Disruptive Telephony

When I was down in Miami speaking at ITEXPO East back in January, one of the interesting parts of the event was the "Startup Camp Telephony" that Larry Lisser produced where a number of startups stood up and gave their pitch on what they are doing. As the pictures on the bottom of the TMC page show, there was great attendance at the event.

Larry's back at it and has plans for "StartupCamp 2: Comm Edition" at the ITEXPO West event in Los Angeles on October 4th:

Five startups will be selected to give brief 5-minute “pitch” presentations following which a panel of industry experts and the audience will ask questions and provide valuable feedback. Early stage telephony companies – voice, mobile, video, network and other - wishing to be included in the pitch roster, should click here to enter their details. Startups will benefit from significant exposure leading up to, at and after the event

I'm slated to speak out there doing my usual security part of Ingate's SIP Trunking sessions, so while I'm there I'll be looking forward to seeing what startups show up and what cool things they are doing!

P.S. TMC did put out a news release about the event with more info.

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For all of you out there working with the Adhearsion open source telephony framework to easily create communications apps on top of Asterisk using the Ruby programming language.... the first "AdhearsionConf" will be held August 14-15 in San Francisco.

Jay Phillips, the creator of Adhearsion, will be in the event and undoubtedly a great amount of hacking on Adhearsion will occur throughout the time.

The exact location and schedule are still being confirmed, but mark the date!

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Skype announced their expansion in Silicon Valley today and while such an announcement might be routine and not really worth mentioning, I was certainly struck by the size of the space they are leasing:

Today, I'm pleased to announce that Skype will expand its operations in Silicon Valley, and has just signed a lease with Stanford University for a 90,000 square foot office space in the Stanford Research Park at 3210 Porter Drive in Palo Alto, CA. Silicon Valley will add to Skype's excellent engineering team in Estonia, Prague and Stockholm, and will also become the home of regional marketing, business development, and the Skype for Business team.

90,000 square feet is good bit of space! Obviously they have solid ideas around growing. It's great to see Skype continuing on its path as its own company and I wish them all the best with the move.

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This week Network World ran a great interview with Jonathan Rosenberg about his new role at Skype. Jonathan is now the "Chief Technology Strategist" at Skype, but he's known in the industry as one of the co-authors of the original RFC 3261 that defines the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and also for his many years working at Cisco. He's been extremely active within the IETF, writing a seriously large quantity of Internet-Drafts. I think, in fact, I first met JDR at an IETF meeting... and subsequently was on at least one panel with him (I think a VoiceCon or Interop in New York).

It's been interesting to watch Skype accumulate more and more people with strong SIP backgrounds, and hiring Jonathan was definitely an interesting - and good - move on Skype's part.

I don't know that the Network World interview broke any amazing new ground for those of us who have been watching Skype closely, but if you haven't been paying attention to Skype, Jonathan gives a great view into what the company has been doing lately and where it is going. It is definitely worth a read.

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It's no big secret that I'm a huge fan of the Tropo cloud communications service[1] and also a huge fan of Google Analytics. Put them together, as Adam Kalsey did in this blog post today ('Tracking calls with Google Analytics'), and I'm excited!

I admittedly had not followed the availability of client libraries for "Google Analytics Mobile", but it makes sense given the diminished capabilities of mobile devices to execute JavaScript (which GA relies upon for tracking). Adam does a great job explaining that and walking through the source code he supplies.

Now I just have to make some time to try it out with my Tropo apps...

[1] In full disclosure, Tropo is a service created by my employer, Voxeo, as part of Voxeo Labs.

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As I note over on the Voxeo web site, I recently posted a video showing how you can use a USB headset with the Apple iPad. The video is available on YouTube and you can see it directly here:

WHY might you want to do this? Well, primarily if you want better audio quality when using VoIP on your iPad... and if you are like me and always find Bluetooth headsets sucking up too much battery power, it's nice to have a wired option.

Next up, figure out what else can be plugged into that USB connector... ;-)

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Have you wished you could easily extend your corporate IP-PBX to your iPhone? Or have you wanted a good SIP softphone for your iPhone that you could use for testing systems? Or do you just like new shiny iPhone and iPad apps?

This week long-time softphone maker CounterPath Corp. released their "Bria iPhone Edition" and for $3.99 it's a great app to have! Ever since I learned about it a couple of days ago, I've been playing with it and this morning I posted a video review as Emerging Tech Talk #51. I show how I've connected the app to Voxeo's corporate IP-PBX, how I can use it to make calls to both regular phone numbers and also SIP URIs, how it works with the iPhone's address book and also how I can use it on the iPad. You can view the 7-minute video here:

Now my friend Alec Saunders spoke with someone at CounterPath and published a great post yesterday discussing some of the limitations and the future plans that CounterPath has. Definitely worth a read - and I'm looking forward to some of those plans! (Like wideband codecs and multi-tasking support.)

As he notes, this Bria app is not specifically designed for the iPad, but as I show in the video it can be used on the iPad, subject to the standard pixelation that happens with iPhone apps on the iPad. (And in tomorrow's video podcast, I'll talk about how you can connect a USB headset to the iPad! ;-)

Here are some screenshots from the app:

So far I'm quite impressed! You can get the Bria softphone from the AppStore on your iPhone or iPad.

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Are you interested in how you can service customer requests across all the different communication channels they might use? Do you want to give your customers a choice in the way they interact with you? Rather than requiring them to call in to a customer service phone number, do you want to let them send you a text message? Or an IM? Or use Twitter?

If so, you may be interested in a free webinar I am giving tomorrow, Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 11:00 am US Eastern time titled "Unified Self-Service: Creating multi-channel communications apps using Voxeo tools". You can register for free.

I'll be talking about this concept we call "Unified Self-Service" where you can create a single application that interacts with customers across multiple communication channel (but not necessarily using the exact same user interface). It's a topic I blog about on Voxeo's site and mention in our various presentations.

Perhaps obviously to long-time readers, I have an interest in the "social" side of the communication, particularly as we talk about "Social CRM" and engaging with customers through social channels. You can naturally expect to hear me talk about that tomorrow as well.

Registration is free... and if you can't attend, the session will be archived for later viewing from our Developer Jam Session page (and if you register, we'll let you know when the archive is posted).

It's a fun topic... and I'm looking forward to the conversation we'll have tomorrow.

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As I mentioned in a post last month, I will be in Orlando, Florida, next week (June 21-23) at the Voxeo Customer Summit. We've got a great agenda of speakers, great attendance, some excellent partners demonstrating their solutions based on Voxeo platforms, a keynote by former hacker Kevin Mitnick and much more. Some great announcements coming up as well...

If you are interested in developing communications applications that work with voice, SMS/texting, IM/chat, mobile web and many other channels, the event will be a great place to learn about some of the leading offerings in the space. Registration is free.

During the event, I expect to be posting photos to my Flickr stream and tweeting to both @danyork and @voxeo. I'm sure I'll be posting to the Voxeo blog portal as well.

If you are coming to the Voxeo Customer Summit, I'll look forward to meeting you there!

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What is different in the upcoming VoiceXML 3 specification from the W3C? How will it help you create better communication applications? How can you get ready for VXML 3?

If you are curious about what the VoiceXML 3 effort is all about, Voxeo is hosting a free webinar tomorrow, Thursday, May 20, 2010, at 11 am US Eastern time where one of the co-chief editors of the specification, Dan Burnett, will talk about these questions and more.

Registration is free and you can register online. It should be a very informative session.

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