Disruptive Telephony

Would you like to learn more about Voxeo, this crazy and cool company I work for? Would you like to learn about how you can build communications applications that go beyond voice and let you interact with customers via SMS/text, IM, Twitter, web and video? Would you like to meet Voxeo executives, partners and others in the industry?

As I wrote about over on the Voxeo Talks blog, you can do all that and MUCH more at the Voxeo Customer Summit 2010 at the amazing Hard Rock Hotel at Universal Orlando on June 21-23, 2010.

Note that the Summit is for anyone working with Voxeo services... so even if you just have a free developer account over on our Evolution developer portal (or are thinking about getting one), you are welcome to come down to Orlando to join in the fun.

On the Summit agenda, you'll see that we have:

• Sessions about the future of Voxeo and our roadmap
• Product spotlights highlighting what is new in each of our products
• Business sessions showing you how you can grow your business
• Technical deep dives to help you get the most out of our services
• Feedback sessions where we want to hear from you about what you want
• Demo sessions where you can see the latest software from Voxeo and several partners, talk with the actual engineers behind the products and learn in a live setting about the products
• Meals and social events including a performance by the Blue Man Group!

It will be an outstanding two days of learning, interaction and fun. The best part is...

REGISTRATION IS FREE!

That's right! In keeping with our free downloads and free developer accounts and free training, we decided to give you this "All Access" pass to get an inside view of Voxeo... for free! All you have to do is get yourself to Orlando, FL, and pay for your hotel, etc.

To find out more about the Customer Summit including discounts on staying at the Hard Rock Hotel, please visit our summit site at:

www.voxeo.com/summit2010/

It's a great time to visit Orlando and given that the Hard Rock Hotel is at Universal Studios you may want to stay a bit longer or bring your family along. Fans of Harry Potter will be delighted by the fact that the brand new Harry Potter ride opens up at Universal just 3 days before our Summit!

Space is filling up fast at the hotel, so please register as soon as possible and book your hotel room.

I'm looking forward to seeing many folks at Summit - we're excited to show you all the great new products and services we're launching and in learning about how we can help you grow your services and businesses.

See you in Orlando!

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I've long been a fan of the work that Jay Phillips did to create the Adhearsion open source telephony framework and so I was delighted to read today of news of its future. To give some context, Jay first created Adhearsion a number of years back because he was frustrated with how hard it was to create dial plans with the open source Asterisk PBX. So Jay went off and created a framework where a programmer could use the Ruby programming language to very simply create voice applications.

Jay went on to team up with Jason Goecke to further develop Adhearsion and then last year Jay and Jason joined Voxeo (my employer) to create Voxeo Labs out in San Francisco. While Jay has since moved on, Jason continues to move Adhearsion forward and announced today that Adhearsion has a new home on Github ... and hinted at much greater plans in store. I'm looking forward to seeing what all they may be...

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What if you could have a single application that communicated with your customers not just through voice but also through SMS, IM/chat and even Twitter?

That's exactly what we announced at Voxeo today with our new Tropo.com release. Tropo is our "cloud communications platform" operated out of our Voxeo Labs team that is focused on reaching out to web developers using today's programming languages and APIs. We launched it back at eComm in March 2009 and have been steadily adding more capability to it over the last year. Today the "beta" label was officially peeled off of Tropo, new international phone numbers were added, international speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) were added in 7 languages, and a host of other features were added, too.

Naturally, though, my interest was drawn to the fact that one of the channels you can now communicate to customers with is....

Twitter!

I demonstrated this in a post on the Tropo blog, "How to Add Twitter Support to a Tropo.com App - Step by Step", where I hooked up the Twitter account @danweathertest to an existing Tropo sample app I had that retrieved weather info from Yahoo!Weather when given a US ZIP code. I tweaked the app a bit and wrote about the tweaking in "An Example of How to Make a Tropo App Respond Differently to Different Channels (including Twitter)".

The cool part is that when it was all done, that single application is reachable via any of these communication channels:

Voice:

+1 (407) 374-3994
Skype: +99000936 9991438833
SIP: sip:[email protected]
INum: +883510001814088

SMS: (407) 374-3994
Jabber IM: [email protected]
Twitter: danweathertest

You can try it out by calling any of those numbers or using SMS, IM or Twitter. To use Twitter, just send a @ message to the Twitter ID "danweathertest" like this:

@danweathertest 32801

In a few moments you'll get back a summary of current weather conditions in whatever ZIP code you send it. Now the app isn't perfect... it doesn't do much in the way of error-checking and as I mention in the second blog post, I need to work on it a bit more to get rid of the initial prompt if you send it a ZIP code. I don't honestly know what it will do if you send it a bogus ZIP code. It's just a simple demo app designed to get people thinking about what you can do with apps that plug in to Twitter.

Want to try out building some apps yourself? Just head over to www.tropo.com and sign up for a free developer account. You can look at the many sample apps or, if you know python, you're welcome to play with the code to my sample weather app. (And if you don't know python you're of course welcome to play with the code, too... ) Have fun with it... I'm looking forward to seeing what people come up with. (And I'll be writing more about Twitter apps soon...)

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Why shouldn't we be able to use our "voice" as a way to securely authenticate into systems? After all, it's one of the few "biometrics" that are unique to each of us... along with fingerprints, retina scans, etc. What about accuracy and "replay" attacks? After all, some of us remember "My voice is my password" from back in the movie Sneakers...

"Aren't voice biometrics hard to implement?" ... "Are they really secure?"

Today, over on Voxeo's blogs, we announced a new voice biometrics initiative with four partners designed to answer these questions and show developers exactly how easy it is to add voice biometrics to voice applications. (also called "voice verification" or "voice authentication", although those are both subsets of the larger "voice biometrics")

The idea is simple. Build a VoiceXML application in Voxeo's hosted cloud and then follow the instructions on the "How To" docs linked off of www.voxeo.com/biometrics to add voice biometrics to your application. You can use an existing VoiceXML application or you can create a new one. Code samples are available. (and it's free to create an account if you don't already have one.)

The beauty of it is that all of the services are out in the cloud... so it's very easy to simply try it out.

Please check out our announcement page to watch video interviews, read relevant blog posts and learn more about how you can get started today.

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Over on Skype Journal, Phil Wolf posted about Tim Panton's VERY cool demo which he gave at Astricon and then apparently just yesterday at eComm Europe. Tim from phonefromhere.com mashes up Google Wave, Skype, Asterisk (with Skype for Asterisk) and Ibook to make Skype calls from within a Wave, complete with recordings of utterances and, naturally, the ability to have an annotated collaboration session in Wave:

Phil quotes Jason Goecke (a colleague of mine at Voxeo) describing how it works:

"it is a Google Wave Gadget with his PhoneFromHere.com IAX2 Java softphone as the client. Then, the IAX2 Java phone connects to Asterisk with Skype for Asterisk installed. Then, there is a server-side element, Ibook, that is breaking apart utterances into individual files. So that as each person speaks, it captures it into its own file. Then, as that happens, a text frame is sent from Asterisk to the softphone with the file details. The gadget then uses some Javascript to embed a link. IAX2 supports text frames."

Read Phil's full post for more info and for Phil's views on what this all means.

VERY cool demo!

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If any of you will be down at VON next week in South Beach, Miami, FL, next week, I'll be part of two presentations on Monday, September 21, 2009. The full abstracts are outlined on a Voxeo events page, but the titles are:

10 – 11:15am, Beyond Boxes: The Future of the PBX 11:30 – 12:30pm, The Apps Race: Building a Developer Community in the New Telecom World

The second one should be fun as it's with my good friend Thomas Howe (who also has a spiffy new website). It's just Thomas and I and a moderator, talking about developer ecosystems. Good stuff!

I'm only there at VON on Monday. That evening I'll be driving up to Orlando where I'll be spending Tuesday through Friday at Voxeo's corporate office. But if you are down at VON, please do say hello.

P.S. And yes, this is the "new" VON put on by Virgo Publishing after they purchased the VON name and tradeshow from Pulvermedia. It will be interesting to see how it is as a show.

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As I mentioned over on one of Voxeo's blogs, Rich Tehrani pulled out his iPhone 3GS down at SpeechTEK last week in New York and shot a quick video of me talking about Voxeo's booth and the 20 Acer netbooks we had there running a 2,000+ node telephony cluster. Rich blogged about the interview and posted it in a way that I can embed:

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, danyork, speechtek, prophecy, itexpo

If you have a new SIP service or application, how can you find other services to which you can directly connect via SIP? That's the idea behind the new "SIP to SIP" directory launched by the folks at FWD and now available at www.siptosip.net. From the main page:

Why SIP to SIP VoIP?

SIPtoSIP lists applications and content that require SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) enabled devices on both ends of the connection. Realizing the promise of VoIP requires expanding real-time communication options beyond the functions already available with traditional telephones or cell phones. The ability of SIP based VoIP to support HDVoice, video, and click-to-connect requires SIP devices on both ends of the connection. Send suggestions for corrections and additional listings to Daniel Berninger at dan at danielberninger.com.

The directory is very obviously new and only has a few entries on the various pages:

• Devices
• Applications
• Content

As is noted, Daniel Berninger is looking for people to email him suggestions.

I do applaud the FWD folks for looking at another way to promote the further building of SIP interconnections and so I wish them well with this directory. I'd note, though, that the VoIP-Info.org wiki does already contain a great amount of this information. For instance, the site has a very lengthy page on VoIP phones. Now, granted, the phones listed there are for "IP" in general and not just SIP. Some use H.323, IAX or other protocols. There is perhaps a role for someone to curate a list like this into just SIP-specific information, but whether that needs to be a separate site or perhaps another page within a wiki like the VoIP-Info.org one is a question to consider.

Regardless, the FWD folks have now made this siptosip.net site available and it will be interesting to see how it evolves.

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Technorati Tags: fwd, sip, siptosip, directories, voip

There is a fundamental problem with the "VoIP is dead" debate continuing to rage across the VoIP/communications part of the blogosphere (see Alec Saunders part 1 and part 2, Jon Arnold, Andy Abramson, Ken Camp, Jeff Pulver part 1 and part 2, Om Malik, Shidan Gouran, Ted Wallingford, Dameon Welch-Abernathy (PhoneBoy), Rich Tehrani and a zillion others...)

Aswath Rao and Luca Filigheddu came closest to the mark in their posts. The fundamental problem with this entire debate is simply this:

Define "VoIP"?

As I discussed in an Emerging Tech Talk video podcast I put up this morning, there are a range of definitions you could give to "VoIP", including, but not limited to, the following:

1. The underlying infrastructure, a.k.a. the "plumbing" - the mechanisms, protocols, etc. that are used for the transport of voice/video/etc. over IP. Things like SIP, H.323, RTP, various codecs, etc.
   
   
2. Consumer "PSTN line replacement" services - Offerings like those of Vonage and so many others where the basic idea is that you can get cheaper telephone charges by going over the Internet and getting rid of your local landline. Also called "pure play" VoIP by some or "VoIP arbitrage" by others.
   
   
3. Computer-to-computer/softphone offerings, often coming from the IM space - Skype sets the bar here, but there's a host of other players as well, including Gizmo, GoogleTalk, FWD, and many others. Some of these came from existing Instant Messaging services that simply added voice.
   
   
4. Enterprise IP-PBX/"Unified Communications" solutions - Communications systems used by enterprises, large and small - what has traditionally been called the "PBX" but that term is increasingly meaningless given the range of options now being provided.
   
   
5. The *entire* vision of rich communication over IP - The whole picture... everything over IP... voice, video, IM, presence, file/data sharing... the whole rich communication experience.

Each and every one of these is referred to as "VoIP" by some segment of our industry. (And there's even more... I did have someone once reply to me that "VoIP" was the pre-paid calling cards that you can buy in convenience stores, etc. (And in truth, they usually do get their cheap rates by using VoIP for transport somewhere in there.))

The point is that we need to be a bit more precise in what we call "VoIP" before we can argue about whether it is alive or not.

From my point-of-view, the life and death of these different definitions of "VoIP" varies:

1. The underlying infrastructure - Doing extremely well... in fact, so well, that it's fading into the background and just being part of our underlying network infrastructure, both in the fixed and mobile environments. (Which also argues that some of the VoIP-infrastructure-specific products/services are no longer quite as necessary.)
   
   
2. Consumer "PSTN line replacement" services - Great for cable companies; not so good for pure-plays - Looked at Vonage's stock price lately? They and so many of the other companies whose only real selling point was "get cheaper phone calls with us" are certainly struggling or dying. Why? The cable companies, for one, are cleaning up in this space with their "triple-play" bundling of voice with Internet access and television. The pure-play companies may be cheaper on voice but the cable packages may be far more compelling. Add in the "unlimited calling" mobile phone plans we have here in North America, plus the softphone players like Skype plus some of the emerging cloud/hosted offerings... and all-in-all it's not a pretty picture for Vonage and friends. (And this is really the VoIP "industry" to which Alec was referring.)
   
   
3. Computer-to-computer/softphone offerings - Very alive - Skype is flirting with 15 million simultaneous online users and also reporting decent income, Gizmo is rolling out a Flash-based softphone to remove the need for a client, TringMe is providing widgets to various folks... and a whole range of others are growing. (While some players are shrinking here, too, of course.)
   
   
4. Enterprise IP-PBX/"Unified Communications" solutions - Very alive - Basically every vendor supplying communications systems to enterprises are now doing so over IP. No one is selling traditional TDM PBXs anymore. Players in this space include the traditional telephony players like Nortel, Avaya, Siemens, Mitel, Alcatel-Lucent, along with newer entrants like the dominant Cisco, ShoreTel, Digium/Asterisk and then even newer entrants like Microsoft OCS and IBM Sametime.
   
   
5. The *entire* vision of rich communication over IP - VERY alive! - In fact, I'd say that the next few years will be one of the most fascinating years in this space. We're at this amazing intersection of insane amounts of local bandwidth and computing power, increasingly ubiquitous powerful mobile devices, and incredible power out "in the cloud". All around us we are building the massive IP communications interconnect. It's happening. At a glacial pace in some areas and at a crazy pace in others. We're layering on applications and services. We're making them available through simple APIs and mashups. We're all collectively doing some pretty amazing things out there. It's a great time to be in this space!

So how do you define VoIP?

If you think of "VoIP" as my #2, the "cheap telephony consumer services", then sure, if you don't consider the cable companies then than sector isn't doing too well. If you define VoIP as one of the other definitions here, well, then in my view it is very much alive.

What do you think? How do you define "VoIP"?

P.S. If you'd like to join a number of us to discuss this topic, Sheryl Breuker and Ken Camp are hosting a conference call tonight at 9pm US Eastern / 6pm US Pacific. Join us... it should be fun. :-)

Technorati Tags: communications, telcom, telecom, telecommunications, telephony, unified communications, voice, voice applications, voip

Is the role of "voice" diminished or enhanced by the availability of web services? How does voice fit into the "cloud"? Where do service providers fit into the picture?

Out at ITEXPO last month in Los Angeles, industry analyst Jon Arnold asked me (Dan York) to participate in a series of video interviews he was recording for his IPConvergence.TV site. In the interview, which is now available for viewing, we talked about "voice-enabling" business processes, web services, "cloud computing", the challenges to service providers and customers and much, much more. Jon also asked me to talk a bit about what I see ahead of us in the next few years. It was a fun interview to do and I appreciated the opportunity.

NOTE: There is no way to currently embed the video, so you'll need to watch it over on TMC's site. I'll also note that on my Mac I couldn't watch the video in Firefox but instead had to use Safari. Now this may be due to some local configuration issue on my system, but I thought I'd mention it.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, dan york, jon arnold, itexpo, commdev