[asterisk-users] Fwd: more on Free World Dialup groups and FWDLive

[Steve Totaro]

FYI

It looks like FWD is looking for value added service ideas for free as
a volunteer.

I think it will fail but we shall see.  I really don't get the nerve
of them (Free World Dialup has changed it's name to FWD) to ask for
free ideas and development on a non-free service.

Maybe if they can come up with a killer app and people will adopt it,
then it might work, but then again, people still cling to their analog
FAX machines....

Thanks,
Steve Totaro


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Daniel Berninger <dan at fwdlabs.net>
Date: Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 10:39 AM
Subject: more on Free World Dialup groups and FWDLive
To: stotaro at totarotechnologies.com


Hello,

We are looking for group leaders and topic ideas for the FWD voice
analog of Yahoo!Groups -> FWDLive.

The exact approach to FWDLive remains a work in progress.

We know FWDLive should offer SIP enabled group conversations along the
lines of an open protocol version of Talkshoe.

We may end up limiting the size and access to groups to avoid the sort
of disruptive participants that led to the demise of Skypecasts.

A prototype of process for creating groups will get posted to FWDWiki:
1) pick a topic and write short summary
2) pick a time to run the call, post to the schedule, request conference code
3) dial into the group at the appointed time

Jeff Pulver will host a call today at 2:00 ET to discuss FWDLive topic ideas.

Reply to this note if your are interested in joining the call with
Jeff or volunteering as a group leader.

I also attached a VoIP Planet article below that provides more details
on why FWD moved to paid membership.

Best regards,

Dan

...................................
Daniel Berninger
CEO, FWD
fwd: 12908
v: +1.202.250.3838
e: dan at danielberninger.com
w: www.freeworlddialup.com

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

http://www.voipplanet.com/news/article.php/3767266

Free World Dialup No Longer Free

August 22, 2008

By Jeff Goldman

FWD, formerly known as Free World Dialup, will next month start
charging a mandatory subscription fee of $30 per year, as part of a
larger plan to reinvent itself as what the company calls a
'Communication ISP.' This follows FWD's introduction a year ago of an
optional $30-a-year membership plan.

According to FWD CEO Daniel Berninger, the mandatory fee was simply a
logical next step. "The voluntary one gave us the confidence to do the
required one... it was pretty successful, so what we ended up figuring
out over the year was that we wanted to be able to fund ourselves
enough so that we wouldn't have to do any kind of PSTN funding, like
selling DIDs," he says.

And that, Berninger says, is really the point. "After a decade, VoIP
hasn't reached its potential—it basically is an on-ramp to the
telephone network, and doesn't do anything else," he says. "People
have experimented with things, but for the most part, all the revenue
models of [companies like] Skype and JAJAH... have something to do
with extracting money based on usage charges and giving people access
to the telephone network."

Instead, Berninger wants to turn FWD into a Communication ISP, an idea
he introduced in a blog post earlier this month in which he argued
that "Interconnection with the telephone network shuts out the
possibility of creativity... Content is limited to those uses
justified in the context of the per minute cost of telephone service."

And so the Communication ISP is intended to be a pure SIP offering,
free of the PSTN and its inherent restrictions. "For your regular ISP,
you pay them a monthly fee and they attach your computer to the
Internet... we want to be the same thing, in that you buy a
communication device, a SIP VoIP device, and you go to a Communication
ISP and get the thing on the Internet... and from there, you build
applications and create new value," he says. "So we're thinking about
this like an entire ecosystem."

To compete with the dominance of the PSTN, Berninger says, VoIP needs
to differentiate itself better, not only with things like video and
wideband audio, but also with a whole new range of as-yet-unknown
applications. "The hard part of the argument is this bootstrap
problem—in other words, how do we get from where we are, not knowing
what the applications are and not having anybody with capable devices,
to scale?" he says.

The parallel, of course, would be the early days of the Internet.
"When it started, there was a very small audience and very limited
content, but it did have global termination for the same price... and
it created the virtuous cycle of content attracting more audience and
audience attracting more content—and the next thing you know, the
thing's growing tenfold a year," he says.

To begin with, Berninger says, the FWD site will soon be redesigned,
largely to make it simpler and more user-friendly: you'll be able to
get your SIP credentials for free with one click, but that credential
will die in 30 days unless you're a paid member. He admits that'll
allow people to simply get a new one for free every 30 days—and he
notes that, similarly, every paid account can carry an unlimited
amount of FWD SIP credentials. "You could pay once and create a
thousand... so we're not clamping down super hard," he says.

One key benefit of the new paid model, Berninger says, should be
improved service. "Over the years, a million people have registered,
so it's been very hard for us to provide good service... what we found
was that by asking people to pay a voluntary fee, it allowed us to
focus on the people that actually care, and create a much better
dialogue," he says. "And so we think, with the paid model, it'll be a
much smaller group of people, but it'll allow us to focus on people
that care."

Berninger also says FWD's new paid model should be a boon to other
providers. "As long as Free World Dialup was still free, then nobody
else in the SIP registration business could create a paid model," he
says. "With us going to paid, that gives people more options. Most of
the people right now are doing SIP registration as a way to extract
some kind of PSTN on-ramp usage fee, but if we're now paid, then that
gives other people more options—different business models that they
can try."

And that gets back to the main task: separating VoIP from the PSTN.
"We're trying to get people to start from scratch, to think about
what's possible, and to break out of this idea that everything has to
tie into the telephone network," Berninger says. "A lot of the
feedback we got was, 'Why don't you just charge money for 'FWDout' or
something like what Skype does?' Well, that's precisely what we don't
want to do, because it really blocks the possibilities... and so far,
the response has been great, so we're not turning back now."

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