Pass me the Alka Seltzer. Last week’s news glut left me hung over. I feel like unless I can report on Harry Potter texting he-whom-we-are-all-sick-to-death-of on his Apple iPhone, what can I possibly have to say?

But at some point we have to get back to real life.

So here’s a virtual cool compress for your forehead in the form of some news you may have missed because of last week’s SunRocket wipe-out and Harry Potter and the Deathless Hype.

Last week UK firm Communic8 launched its Emporia Life mobile handset for elderly people, with user-friendly features like extra large buttons and display, super-loud volume (including the ringer), and a big red pre-programmable emergency button. BBC News story reports that retailers are snubbing the gizmo and are being accused of “ageism” by advocates for the elderly.

AT&T’s endorsement of openness for the 700MHz spectrum that will open up when analog TV goes away shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s a shrewd move for AT&T to tell Google in effect “put up or shut up.”

AT&T has been in the communications and consumer service business for more than a century. Google’s in the…search engine and advertising business. OK, they bought Grand Central. Forwarding calls doesn’t make Google a phone company. Whatever you feel about “Ma Bell,” give them credit for understanding the mandates of the voice communications business.

Kevin McLaughlin of CMP Channel offers insight into how another software behemoth is doing in the telecom business. Microsoft’s small business phone system, Response Point, evidently left VARs at a Microsoft Partner Conference less than enthusiastic. One described it as “semi-functional.”

The IPTV smorgasboard peeking over the horizon may be the oncoming train of an out-of-bandwidth Internet backbone. Wes Thompson of TVtechnology.com offers analysis.

Mobile email is the next big cash cow for service providers and network operators, according to joint report by open source software company Funabol and Frost & Sullivan.

Industry analyst Infonetics has a bouquet of free whitepapers including ones on indoor cell phone coverage and the evolution of VoIP over wireless LAN in the enterprise.
http://www.infonetics.com/services/green.shtml?whitepapers/whitepapers.shtml

Picking up the SunRocket pieces: VoIPVoIP is offering a BYOD pay-as-you-go deal for SunRocket refugees.

Patent Trolling: Rates Technology is now suing Qwest over VoIP patents. The Long Island company already has Vonage, Nortel, and Google feathers in its troll cap.

I can’t close without a Harry Potter comment. So here goes: Philip Pullman’s trilogy — His Dark Marterials, the first book of which, The Golden Compass, appeared contemporaneously with the first Potter book — is far more complex and compelling than Rowling’s septet. And it ends before your interest in it does.

Just in case you wonder if the NSA is watching you, let me clue you in on your real not-so-secret sharer.

Forget your electronic diary, your business deals and double deals, and the fifth wife you’re hiding in the apartment around the corner. Harris Interactive researchers have homed in on one of your most tender and intimate moments. And they understand you so well, they’ve coaxed you into telling all.

Harris figured out that the whole point of screwing your backside into that delicious squinchy spot on the couch — the spot from which you can both read the subtitles and reach the beer on the coffee table — is that you are settling in for a few hours of uninterrupted detachment from your real life.

You know, that real life in which real human beings call you, some good (buyer for your house), some not so good (third wife). And just as you have completely identified with that stud on the screen — whom you didn’t look like even ten years ago — just as he is boldly going where you’d like to go, the phone rings.

Is it the call you want, or the call you don’t want?

Wouldn’t it be nice if your caller’s name flashed across the TV screen, letting you if it’s worth your while to break up your happy little moment of…revery. Not necessary, not vital, not even something you’d necessarily want other people to know you’re lazy enough to use, but wouldn’t it be nice?

According to Harris’s study for Targus, it’s nice enough for two thirds of “all US adults” to tell the Harris Interactive researchers that they’d like that to happen and for half of them to say they’d like it enough to pay for it.

That’s a pretty special moment. According to Targus, about $5.00 special. So who could cash in on that moment?

The next most special moment involves the thing you think is Caller ID on your cell phone or other mobile device. Your cell rings and you look at its display: there’s your fifth wife’s name and number. You decide to let it go to voicemail and wait to hear the message until after you’ve mailed the check so your voice will have that strong ring of conviction when you tell her it’s in the mail, that same ring of conviction that worked in the fateful back seat of the car when both of your voices rang with a different emotion.

But it’s not Caller ID that’s throwing that warning up on the little display. It only shows up because said wife’s number is already programmed in your cell’s contact list. You just get a number with no name or even a restricted number notice if your cell’s contact memory doesn’t already have your caller’s information.

Harris crunched some numbers on this one, too. If nearly two thirds of Americans are couch potatos, nearly 80 percent are at least “somewhat interested” in having real Caller ID on their mobiles. And half of them would go so far as to offer cash, with the figure hovering around $4.00 for the same level of Caller ID they have on their landline phones.

Now, unlike some wireless carriers who view caller name delivery to mobile phones as an expense item with no payback in revenue, Harris is saying different. And that could be very good for TARGUSinfo.
TARGUSinfo’s Caller Name Services has telecom companies supply the full name associated with a caller’s telephone number for consistent Caller ID display on any communications device, including phones, wireless devices, PCs and TVs. It’s also amassed a repository of upward of 250 million caller name records. Therefore TARGUSinfo is pretty much alone in being able to offer a caller name solution that aims at the those very special moments Harris pinpointed.
To check the survey or TARGUSinfo’s prices and per-subscriber pricing models, go to www.TARGUSinfo.com.

Software-as-a-service company Skyytek apparently isn’t listening to Gartner’s nay saying about corporate iPhone use. The company is adopting the iPhone for its mobile employees and is testing it with its on-demand ERP/CRM system, NetSuite. What’s also interesting here is ERP as a mobile phone app. Read Skyytec’s evaluation here.

Another company bringing business apps to the phone is Swedish software company HansaWorld. New offerings for the UK market for PDAs and Nokia business phones include credit card payment processing and filing your income tax.

If you’re an AT&T Pro, Elite and FastAccess customer you now have free WiFi access at any AT&T hotspot. Other customers get access for $1.99 a month. Fierce Broadband Wireless seems to think that iPhone customers are excluded.

TCM Net has launched a new channel on Voice Peering. The value proposition here is connecting calls without touching the PSTN.

Jajah for the iPhone — not! So says Scott Gilbertson of Wired.

Rumor Mill: Full 3G iPhone service by Christmas according to virtual journalist Robert X. Cringley.

Global businesses have big plans for mobile handsets. That’s according to UK research firm Coleman Parkes Research. Seven out of 10 expect to be using mobile VoIP within two years and many are already a variety of business applications. But with the new flexibility comes a whole new dimension of security and management challenges. Robert Jacques at vunet.com has the story.

But while businesses see huge benefits to mobile VoIP, mobile carriers have been circling the wagons, blocking mobile VoIP calls and writing restrictive terms into their contracts. Now UK mobile VoIP provider Vyke is fighting back with a standalone software upgrade that circumvents the removal of handset VoIP capabilities by carriers.

“The incumbent mobile network operators must be feeling very threatened by mobile VoIP,” observed Vyke Communications CEO Kjetil Bøhn in today’s press release. “In the short amount of time that this immerging technology has been in the market, they have already responded by removing VoIP capabilities from mobile handsets that they sell and by introducing very restrictive contract terms prohibiting their customers from using their networks to access services such as VoIP and third party peer-to-peer messaging clients. Vyke has been dedicating itself to circumventing these obstructionist tactics by developing our own stand-alone mobile VoIP application as well as providing access to large scale wireless networks on behalf of our customers.”

Even sweeter for customers, Vyke’s agreement last month with WiFi hotspot provider The Cloud Networks gives subscribers free access through any of the Cloud’s 9,500 UK and European hotspots.

Spanish WiFi company Fon says it has given away 7,000 routers to people living next to a Starbucks to encourage them to provide free or cheap Internet access to the ubiquitous café’s customers. Not surprisingly, the program is called Fonbucks. Mark Kapco at RCR Wireless News has the story.

Last week Truphone announced a whole slew of new features including SMS over IP for unlimited free texting, automatic WiFi network connection, and support for multiple SIM cards.

Steve Jobs has a solution for the AT&T’s sluggish Internet connection, which he outlined in a June 29 Wall Street Journal interview: “What we’ve done with the iPhone is we’ve made it so that it will automatically switch to a known Wi-Fi network whenever it finds it. So you don’t have to go hunting around, resetting the phone, flipping a switch or doing anything. Most of us have Wi-Fi networks around us most of the time at home and at work. There’s often times a Wi-Fi network that you can join whether you’re sitting in a coffee shop or even walking along the street piggybacking on somebody’s home Wi-Fi network. What we found is the combination is working really well.”

I particularly like the part about piggybacking on someone else’s home network. Sounds like the wonder boy of Cupertino lives in a separate ethical universe from the rest of us mere mortals. One where it might be OK to, say, share music online without paying iTunes $.99.

Industry disruption specialist Jajah is jumping on the Apple iPhone bandwagon to promote its mobile Jajah service. This isn’t anything new, but it’s certainly timely to remind customers — if they can get the iPhone service connected, of course — that there is an alternative to AT&T’s extortionate rates.

Now that the cell phone is your fifth most reliable appendage — Viagra notwithstanding — you naturally want to be able to access and do everything else with it, like contact and deploy your weightier less-portable electronic footprint. Transmedia is in the ring for you with GlideMobile — its new information management system that’s designed to let you reach and use every file on your PC, Mac and Linux computers, personal and professional.

It also seeks to remove the need for secondary mobile computing devices like, for a timely example, the much touted iPhone. GlideMobile’s advantage lies in its technological end run around the desire of hardware manufacturers to want you to buy more hardware.

Even if you slept on the pavement to cop the iPhone, Transmedia is betting that you’ve merely added another device to your existing collection of phones and, er…all that other stuff requiring a wheeled Timu briefcase.
“If you buy a device like the iPhone, the odds are you’ll still need your Blackberry because of keyboard and format incompatibilities,” says Donald Leka, CEO of Transmedia.

“Many people already have an iPod. With the addition of the iPhone, you could end up with things like two or three MP3 players. Your BlackBerry doesn’t let you easily get to your Mac. GlideMobile is basically software that lets you buy less hardware and pick only the hardware you want without sacrificing any of their capabilities. It serves things up to you on your phone in the correct format.”

Glide’s browser-based software means you need no installed software. You access Glidemobile from your cellphone browser at http://www.GlideMobile.com and voilá — now your cellphone is your PC, just like that.

Depending on the sophistication of your handset, connecting to Glide’s media sharing platform makes it possible for you to edit and buy photos, create and convert documents to Word and PDF formats, and share files from your collection of computers from whatever undisclosed location you and your handset are in, including your car or the plane.

The core of Glidemobile today is that it’s all browser-based through your phone, according to Leka.

“What it does is let you bypass a lot of the restrictions imposed by the carriers and lets you access your advanced functions. You can create and publish Web sites from your phone. You can share multimedia — say four or five movies — let’s say one hundred MBs from your phone. GlideSync lets you synchronize your contacts, calendars, bookmarks, photos, music, video, and documents from your desktop to your phone.”

By July 31, GlideMobile will expand its browser-based application suite with local BREW and Java applications for download to your handset with local file syncing and media playback, photo and video capture.

“Right now, in order to use Glide on your cell phone you have to have a network connection,” Leka explains. “But say you’re on a plane and you don’t have that network connection. With Glide’s upcoming local applications, you’ll continue to be able to work.

“Coming up, you’ll be seeing mini-spreadsheets and other productivity applications. Over time, we want to recreate and make all those applications available locally on the phone for those times when you don’t have a network connection. That way, you’re never left out in the cold.”

And if your undisclosed location will support a party and your handset happens to support streaming media — namely, a T-Mobile Wing, Samsung Blackjack or Palm Treo — you can really be happening because GlideMobile turns your phone into a music or video jukebox. Oh, and right now, you get two gigabytes of storage free when you sign up.

To see a list of the many handsets GlideMobile supports, go to www.GlideMobile.com.