s telecom-focused competitors (Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Ericsson, etc.) and it’s IT-focused competitors (HP, SAP, SAS Institute) to do more strategic soul-searching and, as their financial situation allows, to pursue acquisitions of their own.”

Many of them already have. Cisco Systems bought policy management firm BroadHop in December, while Citrix System acquired ByteMobile.

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Automakers are coaxing entertainment apps out of the smartphone and into the dashboard, turning the connected car into the next big mobile services platform. But a new startup in San Francisco called Joyride is wondering why you would even bother with dashboard software development if the tools for making a good in-car app are already in the smartphone.

Joyride is creating a voice user interface for the smartphone designed to function much like the voice command-and-control systems in your car. Founders Jeff Chen and James Zhang created Skyvi, a voice-assistant app for Android that received 5 million downloads. With the help of $1 million in seed funding, they’re now building similar voice-interaction technology into Joyride with the aim of creating a game, entertainment and education platform that is fully hands-free. Though you could use its app anywhere, Joyride CEO Chen said, it’s most useful within the restrictive confines of the car.

Joyride plans to launch an Android app in the next few months — right now it’s in a private beta — and its first service will be a trivia game Chen described as “a hands-free version of Words With Friends.” But Joyride plans to layer more games and services on top of the app, and will eventually invite outside developers to embed their own applications into the Joyride app framework.

“Think of Joyride as a portal,” Chen said. “It’s an enabling technology intended for people to build things on top of.” Joyride would be the overarching brand and its voice technology would not only power the apps themselves, but allow you to navigate between them. The first Joyride apps will be games, but Chen hopes to layer on any manner of service that lends itself to voice interaction, from audiobooks and music streaming to highly interactive language-learning apps.

Joyride makes use of the car’s stereo system through an auxiliary jack or a Bluetooth connection, though the app doesn’t actually tap into any connected car software or OS — it’s just using the speakers. From there, all interactions are done via voice — it makes use of Google’s speech API — requiring  no actual physical input, Chen said. The approach also has the advantage of making the app car agnostic. If you can connect your iPod to the car, you can connect Joyride.

Joyride’s $1 million seed round comes Cowboy Ventures and Freestyle Capital as well as from angel investor and Turnable.fm co-founder Seth Goldstein, who is also Joyride’s executive chairman.

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Julius Genachowski will step down as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, confirming press reports Thursday of his planned resignation. An FCC statement on Friday said he would depart in “coming weeks” even though his term expires this year.

President Obama nominated Genachowski to the commission in 2009, where he oversaw some fairly momentous -– and controversial — FCC actions: the creation of the National Broadband Plan, the quashing of AT&T-Mo and the approval of Verizon’s plan to cooperate with the cable companies on residential broadband.

Here’s the full text of Genachowski’s statement:

“Over the past four years, we’ve focused the FCC on broadband, wired and wireless, working to drive economic growth and improve the lives of all Americans. And thanks to you, the Commission’s employees, we’ve taken big steps to build a future where broadband is ubiquitous and bandwidth is abundant, where innovation and investment are flourishing.

“To connect all Americans to broadband, we adopted a landmark overhaul of multi-billion dollar universal service programs, modernizing them from telephone to broadband and creating the Connect America Fund and the Mobility Fund, an unprecedented commitment to broadband infrastructure.

“To unleash the enormous opportunities of mobile, we pioneered incentive auctions and other cutting-edge spectrum policies.

“To fuel America’s innovation economy, we put in place the first rules to preserve Internet freedom and openness.
“To drive competition and empower consumers, we opposed and modified transactions where necessary, deployed technology to drive transparency, and took unprecedented enforcement actions.

“We helped harness the power of digital technologies to give students a better chance, people better health care, and make Americans safer in their homes and communities, while also guarding against digital threats and strengthening cybersecurity.

“Today, America’s broadband economy is thriving, with record-setting private investment; unparalleled innovation in networks, devices and apps; and renewed U.S. leadership around the world.

“While there are challenges ahead in this fast-moving, globally competitive sector, a revitalized FCC is prepared to continue taking them on. I’m deeply grateful to President Obama for his vision, friendship, and the opportunity to serve our country.

“I’m proud of what we’ve done together to harness technology to advance the American dream for the 21st century. I know you’ll continue to fight hard to fulfill this agency’s vital mission, and I look forward to continuing to work together until my last day at the agency, and to count you as family and as an inspiration for long after that.”

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T-Mobile will launch its much-anticipated LTE network next week, but thanks to OpenSignal we’ve gotten what is probably an early preview of T-Mo’s launch markets. OpenSignal collects crowdsourced signal and speed test data from phones all over the country, and a lot of T-Mobile LTE data points have started popping up on its map.

OpenSignal has recorded more than 1,500 signal strength readings in eight metropolitan areas from devices connected to T-Mobile’s network: Denver, Kansas City, Las Vegas, New Orleans, New York City, San Diego, Seattle and the Bay Area. OpenSignal has mapped those signal readings on its blog, though it represents multiple signal readings as single data points, largely to respect the privacy of the testers.

Though the network isn’t commercially launched, OpenSignal CEO Brendan Gill told me that its crowdsourced app is popular with engineers at all of the carriers for ad hoc network measurements. What we’re most likely seeing, Gill said, is a bunch of technical workers from T-Mobile and its vendor partners that have the OpenSignal app loaded and running on their test devices. A good indication of this is that one of the devices sending data is a Samsung Galaxy S4, which isn’t yet available to the general public.

T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray has already confirmed that its LTE network is complete in Las Vegas and Kansas City, so test data from those cities is hardly a surprise. We’ve also seen evidence of the network in NYC: A GigaOM reader mapped out a cluster of cells in Astoria, Queens, and T-Mobile has given several live 4G demos to reporters in Manhattan.

The other five areas are new, but because of their importance you would expect them to show up early on T-Mobile’s national rollout schedule. OpenSignal recorded the biggest concentrations of tests in San Jose, Calif., and surrounding Bay Area cities like Mountain View, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale. OpenSignal even tracked tests in the East Bay, but recorded none in San Francisco proper.

The Seattle area had the second highest concentration of readings, many of them around Bellevue, which just happens to be the location of T-Mobile’s national headquarters. Las Vegas yielded many data points as well, though the signal readings in Denver, Kansas City, New Orleans, New York and San Diego were much more sparse.

OpenSignal also recorded about a dozen speed tests on T-Mobile’s LTE network, averaging an impressive 25 Mbps on the downlink and 8 Mbps on the uplink (though keep in mind that the network is largely empty so there’s no congestion). The speed tests were so few because they must be manually initiated, while OpenSignal’s app takes signal strength readings automatically on a regular basis.

Gill said that he’s fairly convinced that these eight markets will be among the first to launch based on the activity OpenSignal is tracking, though he cautioned that his conclusions don’t constitute a scientific study. The results are dependent on a fairly limited pool of people using OpenSignal’s app, so there are likely many more cities with live LTE networks that the company couldn’t track.

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The Wall Street Journal has it that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski will resign tomorrow, clearing the way for President Obama to appoint the head of the country’s primary communications regulatory agency for the second time. The Journal cited two unnamed sources, one an official within the FCC.

Update: A spokesman from the FCC Chairman’s office declined to comment on the Journal story.

Genachowski replaced Kevin Martin (and interim FCC chairman Michael Copps) in 2009 after being nominated by Obama. Genachowski worked on Obama’s first presidential campaign as chairperson of his Technology, Media and Telecommunications Policy Working Group. The working group germinated the seeds of Obama’s National Broadband Plan, which Genachowski oversaw when he took over the reins of the commission.

Since then Genachowski has been in the spotlight on many occasions, advocating the need for more cellular spectrum and proposing the reallocation of TV airwaves for mobile broadband use. Some of those spectrum proposals, however, landed Genachowski and the commission in hot water, such as the conditional waiver -– later retracted — they granted LightSquared to use its satellite spectrum for a terrestrial LTE network.

Perhaps the most controversial period of his tenure, though, was the nearly one year that the FCC weighed and eventually quashed AT&T’s planned acquisition of T-Mobile. The decision is considered a victory for the competitive market and consumer choice after a long period of unfettered consolidation in the telecom industry.

Not all of the commission’s decisions have been so consumer friendly under Genachowski. The commission let pass Verizon’s spectrum deal with the cable operators, which has big implications for competition in the residential broadband market.

Genachowski’s retirement, if true, doesn’t come as a huge surprise. News reports have indicated that the forthcoming departure of Republican FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell clears the way for Genachowski’s departure as well, as it leaves the commission with a 2-1 Democratic majority.

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Verizon Wireless just updated its messaging service with an interesting and extremely useful feature. The carrier will now allow you to send text and multimedia messages from your PC or tablet just as you would from your phone.

The new integrated messaging feature basically divorces Verizon’s SMS service from the device it’s attached to, virtualizing the customer’s messaging client in an Android tablet or iPad app or within a web browser. In the PC, You can activate the service in the My Messaging tab once logged into the Verizon’s customer portal. So long as the messaging portal remains open messages will start popping up in your PC (Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer and Firefox are supported, though Explorer won’t receive pop-up notifications). On the tablet, the service works like any other messaging apps, spawning push notifications whenever a new SMS or MMS is received.

The service works very similar to many SMS forwarding and cloud-based SMS applications we’ve seen from messaging outfits like MightyText, Zipwhip or DeskSMS. The difference between, say, a MightyText and Verizon Messaging, is Verizon isn’t intercepting messages as they reach the phone. They’re coming straight from Verizon SMS infrastructure, and require no phone client. You can utilize the service no matter what kind of mobile phone you use or whether the phone is even turned on or connected.

As over-the-top messaging services like WhatsApp, Pinger, TextMe and TextPlus, as well as platform-specific apps like Apple’s iMessage and BlackBerry Messenger, carriers are starting to see more messaging traffic move off their traditional SMS networks. Operators like Rogers in Canada – and now Verizon – have been trying to combat that trend by expanding their communications capabilities (and the phone number associated with them) beyond the phone.

It will be interesting to see if Verizon uses this as a building block for more cloud communications services. It could start virtualizing the phone’s voice capabilities in the browser or tablet, turning it into a mobile carrier version of Skype or Google Voice.

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When Continuuity CEO and founder Todd Papaioannou was setting up Yahoo’s architecture it was like his home-brew computing club days all over again. As Chief Cloud Architect, Papaioannou and his 120-person team were tasked with setting up 45,000 Hadoop servers in Yahoo’s 400,000 node private cloud.

The idea was to create a stable platform over which 5,000 Yahoo developers could build their applications. What Papaioannou wound up with was “a bunch of redneck architecture.” Every team took bits of code from here libraries from there and cobbled together something a clever teenager might cobble together in his garage — except on a massive scale. Once the architecture was in place it took developers four or five months to launch applications and innovation stalled.

“In case you haven’t been paying attention, Yahoo may have had a few product issues from time to time,” Papaioannou told an audience Thursday at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York City.

What Papaioannou learned from the experience was one big lesson:

“Hadoop is hard – let’s make no bones about it,” Papaioannou said. “It’s damn hard to use. It’s low-level infrastructure software, and most people out there are not used to using low-level infrastructure software.”

That experience with Yahoo led him to found Continuuity, which creates an abstraction layer called AppFabric on top of Hadoop and HBase, which Papaioannou said would help companies and developers avoid the problems he encountered at Yahoo.

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 live coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

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Harvard Business School and TopCoder recently performed a study where they took a big genomics problem being worked on by Harvard Medical School, broke it into discreet abstract parts, and the threw the problem’s parts to the crowdsourced coding community to solve. What they gleaned was an interesting insight: the smartest guy in the room isn’t always your best problem solver.

Speaking at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference Wednesday, Harvard Associate Professor Karim Lakhani said crowdsourcing the genomics project did several things. First and foremost it generated dozens of different approaches to tackling the same problem.

Before the TopCoder contest was created, researchers were considering two different paths of investigation. The contest revealed 89 differing approaches to the problem, 20 of which were extreme values — possibilities Harvard and its National Institutes of Health counterparts had never considered.

Second, the contest was able to create motivation to solve problems that you wouldn’t necessarily find in a group of researchers. An institution like Harvard may have brainpower in spades, Lakhani said, but throwing a bunch of geniuses at a problem doesn’t necessarily lead to result if they’re unmotivated to solve it.

“When you go into a self-selection model you don’t have to worry about motivation,” Lakhani said. There are monetary rewards for winning a TopCoder contest, of course, but taking home a prize is not guaranteed. Everyone has their own motivation for participating, whether it’s cash, experience, scoring reputation points or even the free T-shirts given to each participant. “Because there are large numbers of people participating, there’s a greater chance you’ll find the right skills and the right motivation,” Lakhani said.

Ultimately crowdsourcing your science isn’t a replacement for having smart people of your own, Lakhani said, but it certainly helps, something Harvard’s counterparts at NASA have discovered.

CHeck out the rest of our Structure Data 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

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Given Detroit’s worship of the automobile, you wouldn’t think public transit would be high on its priority list, but on Wednesday transit ticketing startup Masabi revealed that one of the automotive industry’s most recognized names, Bill Ford, has taken a strategic and monetary interest in the company.

Bill Ford is, of course, the great-grandson of Henry Ford, and the executive chairman of the company that bears his name. He also co-founded a venture capital firm called Fontinalis Partners that focuses on next-generation mobile technologies. Fontinalis is leading a $2.8 million investment round in Masabi with participation form London’s MMC Ventures and existing backer m8 Capital. The company has already gone through several funding rounds, raising $2 million in 2010 and $4 million in 2011. m8 led both rounds.

London-based Masabi said that the strategic investment is aimed at promoting its mobile ticketing technology to U.S. transit agencies, building off of its success in the U.K. (it has 13 transit contracts across the pond), and its recent deployment with Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. To date, the company claims it has processed $50 million in ticket sales worldwide and $3 million alone from the MBTA since its system went live in November.

Masabi’s key product is called JustRide, a cloud-based end-to-end ticketing platform that allows riders to purchase, manage and store transit tickets and passes in their mobile phones. Users can buy tickets from an app in their smartphones rather than wait in ticket lines. For train systems with conductors, the tickets show up as animated watermarks easily identified by ticket takers. For automated ticket systems, the app will display a QR code that will get you through the turnstile. Masabi is also upgrading its software to support near-field communications (NFC) in the future.

Boston, for instance, still utilizes smart card ticketing – which also can be linked to JustRide platform – but the gradual move of its smartphone-toting ridership to the cloud-based ticketing service saves it millions of dollars in ticketing machine and backend infrastructure.

Though smartphone-initiated mobile payments haven’t exactly taken off in the U.S., transit ticketing is starting to become a key component of the digital wallet. The carriers’ mobile wallet Isis may still be limited to two cities, but it’s become popular as a mobile pass for Salt Lake City’s public transit system. Amtrak has started accepting digital tickets on the iPhone, and all of the major airlines now have boarding pass features in their apps.

As for Ford’s interest in public transit technologies, the chairman appears to be throwing his money in the same direction as his rhetoric. Ford has spoken several times about how, at the current rate of growth, the number of cars on the world’s highways would soon lead to massive congestion problems. His proposed answer is coordination between public transit and intelligent traffic management systems to better control of the flow of billions of people as they go about their daily lives.

Fontinalis has invested in many startups designed to make cars smarter such as Streetline, Life360 and Parkmobile, but it’s also invested in companies like Masabi and Wheelz, which go against Ford’s vested interest in individual car ownership.

Bill Ford image courtesy jurvetson via Compfight cc

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Yummly is releasing its semantic food search technology into the wild, announcing on Wednesday that it is selling developers access to its database of more than 1 million web-sourced recipes as well as the technology it uses to parse them.

The launch is timely, considering Punchfork is shutting down its API at the end of the month after it was bought by Pinterest. Several sites and apps tap Punchfork’s recipe content and search capabilities – for instance, Punchfork powered Evernote Food’s Explore Recipes feature – so it will soon be looking for an alternative.

Yummly’s API, though, isn’t just a Punchfork clone, said Brian Witlin, the search portal’s new head of platform and mobile. Punchfork aggregated content from member food blogs and organized its recipes on social principles. Yummly on the other hand delves deep into the ingredients, cooking methods and the science behind each of the recipes it categorizes. It teases nutritional data out of its recipes, and its algorithms can even infer if a particular dish will be spicy, bitter or sweet. Users, for instance, can use Yummly to search specifically for low-fat or gluten-free dish options or find meals guaranteed to blow the socks off even the most jaded spice fiend.

“There are so many ways we can slice and dice the data we have,” Witlin said. “We plan to offer even more options in the next couple of months.” Yummly, however, doesn’t yet have tools to replace the social context Punchfork provides its customers, but Witlin said it’s in the works.

Initially customers most likely will use the Yummly API to provide more generic recipe content and search in their sites and apps. One of Yummly’s early API testers, search engine DuckDuckGo, uses the API to answer specific recipe queries, basically extending Yummly’s search portal onto its own site.

But developers will eventually be able to tap into Yummly’s technology to make their recipe and cooking services smarter. For instance recipe aggregation apps such as Evernote, Paprika and BigOven store recipes scrapped from all over the web, most of them drawn from the same sites Yummly categorizes. Those companies could use Yummly’s API to organize their customers personal recipe boxes into much more useful categories.

Instead of sorting your recipe library by generic soup, salad, meat and poultry labels, you could sort them by calorie level, salt use, level of spiciness or any of hundreds of different categories that aren’t spelled out in the recipes themselves.

Of course, Yummly can only sort the recipes it catalogs so any recipe you enter manually or from a site Yummly doesn’t aggregate won’t benefit from the API. But Witlin said Yummly eventually plans to amp up its recipe parsing technology so it will immediately scan any new recipe it encounters, adding it to its database.  When that happens, there won’t be any recipe Yummly can’t categorize, Witlin said.

Featured image courtesy of Flickr user lilivanili

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When it comes to communication apps we don’t lack for choice. We can message to our hearts content with WhatsApp and make video calls on Tango. And then of course there’s the granddaddy of them all, Skype, which changed how we thought of digital communications. But each of those services has its limitations.

Those apps — which include Skype, Pinger, WhatsApp, Tango and Viber — are all great apps, said Julien Decot, the new VP of business development and monetization at TextMe. The problem, Decot claimed, is they’re five separate apps, each specializing in a different set of features. TextMe, however, has a plan to combine the best aspects of each of those services into a single multidimensional communications tool.

Decot spent the last five years at Skype tailoring the VoIP giant’s corporate strategy, and while he believes Skype has designed a juggernaut of a communication platform, it was one that was always optimized for a PC environment. The hole Skype left in mobile was filled led by numerous mobile over-the-top (OTT) communications apps like WhatsApp. What the market needed, Decot said, is a made-for-mobile Skype incorporating the new features of the emerging class of OTT apps.

Note: This story is just one in an occasional series of stories on important under-the-radar mobile startups.

Starting with a clean slate

Microsoft obviously wasn’t going to rebuild Skype from scratch, but Decot found his new Skype in TextMe, a 2-year-old San Francisco bootstrapped startup, which has already seen 10 million installs in the last two years of its Android, iOS and Windows Phone apps.

TextMe provides a unified voice, messaging and video chat platform, but it can also reach beyond its own network of users to touch any phone number in the U.S. and more than 40 other countries. It’s designed a device-agnostic platform that can turn any tablet into a phone. And to top it all off it’s created a “freemium” charging platform that allows customers to earn credits for services they would normally pay for.

One of the most interesting aspects is how it has overcome one of biggest problems plaguing a new over-the-top app developer: cultivating the network effect. To become truly useful, a communication or social network needs a large number of users. TextMe has solved this problem by issuing every user a phone number just as Google Voice does in the PC world. That means any TextMe member can automatically send and receive text messages from any mobile device as well as place or receive calls from any phone — whether or not the person at the opposite end is a TextMe user.

Of course, not all of the services are free. As with its competitors’ apps, all in-network SMS, voice and video communications are gratis, but TextMe also doesn’t charge for out-of-network text messages to U.S. numbers or for any inbound call, no matter where it originates. TextMe charges for phone calls to non-TextMe numbers, both domestic and international, and this week TextMe this week also introduced a paid international SMS feature.

Customers start out with 10 free credits, which is enough for a 10 minute domestic or U.K. call or a two-and-a-half minute call to France. TextMe sells credits in buckets: $1 for 40 credits or $10 for a bundle of 500. But the startup also offers ways for customers to earn credits through promotions. If you watch video advertisements or download promoted apps from your devices app store, you’ll accrue credits in one-to 20-point increments.

“Most of our credits are earned not purchased, but that’s fine with us, as long as it keeps our customers happy,” Decot said. “We get revenue either way.”

Forget innovation. We need aggregation.

Like I said before, all of these features are available in one form or another in other OTT apps. Pinger assigns phone numbers to handle its voice messaging and out-of-network texts and calls. Skype and Tango offer in-network video chat, and Skype offers exposure to the wider telephone grid with SkypeIN and SkypeOut. WhatsApp is the king of rich-media mobile messaging. TextMe just wraps them all into a single service.

TextMe has so far focused its efforts on smartphones, tablets and iPod Touch (effectively turning the Wi-Fi device into a softphone), but the company is exploring PC clients — bringing it full circle back to Skype — and even WebRTC browser-based communications technologies, Decot said. TextMe will even let you make a mobile phone call without a mobile network connection, tapping into Open Garden’s ad hoc mesh network.

As for competition, take your pick. There is more OTT software in mobile app stores than you can shake a line of code at. The company closest to TextMe’s model, though, is the similarly named TextPlus (formerly named Gogii), which also issues a phone number to each and every user. Last time we checked, TextPlus had racked up 27 million users, and it is even showing signs of adopting an earned-credit charging model via a new partnership with FreedomPop.

TextMe, though, has stumbled onto an interesting idea. A quick look at my smartphone reveals a miasma of IM, chat and social communication apps. If I wanted to reach out to my wife there are literally 20 different services I could use to reach her. Each of those services offers some kind of compelling feature to recommend it — not only could I call, IM, text or video chat with her I could use an app like Sidecar or Glympse to let her know where I am or where I’m going.

What I really want is one service that does all of the above.

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It was only a few months ago that network optimization startup Vasona Networks came out of stealth mode, and now it’s closing a $12 billion funding around. The company’s Form D popped up at the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday (spotted first by VentureBeat) revealing the Series B funding, and the company confirmed with GigaOM that existing investor Bessemer Venture Partners led the round with participation by New Venture Partners and Vodafone Ventures.

Vasona is one of a myriad of companies that develop traffic shaping technologies for mobile networks, but Vasona sets itself apart not in what it optimizes but where it does that optimization. As I wrote back in January:

Where Vasona distinguishes itself from the lot is in the level of precision it can target with its traffic shaping techniques, said Biren Sood, CEO of the Santa Clara, Calif.,-based company.

Most optimization technologies apply the work across entire classes of data in the network core, or they follow specific subscribers as they move to and fro, throttling back their speeds or compressing their videos regardless of the prevailing network conditions.

But Sood said that the network should be treated as a collection of its parts, rather than as a unified whole. Congestion occurs at the individual cell, so carriers should optimize their networks accordingly, applying traffic management techniques only where congestion dictates, Sood said.

“We understand the nature of the cell, and we understand the capacity of the cell,” Sood said. “With that understanding we can get the right bits to the right applications in the most efficient way.”

I checked back in with Sood on Monday, and he told me that Vasona plans to use the funds to scale its operations and trial activity globally. The company is already engaged in several trials with operators, Sood said, though he wouldn’t reveal specific operators (given Vodafone is an investor, it might be a safe bet). Vasona has now raised a total of $22 million.

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In an odd change in mobile data pricing policies, AT&T plans to introduce on Friday a new set of shared plans that heavily discount data if you only access Ma Bell’s network with tablets or laptops, but not phones.

The new data-only plans, announced Monday, start at $30 a month for 4 GB and scale up to $335 for 50 GB a month. Consumers can add up to 10 devices to their plans – each tablet or gaming device costing $10 a month and each laptop or modem costing $20 – and small businesses can add up to 25. In addition to the new data-only tiers, AT&T plans to supersize all of its shared plans, offering 30 GB, 40 GB and 50 GB buckets to both consumers and small businesses.

When you compare the new data-only plans to its regular data share pricing plans, the differences are substantial. A 4 GB plan on a regular mobile share plan costs $70 a month, $40 more than the equivalent data-only plan. At higher tiers the discount is just as big: a 20 GB regular share plan costs $200, while the data-only version costs only $110.

AT&T justifies the differences in pricing through the inclusion of unlimited voice and SMS in its regular plans, while data-only plans, by definition, include no such benefits. But AT&T’s complex shared plan framework actually double-charges customers for those traditional telephony and messaging services. Connecting a smartphone or feature phone to the AT&T network costs anywhere from $30 to $45 a month, and you would assume that those premium rates reflect the cost of voice and SMS.

The good news is AT&T is encouraging the use of data-only devices on its network. It wants to usher in the tablet and mobile-connected revolution on its networks so it’s offering steep data discounts for those use cases. It’s a trend we’re likely to see throughout the U.S. mobile industry. The problem is AT&T seems to be inadvertently punishing the large majority of smartphone subscribers in the process.

Here’s an example: If you were a data-only customer with two tablets and a 4G mobile hotspot, you could get a data-only plan that would allow you pool 10 GB a month between your three devices for the very reasonable rate of $100 a month. Now if you were to add a single smartphone to the same plan you wouldn’t just be tacking on a $30-$40 standard connection charge. Instead, you would wind up paying $190 a month by moving to a mixed voice-and-data plan. Basically you wind up spending nearly double to add talk and text to single gadget in a four-device plan – that does not seem like a fair deal to me.

I applaud AT&T for offering cheaper data options and exploring the concept of a data-only mobile service. But in the process it’s also exposing the fundamental flaws of its regular shared plans. AT&T really needs to do away with the complex system of sliding connection fees, which ultimately charge different rates for data depending on the device you use. Instead, it should make it clear as day what it’s charging for voice, SMS and the cost of connecting a device. Then it should just sell us data at a set universal price.

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Cloud communications outfit Twilio can already connect any application to most any carrier’s voice or SMS networks. Now it wants to do the same with enterprise communications. On Monday, it announced the general availability of SIP from Twilio, which can connect enterprise private branch exchange (PBX) IP voice systems (think of all those Cisco phones in office cubicles) to its cloud communications platform.

Session initiation protocol (SIP) is the signaling system used to manage IP-based voice and video calls and messaging capabilities in many carrier and enterprise networks, but it’s a protocol foreign to most developers. “What’s exciting about this news to the common geek is that Twilio is further establishing itself as the bridge between disparate forms of communication,” Twilio director of product management Thomas Schiavone told GigaOM.

Schiavone readily admits that no developer currently unfamiliar with the arcane ways of SIP is likely to pursue the protocol, but there are plenty of enterprises and enterprise developers that do, and they’re looking for easy ways to link their insular business networks to A broader range of public and private communications tools.

The idea is that Twilio can perform the complex translation of different kind of calls or messages in the cloud. A regular phone call from a landline, a VoIP call from softphone client or a WebRTC call from a browser could all pass through Twilio’s application programming interfaces (APIs) and connect as a SIP-based call on an office extension. “Twilio sits in the middle, allowing you to mix and match all these forms of communication,” Schiavone said.

Twilio’s SIP service, which launched as beta in October, aims to become more than just a translation service. Twilio claims that by connecting its cloud platform directly to legacy PBXs, companies can move the application logic of their communications platform into the cloud, where they can build new features without having to upgrade or reconfigure their hardware.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user 2 Much Caffeine

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The issue of phone unlocking has become the cause célèbre of Washington lately. The White House has gotten behind a consumer petition to overturn the recent ban on  the practice. Not one, but three bills are wending their way through Congress that would make it legal for us to remove the network locks on our handsets once our contracts expire.

All of that legislation and bluster, however, isn’t going to solve the fundamental problem that produced the practice of locking devices in the first place: handset subsidies.

There’s a reason why carriers lock phones. They’re heavily discounting the cost of most devices, which is why you can get a $500 smartphone for $100 and many mid-range and low-end handsets for free. Carriers make their money back through monthly subscription fees that factor in those subsidy costs. For carriers to get the full value of the phone back, subscribers need to finish out their contracts, and locking devices to their networks functions as their insurance policy. It’s a hell of lot easier than repossessing phones.

The bottom line is most consumers don’t really own their phones. They’re mortgaging them. Just like you can’t sell your home without paying off your bank loan, carriers don’t want you selling your phone or taking it to another carrier without finishing your contract and paying off your handset loan.

Thus, we’re left with the locking mess, which leads to all of the problems pointed out by locking’s critics: Having to jump through hoops to get your carrier to unlock a phone when your contract is up, the inability to use a another carrier’s SIM card when traveling overseas, and the difficulty of building a resale market for phones when the majority of devices are locked.

Why unlocking phones doesn’t solve the problem

Making it legal and easy to unlock phones might seem like an easy solution to this problem, but I guarantee you carriers will find some other way to protect their investments. Carriers could require deposits, implement some kind of collateral fee, institute more onerous contract restrictions, or they could simply raise prices. If carriers start losing money when customers skip out on the contracts, you can bet the customers that remain will have to make up the difference.

I’m not saying it’s right. I’m just saying that in this messed-up subsidy system, everyone is trying to protect their own interests. Consumers will try to unlock their phones, and carriers will try to stop them.

If we get rid of subsidies completely, though, all of those conflicting interests go away. Once you separate the service from the device, carriers have no interest — and no right — to lock devices. You may still be under contract, but since there is no subsidy recovery fee bound up in your monthly bill, carriers could care less what you do with your device.

Of course, paying full price for your phone is an expensive proposition. An unsubsidized iPhone 5 costs between $649 and $849, as opposed to the $200 to $400 most carriers charge with contract. But in the long run buying your phone up front will probably save you money. T-Mobile has been a trailblazer in this area, charging cheaper monthly rates for voice and data if you don’t opt for a phone subsidy. What’s more, once subsidies are gone, handset makers will be able to sell their wares directly to consumers, which could lead to a greater variety of devices and more price competition in the device market.

Ultimately, mobile voice and date rates are so high because our phones are so cheap — artificially cheap. If we reverse that equation, we wind up with cheaper subscriptions, more choice and phones we can do with as we please.

What can you do with an unlocked phone?

Unfortunately, having an unlocked device doesn’t leave you with too many options in the U.S. If you travel internationally with a GSM-capable phone you can plug in a local carrier’s SIM card and pay local rates. But in the U.S. itself there isn’t much mobility between carriers.

U.S. operators are split between GSM and CDMA camps, and while it is possible to activate a Verizon phone on Sprint’s network or bring an AT&T device to T-Mobile, there’s no guarantee that you’ll have to access every network or service they offer. U.S. carriers don’t just use different radio technologies, they use different spectrum bands. The band fragmentation problem got even worse with the introduction of LTE.

But there are signs that things will get better. T-Mobile is in the process of overhauling its network, aligning its 3G bands with those of AT&T. In 4G, we’re starting to see some LTE network convergence around the Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) band. We’re even seeing more dual-mode GSM-CDMA devices making their way into the market.

With emerging smart antenna and radio module technologies, handset makers will soon be able to pack a dozen bands into a single device. Eventually we might even see a universal phone in the U.S. that can work on any carrier’s networks, no matter what combination of technologies and frequencies they use. And if that point we’re no longer weighed down by subsidies, contracts or locked devices, consumers will be able to switch to any operator at their whim. That’s not a bad choice to have.

Mortgage image courtesy of Shutterstock user Stuart Miles; Smartphones image courtesy of Shutterstock user Reno Martin; SIM cards image courtesy of Flickr user mroach

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T-Mobile USA is still several months away from officially launching its new LTE network, but it’s actively testing the new technology in the wild. A GigaOM reader came across the network in New York City and mapped out a three-by-five-block nugget of 4G coverage in Astoria, Queens, which you can see on the Sensorly.com website.

The reader, Milan Milanović, said that T-Mobile appears to be still deep in testing so the network is nowhere near ready for the kind of soft launch we saw for its HSPA+ network in the PCS-1900 MHz last year. Before T-Mobile officially launched that network, customers all over the country were connecting to it, and T-Mobile actively encouraged iPhone owners in San Francisco to take the reconfigured HSPA+ service for a spin during Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference.

Milanović said that the Astoria cells are actually invisible to most phones even if they support LTE at the proper band. He had to force his way onto the network by setting his Nexus 4 (which unofficially supports LTE in T-Mo’s 4G airwaves) to LTE-only mode and manually scan for a network connection. Milanović encountered a 5 MHz-by-5 MHz link in the 1700 MHz/2100 MHz frequencies, but he was allocated only half of the 37 Mbps of bandwidth that the network could theoretically support.

The network was also awfully shy once discovered. Whenever Milanović got a connection, the network would wait between five and 20 minutes to boot him off. Clearly T-Mobile isn’t quite at the point where it’s encouraging customers to try out its new 4G systems.

T-Mobile has already completed construction of its LTE sites in Las Vegas and Kansas City, and we’ve even started hearing reports of LTE sighting out of KC. This is the first activity we’ve heard of in NYC, though. For the most part, the new network has remained underground.

LTE test screenshots courtesy of Milan Milanović

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If you’ve ever been an AT&T Mobility customer you’re probably familiar with the concept of rollover: you can take a portion of unused voice minutes one month and add it to next month’s talk bucket. Mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) FreedomPop this week jumped on the rollover bandwagon, but instead of applying it to voice, it’s doing it with data.

For a $3.49 a month, you can store up to 500 MB of unused data in a kind of rainy-day fund, which grow to a maximum size of 20 GB. The feature is available to all of its USB dongle and mobile hotspot customers, whether they pay for subscription tiers or indulge in FreedomPop’s free 500 MB plan (though if you enroll in the rollover plan, the service is obviously no longer free). Using FreedomPop’s social networking features, customers can also give portions of that banked bandwidth away.

FreedomPop notified its existing customers of the service on Wednesday, and in 24 hours 30 percent of its free customers had enrolled in the service, a FreedomPop spokesperson said.

Why the interest? Well, if you think about it, there’s not too much too you can do with 500 MB a month if you’re regularly using a mobile broadband service. But there are many people who only need mobile broadband on occasion. I count myself as one of them – I really only need a mobile hotspot service when traveling.

While I’m completely unwilling to pay $30 a month for a hotspot I use only every few months. I would be willing to pay a few bucks a month for a hotspot that I would allow me to consume hefty amounts of gigabytes at specific times without incurring massive overage fees. It’s a concept that FreedomPop competitor Karma is also latching onto, selling a gigabyte of data that never expires for $14.

The subscription model only works if you’re a regular user of a service. In the case of mobile broadband there is a huge potential for casual users who don’t want to be locked into pricey monthly plans. It’s good to see that companies like Karma and FreedomPop are starting to tailor their pricing to target just such users.

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Samsung hasn’t even officially unveiled its new flagship Galaxy S 4 yet, but one carrier is already announcing it will carry it. No, it’s not AT&T or Verizon or Vodafone. It’s Tucows’ tiny mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) Ting.

Ting said Thursday that it would be among the first in line to sell Samsung’s latest and greatest smartphone — which it coyly said is “commonly referred to as the Galaxy S4” — as soon as it is commercially available. (For all of the details of the official S 4 launch Thursday evening starting at 7pm ET (4pm PT), check out my colleague Kevin Tofel’s live blog.)

“In advance of Samsung’s big launch event tomorrow, we’re excited to say that we’ll be able to offer the follow up to the Samsung Galaxy S3, which we’ll call the Samsung Galaxy S 4 unless we’re provided reason to do otherwise,” Tucows Content Development Manager Andrew Moore-Crispin wrote in Tucows’ blog Wednesday. “What’s more, we’ll be able to do so at around the same time as the major carriers; on or at least around the actual launch day.”

That’s quite a coup for Ting, since MVNOs typically have to wait months — if not forever — to become official retailers of the hottest mobile devices. Not only do MVNOs have to court handset vendors that often have cozy relationships with the big carriers, but they also have to get permission from their carrier partners. In Ting’s case, Sprint provides it network access and ultimately it gets to decide whether Ting or any other Sprint MVNO gets to sell the same devices in its portfolio.

In the last year, though, carriers and Sprint in particular have loosened the leashes on their MVNOS, giving them access to goodies like hot devices and new 4G networks they would normally reserve for themselves. Ting became the first LTE MVNO in August, tapping into Sprint’s brand new 4G service shortly after it launched, and it only had to wait to two months before it could sell the Galaxy S3.

Even more recently those market barriers hindering MVNOs fell further. MVNO Solavei got an early drop on U.S. carriers by becoming the first operator to sell the BlackBerry(BBRY) Z10. Ting’s early access to the Galaxy S 4 is another example that MVNOs no longer have to put up with the big carriers’ scraps.

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E-commerce payments company Braintree kicked off its international expansion only in October, but overseas transactions now account for one-quarter of its business and are largely responsible for a doubling of its payments volume. Braintree is now processing $8 billion in transactions annually, CEO Bill Ready said, putting the Chicago startup at the same level as payments darling Square.

Of course, Square and Braintree have fundamentally different business models, but as they both evolve they find themselves competing head to head. While Square has focused on the small business owner looking to accept credit card payments, Braintree is strictly an e-commerce and m-commerce company handling payments for some of the best-known startups in the business, including AirBnB, Uber, OpenTable, LivingSocial, GitHub and Fab.com.

The model is much more similar to PayPal or Chase Paymentech, which dominate the low-volume and the high-volume end of the e-commerce business respectively. Braintree, however, is trying to bridge the gap between the two. By providing advanced features such as m-commerce, foreign currency processing and high-volume scaling, Ready said Braintree is able to support companies from their birth as tiny startups to their emergence as huge international e-tailers.

Braintree began processing foreign currency payments shortly after its launch in 2008, and that’s been one of the key drivers of its growth. AirBnB, which signed up with Braintree shortly after it launched, was able to expand quickly overseas. That allowed AirBnB to head off potential competition from foreign companies emulating its business model, Ready said.

“That’s one of the big reasons startups want to work with us,” Ready told GigaOM. “Startups need to go international much more quickly than they used to. But in order to accept international payments you used to have to go to [a provider] that required you to have hundreds of millions in accounts.”

Until last year, though, Braintree only processed transactions for U.S.-based merchants. In October, after raising a $35 million Series B round, it went overseas, extending payment support to online merchants in Canada and most European countries. It expanded to Australia in November, and Ready said it plans to launch in Switzerland, Norway and Turkey this week, completing its European footprint.

Ready said that international push as allowed it land key overseas customers like Finland’s Rovio, the creator of Angry Birds. In just six months, Braintree has grown that business to the point its processing $2 billion in annualized transactions on foreign shores, Ready said.

Braintree has raised a total of $70 million and is primarily backed by NEA and Accel Partners. Ready said it has 150 employees, most of which are in its Chicago HQ and in two satellite offices in San Francisco and New York City.

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