- We’ve written about free (ad-supported) VoIP calling previously (When Calls Equal Impressions), but in recent days we’ve seen free SMS from Jaxtr, free 411 from from freeMobile411 (and Sprint!), free music from Nokia/Sony BMG (with EMI coming soon) and not free but unlimited, cheap international calling from Skype, which makes incremental calling essentially free. May we recommend some reading for service providers: Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business, by Long Tail author Chris Anderson.

- Former Googlers are building Mechanical Zoo, a new search engine that takes into account social network data to help deliver better results. Early, but worth watching. Service providers should be positioning themselves to feed information only they have — such as identity, location and billing relationships — into such services, taking a sizable piece of the action for their trouble.

- Google is reworking its iGoogle customizable start page to look and feel more like a social network. Fueling the effort is a new iGoogle developer “sandbox” to speed the delivery of new apps/capabilities to iGoogle. Owning a user’s start page is big business, and one ISPs/telcos are already in, often via partnerships. Back in January (according to ComScore stats via TechCrunch) Yahoo owned 58% of user start pages with Google at 26% and Microsoft at 10%. Meanwhile, smaller start page vendors like Pageflakes are getting bought up. The start page land wars are heating up, there are advertising, upsell/cross-sell value added services and other revenues at stake.

- Nokia is apparently paying one label (Universal) $35 per year per user in order to deliver its all-you-can-eat “Comes With Music” service. The Hollywood Reporter does the math:

Nokia last year sold 437 million phones and could sell around a half-billion this year. If, say, 1% of 500 million phones carry the Universal tie-in, that’s $175 million in Universal’s pocket. If it’s 10%, Universal walks home with $1.75 billion.

Are service providers ready to pony up that kind of cash? Better be ready to at least check out this kind of deal or watch a handset maker turn the iTunes-applecart on its head without you. This as Verizon and AT&T execs used the NAB show to talk up closer relationships with broadcasters.

- Comcast feels the pain of ticking off one of the world’s most popular bloggers, Dave Winer. What I found most interesting: 1) with PowerBoost, he was getting 28 Mb/s download! 2) they cut off his service because he was consuming too much bandwidth; fair enough, but they told him after the fact 3) a few years ago, Winer said he wrote about a bad Travelocity review that ended up being the number 1 Google hit for the brand (uh oh!) 4) Comcast apparently has an employee (Frank) monitoring Tweeter for complaints (under the name Comcast Cares).

Bottom line: service providers separate themselves from Web competitors by actually providing customer service (especially via phone); irony is that customers are using the Web to keep customer service in check.

- The FCC is holding its second public meeting on P2P traffic shaping at Stanford University (PDF) later this afternoon. You can listen to it streaming here. We’ll file a report later this afternoon. Note: no service providers on the panels, not even Comcast, which makes it hard to take this too seriously as anything more than a gripe session.

- Truphone, which we covered in our New Service provider feature, landed $33 million series B financing, which they’ll using to build out their network (yes, the run at least part of their own backbone while leasing key portions) and, according to what Truphone’s James Body told me at VON, to make a rather significant retail push. Are consumers ready to buy a Truphone at Best Buy? Might be a tough sell sitting next to all those shiny smartphones they stock these days.

Here’s some interesting details on Truphone’s backbone from their funding press release:

The company has developed a carrier-grade, global operator infrastructure including a global network of SIP gateways, a Nokia Siemens Networks mobile network Home Location Register (HLR) and a GSM identifier.  The infrastructure is capable of supporting 40 million customers worldwide. This is all enabled by a series of global agreements with PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) and SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) providers.

- Henry Blodget (who didn’t fare too well in Bubble 1.0 but is covering Web/Bubble 2.0 at Silicon Valley Insider) has been chronicling Google’s declining search clicks for three months now, almost as a lone voice in the wilderness. Today, he notes March paid-click growth is as bad as the past several months — just plus 2.7%. Either Google is a proof-point for the expected ad recession or something is wrong (Google itself has said it is trying to stamp out fraud and improve click accuracy for advertisers). Whichever, Google stock is at 451 down from year-high of almost 750.

- There’s an interesting debate going on in the Web world as Facebook sucks in features from high-novelty competitors like FriendFeed and Twitter: will popular new Web services exist as standalone businesses (ie, maintain growth, find revenue) ore will they get sucked into other services as *features*? This is a debate worth noting for telcos. Microsoft and now large Web players like Google/MySpace/Facebook are proving that you don’t need to invent new services to benefit from them — you simply embrace/extend them to your own LARGE, mass market customer base. Can service providers do the same with Web 2.0/telephony 2.0 services? They’ll never be as good at it as Microsoft, which built its business from Windows 1.0 from “mainstreaming” others products, but it’s a tactic that must be built into the playbook.

- Jailbroken iPhones are getting VoIP apps, starting this week with Fring. More coverage here and here.

- Comcast wants a “P2P Bill of Rights and Responsiblities,” apparently written *by* service providers *for* their users. PR effort gone awry, let us count the ways: appending “bill of rights” with “responsibilities” (somehow the founding fathers didn’t go that route); thinking users want vendors to “grant them” rights; predictable negative user reaction (they asked for it). The conventional PR wisdom now is for companies to be “part of the conversation” in an “authentic” fashion — this ain’t it.

- If you like code and want to go deep, definitely read this post by Dan York of Voxeo on how he used Google AppEngine to quickly build a voice-driven application. The app involves dynamic generation of a VoiceXML app using python and Google’s AppEngine SDK, running on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing environment with a phone interface provided by Voxeo Evolution. Check it out — it’s the future, you know ; >

On today’s Telephony 2.0 radar:

- Home page service Pageflakes sold itself today (a nice move in the midst of general Web 2.0 slowdown). Probably wouldn’t be a bad time for managers at telco Web portal decisions to do some bargain shopping. Pageflake’s component/widget-based approach to the user start page is pretty much the de facto standard and the way Google, Yahoo and Microsoft users start their day. The biggest remaining start page indie: NetVibes.

- Verizon handed off its mobile/online advertising to AOL’s ad agency, staying far clear of the battles between Google and Microsoft/Yahoo.

- Google and Salesforce.com announced an integrated product offering today, perhaps the least surprising pairing in the history of the Internet. Both are squarely focused on software-as-a-service and beating Microsoft, making them natural allies and perhaps signaling a future acquisition. Both also have an “app-named” Web development platform, Google’s AppEngine and Salesforce’s AppExchange.

- Three simple reasons why telcos can breathe easy that VoIP-over-wifi won’t disrupt service revenues: VoIP user interfaces are (too often) not integrated into the handset; running a VoIP app kills cycle time and battery life; and at least for U.S. domestic calls, the savings aren’t that great (though international calls, a huge target for calling cards and VoIP services, are a different matter).

- Finally, if telcos aren’t dipping into Google’s search war chest, others (Apple, Firefox, etc) certainly will….check out this map that shows Google’s cloud/data centers around the world….a nice wrap-up of rumors and realities for the soon-to-come 3G Apple iPhone….

Consumer VoiP Services Compared (LucaFiligheddu.com)
Rebtel comes out on top for cost and usability in making voice over IP call from U.S. to Italy via a mobile phone (no PC clients involved).

Facebook Buying Plaxo? (Venture Beat) - Not So Fast (TechCrunch)
A move that would focus less on social network features and more on combining address books and friend lists into a powerful Web-based unified directory/profile service.

IMS vs. Web 2.0 (OpenGardens)
Blog post asks all the right *service* questions about IMS, mainly: if Web services are standard, universal and cheap, what’s the pull for IMS?

Who Will Operate the Cloud (News.com)
Question raised: can an “IT arms supplier” - IBM, HP, Sun — also run a network services clouds? My question: can a telco run a network services cloud?

More Google Queries Get Google Maps (NYTimes)
Data-driven proof (300% increase in search queries returning with a Google map as top return) of how Google hopes to leverage dominance in one area (Web search) to try to take over other key areas, including directory services/yellow pages and mobile, location-based advertising.

Facebook’s Real Problem: Monetization (Dave McClure)
Key quote: A service isn’t a real *platform* until it makes — actually until it MINTS — money. It took Google four years to start up its mint, now running like clockwork. Facebook is dominating as Google did, but how will it create revenue for itself and its partners (Google’s “stickiness” is due to the “Google economy” — all the various advertisers, micro-publishers, etc. that suck on the Google teet).

- Business Week: Google and the Wisdom of Clouds
Cloud computing is finding its way into the mainstream press. Story is pitched as Google versus Microsoft, but really there’s more to it than that. Google’s cloud is coming at you, the service provider, too. The buried story here is that Google isn’t just talking about cloud computing, or using it for its own services, but getting ready to offer pieces of its cloud computing infrastructure to companies and developers to use.

- We’ve written about Google’s ‘cloud factories’ in the past.

- Also: Google’s CEO on the Power of Clouds (Q&A)

- Pertinent Schmidt quote:

What [cloud computing] has come to mean now is a synonym for the return of the mainframe…You never visit them, you never see them. But they’re out there. They’re in a cloud somewhere. They’re in the sky, and they’re always around. That’s roughly the metaphor…In another sense, they’re one large supercomputer.

- Related graphic: check out this supercomputer (a cloud computer) installed in a former chapel at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) (see more pics here).

Does your central office look like this? ; >
(Note: these are real pics, not photoshop-jobs)

Meanwhile…..

- Amazon is adding online database capabilities to its Web services offerings. Lots of push back that a cloud DB can’t compete with a first-class relational database engine (not to mention the the type of high-powered, transaction-intensive systems banks and stock markets run on). Which conveniently ignores the concept — pointed out here – that in true “innovator’s dilemma” fashion disruptive technologies nibble at the edges until the leader (in this case, Microsoft and/or Oracle) can’t stop the bleeding….

- NYTimes: Static on the Dreamphone
Concern about Verizon’s open network plans being centered around a Verizon-controlled testing lab and a call for service providers to go the extra step toward embracing Web models:

And what if this phone company opened up its databases to developers of software applications? We could soon see mash-ups of your call history with the address books from your personal computer, your telephone and your social network. Now imagine a user community turned loose to annotate that data.

Like my journalism professor once said of writing, it’s best to think of “open” as a process and not an event….

- Did you know there’s an open source implementation of Google’s Open Social platform called Shindig? I didn’t. Google’s getting a hard time for pushing the release of Open Social to 2008 — but the software clearly is moving forward. But Facebook isn’t standing still…..

- Facebook has made its social network platform available for any company to license, a clear counter to Google’s Open Social initiative. Any service providers interested? Second-tier social network Beebo is basing their platform on the code. By doing that, they automatically ensure that all Facebook applications will run on their platform — voila, instant interoperability. Meanwhile, Here’s a good story on where the social network “open network” evolution is headed.

- What do the last two postings mean? The social network *platform* wars are underway. Service providers need to watch this platform competition closely and begin to make bets or align themselves among the various camps if they want to play in this area rather than see their customers jump off the telco “platform” and onto new platforms where they might find their voice needs served with just-good-enough VoIP calling. Think this has no chance of happening? Think again.

- This Firefox extensions brings VoIP calling to your browser toolbar — you still need a provider or SIP server but it makes it easier to make a Web-initiated P2P call. You can even input a corporate server or Asterisk PBX if your enterprise is running voice over IP.

- Mobile advertising is apparently off to a slow start — but it’s early and the best practices and accepted models haven’t been discovered yet.

- A bit of news on Cisco’s Web 2.0 plans, which have been formalized into its Entertainment Operating System, still more vaporware (or revenue-vapor) than meaningful product for the networking giant.

- Business Week cover story on Google’s “cloud computing” strategy. - Scott Karp blogs “Why I Stopped Using Twitter”: Answer: consumption-overload. This will clearly be a generational-divide issue.

Things to get off my plate and into your head if you are following Telephony 2.0 issues and trends:

Telco 2.0 Blog: How Practical is Your SDP (Service Delivery Platform)?
also see: JNetX and NetDev

Scott Rosenberg: Terror of the Tiny URL
Growth tied to Twitter explosion

TechCrunch: Plaxo + LinkedIn + iPhone = Brilliant
Our take on Plaxo

TechCrunch: VoodooVox: Building a Voice 2.0 Ad Network
This is something we’d like to take a closer look at…

GigaOM: From Information Age to Connected Age
A nice leap, we’ll see if it sticks

Nick Carr/RoughType: Facebook and the Grownups
Turns out kids are laughing at the business users yielding opportunity for targeted social nets

HipMojo: Google’s Shock and Awe: 40% of of U.S. Online Ad Revenues
Classic partner decision point: Telcos can’t afford to ignore them, can’t help but fear them