When I checked out Google’s blog post Tuesday about its Free the Airwaves project, which aims to convince the FCC to approve the use of the white spaces between the spectrum vacated by analog television channels for broadband access, I saw it offered the ability to phone your Congressman. I thought that was kind of cool, so I clicked through to learn more.

I found myself at the master’s thesis of Fred Benenson — a VoIP-based program called Cause Caller that mixes IP telephony and activism. At the site you can enter your telephone number and Cause Caller makes a VoIP call to one of a randomized list of Congressional reps. So far 11 people have made calls on behalf of the Google campaign, which is exactly where things stood on Tuesday when Google provided the link. On the site Benenson said he funds the project himself, so I wondered if an influx of Google calls might bankrupt him, or if Google had volunteered to help offset costs.

Apparently the answer to both is no, and since few calls have been made so far, Benenson may not have to worry. So far Benenson says his most expensive cause has been an effort to impeach President George W. Bush that generated 1,000 calls, but also says he pays less than 3 cents a minute for VoIP and uses Amazon’s EC2 for his servers and Asterisk for the PBX. The EC2 is the most expensive part of the project, which in total has cost him about $500 so far. Benenson has a day job at Creative Commons, so he’s not looking for a revenue model, and says he doesn’t mind footing the bill so far.

“I keep it alive because it’s a fun hobby,” Benenson says. “I basically did the whole site by myself from the design to the VoIP programming, so I kind of took a long hiatus, but now I’m ramping up and starting to blog about it again. The Google notice is like a shot in the arm.”

Cause Caller strikes me as one of the more interesting ways that technology can intersect with politics, with the potential to make a greater impact than emailing petitions and encouraging voter engagement by texting a candidate’s running-mate announcement.

It isn’t quite earth shattering, but Intel is introducing a technology that could make computers more useful. The company has developed ways to power up PCs remotely, allowing people to, say, retrieve files, according to the Wall Street Journal. Intel calls this Remote Wake, and it will work on forthcoming desktops with a new chipset that will have the new software embedded in the memory. Apparently, this will be much easier to use than the current options.

Intel is working with Jajah, CyberLink, Orb Networks and Pando Networks. Because of Remote Wake, a PC will also be able to make and receive calls over the JAJAH network and wake up from sleep mode to receive a call. This is improvement over the current scenario, where you can’t quite use your PC as your phone, because when it’s in sleep mode, you miss the calls. Pando’s service could deliver video at a dedicated time to a PC after waking it up remotely, an option that could make Pando quite viable as a desktop-oriented content delivery network.

If you are an expert on remote access and have some opinions about Remote Wake, please share your opinions with us.

Earlier this week, Delta Airlines announced plans that will turn the boarding passes into advertising opportunities, or billboards, hawking destination specific businesses and products. An Omaha-based start-up, Sojern is behind this advertising offer, which is going to be adopted by four airlines in addition to Delta - American, Continental, United, and US Airways. Given that airlines are in such desperate position, mostly because of their incompetency, they are ready to try anything, however strange it might seem.

Now there is word that IDT Corporation, a calling card company is going to start using advertising messages on its pre-paid calling cards. Using technology from in-call advertising start-up VoodooVox, IDT will hawk marketing and advertising messages that are matched with their demographic profile. For instance, someone is calling Dominican Republic, an ad for airline would be piped in while the caller is waiting for his call to connect. IDT sells about 17.5 million pre-paid calling cards every month.

Given the razor thin margins in the long distance business, I am not surprised IDT is going down this path, but I wonder if they will use some of the fat CPMs from advertising to offer cheaper or near free long distance call. Now that would be cool, and perhaps somewhat receptive from the audience, who might get annoyed by ads intruding their calls.

These two examples make me ask the question: are we getting so saturated with ads that they will just become meaningless and lose their entire effectiveness?

A growing number of people expect mobile phones to emerge as the dominant means of Internet access for the 6.6 billion people on Earth; as proof, they point to the 10 percent of the 2.5 billion handsets in circulation that already include such access. But there exists a flaw in the mobile phone-as-path-to-Internet-ubiquity theory in that telcos generate the majority of their revenues from voice services that the Internet threatens to make obsolete — like a power company that makes most of its money through a monopoly laundry service that at-home washers and dryers have the power to put out of business.

In fact, given carriers’ efforts to excise voice functionality, it’s the Internet that seems unlikely to survive, much less prosper. Carriers routinely require device manufacturers to handicap handsets, for example, to remove Wi-Fi functionality in order to make it difficult to bypass voice plans. Another example is that of Apple and AT&T, which require iPhone customers to purchase both voice and data connectivity (i.e. laundry service and power) — a policy that’s even enforced for deaf customers with a doctor-certified inability to speak or hear.

Low cost or free voice functionality helps drive demand for Internet access, so it hardly seems a good idea to sacrifice voice in order to get mobile phones with Internet functionality. The way forward requires making the Internet more useful for connecting communication devices, not less. For example, addressing the three issues below would go a long way toward creating an Internet for devices that competes directly with carriers for mobile phone users:

• Close the ease-of-use gap between configuring session initiation protocol VoIP devices like the Linksys WIP330 IP Phone (a.k.a. “Cisco’s iPhone”) and the provisioning process for cell phones. The former remains sufficiently painful as to exclude everyone without an IT department or geek credentials, but the telcos cannot stop the 100 or so manufacturers of SIP devices from agreeing on a common provisioning mechanism.
• Unify the addressing of all SIP-based devices. The insistence on proprietary screen names and unwillingness to peer leaves real-time Internet services like instant messaging and VoIP mere islands of communication. Even the millions of users claimed by AIM or Skype are meaningless vs. the 3.3 billion wired and wireless phones addressable by telephone number. The secret to carriers’ ability to generate in excess of a trillion dollars in revenue from voice services is interconnection.
• Eliminate the user intervention steps necessary for wireless device connection. Connectivity should get addressed as a matter of reception, as in the case of mobile phones or even FM radios, not by presenting users with lists of Wi-Fi access points. It seems like there must exist automated solutions for picking and connecting to or disconnecting from Wi-Fi access points.

Initially, electric power generation companies were application-specific, which resulted in incompatible voltages and infrastructure being used for everything from street and residential lighting to industrial applications. The decision to abandon the link between application and power generation unleashed an explosion of devices offering the tremendous range of productivity and entertainment options we take for granted today. When it comes to decoupling the connectivity and application, the nature of the Internet makes it possible to create mobile phones with CD audio quality. The Apple iPhone’s elegance does not change the fact that basic voice quality remains unimproved since mobile phones first arrived 25 years ago. The mobile phone companies see the Internet as a threat, not an opportunity.

Microsoft Corp., in its effort to woo telecoms has come up with yet another project, Echoes, a services platform that will likely to be sold to telecom carriers. It combines Microsoft’s Live Messenger, with over the air syncing of people’s address books with presence and gift wraps it as unified communications platform.

Mary Joe Foley points out that Bill Gates has been referring to Echoes in his speeches recently. Echoes was incubated by Microsoft Israel Research’s Corporate Vice President Moshe Lichtman and is being developed by Microsoft’s Israeli Strategic Development Center, Foley reports. According to one of her sources, the new platform will be able to:

• Syncs Address book contacts over the air.
• Ensure that IM messages work seamlessly with SMS.
• Windows Live Messenger contacts get local numbers.
• Voice calls from Messenger on PC to mobiles.
• Some sort of presence.

Skype, GrandCentral and others already deliver many of these services. From that perspective there is nothing new here, except for the need of being tied to Microsoft’s platforms. Echoes’ outlines Microsoft’s biggest challenges: the inordinate amount of time they spend on developing products that are either a platform or a suite forces them to make too many compromises. One can’t blame the company whose DNA is Windows (Platform) & a Suite (Office.) This is a malady which makes them unable to move ahead and define the future.

Like all the other geeks in attendance, I couldn’t help myself from letting out an audible “whooo” when Google showed off an Android phone demo Wednesday that linked Street View to a compass (see video below). Sure it was just a demo, but watching the virtual-reality performance of photo-maps linked to hand motions shows how cool new applications could be when they start by running on a high-end mobile phone.

Delivering lots of cool new apps is the promise of Android, the open source mobile OS project from Google. With a much-improved iPhone-ish look and feel, the base Android platform seems ready for prime time and on schedule to launch somewhere, sometime, later this year. But I still see three big problems for Android apps that could keep the add-on market small for the foreseeable future.

Specifically the problems are:

– how many carriers are really going to offer Android phones?
– how will users find Android applications?
– how will developers convince users to take a chance and download their app?

Until Google can help answer those questions, Android apps are probably going to lag far behind those provided by big carriers on their captive hardware/software offerings, especially those designed for the already popular iPhone.

With a big crowd overall and packed rooms at Android-specific discussions, the Google I/O conference Wednesday showed there is great interest from the developer community for the idea of an open-source platform for the development of mobile apps. And the list of early winners in Google’s Android app development contest shows a wide range of creative thinking, with developers using the features of mobility and base apps like maps to build new, rich and sometimes quirky programs that would likely never get past the first gatekeeper at AT&T Wireless or Verizon.

But getting back to the problems — without a committed list of service providers, Google doesn’t have much of a market to offer developers yet. Similarly, the company’s silence on any kind of an apps marketplace means developers might be on their own when it comes to marketing their one-off ideas, adding a huge degree of difficulty, especially for smaller shops.

And the lack of an application certification process (Google said Wednesday that users will be asked to certify an app themselves at install) means another big hurdle for developers to cross, namely convincing users to trust that their app is safe, won’t break their phone or transmit personal info to undisclosed locations.

Seems like a lot to ask from users, especially those in the U.S., who historically haven’t been able to do much with their phones other than download new ringtones. Add education to the list of above problems and you see why I think this market is going to stay small for some time.

Paul Kapustka, former managing editor for GigaOM, now has his own blog at Sidecut Reports.

Earlier this morning I met with Sarik Weber, co-founder of Hamburg, Germany based mobile call back service, Cellity. He brought me up to speed on his company, but he also mentioned that they had launched a Facebook application that allows you to send free SMS messages to anyone worldwide.

I signed up for the app but also looked at the competitive landscape and found that there are around three dozen (free) SMS related apps, but they have little or no usage. Even the best ones get about 500 users a day, though most have fewer than 50 daily users. (Related story: 5 Ways to SMS for free.)

The state of these SMS apps, is no different from many Social Voice applications (Voice widgets). The only difference being that the VoIP widgets have high incidence of installs but comparatively low daily usage.

These two examples make me question the viability of Facebook as a communications hub. Our columnist Daniel Berninger has eloquently made an argument for a social directory that uses Facebook and other social networks to break away from the current paradigm of numeric phone numbers.

He is part of a group that believes that social network could be used to authenticate our “communication” relationships. I don’t necessarily disagree with Daniel, but the usage metrics of SMS and Voice Apps makes me wonder if Facebookers really want to do anything more than throw Vampire Bites, Scrabble and pretend to have a lot of friends. O