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

Tue Sep 23 13:24:07 CDT 2008

I was interested in participating but receive no reply at all about how
to be on the call. Nor was Jeff Pulver on Facebook or responding to
Twitter.

And I paid for my membership thinking that I'd give it a year and see
what happened.

Michael

On Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:16:09 -0400, Steve Totaro wrote:

>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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--
Michael Graves
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o713-861-4005
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