A belated hello to the mobcasting list from London. My name is Chris
Foster, and I work in the University of Arts, London in e-learning.

I'm interested in all types of mobile technology, and I'm positive
mobcasting tools could be very useful, both in the south, where mobile
phones are available and literacy is patchy, but also in places like the uk
where such software could be used as an aid to learning and social connections

Open source telephone projects such as asterix are definitely a good way to
go to having a realisible mobcasting tool (although like Andy I'm unsure of
the telephony jargon). Also, it might be worth examining more "lo tech"
solutions, even if only for some experiments. Hence, I flag a possible
combination, I worked on recently.

Initially all I wanted was to post to a blogger blog from a phone (without
having to call the expensive US audioblog number!!). This is possible using
the skypeIn service, some free skype answering software (called Jabbernut)
and some glue code. With the skypeIn you can call a computer from any
phone, and the answering software will save voicemail messages as wav
files on the pc. It is then just a matter of detecting, converting and
uploading those files to the relevant blog........But you can go further
than that. When you call skypeIn from your phone, it can be answered by the
answering software using a personalised greeting from your computer. It is
possible to change this file automatically using a previous voice messages.
Hence, a primitive mobcasting app. I hope to be able to adapt this in the
future to allow art students to share critiques of public artworks within
my job.

I have to say that this type of approach has problems at the moment. The
skypeIn quality is often so poor you cannot hear it and the answering
software/my code is only just up to the task. Saying that I think that
building this does highlight a number of issues, particularly the
importance of a level of voice quality, and how exactly the interactions
would work. Anyone interested in trying it out is welcome to email
me for the code i wrote, its not too complicated, written in python.

It seems like the technology is nearly good enough to build some really
useful telephone/pc hybrid applications and I look forward to working with
the list to help develop them.

Cheers
Chris