Get an Aussie Phone Number that you can really control

Well its supposed to be the Christmas holidays - and everybody is off work ? we'll we cant keep our team from implementing new things, and we are now pleased to annouce that we have released our incoming call control system and are launching it with Australian phone numbers at only $5.99 a month including unlimited voicemail and complete call control

You can now set "rules" for incoming phone calls in the same way that you can do for emails - you can decide who can call you at what time of day and from what phone number (callerID) - you can even create multiple voicemail profiles that play different messages, and best of all (i think) is we even have a "private callerID rule" that means that when you get called by a private callerID phone number - the system can ask the caller for a PIN - if the PIN is entered correctly the call is connected to your mobile (or office) phone - but if its entered incorrectly the call is sent to a voicemail system and that voicemail is emailed directly to you.

We think this is a really cool way of managing your calls, but its only one of the powerful things you can do with our incoming phone number service.

Check it out!

Signup for a free online account here

Who says Apple makes it hard to get telco apps approved!

Lots of bloggers talk about the challenges in getting their telco style apps approved - it was big news Q3 2009.

As a provider of a telco app for the iPhone, shipping since mid 2009, we have been through the process of getting our app firstly accepted and then delivering a number of updates.

The big news is that it looks like Apple is getting serious about their commitment to helping developers get their apps to market quickly - and is even extending this to the Telco apps market.

We had an amazing experience with Apple this past week.

We have been hard at work on our new WebCan V2.0 system and had released the web version only early December 2009. To make our iPhone app compatible with the new backend we needed to release a new version - and we really were fearful that it would take a lot of work to get it approved.

Well to our surprise the approval process for our update - which contains a lot of fantastic new features - took all of 5 working days! We were ecstatic to be able to get the update out to our users before Christmas.

And we learn that on the same day Apple has also approved the Ribbit App - that provides some of the same features as BigTinCan Connect (just at $30 a month!) anyway it really shows that the telco market on the iPhone is starting to get serious.

We think that this is all a preview to the VoIP over 3G market that will be significant in 2H2010. We are very much looking forward to releasing our solution for that market.

Its going to be a great year in 2010 for a whole range of smartphone apps that offer telco cost savings and most importantly productivity gains.

GetMusic and MyWorldTour Launched on AppWorld Australia

We are pleased to announce that GetMusic and MyWorldTour are now available on the BlackBerry AppWorld. These are two very exciting BlackBerry applications that we build for Universal Music and RIM. They are a different way of looking at music and music related events on a smartphone platform

Give them a try (or you do need to be in Australia to get them as they are designed for use in Australia only at this stage) and you can see that they are not just your normal "buy a song and download it" app - they are about the whole music environment and how you can find out about the latest tours, new music, charts and then the music genre that you like!

WebSite update

Well it seems like only yesterday that we were updating our website. And guess what we felt that we still needed to make our site even better and to show what we do in an even simpler way.

With the launch of WebCan v2.0 (and we would love to try it free - click here to try) we have made great steps forward in the development of the calling and messaging services. The new site is designed to make that even more prominent and easy to understand.

And its going to get even better over the coming weeks - we are adding a whole section on how to use WebCan and more information on a new version of BuzzMe.

So stay tuned.

Apps/services that post to OSM - increasing use of smartphone apps

New results have come out from OSM detailing how users send updates to OSM.

The table is shown below

editor | num | num_data | num_users
-------------------------+---------+----------+-----------
Potlatch | 988916 | 739623 | 55941
JOSM | 1092702 | 1043776 | 12945
Merkaartor | 124756 | 117812 | 2100
Mapzen POI Collector | 1374 | 1341 | 239
BigTinCan Upload Script | 266 | 219 | 124
iLOE | 1113 | 1019 | 105
osm2go | 901 | 868 | 99
Osmose Raw Editor | 756 | 358 | 82
Mapzen Beta | 218 | 155 | 65
bulk_upload | 60110 | 55417 | 61
osmtools | 8326 | 8021 | 57
Vespucci | 558 | 374 | 49
Mapzen Alpha | 333 | 185 | 37
andnav | 207 | 191 | 31
QGIS OSM v | 117 | 100 | 24
PythonOsmApi | 937 | 753 | 18
upload | 35560 | 33959 | 14
KMLManager | 17443 | 17313 | 9
GpsMid_ | 121 | 98 | 7
OpenSeaMap-Editor- | 41 | 35 | 6

Whats interesting is the growth of smartphone apps (including our BTC Mapper and Mapzen). We really see this as key to increasing the data going to OSM data.

At BTC we are committed to adding a lot of extra features to our smart phone apps that will make it even easier for people to add data to OSM.

Look for new versions of BTC Mapper for BlackBerry, Android and finally iPhone in early 2010.

WebCan v2.0 soft launch

Today we are "soft launching" - well that's what we call it ;) - WebCan v2.0

WebCan is our web interface for the BigTinCan Calls and Messages Service - BigTinCan Connect

We have been working very hard (you know who you are) and have made this something that we are all very proud of here. Its a new, fresh interface that makes using Connect easy and fun.

You can now add incoming phone numbers in over 40 countries worldwide, and we have significantly improved the interface for making international phone calls and sending SMS and MMS messages.

Plus we have made huge changes to the system for how we handle MyFiles so you can store your content online and send and resent to anybody worldwide.

We would love any feedback on this softlaunch and we hope to have the system in full production before Christmas.

BuzzMe - Great stuff coming

We are well into the process of creating a new version of BuzzMe and BuzzMe Pro.

Its been a real challenge trying to think about what to add in and what is not really that important to everybody.

What we have tried to do in use our new BOPA structure to create a new way of using BuzzMe that is more flexible than anything that has been in the market before. So look out for this! We think you will love it.

Another interesting development is how we can use some of the exiting new tools of AppWorld to make the experience of having the app even better - and yeah, before you say it - we do know about the AppWorld (ongoing) update issues - they assure us that they will fix it "real soon" - but even given that, we know that there are some very powerful features in AppWorld that we can use to make it easier for you.

And we would love to have you post here for anything that you would like in the new BuzzMe - we are open to ideas! no matter how crazy you think it might be!

VoIP over 3G - finally?

With Google's acquisition of Gizmo5 are we ready to enter the world of VoIP over 3G? Well certainly it would offer great benefits to users in terms of cheaper calls, more powerful features and flexibility

But the question is - are the current 3G networks ready for VoIP! can they deliver the consistently low latency and throughput and constant signal to allow people to move to VoIP over 3G?

We have been running VoIP over 3G on the Android platform for months here in Australia and we can tell you that given a good network connection it works great.

However during our recent trip to San Francisco we really feel that the networks in the USA are not ready for any mass deployment. We found high latency, and signal drops that would cause havoc for VoIP calls.

We then posted a question on our Twitter feed and asked people whether they felt the networks were ready for VoIP over 3G and the feedback we got was NO WAY!

Users do not believe that their carriers are ready in most countries worldwide.

So does that mean VoIP over 3G is a 2011 technology?

Probably not - with the right circumstances, and the continued proliferation of WiFi in major cities, adding VoIP options to callback services like our BigTinCan Connect will make a lot of sense and help people to save lots of money and be more productive. So we can say that we are throwing our hat into the ring for VoIP over 3G integrated to BTC Connect. Look for that early 2010.

BlackBerry Dev Con Results

Well the conference is over for 2009 - and we must say that it was a fantastic event. We are now back home trying to digest the key things and how we can implement them.

BlackBerry Flow - we think that is the key marketing message and key development philosophy that will pervade development on the BlackBerry platform into 2010.

Well, its kind of interesting that we launched our BOPA strategy at the same time that RIM introduce BlackBerry Flow - it shows that anybody thinking about development and customer benefit on BlackBerry is working towards the same principles.

The question now is what to do next: - we think its all about integrating telco services that overlay ontop of the existing carrier networks

We have some great plans for that, and hope to be able to keep you all informed as we develop those plans for 2010

Wednesday 12th November 2009 27,000 downloads

Wow its kind of hard to believe but when we looked at the stats for downloads for yesterday we found that we had over 27,000 downloads of our range of apps across iPhone, BlackBerry and Android apps - I just wanted to thank everybody for taking your valuable time to try our products.

We are constantly trying to update and improve what we do and we have some really great plans for our range of services for 2010 - and we hope to incorprate in a number of features that you have been asking for.

A good example is things like the Missed Call Reminder, and MyColor in BuzzMe which came directly from your input.

So thanks again and we would love to hear from you at support@bigtincan.com about what we can do to make our apps and services even better.

Launch of BOPA

Today at the BlackBerry Dev Con we launched BOPA - BuzzMe OPEN Plugin Architecture - this is an exciting development that allows 3rd parties access to BuzzMe and the ability to control alerting using all the features of BuzzMe v3.0 planned for early next year

Check out the Press Release here

We would love your feedback

New BigTinCan Website

we are just about to publish our new website - its been designed to allow us to show people all the interesting things that we do in only a few seconds - its hard to communicate all the stuff that we do in simple way - so we have put together what we think will work

its a work in progress though and we are planning lots of changes already - even before we put it up

but thanks for your patience with our old site - we think the new site will be a breath of fresh air for everybody

BlackBerry Dev Con Update

very interesting day at the Dev Con - big announcements about extra tools and APIs for developers to use - a very interesting API set called Locate that will add easy to use call tower based location services - not as accurate as GPS but low battery use and it works inside - yeah!

Lots of info on our Facebook page

We have had a Facebook page for a while which has always been a great place for us to share info and news about what we are dong - well this Blog is going to be a compliment for that. So we will do our best to update both the Blog and Facebook sites ! we would love to know which one you prefer?

BlackBerry Dev Con 2009

The BigTinCan team is at the BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco (http://www.blackberrydeveloperconference.com) this week - its going to be a great event - we will be launching our BOPA strategy (look for us in the crazy tshirts)