Basically,  your data, voice and video is digitalized and modulated to travel over laser light using one of the multiplexing techniques: Time division, frequency division or Wavelength division multiplexing. Then its all upto the fiber to carry it across to the other end. Total internal reflection ensures that it always stays inside the cable, even through bends.

The optical fibers can carry signal upto 50kms without need of any special equipment. Beyond that it needs to be amplified and reconstructed to reduce errors, such thing is done by devices called repeaters.

Checkout an easy explanation of how Optical Fiber Cables work, (its easier than the text above):

The video explains how Total internal reflection is the property of every liquid and solid when light travels through it. The explanation goes onto how fiber carries the light signal, how it encodes and decode PCM signal and so on.

More Technical explanation taking physics concepts into consideration:

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You might be surprised by that technology till date couldn’t actually create a device that could Transmit and receive at the same time wirelessly – aka Full Duplex communication. You might argue that your GSM/CDMA phone, your wifi already does that. But if you jump into the details of how these wireless networks operate, you will realize they use Time division multiplexing or a similar technique to make it simulate a full duplex communication. TDM divides the time into slots (of the order of ms) which are used for Transmit and followed by Receive, both in separate slots, i.e. at a different time. Because these time slots are as large as 2-10 milliseconds, they feel to be happening at the same time.

Radio traffic can flow in only one direction at a time on a specific frequency, hence the frequent use of “over” by pilots and air traffic controllers, walkie-talkie users and emergency personnel as they take turns speaking.

Stanford‘s engineering labs have discovered new ways of avoiding wireless interference, and hence make it to possible to have full duplex communication even in a noisy environment.  Electrical engineering graduate students, Jung Il Choi, Mayank Jain and Kannan Srinivasan, began working on a new approach when they came up with a seemingly simple idea. What if radios could do the same thing our brains do when we listen and talk simultaneously.

A newfangled wireless technology developed is proving that signals can indeed be sent and received at the same time. Typical wireless signals have to take turns when it comes to listening and transmitting. As an example, it’s impossible for a WiFi router to “shout” out signals while also being intelligent enough to quiet its own voice in order to hear “whispers” from a connected device.

Their main roadblock to two-way simultaneous conversation was this: Incoming signals are overwhelmed by the radio’s own transmissions, making it impossible to talk and listen at the same time.

The breakthrough came when researchers found that radios could be tweaked to filter out the signal from its own transmitter. This phenomena has been derived from noise-canceling headphones, which cancel out the sound waves from surroundings.

“When a radio is transmitting, its own transmission is millions, billions of times stronger than anything else it might hear [from another radio],” Levis said. “It’s trying to hear a whisper while you yourself are shouting.”

If a radio receiver could filter out the signal from its own transmitter, weak incoming signals could be heard. “You can make it so you don’t hear your own shout and you can hear someone else’s whisper,” Levis said.

This technology can help overcome various current challenges like overcoming a major problem with air traffic control communications. With current systems, if two aircraft try to call the control tower at the same time on the same frequency, neither will get through. Levis says these blocked transmissions have caused aircraft collisions, which the new system would help prevent.

If this can be packaged into a commercially viable platform, it could instantly double the amount of information sent over existing networks, and on an even grander scale, it could allow airplanes to radio into control towers simultaneously.

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GSM Security is inherently weak and that’s why it was made possible to Hack GSM Security (GSM’s 64-bit A5/1 encryption), last year. However, governments own devices that are worth $50,000, which essentially monitor phone activities for National security.

“GSM is insecure, the more so as more is known about GSM,” said Security Research Labs researcher Karsten Nohl. “It’s pretty much like computers on the net in the 1990s, when people didn’t understand security well.”

Every aspect of the GSM Hack was demonstrated from start to end including scenarios in which GSM networks exchange subscriber location data, in order to correctly route phone calls and SMSs, allows anyone to determine a subscriber’s current location with a simple Internet query, to the level of city or general rural area. Once a phone’s City is known, a potential attacker can drive through the area, sending the target phone “silent” or “broken” SMS messages that do not show up on the phone. By sniffing to each bay station’s traffic, listening for the delivery of the message and the response of the target phone at the correct time, the location of the target phone can be more precisely identified.

GSM Network Sniffer

Researchers replaced the firmware of a simple Motorola GSM phone with their own, which allowed them to retain the raw data received from the cell network, and examine more of the cellphone network space than a single phone ordinarily monitors. Modifying the USB interface, helped them send this data in real time to a computer, which captured every bit of the information.

By sniffing the network while sending a target phone an SMS, they were able to determine precisely which random network ID number belonged to the target. This gave them the ability to identify which of the myriad streams of information they wanted to record from the network. After that, the next step is essentially decrypting the information. ITs not that easy, but was made possible by the way operator networks exchange system information with their phones.

As part of this background communication, GSM networks send out identifying information, as well as “keepalive” messages and empty spaces are filled with buffered bytes. Truth be told, a new GSM standard was put in place several years ago to turn these buffers into random bytes, they in fact remain largely identical today, under a much older standard. Sticking to older standards enabled hackers to predict with a high degree of probability the plain-text content of these encrypted system messages. This, combined with a 2 terabyte table of pre-computed encryption keys (a so-called rainbow table), allows a cracking program to discover the secret key to the session’s encryption in about 20 seconds. (Rainbow tables are usually used in all kinds of Brute-force password hacking).

Many GSM operators reuse these session keys for several successive communications, allowing a key extracted from a test SMS to be used again to record the next telephone call, minimizing the need for recomputation.

The process was demonstrated using their software to sniff the headers being used by a phone, extract and crack a session-encryption key, and then use this to decrypt and record a live GSM call between two phones in no more than a few minutes.

Can something be done about GSM’s security?

Any geek can make such devices and with the help of the open source software, can mimic these hacks. So can we really do something to prevent these kinds of hacks from happening?

“Much of this vulnerability could be addressed relatively easily”, Nohl said. “Operators could make sure that their network routing information was not so simply available through the Internet. They could implement the randomization of padding bytes in the system information exchange, making the encryption harder to break. They could certainly avoid recycling encryption keys between successive calls and SMSs”.

“This is all a 20-year-old infrastructure, with lots of private data and not a lot of security,” he said. “We want you to help phones go through the same kind of evolutionary steps that computers did in the 1990s.”

Worst part is, all the current 3G phones are NOT shielded from this hack. Knowing that 3G is primarily used for Data, its now easy to capture any 3G user’s online activity including their passwords and credit card numbers.

Maybe its high time for GSM consortium to wakeup and address these issues, or atleast learn few things from CDMA networks, which are inherently secure.

Resources:

Rainbow tables, Airprobe, Kraken  srlabs.de
OsmocomBB firmware osmocom.or

PDF Presentation

The Video Presentation can be downloaded here: Part1, Part2.

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Yes, its now possible to do it, right on your android phone. You’ll be able to see every tower that’s connected to you, their individual strengths, and your overall connection strength.

On 3G or CDMA networks, you’ll only get to see one tower, due to an Android OS limitation, but you can still know where your strongest tower is located, and how you’re doing on connection. Pretty nifty when it comes to finding the best location in your work or at home when you experience weak signals.

Also, you can Monitor Android Battery Power usage.

For best results, switch on both data service 2G (“EDGE”) and 3G connections (if your networks supports both).

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via tested

Google has bought the company at $68.2 million, not a bad deal for the kind of VOIP innovation the Global IP solutions had been holding.

Apart from running Real-Time Video conferencing to Android,  it could also create a Skype-competitor by adding video capabilities to Google Voice, just like GTalk but would work with desktops and mobiles, alike. This service can somehow be coupled with Gizmo5 acquisition to enable powerful VoIP and video conferencing across all kinds of devices (IP phones, IMs, Cellphones). To extend it, Google could offer the developers the API to leverage the potential to create next level of applications that would add communications to Webapps, and even to corporate Google Apps.

Yesterday, Google launched a new version of Google’s Feed API, which will push updates directly to a user’s browser. No more refreshing pages to see when new content is available – the real-time web comes to you live, nearly instantly as soon as it’s published. Same is the fate of Video conferencing.

An API from Google incorporating this real-time video communication, pushing content in the same way as it will with its Feed API, would further enable endless possibilities.

We write latest in technology and will be covering various events from  Google,  Security, Open Source, iPhone, Android along with other Programming news, get them all @taranfx on twitter or subscribe below:

Cisco has announced they’ll be acquiring Starent Networks for $2.9 billion.  When the deal is completed, expected to close during the first half of 2010, Starent Networks will become the new Mobile Internet Technology Group at Cisco, led by Starent Networks’ President and CEO Ashraf Dahod.

Starent Networks enables mobile operators to deliver rich multimedia on mobiles – video, mobile TV, audio, and games. Starent’s technology helps operators to scale their infrastructure and deliver content on 2.5G, 3G and 4G radio networks.

The Starrent is a Massachusetts-based company that was set up less than ten years ago but these days employs about 1,000 people, mostly at its development centre in Bangalore.

It’s developers create routing and management systems to carry IP packets over cellular networks, which are then integrated into all the popular wireless technologies as well as being ideally suited for LTE - the next generation of wireless that’s much more IP-based.

Those systems have already been deployed at more than 100 operators in 45 countries, including the LTE-capable system sold by Motorola amongst others.

“Combining Cisco’s strength in video and IP with Starent Networks’ leading mobile infrastructure solutions creates a compelling portfolio of products that provides an integrated architecture to offer rich, quality multimedia experiences to mobile subscribers on 3G and 4G networks,” said Starent CEO Ashraf Dahod.

“Video traffic will make up 64 percent of the world’s data traffic by 2013,” Romanski said. “That puts pressure on the providers. The combination of Cisco and Starent will mean faster feeds, better content, more robust interaction with your mobile device.”

Today, mobiles aren’t just about making and receiving phone calls; smartphones are on the rise, and users of these devices expect a rich multimedia experience. With its second big acquisition this month (they also acquired Tandberg).

Cisco is using the recession to extend its range of services and position itself to the mobile future.  ahead of us.

Most Business models today rely on basic collaboration that includes nothing more than Email, IM, Screen sharing. Which is barely sufficient, for atleast the way they think about it.

What is meant by a Good Collaboration has alot more than these inferior ways of communication.

- Unified Communications – A single device that lets you control over everything. It can be a single messenger/ gadget that can handle your VoIP, Messages/Emails, instant messaging, Realtime Video conferencing and NextGeneration Screen sharing/control.
How do you end up cutting Cost?

- Travel - As per Gartner, business spent $41 Billion in last year alone for travel. Imagine the scope of savings when you no longer have to travel because of proper Collaboration tools like Cisco’s Telepresence, etc.

- Time – Time is Money for every business. Improper communication tools has discouraged fast business models to evade deals at faster rates. The means of accessibility, travel, access to data, analytics; everthing causes delays in the business and hence heavy losses.

Acoording to a research, 60% of the time today is spent achieving what could have been possible to achieve, with proper collaboration, in only 10% of the time.

Let’s hear more for Cisco’s experts of collaboration -

NTT DOCOMO is a Japanese Telecom famous for it’s most high-end telecom VAS, value added services, is Japan’s premier provider of leading-edge mobile voice, data and multimedia services. With more than 54 million customers in Japan, the company is one of the world’s largest mobile communications operators.

After having winning in Japan, and China’s Invasion, they are stepping into another international Market. Their current step is to capture World’s most Dense Mobile Network – India.

UPDATE: They have launched two Unlimited GPRS plans for prepaid users. So what speed can you expect – upto 26-48 kbps depending on network. Two plans are available, both are cheap.

The Deal goes in partnership with Indian Communications and Steel Giant TATA Group.

Motivated by the Business and Technology Cooperation Committee that DOCOMO and TTSL have jointly established, symbolizes the two companies’ strong partnership and their commitment to the development of India’s rapidly growing mobile phone market.

TTSL plans to launch the GSM service in southern India and gradually expand it nationwide. The southern part has already been covered, now plans to conquer Northern India continues.

TTSL has created significant strengths with its high-quality network and extensive retail stores and customer-service outlets covering nearly all of India, where new subscribers have been surging with net monthly increases of more than 10 million.

DOCOMO, as part of its effort to leverage TTSL’s continued growth and development, is participating proactively in TTSL’s management by providing human resources and technical assistance to help realize improved network quality and the possible introduction of leading-edge, value-added services.

Tata DOCOMO is Tata Teleservices Limited’s telecom service on the GSM platform.

Tata DOCOMO marks a significant milestone in the Indian telecom landscape, as it stands to redefine the very face of telecoms in India. NTT DOCOMO has played a major role in the evolution of mobile telecommunications through its development of cutting-edge technologies and services. Over the years, technologists at DOCOMO have defined industry benchmarks like 3G technology, as also products and services like the i-Mode, e-wallet and a plethora of lifestyle-enhancing applications. Today, while most of the rest of the industry is only beginning to talk of 4G technology and its possible applications, DOCOMO has already started conducting 4G trials in physical geographies, not just inside laboratories!

DOCOMO is also a global leader in the VAS (Value-Added Services) space, both in terms of services and handset designs, particularly integrating services at the platform stage. The Tata Group-NTT DOCOMO partnership will see offerings such as these being introduced in the Indian market through the Tata DOCOMO brand.
Tata DOCOMO has also set up a ‘Business and Technology Coordination Council’, comprising of senior personnel from both companies. The council is responsible for the identification of key areas where the two companies will work together. DOCOMO, the world’s leading mobile operator, will work closely with the Tata Teleservices Limited management and provide know-how to help the company develop its GSM business.

Till date, Tata has heavily advertised their new plans for Mobiles. And they already achieved few thousand subscribers in less than a month which  shows how well DOCOMO brand name is in capturing Indian market. As part of the initial attraction, they have introduced 1 second call pulse which reinforces people to pay per second rather than per minute. So user gets flexibility of paying exactly what he used.

They plan to bring High speed 3G services in coming months. HSDPA, EVDO upto 7.2Mbps is set to launch in 4-5 months. Followed by 4G services which are is tests in Japan, currently.

The DOCOMO’s year-on-year revenue growth is faster than others in the Telecom industry, growing at whooping 11%. Within next 3-4 years, they can easily beat AT&T.

eBay filed a concern with SEC – A legal dispute between the Skype unit and Joltid - the organisation from which Skype was purchased.  If nothing is done, the entire Skype service could die.

Skype is the largest carrier of international telephony in the world (around 8% of global traffic). though Skype provides alot of free calls, but an increasing number of customers are using the paid Skype Out service – amounting to 8.4 billion minutes alone in 2008.

On page 15 of eBay’s quarterly SEC filing, it wrote the following -

(Don’t worry if you don’t understand this, I’ve explained it in the later section)

“Skype licenses peer-to-peer communication technology from Joltid Limited pursuant to a license agreement between the parties. The parties had been discussing a dispute over the license. … Following the filing of the claim, Joltid purported to terminate the license agreement between the parties. In particular, Joltid has alleged that Skype should not possess, use or modify certain software source code and that, by doing so, and by disclosing such code in certain U.S. patent cases pursuant to orders from U.S. courts, Skype has breached the license agreement.”

“Joltid has brought a counterclaim alleging that Skype has repudiated the license agreement, infringed Joltid’s copyright and misused confidential information… Joltid’s notice of breach and subsequent notice of termination are invalid, and that Joltid has certain indemnity obligations in relation to the U.S. patent proceedings. Trial is currently scheduled for June 2010.”

“Although Skype is confident of its legal position, as with any litigation, there is the possibility of an adverse result if the matter is not resolved through negotiation. Skype has begun to develop alternative software to that licensed through Joltid. However, such software development may not be successful, may result in loss of functionality or customers even if successful, and will in any event be expensive.  If Skype was to lose the right to use the Joltid software as the result of the litigation, and if alternative software was not available, Skype would be severely and adversely affected and the continued operation of Skype’s business as currently conducted would likely not be possible.”

Ok, I didn’t understand this, can you explain it in simple language?

To make it simple, Millions of internet users who use Skype could be forced to find other ways to makephone calls after parent company eBay said it did not own the underlying technology that powers the service, prompting fears of a shutdown.

Secondly, if the June 2010 case goes against eBay, a lot of people will have to return to the POTS to carry their calls or look for an alternative.

Rise of the Fallen – Other Providers

Right now, It’s the best time for other VOIP providers to showcase their features and outrun Skype. This is the best time when users will not mind switching to something that has a more reliable future.

Google Voice, which serves free internal calls within US, might take the best advantage of the scenario. Earlier we articulated how Google Voice can kill Skype, but now it’s much more easier than what it use to be then.

The Market is open, competition awaits a good opportunity from alternate providers.

Wave a complete Collaboration tool, that let’s you do everything in REALTIME! In other words it’s a LIVE communication platform that will converge your Email, IM, Docs, Apps, Videos, Photos, wikis, Office Collaboration(Bugs, Reviews, Meetings, Discussions,etc.), Social Media, and any type of External tools (using Extesnions which are easy to integrate) to build one elegant, in-browser communication and Extensible to Desktop client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss or share all the stuff described above.

Describing Google Wave in a single Blog is way to impartial. I`ll try to cover as much as possible, but at the end of the day, it’s much more extensible than that.

Google Wave has alot of innovative features, here are few that have been exposed by Google, till date:

- RealTime: Everything you do in Google Wave is REALTIME. For Instance, you can see what the other party is typing, character-by-character. You can edit/modify the same document along with the other users. This was never possible till date. The Integrated Search is also REALTIME. The moment other party creates a draft or message that matches your search query, it pops-up immediately.

- Advanced Spell Check and SMART Correction and Translation: You no longer have to worry about grammatical, or spelling mistakes. It not just finds mistakes but also fixes them as you type – to the most intelligent word that suits the sentence formation – including the difference between similar words, like “been” and “bean.” It can also auto-translate on-the-fly, from the large no. of available languages. It’s the industry’s most advanced spell check and decision cum Translation engine.

- Embeddability: Waves can be embedded on any blog or website and it will still work in the same way, everything is in Realtime, all features same.

- Applications and Extensions: Just like a Facebook application or an iGoogle gadget, developers can build their own apps within waves. They can be anything from bots that does some routine task like search something on twitter automatically and popup to your inbox to complex real-time Multi-player games.

- Collaborated-Wiki functionality: Anything written within a Google Wave, when shared to all or a list of people, can be edited by anyone else, because all conversations within the platform are shared. Thus, you can correct information, append information, or add your own commentary within a developing conversation, all in realtime. Imagine a document being reviewed by 10 different people, all at same-time, while they see what others are doing.

- Open source: The Google Wave is developed in web’s most advanced tool, Google’s Web toolkit (GWT), and the code will be open source, to encourage innovation and adoption amongst developers.

- History and Playback: For everything you do, a History is maintained. At anytime, for anyone, you can playback any part of the Wave to see what was said. This functionality is inherited to everything that runs inside Wave i.e. from a Game to a Review conversation.

- Drag-and-drop Sharing: No Browsing, No attachments; All you need to do is drag your file and drop it inside Google Wave and everyone will have access. You can share your Photos, no longer need of opening Picasa to do it. Share your media on the fly. And coz it’s realtime, thumbnails will appear for everyone else as they are uploaded. And if you publish them on a blog, and update Photo comments later, they are automatically updated on the blog aswell.

- HTML5: What Makes Wave even better is, it’s all on the upcoming open standard HTML 5. Currently, Google Wave can run independently on the Desktop using Google gears, but in future, with HTML 5 standard getting matured, it will be inbuilt in browsers.

- Mobility: The same experience is available on mobile web browsers on most smartphones like iPhone, Androids. No modification of code is required for that. In case you write new plugins, you have to just take care of layout, that only eats 5% of the effort.

- Hosted Service/Independent Servers: This is the best thing. Google let’s you modify the original code and let’s yu run it independently as a competition to google. A more practical use it to use it within an Enterprise or an Organization that may or may not want to share the data on the public Internet. You can take your own server, database and host it inside your premises, independent of the world and still let them integrate with other Wave applications around the globe( if you want to). This will encourage Enterprise’s Web 2.0 to be more effective than before becuase of the collaboration tools discussed above.

Google Talks about their plan for Open sourcing the protocol to enable Entriprise 2.0, Extensibility, Inter-Operatability.

Google quotes:

Google Wave introduces a new platform built around hosted conversations called waves–this model enables people to communicate and work together in new and more effective ways. On top of that, with the Google Wave APIs, developers can take advantage of this collaborative system by building on the Google Wave platform. We want to expand upon that platform, which is why we’ve put together the initial draft of the Google Wave Federation Protocol, the underlying network protocol for sharing waves between wave providers.

Yes, that’s between wave providers: anyone can build a wave server and interoperate, much like anyone can run their own SMTP server. The wave protocol is open to contributions by the broader community with the goal to continue to improve how we share information, together. If you’re interested in getting involved, here are a few things you should check out on www.waveprotocol.org:

Draft Protocol Specification — This is an early draft and will definitely change

Community Principles — Understand how this open source project works

Architecture White Papers — Learn more about the components of Google Wave

Google Wave is much more than all this. You really have to checkout the Application to feel the Excitement.

Because, It’s not yet launched to public, for the meanwhile you can watch the Video and Screenshots below:

Screenshots:

A conversation in Wave:

How you add someone to a Wave:

Contextual spell-checking in Wave:

How to get it?

Currently, Its not available. Though if we you want to be among first who get hands-on, signup for an invite at http://wave.google.com. Google will be giving out invites as early as September 30th.

so go ahead and grab one.

VERDICT:

20 years back when Email was invented, we never thought it would become a mandatory thing in life. And if it had been invented today, definitely it had been something like Google Wave. It will replace all othermodes of communication that we use online today. Though it’s not wise to say this but it will challenge Social media sites like Facebook aswell. Why would I go ot Facebook when I can do the smae thing on this Converged Application.

Google Wave is the future of Converged communication solutions for the web. I would expect Google Voice and VOIP (GTalk voice) Integration in future which will make it THE KILLER APP.

“With this new support, OnState allows you to turn Google Voice into a full-featured PBX or call center for a fraction of normal industry prices,” said Pat Kelly, CEO of OnState. “And while using Google Voice you can reap the benefits inherent to OnState, including multi-modal capabilities, business- and skills-based routing, seamless application integration, reporting and analytics, and our business presence capabilities.”

with OnState, now its possible for Businesses to add Google Voice, Google Talk, and even video chat to customer-facing communications, websites, and applications with OnState, and use their layer of abstraction of business presence to direct inbound inquiries to employees that can best serve the query based, independent of employee location or available in-use applications like PBX phones, Google Talk, Google Voice, PC phones, or mobile phones.

Currently, Google Voice is designed to facilitate personal communications, but is not well suited for customer-facing applications that allow a company to establish conversations based on business logic and job functions. Business presence layered on top of Google Voice and Google Talk helps companies extend the application to improve customer satisfaction and enhance worker productivity by connecting customers on the first attempt to the person who can best serve them.

In future, We expect google to play role in Enterprise sector by supporting ways to integrate into existing communications system that can suite Enterprises better. May be Google already ahs plans, first they want to test with the small sector, then they might get their hands into BIG market.

Benefits are clear, lower costs, more features at almost no new hardware.

Google Voice started from GrandCentral, will eventually conquer large part of US and the world. Google last week started sending out invitations for Google Voice, its new VoIP service built on technology it acquired  in 2007. Google Voice will be rolled out slowly, according to Google, but as of last Thursday, the service is now available to anyone who had requested to try the beta version.

What is Google Voice Hype All about?

Google Voice provides users with a universal phone number to cover all their phone communications – work, home, mobile – but more important are Google Voice’s bells and whistles, which include a transcription service for voicemails, the searchable cataloging of text messages and lots of different routing and forwarding options

Why it could pose a threat to Skype?

As a a consumer-grade VoIP service, Google Voice is Ready for a showdown with VOIP leader Skype. Here are the reasons why Skype, despite its enormous popularity, will need new things to compete:

1. Routing & forwarding Re-Defined: Google Voice allows users to customize the call routing. As per the need, Incoming call can be routed to certain phone number, ring certain tones and all this on any number of phones. Talking about customized preferences: The service offers the ability to direct your calls automatically to whichever phone (personal calls automatically to home phone, for example) as well as send calls automatically to voicemail.

2. A new definition of “Call Screening”: Call screening generally means throwing a glance at the incoming call number or caller ID screen and deciding whether to answer. According to Google however, when a call is made through Google Voice, the user gets to see the name plus four options: Answer it, answer it and record, send it to voicemail or send it to voicemail while listening to the caller leaving the voicemail, just like you did on landline answering machines . Google Voice can also apparently ask for a caller’s name if it isn’t in a user’s saved Google contacts and get that name to the user before he or she picks up the call.

3. On the Fly Switching: No matter which channel a call comes in through Google Voice, you can switch the phone midway through the call and pick up again without dropping it. Everything is done on the Fly without any disruptions.

4. Read your calls: When you send a Google Voice call straight to voicemail, you can listen live to what the caller is recording, and also answer the call part way through that recording. Not only that, but you can listen to your saved voicemails online (via Gmail-like interface) as well as forward them, and for a small fee, receive transcriptions of your voicemails as well. using internal voice recognition system.

5. The Google God: Skype has enjoyed a long period of dominance. When its to fight with Google, I haven’t seen any survivors so far (don’t argue about Android, its a success in its own stream).

Google has previous records to start with a base service, and eventually make it one of the most feature-full products in the market. Just like the Gmail, which once came just as an email client. And now its a boom with all integrated GTalk, plugins, Gadgets, Docs, Google Apps for corporates, to name a few. I foresee integration of all these with Google Voice. It will be fun to see how you could call Google Voice and check your meetings, prepare docs and send it out to all without opening the mail. commercial POTS will vanish, Possibilities are endless. And then someone will have privacy concerns over Google Voice just like they did over search, Gmail

Unified communications was once initiated by Cisco, Verizon, and now Google will Raise the bar.

Cells were considered good innovation till date. Where wireless communications company Ericsson usually deals in products meant to be unseen, it has taken a different approach with its new Capsule cell site, and designed a mobile broadband base station that is meant to be seen without standing out.

Even though mobile broadband coverage is in increased demand, property owners and communities are often less than thrilled to have cell towers erected near their homes and places of business. Companies have tried to make the giant towers less obtrusive by hiding them in fake foliage, or in creative architecture, and in urban areas, they’re frequently put up wherever there is free space. Sometimes they put it on high skyscrapers, but nothing served the purpose.

Ericsson has devised an all-in-one mobile broadband tower that can be set up in less than 24 hours which is designed to be either as noticeable or as un-noticeable as its surroundings demand. Earlier, similar setup of a BTS used to take days, I have seen one of them being planted on the top of my building for several weeks (including testing)

The towers, designed by Scandinavian architect Thomas Sandell, are about 14 meters tall and weigh less than a ton (800kg). They require only a 2 meter equilateral triangle of ground space, and their composite exterior can be illuminated and adorned with advertisements or simply camouflaged into its surroundings.

Ericsson launched its first Capsule site today.

A demonstration of an early version of Wave reportedly drew a standing ovation at Google’s I/O developer conference in San Francisco Thursday. While the software isn’t expected to be generally available to the public until later this year, Google is reaching out to developers to help the company fine-tune the software and suggest ways it can be used and improved.

Wave will pose a competitive challenge to SharePoint, Microsoft’s collaboration and communication software that’s generating more than $1 billion in sales, as well as collaboration and communications applications from IBM Lotus and other vendors.

“A ‘wave’ is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more,” said Lars Rasmussen, the Google software engineering manager who co-founded the Wave project, in a blog post.

Rasmussen wrote that e-mail mimics “snail mail” and IM is akin to phone calls. But those forms of communications don’t tie in well with wikis, blogs, collaborative documents and other newer forms of communication. The idea behind the new Google software is that users can create a “wave” and add people to it. Everyone on that wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets and feeds from other information sources on the Web, Rasmussen said. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. And a “playback” feature will let users rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

Google Wave consists of three layers, according to the blog posting. Google Wave application, now available as a developer preview, is the Web application people will use to access and edit waves. It’s based on HTML 5 and built using the Google Web Toolkit. Secondly, Rasmussen said Wave can be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that developers can use to embed Wave in other Web services and build extensions that work inside of waves.

Finally, the Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and sharing waves. Google intends to make the Wave code open source to encourage adoption of the protocol.