Three conferences next week

Next week is a busy week for the Ringful team.

On Tuesday, we are invited to attend the annual Seed Stage Forum hosted by the Austin Technology Incubator and University of Texas at Austin. We will have a table in that event to meet investors and showcase some of our cool voice / facebook / iPhone mashup applications. We are not pitching for money at this time. But we are very much interested in meeting potential advisors, investors, clients, or anyone interested in this general space. Hope we will make some good connections there!

On Thursday, I will sit on Raven Zachary's iPhone panel at the InnoTech conference. We will be discussing the marketing opportunity for iPhone applications -- both the native SDK apps and web apps. You would not want to miss that if you are interested in the iPhone!

Then, on Wednesday and Thursday, the Ringful team will participate in the Texas Wireless Summit (TWS). The TWS is one of the premium conferences on the future of the wireless technology. It features speakers such as the CTO of AT&T, President of Nokia, and CTO of Ericsson North America etc. I am excited to meeting cool people and hear the vision from industry heavy weights.

If you are attending any of these events, let's hook up. You can get hold of me by leaving a comment or emailing me at michael AT ringful DOT com.

Obama's iPhone app is an excellent mobility mashup

The Obama campaign released an official iPhone application last week.  The application is developed by a team of developers led by Raven Zachary. It has a chokeful of useful features for Obama fans. But what caught my eye is the way the app mashs up voice calls with web and social features.

At the bottom of the app's start page, there is a small "donate" button. When you click on it, it actually makes a phone call to connect you to an operator to make the donation. That really leverages the voice infrastructure the campaign already built, and beat the typical  enter-your-credit-card-number approach by a large margin. 

Then, another cool feature is that the app organize your contacts in the address book into a priority list with "battle ground state" residents listed at the top. It even encourages you to call those friends by keeping track of the calls you made, and compare you against other people! (Well, guess I do not know many people in battle ground states!)

Of course, none of those features are revolutionary on its own. But they really show how voice mashup can improve user experience. I'd like to see many more iPhone applications utilizing the voice features! It is a "phone" after all!

What is mobility mashup

Welcome to the Mobility Mashup blog! This is the team blog from technologists at Ringful.com. We are primarly interested in mashing up mobile services with SaaS and social media applications. Why do you need to mashup mobile services with those existing services? Well, a couple of scenarios we have in mind include:

1. Enable interactive voice and messaging features in CRM, project management, enterprise IT, and e-commerce applications. That is a huge and under-served market, espcially for small businesses.

2. Help businesses, community leaders, or artists keep in touch with consumers / fans via mobile voice and messaging apps. It is not only a more personal way to engage consumers but also enables consumers to react right there on the phone.

3. Help social media users to have richer interactions via instant group calls or interactive messages boardcasted to mobile phones. It could multiple the effectiveness of social media apps.

4. Enable rich mobile apps or mobile web apps to support multi-party phone conversations, and voice / SMS messaging, from inside the app. Voice is the killer app on mobile. With mobility mashup, developers can continue to take advantage of this important feature in
applications.

At Ringful, we are building many of those applications. But more importantly, we are building a RESTful mashup platform that drastically simplifies telco application development. It lets any small business to create their own mobility mashup solutions.

Stay tuned!

Michael