WHY USE A WORKSTATION AND A MOBILE PHONE SEPERATELY ?
Anti Oulasvirta published (in 2008) an interesting paper describing how people “do the Ubicomp” by juggling with many different devices at the same time, using the most appropriate device for each task. On the other hand, what we experience every day is that communication is often triggered by some messages we receive via email or instant messaging tools. Is it possible to integrate these applications with mobile phone technology seamlessly? In other words, think about a scenario like this:
You receive an email message saying ‘[...] please call me on my mobile phone as soon as possible [...]‘, you look for the number on the address book on the phone and do not find it, then you look for it in the signature of the email message, or in previous email messages and do not find it…
Wouldn’t it be better to have a simple button, provided by the email client, that you can press to automatically start a call from your mobile phone to another mobile phone? That’s a project we are starting to develop, in partnership with DISCo.
We are trying to integrate Guglielmo with Mozilla Thunderbird (that’s coherent with our idea of releasing Guglielmo for general purposes), and then Mozilla Thunderbird with Parlay X (or similar) APIs offered by Telecom Italia. This means that users will be able to start a call by clicking a button, without having to look for a phone number neither on the phone nor on the PC or the Web. Our plans are of having something ready by the end of Summer, would you give it a try? 
Tags: cellular, communication, computing, Guglielmo, mobile, parlay, phones
I really think that this integration will make the battle easier. We all know that one of the real causes that push people to use a feature is their lazyness: a click-and-phone technology will be absolutely well accepted!