More jobs @ Voylent

Tired of proudly serving your corporate masters? Then why settle for the lesser evil! We have a new position and we haven't yet filled some old ones, so if you are in London and looking to land a job as a:

- UI designer
- Senior Symbian developer
- VP Marketing

then have a look at our jobs page on how to send us a resume. Call us, email us, we wanna hear from you.

Link

VoIP revolution leaves US behind

Excellent piece of analysis at The Register about the differences in handset availability in Eurasia and North America.
Mobile operators, who at the time of writing (2006) are still tied to voice revenues and are unable to provide a decent portable email solution, are trying to avoid to make money from SIP/VoIP calls. Either they change business model or their customer will change behavior. So far only Vodafone has licensed a SIP stack for their network but it's not available to users. No work from the others.

Link

Voylent featured on the WSJ

Voylent was featured this friday on the Wall Street Journal Asia. I Do not have the original article yet but there's a repost in Chinese (Simplified).

UPDATE: A kind reader sent the link to the English version of the article.

Link (Thanks, Jeremy!)

Voylent to speak at GSC

We have just been confirmed as speakers for the Global Security Challenge Conference. Held in London on October 26th, GSC is a defence and homeland security conference organized by the London Business School.

Rodolfo Rosini, Voylent CEO, will be taking part in a panel titled "From idea to IPO: the difficult path of a security startup", alongside Gerry George (London Business School), Matt McCue (Columbia University Technology Ventures) and moderated by Niloo Howe (Paladin Capital Group)


Link to the conference website (link to registration).

Voylent is hiring!

Just a quickie: we have several open positions waiting to be filled by bright talent in our company in our humble London office. We have all the range from Accountants to Zoomers. Check out our webpage or give us a call.

Voylent featured on SymbianOne

A new article on Voylent just went live on SymbianOne, a website devoted to the Symbian OS. That was the most difficult interview ever: I was traveling across Europe and Richard (SymbianOne's feature editor) is based in Wellington, NZ.

Link (Thanks, Richard!)

Speaking at Dorkbot

Dear all,
we have just been confirmed as speakers at Dorkbot #41 in London. For the uninitiated Dorkbot is a meeting of people doing strange things with electricity. Topics covered range from music, art, maps, security, hacking, the occasional hacktivismo project plus a weird guy who plays with lightning bolts. We are going to talk about cellphone privacy (or the non-obvious lack of it).

Pics and slides will be posted here after the event.

Link (Thanks, Saul!)

VX 2.2 is out

We have released a new updated version of Voylent Communicator, VX 2.2. It has been tested in the past few days and there shouldn't be any major issue.
Mostly stability and connectivity issues fixed in this release (eye candy in the next one, we promise) but let us know what you think.

Voylent sponsors Bellua Cyber Security Asia

We are proud to be associated as sponsors to the upcoming Bellua Cyber Security Asia conference in Jakarta, Indonesia. We will have a small space as well for demos. Be sure to stop by to say hello if you're there.

Real interception | Digium scores

Just a roundup of today's news:

- 3 guys have been arrested in London in connection with an eavesdropping scandal involving the British Royal Family. One of them is the correspondent of a shady tabloid known for it unorthodox approaches to scoops. Technical details are sketchy but seems that only voicemails where abused.
Interestingly after I started reading about the monarchy on wikipedia, it turned out that there have been a lot of unexplained leaks in the past (see Squidgygate for more info)

- Digium has raised over 13m USD as their Series A! (first round of venture capital invesment, that is). Holy moly! That means that their backers have serious expectations in terms of returns. But at least have bought the most recognizable brand for open source telephony, regardless of the product (and by the way, they claim to have over 1m users. Impressive.)

Emerging Telephony Conference 2007

The future is calling. Will you answer?

Just heard that ETel is coming back in 2007. It's an O'Reilly conference about Open Source and telephony, quite exciting, quite nerdy, all interesting.
Call for Papers ends on Sept 26.

Link

CA and F-Secure squabble over mobile threats

This is interesting: according to ZDNet UK "a spat has erupted between the two security services companies folllowing CA's accusation that antivirus vendor F-Secure was overplaying the threat of mobile malware".

Link (via ISN)

Voda scandal update

More information about the Greek Vodafone scandal in this article from the Guardian. Apparently it was an inside job.

Link (Thanks, Ollie!)

Voylent featured on Symbianwatch

More coverage on the way! Symbianwatch is an excellent resource for Symbian OS news and mobile phones applications and recently featured Voylent Communicator on their webpage. Worth having a look.

Link (Thanks Dusan!)

Privacy and phone spying

Two articles from Red Herring, one about spying of phone conversations in the U.S. and the other about privacy. It's a business / Venture Capital publication, but the articles are quite interesting.

RH: Keying in on Phone Spying
RH: Life After Privacy

The day after the launch

Yesterday we went live with the public beta of the Voylent Communicator, so far we made it to

Boing Boing (Thanks, Cory!)
IrishEyes
ISN: InfoSec News mailing list
VoIP Security Alliance
Digg

Pretty cool, considering our marketing "budget". Thanks to everyone who spread the word.

Also, some people tested it on the Cingular network and they had some issues to disable the "Dual Mode" option on their cellphones. If you managed to make it work, let us know!

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Voylent the joins Symbian Platinum Partner Program

We have just announced that we've partnered with Symbian. Truth is, we have been partners for a long time.

Let me explain.

There are two kinds of partnerships: those who work and those who don't. There is no surefire way to figure out which one will be when you start, but announcing with a flashy press release it's not going to affect the quality of the relationship. If not it creates high expectations from customers and the market in general.

So in this case we signed with Symbian way back, we worked together and we are now quite happy about it. Today we decided was a nice day to mention it in public. Thanks to everyone at Symbian for their support especially Laura who's our point of contact.

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New company name: Voylent

From today we are rebranding under a different name: Voylent.

When we started we had a few names but nothing we really liked, and since one of the products we were thinking of was a firewall for mobile phones, well, we picked Cellfire.

Fast forward months later we decided that was better to write code and develop products than sitting in feng shui offices doing branding exercises while listening to the singing of whales.
With the release of the beta of our client we got back to our todo lists and the name change was there looming, so we debated until we found a name we liked, that the .com was available and that at the time of this writing there are 240 hits on Google and we're already ranking 1st without even having it as a keyword on the pages. Pretty neat, I say.


Now what's in a name? It sounds like "violent" but it's not why we had it. Being geeks we got it from a SF movie from the '70 (one of my favorites - Rodolfo): Soylent Green. You probably haven't seen it, but there are countless jokes about it on The Simpson and Futurama. Now you know.

SkypeCamp

BarCamp are informal gatherings of hackers to code, discuss technology and generally eat junk food. Skype is entering the turf with its own SkypeCamp in Las Vegas on June 10-12 2006 (seems that concurrently there's the eBay developers conference). Might be interesting.

Link (via SkypeJournal)

Smartphone growth slows in EMEA

Canalys has released new research about the Smartphone market in EMEA and Asia. The interesting bit is that the growth actually slowed in the past 12 months in western Europe.

They also provide a breakdown of the handset vendors market share, and Nokia is the 800-pound gorilla here:

"Despite delays in the release of its enterprise-focused E-series smart phones Nokia not only retained its comfortable lead in EMEA in Q1 2006, but increased its market share to 76% from the 67% it had in the same quarter one year ago, according to the Canalys estimates.

Both Nokia and second-placed RIM increased their respective device shipments above the market average of 25%. Qtek (the brand used by HTC on its own devices in EMEA) posted the highest growth among the top five vendors, its 211% rise taking it just above HP and Palm for the first time and so making it the leading Windows Mobile vendor in the quarter.

HP and Palm, along with several others, are feeling the effects of the decline in the handheld market, which their converged device volumes are not yet high enough to completely offset."

I think the trend will not reverse until the introduction of dual core processor for mobile phones, which should reduce the total bill of materials by enough to create a wedge between multimedia and corporate mobile handsets. At that point manufacturers will stop cramming as many features as possible in buggy handsets as they are doing now (RIM aside).

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