PaulSpoerry.com

Last month Google reserved an additional 1 million phone numbers with Level 3, who has been providing numbers for Google Voice since it was announced. Many are speculating it’s release to the world in general is eminent. A public launch has been anticipated since Google said in March the service would be “open to new users soon.” Many believed the new numbers would be unleashed on June 18th, but Google Voice Product Manager Craig Walker quickly dispelled that on his own Twitter stream.

Google Voice is the re-branded GrandCentral. Google Voice provides a lot of the functionality of a full blown PBX and wraps it all into a user friendly interface. Many believe it will provide “One Number To Rule Them All” where you have a single number that rings any or all of your phone. You can also decided which calls go to which numbers, screen incoming calls, use SMS, and have your voicemails transcribed and sent to you (though this isn’t 100% perfect it works pretty darn well). The full list of features can be found on the Google Voice “About” page.

Last week, TechCrunch reported that Google would add number portability later this year to Google Voice, which would let users keep one of their existing phone numbers as their Google Voice number. For example, users could make their cell phone number their Google Voice number.

I don’t know that 1 million numbers is enough to satisfy the demand for users wanting to get their hands on Google Voice, especially once number portability is integrated. I know people who check almost daily in an attempt to get a Google Voice account (lucky for me I’ve had an account since it was known as Grand Central). What we may be seeing is Google ramping up for the first round of public beta’s. Perhaps they will do like GMail and let the first 1 million number out, and then only additional numbers via invites from existing users. We’ll see soon enough as Google seems to be adding more and more features and gearing up for some type of release in the near future.

The Internet was abuzz with reports of widespread trouble with Google Inc.’s Google Apps service this morning.

Google Search and Google News performance slowed to a crawl, while an outage seemed to spread from Gmail to Google Maps and Google Reader. Comments about the failure were flying on Twitter, and “googlefail” quickly became one of the most-searched terms on the popular microblogging site.

So what happened? This morning Google finally posted their response:

“Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That’s basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.

An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We’ve been working hard to make our services ultrafast and “always on,” so it’s especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We’re very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we’ll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won’t happen again. All planes are back on schedule now.”

Another cloud service is coming, this time on your phone. Dashwire is intended to mirror your phones content onto a web based interface. I’m sure the power users are thinking “I can already do that with other 3rd party apps. Yes, you can… but Dashwire is probably not intended for the ultimate power user and it does do a good job of providing a clean, easy to use web based interface for accessing for phones information. Some of the things they list that Dashwire can do today via their Web-based interface:

• Send and receive text messages (SMS)

•  Add and edit phone contacts

•  Easily organize your photos and videos

•  Listen to voicemails

•  Set Internet favorites, ringtones, speed dials, and wallpapers for your phone

•  Transfer contacts and settings to your new phone

•  Automatically upload photos and videos

•  Find friends and people you want to follow

•  Create a personalized web page to share your media

• Add comments and star ratings

• Single click photo upload to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Bebo

The interface is smooth, grey, and very attractive looking. The fonts are large and everything is easy to read.

On your Dashwire dashboard are your photos and videos, contacts, bookmarks, and SMS and call history laid out in movable AJAX tiles. You can click to play on your ringtones (I found this a very easy way to manage ringtones. There are tiles for phone, and text messages and you can reply to them with your keyboard. Even with a Treo or Blackjack you can’t bang out an SMS as fast as you can on a traditional keyboard. You can e-mail photo links from Dashwire, too, without your friends having to sign up to the service to view them online. Contacts you add online materialize in your mobile address book. Essentially, Dashwire is allowing you a web interface for interacting with your phone, while at the same time making an online backup of some of the most important “data”. It’s not backing up your programs, registry settings or anything like that, but all your critical stuff like contact, messages, etc.

Now it’s time for the secret sauce: how your content gets there. Dashwire begins as a mobile app that most users will probably download over the air. It installs, and then syncs to your personal page on Dashwire.com, which you’ve configured by registering your screen name and number on sign-up. The synching takes FOREVER, and might take more if your mobile network is lagging. Photos and videos take the longest to upload, and even longer the more you’ve got. I only have the “stock photos” that came with my phone and I’m sure that’s the part taking the longest. I wonder about the value of that (personally) though for people unfamiliar with other backup solutions this might be a great alternative.

The video they put together gives a great overview of what Dashwire can do, so check it out and see if this is a solution you could use. The accounts are free (not sure yet how’ll they monetize this service yet) and it’s in open beta. Some improvements they could make are faster backups. Even once my phone was sync’d it still take a LONG time during the sync process… and I wonder… why? For the moment, it only supports Windows Mobile 5 and 6, and subscribers have to specify their carrier and device model when they register. Dashwire doesn’t manage files or programs, or perform certain small tasks like deleting photos from the phone or reading and initiating e-mail. Those would be welcome additions. Dashwire also has a setting to update your status on Facebook and Twitter… though I haven’t seen HOW this works or any instructions on their site for making this interaction occur. Still… for a beta it’s not bad and definetly worth checking out.