Mobile Convergence is not about iPhone apps

You hear more and more about the "mobile market" and a deeper dive normally shows that the authors of these statements mean the "iphone market". As an Android owner, obviously I take exception to that. But, it goes further than that.

With Reliable Response Notification, I strove to develop an application which is focused on mobile, but requires no mobile development and no smart phone. How is that, you say?

Mobile convergence is about using the best technologies available to the widest selection of mobile devices. The iPhone is only a small percentage of the market. Android is even smaller. Blackberry and Palm are much more popular, but still small. Nope, the largest type of mobile device is the plain, dumb, cheap cell phone.

Yes, the cell phone that comes free with your plan.

Notification (and vPo.st) uses email, text messaging and voice communication. These are available to pretty much every cell phone out there. In fact, you can use any touch-tone phone, cell or otherwise. It even works with softphones (with a SIP/Skype->POTS gateway). They're successful because they're ubiquitous, cheap and easy, which translates into an application which is also ubiquitous and easy.

With Reliable Response, I've designed telephone interfaces using Qwest, Voxeo, VoiceShot and Twilio. Personally, my favorites are VoiceShot and Twilio. Twilio has the best payment structure and is very developer focused. VoiceShot is the only one which works from behind a firewall, a requirement for many of Notification's enterprise users. For cloud-based software, Twilio is the obvious choice.

For anyone thinking of cloud-based mobile convergence, I think reviewing Twilio's capabilities should be a requirement.

Introducing vPo.st

I'm proud to announce the availability of vPo.st, a new mobile-to-social networking tool. vPo.st allows you to post messages to your social networks, including Twitter, Blogger and Facebook, through voice telephone calls or email. For example, a user would dial in, be authenticated based on phone number, record a message, and then select the social networks where the information should be posted. The voice transcription capabilities are powered by Twilio. For messages sent by email, Vpo.st will appropriately handle attachments based on the specific social network (e.g. creating a photo album for Facebook while providing a link in Twitter). We are working to add additional posting options including YouTube and several Google Apps.