Today Palringo is unveiling their “vocal instant messaging” on iPhone. It lets users send the equivalent of a text message, but by voice. Sound familiar? Of course. It’s the service we’ve all come to know and love as “push to talk”. But unlike traditional push to talk services, this one spans handsets from Apple, Nokia, RIM and Windows Mobile OEMS, plus carriers.
That’s a paradigm shifter.
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I had the opportunity to chat with Clarity Communications Systems Inc VP of Business Development Tom Carter earlier this week.  Clarity is a wireless company focused on location based services and push to talk. They differentiate from competitors like Kodiak in two ways: market focus, and technology. Kodiak is targeting the tier 1 player with a circuit switch solution.Â
Clarity’s technology provides their services over 1x CDMA networks. All IP, it can bridge connections from any number, IP address, or URI to any other. The implications are that Clarity’s future is in far more than push-to-talk — push data, video, clips, real time sessions are all possible. Combined with location based services, it means new scenarios like “push to call at a particular location”, geo-fencing, or push advertising delivery.
Clarity is staking out a position in the market providing hosted push to talk services to tier 2 and 3 carriers. These are the carriers providing services in the places that Sprint/Nextel doesn’t touch, and potentially very lucrative accounts. Their hosted model allows the carrier to be up and running with push to talk services in a matter of weeks. So far, they’ve been experiencing some great success to, with four new deals done in the last few months.
Push to talk is a pretty interesting application. It’s instantaneous, like IM, but voice. By combining push to talk with location, Clarity’s building a full-on New Presence application.Â
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