Phone 2.0 (like snail mail to email)

At my step-son’s soccer game Saturday, one of the other parents asked my wife: “Can we switch games to bring the Team Treats?” She replied, “Sure, but can you send me an email to remind me?”

I speed dialed Jott, said her name and, “Switch soccer Team Treat days with…”

The next time she checked her email, there was the reminder – my words, transcribed to text, with a link to the audio if needed.

I mentioned briefly last week how what I’m calling “Phone 2.0” tools are poised to change everything. I don’t think I did it justice.

In short, it’s reminiscent of when we started seeing free email accounts that weren’t linked to our ISP providers – giving us freedom and choices.

Well, consider:

1. Is your (cell phone) voice mail owned by your (cell phone) provider? (Kinda stings, like when you couldn’t take your AOL email account to Netscape in 1995, eh?)
2. Is your phone number tied to a piece of hardware, such as a cellular handset, a house or a city? What’s an area code, after all?
3. Maybe you can forward calls from your cell phone to your house – manually. But can you schedule when you want to receive calls, and where they should be routed? (11pm – 6am, directly to VM, M-Th)
4. Are voice mails and text messages one in the same? (Can you get an audio of any text, or a text of any audio?)
5. And, what’s a distribution list? Why not determine that independent of what phone you’re using?

Answer: Phone 2.0 is emerging.

Here are a few favorites:

• GrandCentral: purchased by Google (Sterling’s thoughts). As I said previously, get a free phone # online; route calls from it to any combination of phones (your cell, home & work can ring simultaneously); customize voice mails per incoming line (“Hi, honey…” for a spouse’s cell); and, get your voice mails transcribed to text and SMS’d or emailed to you (audio file attached). Wow. My GrandCentral number made me want to “drop” all my numbers for this one.
• YouMail explores the “custom voice mail – independent of provider” biz model.
• Jott: mentioned above. Create an account, register your phones, then create distribution lists. Speed dial it, and caller-ID drops you into your account. “Who do you want to Jott?” (Answer: Self) “Go ahead.” (“Don’t forget to log into our credit card account and see what happened today with…”) It gets emailed to you, with a link to the audio clip.
  One friend realized he could use this to record melodies he’d thought up, while driving.
  I also noticed on Twitter today an add that you can Jott to Twitter.
• Pinger similarly creates a voice-to-text (and vis-à-vis) communications platform out of ordinary phones. Better for groups, in some ways, but I suggest trying both for your needs. They have a nice video explaining it, too. (See homepage, “Watch The Video.”)
• Simulscribe: converts your VM to text… great reviews and I don’t know if it’s different from the others here yet.

I keep a del.icio.us list of “Phone 2.0” and welcome suggestions.