Will VoLTE Eliminate VoIP in 2016?

Will VoLTE do away with VoIP in 2016? With major carriers like AT&T and Verizon Wireless in the United States now offering VoLTE services, will this voice technology become the new standard by 2016?

At the moment, many of us choose to use VoIP services, which seem on the surface to be quite similar to VoLTE. Both transmit voice calls using packetized data. However, there are some key differences to be aware of which leads some to believe that VoLTE is the superior technology. Here’s a look at these differences, and whether or not VoLTE will be able to overtake VoIP by the end of next year.

The Differences between VoLTE and VoIP Although VoLTE and VoIP may share common acronyms, they do work a bit differently. This also translates into differences in performance. If you’ve ever used an app like Google Voice, Skype, or WhatsApp, you already know how VoIP generally works. It allows you to make voice calls over an IP network, transmitting the voice data in packets. VoIP can be used over any sort of network, whether you’re connecting with 3G, 4G or local wireless.

VoLTE can only be used over a high-speed LTE network. It still breaks your call down into smaller data packets, but it offers a faster speed and does away with the need for a third-party app in order to function. In terms of performance, VoLTE can be clearer and more reliable, simply because it relies on that 4G connection. At their best, VoIP calls can be great.

Bear in mind that they do depend on the connection you’re using – as anyone who’s had a Skype session suddenly interrupted knows! Because VoLTE doesn’t use third-party apps, it also is less of a battery drain on your smartphone than a VoIP service like Skype. Predictions for 2016 At the moment, VoIP is still far more available than VoLTE because it can be used over any IP connection, whereas LTE still needs to be rolled out in many areas. Will this facet of the technology be reversed in 2016?

Some like to think so, while others see VoLTE as a real wild card. One big factor that could lead to it eventually overturning VoIP is the fact that VoLTE is more efficient for network operators like Nokia Networks and Verizon Wireless. This gives them added incentive to work on pushing it as a mainstream form of technology. '

In large markets like India, where dropped calls and poor reception are a major issue, there is a huge push at the moment to work on widespread 4G networks and VoLTE services. The Bottom Line As 4G becomes more ubiquitous worldwide throughout the next year, it’s likely that worldwide carriers will follow in the footsteps of operators who already provide VoLTE as a standard service. Whether or not 2016 will be the year that it breaks into the mainstream and overtakes VoIP remains to be seen, however.

There is still the challenge of creating a uniform experience for telco customers, so the service needs to be interchangeable between carriers for it become more widespread. Most of us are already quite comfortable using our VoIP services, but if VoLTE is built into new devices and contracts we may make the switch over time. This will most likely take place over the next few years rather than something that happens all at once in 2016, but at some point VoLTE will be the new standard in voice calling.

Contributed by Rachel MacDonald, Nokia Networks

MobileDay for Connecting to Your Biz World From Some Exotic Spot

You Want to Talk When? It’s happened to the best of us: we plan for months to get away from it all, leaving the laptop and the smartphone back home, while taking in the cliffs of the Grand Canyon, or the coves of Kauai.

But, as you’re setting up your vacation auto-response with one foot out the door, an R&D team manager says they’ll be ready to present early next week, or your coworker explains that he just doesn’t feel comfortable dealing with a client on his own, or your CEO schedules a review at the exact moment of your tee time.

For business professionals, taking off on a jaunt to some remote location is a fleeting reality when people in your business and personal life expect you to be connected all the time.

MobileDay is a new app which launched earlier this month, which provides one-touch access to any conference call in North America, without the need to remember call-in numbers and access codes.

It's great for connecting when you otherwise wouldn't or find difficult to. Need to discuss last month’s business plan with your boss from the top of Deer Valley? Want to review projections with your team from the scuba rental shop in West Palm Beach? Or, outline next steps with product development from the Victorian Grand’s porch at Mackinac Island?

With MobileDay, you can handle this with ease on your smartphone, which surely you'll need for all the cool Geocaching you plan to do with your family on vacation anyway.  

GigaOm Event on Nov 10: How will Connectedness Transform Everything?

Blazing fast networks, cheap silicon, always-on devices and a torrent of data will fundamentally change everything — how we consume media, how we work, how and what we buy, and even who we are. They plan to expore how connectedness will transform every industry and facet of life. Here's a snapshot of the opportunities they plan to examine. Meet the GigaOM editors and analysts who are unveiling the trends driving consumer connectedness. The speaker lineup includes: David Card, Director of Research, GigaOM Pro Katie Fehrenbacher, Senior Writer, GigaOM Mathew Ingram, Senior Writer, GigaOM Ryan Kim, Staff Writer, GigaOM Ryan Lawler, Staff Writer, GigaOM Om Malik, Founder, GigaOM Jody Ranck, Analyst, GigaOM Pro Paul Sweeting, Analyst, GigaOM Pro Michael Wolf, Vice President of Research, GigaOM Pro All registered attendees to GigaOM RoadMap will receive a complimentary copy of a GigaOM Pro in-depth report on the future of connectivity. You can register here.

Speaker Lineup   Robert Bowman CEO of MLB.com   Ed Leonard CTO of DreamWorks Animation   Brian Chesky Co-Founder and CEO, Airbnb   Jack Dorsey Co-Founder and CEO, Square   Venky Harinarayan SVP Walmart Global eCommerce and Head, @WalmartLabs   Matt Mullenweg Founder, WordPress/Automattic   Drew Houston CEO and Founder of Dropbox   Jim Lanzone President, CBS Interactive   Frank Moss Professor of the Practice of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT Media Lab   Tom Conrad CTO and EVP of Product, Pandora   Michael Moritz Venture Capitalist, Sequoia Capital   Richard Nash VP, Content & Community, Small Demons   Matt MacInnis Founder and CEO, Inkling   Mark Rolston Chief Creative Officer, frog

 

Call Advertising Market Acquisition: Marchex Buys Jingle Networks (the FREE411 Guys)

Marchex, Inc. (NASDAQ: MCHX) announced the acquisition of Jingle Networks, adding a growing source of mobile distribution to its call advertising network. 

The deal is that Marchex plans to pay up to $62.5 million in cash and stock for Jingle Networks, which is a leading providers of mobile voice search performance advertising and technology solutions. Some may know them through their service: 1-800-FREE411.

Jingle Networks’ core business is providing performance advertising solutions to mobile carriers and mobile network operators so that advertising agencies and businesses can leverage in-call advertising, including pay-for-call, to gain new customers over the phone or through the use of mobile applications.  Over the last twelve months, Jingle Networks has added numerous mobile distribution partners and grown its mobile partner call volume by more than 200%. 

Combining energies, the Marchex Call Advertising Network will now have an annualized reach of more than 500 million phone calls across digital media, including mobile.  This new call advertising network empowers both large and small businesses to reach customers when they are ready to buy.  As the digital advertising market shifts to incorporate phone calls in a more significant way, the Marchex Call Advertising Network is best positioned to provide solutions to advertising agencies and businesses due to its open platform approach using all digital media platforms and supporting all partner types.

 

Driven by the rapid adoption of mobile and smart phones, mobile carriers and network operators are seeing a significant rise in the number of consumers leveraging voice search to find businesses.  Voice search, however, can be costly for mobile carriers and network operators given the technology and other items necessary to operate the service.    

Call advertising helps businesses acquire and up-sell new customers through phone calls, by reaching customers when they are ready to buy.  Marchex provides unique phone numbers and analytics tools that are used by advertisers to place, measure and optimize campaigns across all digital media channels, which helps these businesses increase their sales.  Call advertising and analytics technologies are more important than ever to track and measure the success of call advertising campaigns in order to help advertisers better optimize their call advertising strategies to increase impact, maximize spend and deliver better sales results for their business.

Defrag Explores Tools & Technologies around the Data Deluge

This year's Defrag is all about the "data deluge" and the technologies the industry is building to leverage that situation at the individual, group and organizational level.

Sitting at the intersection of BI, Social Media, Enterprise 2.0, Big Data and the Semantic Web, Defrag is a unique conference that combines a mixture of traditional panel discussions and speakers with an un-conference informal feel in the middle of the Colorado mountains (the venue is nestled off Interlocken in Broomfield, not far from Denver).

Keynote speakers for this year's conference include:

• Alex Wright (author of Glut)
• Vivek Wadwha (Duke, Harvard and UC-Berkeley)
• Esther Dyson
• Dion Hincliffe (Dachis Group)
• Jeff Ma (inspiration for the movie, "21")
• David Weinberger (The Cluetrain Manifesto)
• Paul Kedrosky
• Jeff Jonas (Chief Scientist, IBM)
• JP Rangaswami

To register, take advantage of this special 15% discount: click here and enter VIP1.

The Faces of Mobilize 2010

Below are some fun shots taken at GigaOm's Mobilize event in San Francisco this past week. Blog post about the core of the event, the sessions, topics and players can be found here. 

Laura Locke, New York Times' Verne Kopytoff, Renee Blodgett and Tango's Jenny Nielsen

Joyent's Director of Marketing Nima Bradley

Intuit Dazzled Crowd with Cupcakes

Oliver Starr and Bubbalon's Todd Hamilton and Alex Galkin

The VC Panel

Roy Satterthwaite from Opera Software and Bob Borchers with Opus Capital

Sweden-based Rebtel comes over for the event

Schmooze in between sessions

 

GigaOm's Mobilize: Mobile, The Enterprise & The Suits Meet The Cloud & Big $$

GigaOm's Mobilize was held in San Francisco this past week. On the heals of Techcrunch Disrupt, the vibe couldn't have been more different. A mile away and a day before, Techcrunch Disrupt drew start-up energy which means that the 'culture' of the event was all about entrepreneurship, early stage ideas and investors and product launches.

It also meant that the crowd was a lot younger and a helluva lot more informal. Translation: t-shirts, sneakers, jeans and the occasional segway flying by in the hallways. No dogs on or off leashes or pretzels and pizza laying around, but you get the idea.

Both events enticed "the money"; those interested in investing or learning more about new innovations and trends. And both events had heavy hitters and an incredible line-up; one more focused on consumer and B2B and the other on mobile and the enterprise, even though companies like @phonetell and @tango_me did on-stage splashes at Mobilize, both of which target consumers.

Many attendees at Mobilize actually wore jackets and the press in the audience showed that the panel discussions were about big corporate deals, i.e., Dow Jones, New York Times, Time, Forbes, Barrons and others.

Enter the focus of Mobilize, Om Malik's GigaOm event focused on the convergence of mobile computing and cloud-based services, which is already and will continue to unleash an entire new wave of product and market growth.  

The success of touch based tablet devices is likely to see the addition of millions of new subscribers in markets already considered saturated. Then add to that base a new legion of machines as subscribers – your car, your fridge, your TV for example, and you have the makings of a vast new opportunity.  What monetization schemes that will succeed short and long term?

Discussion Topics Include:

App vs. Web

What’s a developer to do? Should they go for a native app based approach to their proposition or go for a web based approach? How will Cloud Computing and new wireless speeds affect the balance? The core debate is exciting, important and could dictate the future of the mobile web. Join us!

The Internet of Things

The M2M or “Internet of Things” proposition opens up a vast new array of opportunity for carriers, entrepreneurs and consumer experiences. We look at some of the biggest markets out there – medicine, consumer goods, automotive and more. We ask what needs to be done to catalyze the opportunity and what returns these markets will yield.

Monetizing Location Services

We see a flurry of investments in the location services space. But what will be the business models that provide both a revenue stream and a return on investment? Will it come from the sale of the apps themselves, coupons, advertisements or from the middleware layers that make such services possible? We gather some of the people tasked with the job of making location services pay to talk about what’s working and what’s not.

Handset Virtualization

With growing processor power and faster network speeds, handset virtualization is about to hit it’s stride. New services, user experiences and business models will be enabled by this technology. We examine what what new opportunity is being created from the intersection of higher bandwidth, powerful chips and handset virtualization.

Mobile Payments: Finally here?

Mobile payments have long been promised and indeed the potential is huge. Has its time for mass market success finally come? Are subscribers ready for mobile payments? Can app publishers use these new payment channels for new monetization models?

The VC Panel

Our annual VC panel will ask about 2010 investments and also ask what the 2011 investment plan looks like. Chips? Middleware? Apps? Media? Infrastructure? Find out as we ask 5 of the valleys finest investors where they are putting their money.

4G with 4 Wheels: The Automobile as an App Platform

Take an advanced car and add to it a powerful computer and display. Add fast wireless broadband and what do you have? A huge new rolling opportunity, that’s what! But it comes with an equally large number of questions: What new applications will this new platform support? What sort of consumer demand will it see? How will the market evolve? Who will have the dominant platform? What role will the smartphone play in the ecosystem? 

 

Qwiki's Melded Audio, Text, Video and Images Win them $50K at TechCrunch Disrupt

Qwiki wins this year's Techcrunch Disrupt Award. There's a great shot of the team on-stage at announcement time; have you ever seen so much joy in tech? Jumping and screaming, they accept the $50,000 check in front of a large audience of technology entrepreneurs, press, venture capitalists and other presenting companies.

They climbed above the rest by offering a new way to consume information: text, audio, video, and images melded together in a seamless interface, generating a dynamic movie of whatever you search for.

What is Qwiki? from Qwiki on Vimeo.

Sococo's Smart Spaces Connect People Using Chat, Voice & Shared Apps

Sococo is a new mode of online communication that provides smart spaces to help people communicate naturally. Smart spaces automatically connect people using chat, voice and shared applications. The spaces also help people visualize where they are and what is being talked about while they are with others. That helps people interact more naturally. Sococo spaces can be used to bring realtime communication to essentially any community of people distributed around the Internet.

Sococo smart spaces can be used standalone or in combination with any web service delivered through a browser. Sococo’s first commercial service, Team Space, is an always-on group communication service that allows distributed teams to communicate more effectively. Since it’s always on, there are never any web meetings to schedule or coordinate. Its visual layout depicts an office floorplan with individual offices, conference rooms and common areas. Visual cues allow you to see who’s in the office, who’s busy, who’s free and who’s meeting with whom. A simple click allows you to enter any room and be instantly connected to all those within with voice, chat, and multi-screen sharing.

VoiceBase's New Voice Communications Platform: Search, Share, Store & More

Today, at DEMOfall in Santa Clara, CA, VoiceBase unveils a new search, share and store voice communications platform, which will allow users to easily access and organize meeting and conference content from any web-enabled device.

The goal of their new web-based service is to make voice communication as efficient and effective as e-mail communication. The new service offers storage, search and retrieval, as well as discussion and sharing of voice communications, through any Web-enabled device. Recorded content is uploaded to VoiceBase servers, where a time-synchronized transcription – human or machine – is added to the recording prior to its post to the participant's VoiceBase personal Webpage.

Basic use of the service is free. Content will be stored for one year, after which subscribers can purchase additional storage hours.

Video of their presentation and demo at DEMOfall below: