[*] StarStar Me: Using your name as your phone number

[John Lange]

That article about the ** thing is just a gimmick. Basically it's a
speed-dial-by-name. If you a contact list you can already dial-by-name.

But Ron's comment about email addresses reminded me of something...

A few years back we talked about the challenge direct "dialing" people with
the keypad who don't have a phone number. There have been a few proposals
in this area specifically things like ENUM.

What I've come to realize in the intervening time is that this problem is
already well on it's way to solving itself and it's actually not that
complicated.

Step 1. Forget about the numeric keypad as the problem. With the
proliferation of smartphones, just about everyone effectively dials by
name. They lookup a contact and then press "call". On my smartphone, when I
touch the "phone" button, it doesn't come up with a keypad, it comes up
with a list of searchable contacts. I can't even remember the last time I
called someone by punching in numbers using the keypad. So while I may not
be typical, it does prove that it's possible to get rid of they keypad as
the primary input device.

With deskphones it's the same thing. If you look at Microsoft Lync, even
the desk phone is integrated with your address book. I just start spelling
the name with the keypad and typically within 3 key presses it's narrowed
the list down to my intended contact (It automatically matches the name or
the phone number as I type it in).

Step 2. Adopt a standard for direct sip-to-sip calling. Microsoft (yes
Microsoft!) has already solved this problem with an elegant and simple
solution; DNS SRV. It works like this: take an email address and look up
the sip service for my domain using DNS SRV, then call that destination
directly bypassing the PSTN.

So lets take this as a practical example. Lets say I have a contact in my
address book "Mike Smith". I probably have his name, email and phone
number. If I want to call Mike, I look up his contact and touch "call". In
the background my voice application (my "phone") does DNS SRV lookup for
SIP using his email address. If it returns a result, I "dial" that and talk
to Mike. If it fails, I fall-back to a traditional PSTN/Cell call.

John
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