Disruptive Telephony

Ironically, I won't be speaking actually at the formal "ITEXPO", but rather at the Ingate SIP Trunking Seminars and then at a new "Cloud Communications Summit" coordinated by Thomas Howe. Somehow my sessions wound up back-to-back... I'm just hoping the rooms aren't too far apart!

Voxeo will also have a couple of exciting announcements, so it should be a great event. Here's my speaking schedule:

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

11:30-12:00, Ingate SIP Trunking Seminars, Dan York

“The Enterprise Edge and Security”

Representing the VoIP Security Alliance (VOIPSA), Dan York will give an overview of security concerns related to Unified Communications and VoIP with a focus on SIP trunking.

12:00-1:30pm, The Cloud Communications Summit, Dan York

“Cloud Telephony for the Enterprise”

This session discusses tradeoffs in deploying communications applications behind the firewall, with a hosted partner or through elastic mechanisms such as Amazon’s EC2.

Other speakers planned for this session are Troy Davis, CEO of CloudVox, and Evan Cooke, Co-Founder and CTO of Twilio. Thomas Howe will moderate the session.

If you are going to be at ITEXPO, drop me a line. I'll have some of my podcasting gear and other equipment, so I intend to be producing some content from the show floor. I'll of course be tweeting, both as @danyork and @voxeo

See (some of) you there..

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I was employed at Mitel back in 2006 when the company filed for an IPO the first time. As the only "blogger" at Mitel at the time (writing here on this site), we had a number of internal conversations with the communications team about what I could and couldn't say. The rules for the "quiet period" of an IPO are very strong and at the time it was unclear (to me, anyway) about what could be said in social media. The result, as I recall, was that I didn't write about Mitel much at all during that time.

That IPO attempt ended with the Inter-Tel acquisition in 2007 (which also ended my employment at Mitel) and the company has been working away privately since that time.

I wish them all the best with this second attempt. There are some great people there and they have some great products and technology. Congrats to Sir Terry Matthews and all the rest there!

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The investor group is led by Silver Lake, and includes Andreessen Horowitz, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), Joltid Limited and our founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. The deal valued Skype at $2.75B US, with eBay retaining approximately 30% of Skype, and the investor group led by Silver Lake controlling the remaining 70%

Back when eBay purchased Skype in September 2005 (Was it really four years ago?!?), I and many others thought it was a strange move, and certainly the synergies that someone thought would be there never really seemed to materialize.

I'm delighted for the many friends I have at Skype that they are now "free" from the shackles of a large public company. I wish them all the best and, as I said back in my post in September...

Onward the disruption...

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca. Dan can be found on Skype as "danyork".

I had all these grand delusions, too, about how I was going to write about all the lessons I've learned... about some of the great things I've done... the people I've met... etc., etc.

But the reality is that I've simply learned way too much, done too many great things and met too many great people to easily write such a post.

So here's the short summary of what I've learned over two years:

Voxeo rocks!

It's a great place to work with tremendous benefits (and we're hiring)... there's a fantastic team of people involved... it's fun to be with a company on the bleeding edge of how communication is changing... that is this big massive SIP-based application cloud... that does disruptive things like give away speech recognition technology (and other products) for free... is focusing on innovation in communication and offering new cloud telephony platforms... and just took a $9 million strategic investment, not because the company had to but because it wanted to in order to seize opportunities and acquire more companies in this economy.

What's not to like?

Sure, we work long hours and have our share of crazy days... but even two years later I wake up each morning excited for the change I can be part of that day. THAT is a key for me...

And yeah, I head up Voxeo's marketing team, so you would expect me to say all this, right? But if so, you haven't been reading my blog long enough. Here and over on Disruptive Conversations I call it like it is... and if I don't have good things to say, I simply don't write it.

So I'm utterly amazed that two years have gone by... and I'm very much looking forward to the next two years... there are many more stories to tell... and I definitely look forward to telling them...

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I still find the whole process bizarre. I do understand the fundamental motivation... here in the USA, there are only three wires going into (almost) every home:

• electrical power line
• phone line
• cable television line

If you want to get your service into a home in the USA over a wire, you have to ride over one of those three wires. That's it.

So I can see the logic someone out there is thinking... he/she who controls a wire has a platform to launch services.

There are, though, two major problems I see:

1. WIRELESS, a.k.a. WE DON'T NEED NO STINKING WIRES - While there may be only three wires going into the home, there are a lot of wireless signals going into the home. While it may not have the performance of wired connections, I know a good number of folks who now have wireless Internet. And while much of this has traditionally been satellite-based, I'm seeing some folks going for the wireless WAN cards (or "air cards") offered by the cellular networks - and some of the newer laptops with this technology built right in. Plus you have to wonder about newer technologies like WiMAX should they ever start to really take off.

2. LANDLINES ARE LOSING - As I mentioned in my last post, US residents are leaving landlines behind. The NHIS survey I referenced showed the number of homes without landlines at over 20% - and increasing rapidly. My own perception based on comments from people around me is that the cable companies are eating the telcos' lunches when it comes to signing up new people. I need to pull some stats to back up that view - but anecdotally I'm finding more people signing up for cable Internet (often as part of a "triple play") and I haven't heard of anyone in recent times signing up for DSL from their phone company. To me, I just can't see the landline business as a great place to be these days... but obviously some folks out there think they can somehow magically make it work. I wish them luck.

What do you think? Would you invest in the landline business in 2009?

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Over on my Disruptive Conversations blog, I do get into a bit more detail about what I'm doing (or think I'll be doing) with this...

If you do choose to subscribe, thanks!

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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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Monday, Nov 2 3:15 – 4:15 pm – Presence – Current Progress and Future Trends Wednesday, Nov 4 3:15 – 4:15 pm – Developing Voice Apps Using Mashups and SOA Thursday, Nov 5 8:00 – 9:45 am – Web 2.0 and Enterprise Communications – Fad or the Future?

The full descriptions can be found on a page on our Voxeo Events page. I'm very much looking forward to all three sessions out there. The first is a "reactor panel" where we have a discussion around the issue of getting richer presence info between systems - and moderator Don Van Doren specifically asked me to be there to react to what the larger vendors will be saying. The second panel is just two of us (myself and a gent from IBM) talking about creating mashups and then the last is a "Deep Dive" that Irwin Lazar and I will be doing into what is the state of "Web 2.0 in Enterprise Communications".

Should all be fun.... if you are out there at either conference, let me know. See some of you out there...

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Yesterday Google made another fascinating move in the telephony space... letting people use Google Voice with their existing phone number. This is key because previously if you wanted to try out Google Voice you had to get a new phone number that was different from any of your existing numbers.

Now a business or individual can move their existing number over to Google Voice... and Google can try to convert users over to their service from other services.

[UPDATE: Note that Google states that you can use Google Voice "with your existing mobile phone number", i.e. not a landline phone number. Others have pointed out that essentially all you are doing is forwarding your unanswered calls to Google's voicemail service instead of your mobile carrier's voicemail service. In this way, Google Voice is basically just like Jott or any of the many other similar services out there. Except, of course, it is from Google.]

When you use an existing number, Google Voice gives you these services:

• Online, searchable voicemail
• Free automated voicemail transcription
• Custom voicemail greetings for different callers
• Email and SMS notifications
• Low-priced international calling

With a new phone number under Google's control, you get additional services like conferencing, call recording, call screening, etc. More significantly, you get what I consider the key feature of Google Voice:

One number that reaches you on all your phones

That's the value I get out of Google Voice. If you call me on +1-802-735-1624, it rings me on my mobile, on my desk phone, on Skype (via SkypeIn), on a SIP phone... and could on other phones as well. That "one number" service is not available for existing phone numbers... but only for new numbers Google controls.

Without that feature, Google Voice is essentially a hosted voicemail provider for your existing phone number.

Except, of course, it is free.

Free and part of the ever-growing suite of Google services.... and still in beta and still invitation-only... but yet, it is Google. It will be interesting to watch over time what disruption this new offering causes in the traditional hosted voicemail market.

Meanwhile, it's now out there and if you want to try Google Voice with an existing number, you can request an invitation or find someone with an existing GV account and ask them for one of their 3 invites. (Sorry, mine are all gone.)

UPDATE (10/30/09) - Also check out Dave Michel's post about the broader ramifications of this story.

P.S. You can also watch this video from Google:

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As FierceTelecom points out, this bankruptcy has been expected for quite some time now. Last week there was much publicity up in these parts about Fairpoint working with its unions and banks to try to avoid the formal filing... but obviously today's filing indicates that they couldn't pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat. This morning, Fairpoint issued a news release and set up a web site about their restructuring:

http://www.fprestructuring.com/

Now, I should mention that I am a Fairpoint customer and do have a landline from them - I've also not personally had any customer service issues with their service. I am also not at all surprised.

I thought Fairpoint's acquisition of Verizon's landline business last year was an exceedingly dumb idea then - and I still think that today.

I mean... you don't need to be a rocket scientist or industry analyst to figure out that landlines are a dying business. Here's part of the overview from the most recent "Wireless Substitution" report from the US National Center for Health Statistics (my emphasis added):

More than one of every five American homes (20.2%) had only wireless telephones (also known as cellular telephones, cell phones, or mobile phones) during the second half of 2008, an increase of 2.7 percentage points since the first half of 2008. This is the largest 6-month increase observed since NHIS began collecting data on wireless-only households in 2003. In addition, one of every seven American homes (14.5%) received all or almost all calls on wireless telephones, despite having a landline telephone in the home.

I personally expect that trend to continue and if anything to accelerate as we collectively continue to choose mobile devices - and also as the cable companies and other players out there continue to offer compelling alternatives to the traditional landline. (Hmmm... and gee, do you think the cable companies up here aren't going to seize this opportunity to court Fairpoint customers?) And while I kept our landline for several reasons, I don't necessarily expect that I'll need it for a long time.

Sure... perhaps Fairpoint thought it could make money off the Internet access side of the house... I mean, buying your way into being the incumbent utility ought to be a good thing, right? But then again, the cable companies are right in there... as are the satellite folks and many others offering Internet access...

All I can say is kudos to whomever it was within Verizon that thought up this strategy of selling off their dying businesses to other companies... and let's see if they succeed in doing it again with Frontier Communications.

In the meantime, we will see what kind of chaos this filing stirs up today up here in both terms of business and political maneuverings...

It's also interesting to contemplate: what would happen if such a major utility like the "local phone company" were to completely fail?

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