Disruptive Telephony

Is Nokia about to drop its entire mobile platform for Android or Windows Phone 7? Yesterday the buzz in the telecom space was all about an apparent memo to employees from Nokia CEO Stephen Elop that said Nokia was on a "burning platform" and needed to make some hard choices. The text of the memo, which Engadget has in full, is brilliantly written. The metaphor of the worker on a burning oil platform is well done... and I expect we'll hear more usage of that in the future by others.

The memo is also a very well done and brutally honest assessment of where Nokia stands in the mobile market and where the competition sits. What I found most compelling, though, was the commentary around the "war of ecosystems" (my emphasis added):

The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren't taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we're going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.

We ARE in a "war of ecosystems". No one can doubt that.

On a macro level it is Apple iOS versus Google Android, with Microsoft attempting to have some relevance with Windows Phone 7.

RIM would very much like to still be in the game with its Blackberry OS, but recent surveys don't bode well (66% of Verizon Blackberry users said they would likely move to the iPhone). HP would like to think it can be a player with WebOS (and is making a "big announcement" today) but that seriously remains to be seen. And Symbian? Well... read the Nokia CEO's letter...

The "war of ecosystems" is MUCH broader than the mobile market, of course... it's a war going on across the telecommunications and computer industry in general. It involves so many others, too, like Facebook and Twitter and everyone else in the "social" space...

It's a war around who can attract the most developers to build the most applications on a "platform"... it's a war around "open" versus "closed" ... around "simplicity" and "features"... around "applications" and "big, fat, dumb, pipes"... around "APIs"... around who can be our "portal" for communications ... about how can get the eyeballs...

It's a war for the future of our communications....

... and it's ALL about the ecosystems!

Who will survive?

That story is still being written... it's an exciting time... but a crazy, chaotic time, too...

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P.S. Engadget is now saying this memo/letter is true based on multiple sources... and I'm inclined to believe it. From a PR point-of-view, it's a brilliant move to hype and tease about Nokia's announcement on Friday. Many people - myself included - probably had no idea that Nokia was going to be making a huge announcement on Friday.

Well played, Nokia. You got our attention.

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Would you like to understand what Voxeo, my employer, is all about and where the company is going? Want to know about all the cool tools and services we make available for free for developers?

If so, just watch this video interview that I recorded at ITEXPO with TMC:

I spoke with TMC's Pat Barnard about the panels we were on at ITEXPO, as well as Tropo.com, Phono and the other services and products we offer for free to developers.

The amusing part was that this interview was not scheduled in advance but was rather a result of walking by their video area and being asked "How about recording an interview right now?" It was fun to do.... I actually love doing things like this, even just on-the-fly like this. Only one mistake I noticed... the "Facebook Telephone" app is at http://apps.facebook.com/telephone, not the URL I gave in the video.

I also noticed that I talk fast! And as far as I can recall, this was BEFORE any kind of caffeine. :-)

Anyway, if you'd like an understanding of where Voxeo is going and all the cool things we are doing, this video should help in that...

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If you go back in time to September 2008 and recall the whole kerfuffle over the Gogo in-flight WiFi service NOT allowing VoIP calls (which we also covered on Blue Box podcast #83), one of the threads that was floating around was the wish that they would at least allow chat over Skype. If you couldn't make calls, at least you could have IM conversations.

I didn't really pay any further attention to the matter and didn't find myself on planes with Gogo WiFi until this past week... and found that yes, indeed, sometime in the last two+ years Gogo did relax the Skype chat restriction (at least on Delta flights).

The FAQ now clearly states that Skype IM is allowed, while VoIP services are still not permitted:

While I was on a short flight and didn't feel the need to pay for the in-flight WiFi, it was nice to know that I could have used Skype IM if I had wanted to.

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When I saw that Skype had a blog post up about their effort to recruit as many as 350 new employees, I didn't expect them to release a video... nor did I expect to be so amused seeing so many of my friends there cavorting around on the video!

As they note, Skype is hiring!

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This week Skype 5.0 for Mac OS X left the "Beta" label behind and was released as a production product. I naturally downloaded it onto the iMac where I'm running Skype 5.0... and found that while some changes were made (and some very good changes, I should add), it's still a very different user experience from Skype 2.8 and one I'm still not sure about.

I did my usual test call with Jim Courtney, took a good number of screenshots and will write up some thoughts after using it a bit more.

Meanwhile, Jim's out with his thoughts on the technical side:

Skype for Mac 5.0 Goes Gold: Incorporating Beta Feedback and More

While Phil Wolff over at Skype Journal took a different tack and wrote about the sentiment from Mac users about this new release:

Download: Skype for Mac 5.0 Gold

As Phil notes, the Skype community forums do have areas filled with disgruntled Mac users who are upset that Skype didn't go far enough in incorporating their feedback.

I still need to work with it a bit more before I jump to that level... but I am glad to see that Skype incorporated some of the feedback. More soon...

If you have tried out the "Gold" release of Skype 5.0 for the Mac, what do you think? What did you find that you liked?

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If any of you will be in South Beach, Miami, next week I'll be there speaking as part of the Cloud Communications Summit and SIP Trunking Workshops. I've got a page up on Voxeo's site that shows my schedule at:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/events/itexpo-east-2011/

I know a good number of other folks from the VoIP/UC/Cloud Telecom/Voice Mashups/SIP/etc. world are all going to be down there, so I'm looking forward to catching up with some folks there.

If you are down in Miami for ITEXPO, the Cloud Communications Summit, Digium/Asterisk World or any of the other events, please do stop by and say hello... or find me down at one of the sessions I'm in (my schedule is online). You can always email me or ping me on Twitter.

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News today out of ReadWriteWeb and The Daily What is that a "Call" button was spotted briefly inside someone's Facebook profile:

RWW goes on to speculate about whether or not this could be part of the "deep integration" between Facebook and Skype announced last September. Mike Melanson at RWW wrote this:

The move would make a lot of sense for Facebook, which has worked recently to become the center of your online communication experience. Its recent "not email" announcement debuted a form of communication that would supposedly work seamlessly between devices, so that there would be little differentiation between messaging, email and Facebook chat. Voice calling between users, whether from browser to browser, phone to browser, or browser to phone, would just make sense in creating a more seamless communication experience.

Now, there is the obvious question -

is the screenshot real?

Or are we being hoaxed? Having personally been in a situation where I received an inadvertant preview of possible new Facebook features (which sadly have yet to materialize), I'm inclined to believe that the screenshoot could be real.

The Skype Connection?

But is it connected to Skype, as RWW wonders? The "deep integration" reported by RWW in September did turn into reality in October with the release of Skype 5.0 for Windows and the integrated Facebook panel. That release allowed you to:

• see your Facebook News Feed in Skype
• post status updates that can be synced with your Skype mood message
• comment and like friends’ updates and wall posts
• call and SMS your Facebook friends on their mobile phones and landlines
• make a free Skype-to-Skype call if your Facebook friend is also a Skype contact

This brought Facebook into Skype... so why not a reciprocal exchange of bringing Skype into Facebook?

As Google continues to amass voice resources through acquisitions, there's also a certain sense to it in the battle among the giants.

But Will Facebook Users Actually USE Voice Calling?

The larger question to me is whether or not Facebook users would actually use a voice calling capability. One commenter on The Daily What story voiced an feeling I've often heard expressed:

And indeed there are many phone/voice call applications already in existence for Facebook, some of which have been around for years. Back in October I reviewed one such app, the aptly named "Facebook Telephone" (in full disclosure, created by colleagues at Voxeo Labs as a demonstration of what could be done with the Phono SDK) and way back in April 2008 I reviewed an earlier Facebook application (also using Voxeo's platform). While applications like those have certainly seen some success, it hasn't been overwhelming... and begs the question of whether people inside the walls of Facebook truly want to interact via voice.

The Key Difference

The big difference from those applications and the "Call" feature we're all speculating about right now is exactly that...

all of the previous voice services are separate applications!

In order to use the app to communication with someone else inside of Facebook, both parties have to have the application installed.

There's the first barrier... and it's a huge one. It creates friction and no matter how easy the app creator makes it to install the app, it is still one more step that the recipient has to make in order to start communicating.

Now... imagine if Facebook just made voice calling part of the fabric of Facebook? What if everyone just got this "Call" button and were able to start making calls from their computer? Without any further installations of apps?

What if Facebook extended that to their mobile versions so that you could make calls directly from inside the app to anyone else? (You already can in the iPhone app... but only if your friend has entered a mobile phone number in their profile.)

Would this make Facebook more of a communications portal for you?

Stay tuned... the global war for your eyeballs... and your voice... is only going to get more crazy in the time ahead!

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Do you want to learn more about the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and how it enables Voice over IP (VoIP) and Unified Communications? Want to learn how it works? What it does? How it can be used? How secure it is? How does SIP relate to HTML5 and what is going on with the "real-time web"?

If so, consider attending the SIP Tutorial at ITEXPO next week in South Beach, Miami, Florida, on Friday, February 4, 2011.

Taught by Dr. Alan Johnston and Dr. Henry Sinnreich, two veterans of SIP and IETF work, the day-long session covers a wide range of topics. In speaking to Alan Johnston, he said that for the first time this session next week will particularly get into some of the real-time communication coming into HTML5 and related technologies.

If you would like to attend the session you can still register. Alan passed along that the priority code "SIP" will get you a 50% discount.

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Yesterday, the Mozilla team took the rather drastic step of adding the Skype Toolbar to their "Firefox Blocklist" so that the toolbar is disabled by default (with the user being notified and having the option to re-enable it). Mozilla's reasoning is rather straightforward:

The current shipping version of the Skype Toolbar is one of the top crashers of Mozilla Firefox 3.6.13, and was involved in almost 40,000 crashes of Firefox last week. Additionally, depending on the version of the Skype Toolbar you’re using, the methods it uses to detect and re-render phone numbers can make DOM manipulation up to 300 times slower, which drastically affects the page rendering times of a large percentage of web content served today

Yikes! If it's causing that many crashes, I completely understand their rationale.

What's interesting about this, of course, is that it shows the linkages beyond simply VoIP and communication into the larger ecosystem of applications. Here you have a web browser add-on for a communication product which is then slowing down or crashing the web browser product.

In this brave new world of Unified Communications, or whatever we want to call it, the apps are all linked together... which creates both benefits and, in this case, challenges.

I don't personally use the Skype toolbar, so I don't know how useful or not it was to people out there. It will be interesting to see how Skype responds and whether they will be fixing it soon.

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UPDATE: Skype's PR team contacted me with an official response which is similar to what is now published on TechCrunch:

"We are working with Mozilla to ensure that there are no other compatibility issues and to optimize the Skype Toolbar for Firefox, in order to enable the convenience of making Skype calls with one click from Web pages (e.g., calling your favorite pizza place directly from a Google search result). We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused our users.

Based on our initial investigation, we know that downloading the new client will fix any compatibility issues for most users. Users can download the latest Skype client with the latest Toolbars included OR the latest toolbar installer itself is here: http://www.skype.com/intl/en/get-skype/on-your-computer/click-and-call."

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For those of us who have been around the "VoIP industry" for some time now, the "VON Conferences" put on by Jeff Pulver were the place to be in the early days of VoIP. We were all mostly early adopters and embraced with enthusiasm this idea of sending voice and later video over the IP networks... there was a real community of both attendees and speakers... all of us chasing that vision of real-time communications over the Internet and other IP networks.

"VON" as a name continued to morph and evolve... it became a series of conferences... the "V" included "video"... it spawned the VON Coalition on public policy issues... Jeff and his Pulvermedia team launched "VON Magazine", issues of which can still be found online in some places... www.von.com became a media hub around VoIP issues... "VON" became many things...

And then it all ended in early 2008 with Pulvermedia's investors seizing assets and then with Jeff's resignation. Fast forward to December 2008 and the VON brand was reborn through Virgo Publishing. I and many others wondered if Virgo could recapture and rebuild the VON community. They tried. They had a VON conference in 2009 (and I was a speaker there). They seemed to try a bit with online content.

But it never really worked. Times had changed... the industry had evolved. "VoIP" and even video are now mainstream and no longer solely the province of early adopters. Voice/video communication is not the only way we communicate... social media, in particular, as well as mobile communications and apps have changed what we do. While the conference industry in general declined, too, new conferences emerged, with many early adopters joining events like eComm or Jeff's own #140conf events... or the myriad of "____Camp" events happening on a smaller scale all over the world.

Virgo Publishing subsequently cancelled the VON 2010 show to focus on online content...

... and now, as of Monday, January 17, they've killed the VON name. Henceforth, all the VON URLs and content are under the "vision2mobile" brand. They provide a rationale which sounds reasonable on some level.

Still, for those of us who been in this industry for a while, it is sad to see the passing of the "VON" name, even though in many ways "VON" died a few years back.

R.I.P., VON... it was great to know you!

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