Ideas and reviews for websites, film, business, products, and designMicroblog your ideas and be discovered

Phonebooth.com , a VOIP service for individuals and small businesses, just launched a free version of its service. Phonebooth, just like Google Voice and Ribbit Mobile , provides its users with a free local phone number that can be forwarded to any cell phone and landline. Phonebooth also offers voicemail transcriptions. What makes it stand out from it competitors, however, is that it offers an auto attendant feature that allows you to route callers to different employees. Sponsor It’s worth noting that Bandwidth.com , the company behind Phonebooth, has been providing infrastructure services to other VOIP services, including Voxeo and Yext, for more than three years. The company’s VOIP network delivered almost 4 billion minutes in 2009. Bandwidth began a beta test of the paid version of Phonebooth.com last year and now has over 1,000 customers. Features in Phonebooth’s free version : Free local phone number for your business Includes an auto attendant (Press 1 for Sales, Press 2 for Support…etc.) Unlimited extensions for your employees or partners Read your voicemail, with VM-to-email & text transcription 200 free minutes of inbound calling (6¢ additional) Includes new Contact Us Plus feature A Free VOIP Service that Will Grow With You Starting today, Phonebooth will offer a free service geared towards individuals. The company also announced the general availability of its $20/month/user option, which offers a fully featured phone system in the cloud. One of the advantages of using Phonebooth over similar services like Google Voice or Grasshopper is that the company allows users to upgrade their phone system over time. Once your company outgrows Phonebooth’s basic plan, you can easily switch to a higher-end phone system (Phonebooth on Demand) with hardware IP-based phones. Phonebooth’s users will be able to choose local numbers from virtually everywhere in the U.S. (the service us U.S.). Sadly, though, there is no way to make your Phonebooth number appear on the caller ID for outgoing calls from your landline or cell phone. Phonebooth doesn’t currently offer any mobile apps, though the company told us earlier today that mobile apps are definitely on Phonebooth’s roadmap. Contact Plus Widget In addition to the free VOIP service, Phonebooth is also launching a new widget for small businesses – Contact Us Plus – that allows potential customers to use Phonebooth’s VOIP service to initiate a call right from the website. In addition to initiating phone calls, the Phonebooth widget can also feature additional contact info (Twitter account, email etc.), as well as your address and a map. Phonebooth’s users can also opt to show phone numbers for different departments in their company in the widget. Discuss

Seth Goldstein comes up with a lot of ideas. Some of them work and some of them don’t. He was one of the original backers of Del.icio.us (bought by Yahoo), Etherpad (bought by Google) and Bit.ly (huge via Twitter). He was also President of the short-lived Attention Trust and built a browser plug-in that allowed people to track, manage and sell on the Chicago Board of Trade futures in their browsing history and other online attention data. That didn’t work out so well, though it was a very interesting idea. Two years ago he raised $10m, built an advertising network called SocialMedia.com and then sold it off a big chunk of it in November . Goldstein’s latest idea may be one of his most interesting yet. He’s co-founded a company called Stickybits . It’s a service that uses vinyl barcode stickers and a mobile scanning app to layer social media content on top of physical objects. Sponsor You scan a Stickybits barcode that you place or find on some thing or some place (perhaps on someone) and you can see all the multimedia that’s been associated with that barcode before and add your own. Erick Schonfeld covered Stickybits this morning on TechCrunch and called it a way to unlock “the secret lives of objects.” Commenters on that post brought up far more questions than Stickybits has answered so far. Someone is going to nail this, though. I’ve long fantasized about being able to use my mobile phone while around town to find out the news, demographic and property ownership history of various locations. Stickybits isn’t doing anything that ambitious yet; it’s mostly just tweets, photos and audio messages. It’s hard to know if a temporary sticker from one particular company will be the way forward into a world of places and objects with social histories made easy to unlock. Stickybits is selling packs of 20 attractive vinyl stickers for $10, a steep price if you ask me, but perhaps calculated to maximize the significance of each one and minimize the annoyance of property owners about to get annotated. How that price point and the need to download a free mobile app will impact the spread of the program remains to be seen. Whether the messages attached to the stickers end up looking more like Foursquare, Gowalla, Wikipedia or ChatRoulette is another one of the many questions that come to mind. In a location-aware world, the primary role of the barcode stickers may simply be in letting people know that there is data associated with a particular location, something that other services that let you “tag your world” have struggled with. There will likely be other user experience subtleties, sublime and profane, that users start to notice after a few Stickybits scanning experiences. Expect to find these things stuck around various places in Austin this weekend. Perhaps on cats, dogs, planes, trains, automobiles and street light poles all around the country soon. Will it work? We’d love to hear your thoughts in comments below. Discuss

Testifying before a congressional hearing in late February, Mike Altschul with the Wireless Association was blunt : Federal mobile phone privacy policy is undefined and the privacy guidelines for location-based services written in 2008 are obsolete. The hearing on consumer privacy was the fifth in a series that seeks to evaluate and eventually legislate location-based privacy issues. It comes none too soon. The recent flood of location based apps and services has significantly shifted liabilities from mobile carriers to app developers and end-users. As Congressman and hearing chair Bobby Rush of Illinois said, Yesterday there was Facebook, and in the not-too-distant future we will be encountering something more akin to a “Placebook.” Sponsor While the Wireless Association works on its 2010 guidelines, and while Congress deliberates, what’s going on with all our geolocation privacy rights? Do we have a right to control what location-based advertisers do with our info once they have it? Do we have a right to ensure that law enforcement and government agencies don’t abuse our easily obtained mobile data streams? Are our children safe? What does social science research say about all these changes? These are the many questions that this congressional hearing sought to address. Here’s a breakdown: What does the privacy research tell us? Lorrie Cranor, direct of CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory at Carnegie Melon University testified about her research into how end user’s react to the implication of privacy loss due to location-based technologies. She also reported on her survey of the most popular applications and systems. “In August 2009 we evaluated 89 location sharing applications and systems to determine the types of privacy protections each offered,” she said. “Overall, we found that most of these applications provided fairly limited privacy controls and about a third of them did not provide readily accessible privacy policies on their websites. We reviewed the websites for these applications again in February 2010 and found similar results for the 84 services still in existence at that time.” Who will have access to our information? Last Tuesday we reported in our Ads with Eyes post about a report by the Center for Democracy and Technology on advertising abuses that mobile end-users may face. The center is also concerned about abuses of law enforcement and government agencies related to their use of location-based information. At last week’s hearing John B. Morris, general counsel for the center presented the case for why the Electronic Communications Privacy Act should be updated to protect location information from inappropriate disclosure to government. He highlighted how recent court proceedings and local government surveillance protocols are creating contradictory rulings, unclear jurisdictions and generally snowballing into a fundamental lack of privacy protection for U.S. citizens. What’s the latest wording of potential new laws and guidelines? The preliminary language of almost all future U.S. laws begin in hearings such as these. In his testimony, Tony Bernard, VP of Useful Networks, sought to outline some of the most essential elements of this new language. “In order to derive an end user’s location from any source, the end user must be presented with notice of how, when and by whom location will be used,” he said. Additionally, said Altschul, senior VP and general counsel for the Wireless Association, “Notice must be provided in plain, easily understood language. It must not be misleading, and if combined with other terms or conditions, the portion pertaining to the location-based service must be conspicuous.” How will kids and young adults be affected? Anne Collier, Co-Director, ConnectSafely.org testified that new technologies are not as much of a threat to children as we may believe, and the real issue is the quality of parenting and supervision that kids are getting. As far as kids’ potential for future use of location based services, she presented startling data. “U.S. teens now send or receive an average of 3,146 text messages a month and 9- to 12-year-olds 1,146, according to the latest figures from Nielsen,” she said. “For them, a text isn’t like a phone call, it’s part of a conversation as well as of the ongoing flow (or seemingly 24/7 drama) of school life. But texting is only one of young people’s social tools. There is as yet no data on teens’ mobile social mapping or LBS use, but we know that more than 65 million, or about a third, of Facebook users of all ages currently access the social site through their mobile devices.” What comes next? At the end of the hearing, Rush said, “In closing, let me state clearly, for the record, and especially for those interested consumer groups, industries, and government regulators who have been monitoring our series of hearings that, with the information we’ll obtain from today’s hearing, we have now learned enough to take the next major step.” What should that next step be? Are you ready for more clearly defined location-based privacy protections? How can companies who are currently building applications and services keep themselves out of the courts? Do we really need more regulation to resolve this? What do you think? Hands photo by Monika Leon . D.C. photo by Barb Ballard . Discuss

We’ve talked about design a lot recently , highlighting the nuances of thoughtful placement and treatment of various elements of a web page. Today I stumbled onto an interesting blog post by Ryan Spoon of Polaris Venture Partners about how small changes or additions, specifically in design, can at times make a huge difference for a product on the Web. In the example Spoon references, Facebook added a post log-out message to their homepage which for some users will suggest they look into using Facebook mobile – a small change that is proving useful for the social media powerhouse. Sponsor Now when users log out of Facebook and are redirected to the homepage, an updated graphic directs their attention to the service’s mobile offerings. One message says “Leaving? Try Facebook on Your Mobile,” and another reads “Headed out? Stay connected: Visit facebook.com on your mobile phone.” It’s a subtle and easily implemented change from the default image, but in terms of visibility for their mobile efforts, its huge. Previously the main promotion for Facebook’s mobile services came in the form of a small icon and text below the “Connect With Friends” section in the lower right portion of the site. The new promotion is wrangling up users who may or may not have known about the mobile capabilities of Facebook at the exact moment they might need to use the service: when they logout and leave their computer. Some new data from the blog All Facebook suggests that the site’s new promotion has had a significant impact on use of its iPhone application. During the month of February, daily active users of the app hovered between 13 million and 14 million, but last week this figure leaped 20% to over 16.5 million. It is unclear, however, if a similar uptake in text alerts was seen from the promotion, but it may be fair to assume that it did. This represents a significant boost for Facebook’s mobile options, but it still falls far short of the site’s most used application, FarmVille, which has roughly 30 million daily active users. Whether or not a 2 million user spike in mobile usage is considered a marketing success for such a large community as Facebook, this still serves as a great example for startups of how small tweaks can make a large difference in the usage of your services. One thing of interest about this data is that it says to me that Facebook mobile, which I would consider a main feature, had gone relatively unnoticed by the majority of Facebook users. Or they just needed a reminder that it existed. This is a reminder that for the most popular web services, the majority of the users are not like its creators; they are not web savvy geeks. We learned this a few weeks ago with the whole “Facebook login” debacle when wayward Facebook users were directed to an article we had written about Facebook Connect after trying to use Google search to login. What this means is that no matter how obvious you think something is, there will always be a portion of your audience that may be oblivious to it. In most cases, its better to not constantly bombard users with promotions of secondary services; it can be annoying and it clutters up design. This creates a dilemma for promoting services without taking up precious real-estate for main features, one which Facebook solved with their post log-out promotion. But aside from promoting services, small changes to colors, sizes, and styles for things like call-to-action buttons can make a big difference. Personally, I was surprised that so many people actually log out of Facebook manually. I always stay logged in on my home computers – I even had to look around to see where the “log out” button was. But once again, the lesson learned here is that not all Facebook users are like me. It also could say that healthy reminders that aren’t overdone can be helpful in promoting services. Don’t be afraid to make a small change and see how it affects your numbers, you could end up learning something useful about your users from it. Discuss

I don’t know about you, but whenever I watch something on services like Hulu I am always more than piqued by curiosity regarding what kind of rating that particular instalment got, as well as what did critics have to say about it. If you can tell a similar story, it just looks like this is our lucky day. HQueue is a queue viewer for Hulu that lets anybody keep track of these shows that he is yet to watch. Read more Learn more about HQueueApp.com in Dataopedia.com Find out how much HQueueApp.com is worth with Stimator.com