Disruptive Telephony

Or perhaps condolences are in order... somehow he has to make developing for the Blackberry sexy again to all the app developers who focus these days on the world of iOS/iPhone/iPad and the Android platform.

Alec certainly has his work cut out for him. As he writes in his post today announcing the news:

Over the last few days I’ve been in San Francisco at the Mobilize conference, and speaking with developers. It’s clear from those conversations that the primary problem we face is lack of support from application developers. My team’s job is to correct that – to win the hearts and minds of mobile developers again.

"Lack of support" probably doesn't go far enough as a statement. Any of a zillion charts will show you Blackberry's rapidly declining marketshare (particularly in the US). iPhones are dramatically outselling Blackberries and Apple is poised to launch iPhone 5 / iOS 5 / iCloud next week, pretty much assuring even more of a boost to the iOS platform and developer ecosystem.

On the Android side, recents stats show twice as many people buying Android devices as iPhones... and today's mega-launch of the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet is going to light an even larger flame under the Android ecosystem.

Plus, add in Microsoft and all they are attempting to do with the Windows Phone platform...

And somehow... in the midst of all of this...

Alec is going to try to get developers excited about developing apps for the Blackberry???

Not just for the Playbook, mind you, but for the traditional Blackberry platforms of "BBOS" and the new QNX platform. As he says in an interview posted on RIM's Blackberry Developer Blog today:

Developer evangelism is all about personal contact, listening, responding, and educating. We’re going to work very closely with the developer community, expand on support and programs that make it easy and rewarding for developers to create apps, be in the midst of developers to understand their needs and secure a great developer experience, and identify and remove the barriers developers face in supporting our platforms and doing business with us.

It's a tough task, made even more challenging by RIM's recent earnings report (or lack thereof), but if anyone has a hope of pulling it off, it's Alec. He's an exceptional communicator, marketer and salesman... and brings both a great technical depth and ability to communicate in "regular" language.

I do seriously wish him all the best! I've been a long-time fan of the Blackberry, even though I myself changed mine in for an iPhone back in 2008 or so. RIM has done some pretty amazing things in the mobile market, but as Gizmodo recently noted ("How RIM Could Save Itself"), RIM tied itself to the enterprise so tightly that it missed out on the rise of smartphones in the consumer space - and the corresponding move of those "consumer" smartphones back into the enterprise.

What will their future look like? Can they win back developers? Can they make the Blackberry ecosystem sexy again? Can it claw its way back into being a player in the smartphone market?

Alec's got a challenge before him - and I look forward to seeing what he'll do!

P.S. Up to join in the challenge? As Alec notes at the bottom of his blog post, he's hiring developer evangelists...

Other notes about Alec's new role:

• Jim Courtney at Voice on the Web with a long, thoughtful piece on Alec's past and what this all means for RIM.
• Andy Abramson at VoIP Watch

Image credit: me. Taken at ITEXPO East 2010 in South Beach, Miami :-)

You can, of course, register for a free Tropo.com account and start creating your own voice/SMS/IM/Twitter apps using languages like PHP, Python, JavaScript, Groovy and Ruby...

Per Mitel's news release, the app allows users to:

• Search the corporate directory and click-to-dial from corporate contact list to place calls through the corporate network.
• View missed, dialed, and received calls.
• Access visual voicemail from your office extension and manage messages by preference rather than sequence.
• Automatically update presence status and call routing preferences based on your location, or time of day.

Given enterprise users' desire to use their own devices, it is not surprising to see these type of apps coming out from a vendor like Mitel. It will be interesting to see how this helps Mitel in the marketplace.

Kudos to the Mitel team for creating the apps.

In a recent Voxeo Developer Jam Session, I explained what is new in Voxeo's Prophecy 11 and VoiceObjects 11 and how you can use them to build even larger-scale communications apps than before.

The session is available for download, as are the slides. It is also available for viewing on YouTube. If you don't know anything about Voxeo, this is also a great way to learn more about its core products.

Oh, and when you're down watching, you can download Prophecy 11 or VoiceObjects 11 for free for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. :-)

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If so, check out this video from Chris Pirillo about the work being done by a team of folks to supply local cell phone coverage... the vans with satellite and cell hookups are already enroute... it uses software from OpenBTS and Tropo.com to let burners leave each other voice messages, exchange SMS messages and more. Here's the video:

And here are some blog posts that provide more information:

• The Long and Winding Road to Burning Man
  
  
• Tropo + OpenBTS + Burning man = Awesome
  
  
• Voice Board and Group SMS for Burning Man
  
  
• Papa Legba FAQ (about the deployment at Burning Man and what you need to do to participate)

I'm not personally going to be at Burning Man, but this does sound very cool!

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Tomorrow, Wednesday, June 22, 2011, at 1:00pm US Eastern, I'll be speaking in an online webinar on this topic called:

"Taking Customer Service to the Cloud"

The session will begin with industry analyst Daniel Hong from Ovum discussing what he found in his new 2011 research report, "Decision Matrix: Selecting a Provider of Cloud-based Speech Self-Service Solutions in North America." I will then follow discussing what you need to consider when choosing a hosted provider (such as that of my employer, Voxeo). Next Debbie Diersch from Chrysalis will discuss factors to consider when choosing an application developer... and then we'll throw it open to questions.

Daniel's got some great data and Debbie and I are both aiming to provide some solid educational material (i.e. it's not just sales pitches), so if the topic is of interest, the hour will be a good use of your time.

You can register to join for free. The session will be recorded for later viewing, but if you register you will also get a copy of the soon-to-be-released Ovum report (a $2,500 value).

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As Adam Kalsey writes in the Tropo blog post, "Announcing New lower SMS pricing" sending an SMS is a trivial matter in Tropo. His language of choice is PHP, so he shows:

<?php
call('+14155551212', array('network' => 'SMS'));
say('d00d, Penny SMS? ');
?>

But you could obviously do something very similar in Python, Ruby, Groovy or JavaScript in Tropo Scripting... or with any language using the Tropo WebAPI.

Personally, I like seeing what I can do to merge SMS with Twitter... back in December I wrote about how to use Tropo to trigger alerts via SMS based on text in Twitter, which is a variation of an app I do actually use for Twitter monitoring. My colleague Justin Dupree also wrote a cool post about using Node.js to build a Twitter IM/SMS service.

Anyway... all of these SMS apps are now able to be deployed in production for only 1 cent per message to and from US numbers. Text messages to numbers outside the US are still the low 2 cents per message. If you'd like to try it out, Tropo is free for developers to build and try apps... you just have to sign up for an account.

P.S. In case it wasn't crystal clear, Tropo is a service of Voxeo, my employer. However, I wouldn't write about it here if I didn't think it was cool!

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Next Tuesday, April 19, at 11am US Eastern time, I will be joining an industry analyst in a webinar called "Best Practices in Multi-Channel Customer Interaction". We'll be covering topics such as:

• what communication channels customers are choosing for interacting with businesses
• best practices you can implement for each channel
• where customer interaction is heading, with particular focus on social and mobile channels
• how you can create applications that interact with customers across multiple channels
• best practices in cross-channel analytics and integration into business intelligence systems

I think you'll find it quite educational if you're wondering how to expand your customer interaction beyond simply voice or web. The session will have some solid quantitative data and will take a look at what's ahead in terms of customer interaction.

Registration is free and simple and is open to anyone. We'll also be recording the session and it will be available for listening after the fact if you can't attend on Tuesday.

Please do join us... and bring your questions... it should be a good time!

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