Wired had a rather amusing article yesterday on a story picked up from the AP newswire. It turns out that there are two U.S. wireless operators (Cingular Wireless and Virgin Mobile USA) that decided to take advantage of a niche opportunity for offering what I call a "saved by the bell" call service.  These are rescue calls designed to get a cell phone subscriber out of a bad situation (those include bad blind dates, a lengthy client meeting from which may be hard to leave, and other awkward meetings). 

The actual service is provided by BeVocal, a California-based startup founded in 1999, and backed by VCs such as Mayfield, US Venture Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures.  BeVocal's telco-grade VXML platform can provide advanced call automation solutions, including these rescue calls.  The service allows the user to be called at a pre-determined time.  When the phone rings, one of many pre-recorded messages (with the excuse for breaking up the encounter) is played, and just like magic, the meeting is over. 

The two service providers are using different billing models for this service: Virgin Mobile charges 25 cents per call (plus the airtime) for its Rescue Ring service, whereas Cingular packages its Escape-A-Date offering as a monthly service (at a cost of $5 per month).  The article does mention that the highest call rates registered by BeVocal are around 8 PM on Fridays, which might be indicative of many blind dates that go sour.  The call volume totals about 10,000 calls per month.  So the only question is how long before we see this service here in Canada?  Will Virgin (the joint partnership between Virgin and Bell Canada) be the first operator to have this service?  We will soon find out...

Microsoft announced yesterday that its much awaited next-generation OS (codenamed Longhorn) will be introduced sometime in 2006.  In order to accommodate the new timetable and deliverable targets, the software vendor would more than likely not include its reworked Windows storage subsystem (named "WinFS") with Longhorn.

Apparently, the need to quickly patch up the security of Windows XP (under the Windows XP Service Pack 2, which was wrapped up on August 5th), created the need to redeploy some programmers that were working on Longhorn to the Service Pack team.  Given that the performance of a parallel project (Windows Server 2003, scheduled to be released in 2005) was much better than Windows XP, Microsoft made the decision to move Longhorn from the XP code base to the Windows Server 2003 code base.

The upshot of this move was a delay in the delivery of Longhorn.  In order to meet the original deadline, Microsoft decided to drop the support for WinFS in the first release of the new OS.  Interestingly enough, Windows chief Jim Allchin, declared on a ZDNet interview that WinFS was just one of many improvements that Microsoft had in store (others included "great roaming support," .Net Framework 2.0, "new browsing capabilities," the "fresh" user interface, improved migrations and deployments, "more resilience to malware" and "a new photo experience").