Disruptive Telephony

By way of a ZDNet blog, I learned of "Tryphone" a site that lets you "try out" various new mobile phones online. It currently just has the Apple iPhone, LG Muziq, Blackberry Pearl and Samsung Juke... but of course lets you buy the phone immediately after trying it if you wish. I don't know that something like this can ever replace the experience of actually holding the phone in your hand, but it's an interesting idea nonetheless.

Technorati Tags: iphone, mobile, phones, tryphone

Skype Journal had this post today that was short enough to be captured in a graphic:

Indeed. How many other startups have ditched landlines, IP PBXs, etc.? Tools like Skype make that rather trivial to do, especially when voice no longer matters as much in everyday business communication.

Interesting times we live in...

Technorati Tags: skype, voip

When I think of "disruptive" actions in our industry, I personally don't ever tend to think of Verizon (well, I do think of them in terms of disrupting GSM service in Vermont, but that's a different post I need to write). But yesterday, Verizon issued a news release that I think bears reading: "Verizon Business Adds New Option to Simplify Move to IP". Essentially it amounts to the fact that Verizon will be offering "large-business" and government customers the option of having their IP-PBX hosted in Verizon's cloud. From a technical point of view, it's basically a hosted offering of Nortel's recent products:

The Nortel-based offerings, leveraging the Nortel Communication Server 1000 IP-PBX, Business Communications Manager and CallPilot platforms, enable advanced voice applications such as "find me, follow me," and integrated communications that allow for multimedia collaboration. They also help companies move to a unified communications platform to simplify and integrate a variety of business communications functions such as voice mail, e-mail and instant messaging. For example, end-users can see who is online, or they can prompt the system to prioritize incoming messages and send alerts to end-user devices. Verizon Business' support for the offering includes full implementation, as well as management of fault, configuration, accounting, performance and security functions.

The release also indicates that Verizon Business has set up close to 5,000 Nortel IP telephony platforms, which is certainly not a number to sneeze at. Now on one level, this isn't a terribly big deal. Verizon already provides all sorts of hosted/managed services to those large and government businesses, but this does mark Verizon's endorsement of hosted VoIP and their expansion into the support of the technology. Interesting move... and a nice win for Nortel as well.

Technorati Tags: voip, verizon, nortel

The world is a bit darker tonight. Oliver Starr relayed the tragic news that Marc Orchant passed away earlier today. I've sat here tonight saddened... with my thoughts very definitely going out to his family... especially at this time of year.

And then, as a writer, I feel compelled to write. It seems really the only way to honor Marc's passing.

By most measures, I did not know Marc well. We never met face-to-face. I did not work directly with him. He had not ever interviewed me, nor I him. We had not participated in any joint projects. But in this crazy world of interconnected social media, it sure felt like I knew him. I'd been reading his ZDNet "Office Evolution" blog all along up until August when he left to join Oliver Starr in starting up us.blognation.com. There on blognation I enjoyed his writing and followed along as wrote about the latest Apple happenings, talked about how he liked his Kindle reader and ultimately how he removed himself from Facebook. Since he occasionally wrote about Skype, something I cover here as well, I did pay attention especially to those posts.

Marc and I did "meet" virtually through Robert Sanzalone's "Pacific IT" Skype groupchat, where Marc participated for a few months this fall. He pointed me to what he considered the best mobile VoIP handset around. We chatted about the new MacBookPro's. He sent me a Jaiku invite when I was looking for one... the kind of ordinary things that happens in such group chat rooms. He was helpful, kind, courteous... a consummate professional.

Perhaps why his death strikes me so hard is because he was one of us... a "tech blogger"... a writer... a storyteller.

He used words to help try to make sense out of the insanity that surrounds us on any given day. He tried to educate... enlighten... de-mystify. He wrote well and with an enjoyable style. He told stories.

And now he is gone.

What remains is his family (donations are being collected by Oliver Starr) and, of course, in this era of Google and seemingly infinite disk farms... his words:

• his past writing of ZDNet's Office Evolution blog
• his writing on us.blognation.com
• his own blog at blog.platformagnostic.net
• his LinkedIn profile
• his Twitter stream and Jaiku stream (his Jaiku feed also includes his other blog posts)
• his shared items on Google Reader
• his newly-created Tumblelog

And undoubtedly many more places than those I've listed here. Technorati also pulled up this video of Marc in 2005 explaining what a blog is:

There are perhaps more of those out there as well... and undoubtedly pictures in Flickr and other such sites.

Now, for the rest of us, all we can really do (outside of donating to Marc's family) is to remember him. Consider this my entry in building that collective memory... in helping in some small way to tell Marc's story. I've seen posts already from Alec Saunders, Aaron Brazell, Tris Hussey (on blognation),Robert Scoble... and I'm sure we'll see many more in the hours and days ahead.

No mere words can ever replace a loved one, but perhaps in some small way they can offer some degree of solace to Marc's family to know that he was valued by others... that what he did mattered... and that the world is a better place for him having been here.

Rest in peace, Marc... thank you for all you shared.

Technorati Tags: marc orchant, marcorchant

I was up way too early out here in Vancouver, so I wandered over to the show hotel and recorded a little greeting:

Technorati Tags: ietf

The major product Dean Elwood has been working on now that he has moved to Truphone is the Facebook application that Truphone announced two days ago. Their blog provides a link to the Facebook application and, of course, in true Truphone style, offers us a video with cows:

I've not yet had a chance to do more with it than install it and play a bit with the configuration options:

but I'm very much looking forward to giving it a try. There are several interesting aspects to this app for me:

• It is an embedded softphone (Java-based). No extra software you need. Just click the button and you can call the person who has it on their Facebook profile. To my knowledge this is the first time we've seen this in a Facebook app.
• From the user side, you can link that button to any of the following:
  • Your Truphone number.
  • Any regular landline or mobile phones in the US or Canada.
  • A SIP address.
  • A Google Talk address.
• A GrandCentral phone number.
• The Facebook app uses the IAX protocol used primarily by Asterisk. This gets around all of the firewall/NAT traversal issues that plague SIP.

All of that makes for an interesting new app inside of Facebook. Now, there are already a number of "click-to-call" Facebook apps out there (some of which I've covered here) but in his announcement of moving to Truphone, Dean talks about what is different:

There are several click to call/callback/speak type applications already on Facebook. The differentiator here, and the interesting part about this application (and also the hardest part) is that we’ve embedded a JAVA based softphone right into the heart of Facebook. This makes the experience from a user point of view seamless with the Facebook environment. The user never leaves Facebook, they speak into Facebook. Additionally, the "call me" button for this application is not restricted to your own profile page - it functions as a Facebook attachment, which means it can be dropped onto a friends Wall, or added to a Facebook mail message or any other attachment-accepting application which exists on Facebook now or might do in the future.

So now Facebook users can put this "Call Me For Free" button in other locations within Facebook... and Facebook users can use this as a way to stay inside of Facebook but yet new mix in voice communication to people outside of Facebook. Now I can look up someone in Facebook and then simply click the call button to reach them by voice directly.

I look forward to experimenting with the application in the next week or two. Those of you who are Facebook users and want to try it out can simply install the application.

What do you think? Do you think people will use this app? Does voice have a role mixed into a social network like Facebook?

Technorati Tags: applications, dean elwood, facebook, iax, truphone

One interesting development in the world of Skype last week which I've seen little mention of is the fact that the folks at Highspeedconferencing.com have rolled out a Skype Extra that lets Skype users have large-scale conference calls. Like most such large conference bridges, they have moderation/"hand-raising", call recording, email invites, etc. However, the key point to me is that their conferencing bridge uses the wideband audio supported by Skype! That is the key. You now have conference calling with audio quality that is far better than the PSTN! This is where we start to get into the space where VoIP can offer a truly different - and better - user experience than traditional telephony. The Skype blog touches on this:

HighSpeed Conferencing is the only audio conferencing service available to Skype users that offers high-definition (HD) voice quality. There’s no degradation of audio quality, no matter how many Skype users participate in a conference call. And with unlimited usage during a conference call, you can talk as much as you want. Some people stay on the conference bridge all day.

I've not yet used the service as right now I'm not involved with large conference calls, but at the point that I do I will very definitely check it out. (On a tangent, I wonder if Polycom has a trademark on "HD Voice"?) Have any of you tried it out?

Technorati Tags: skype, wideband, audio, wideband audio, HD voice, conference calling

A large part of why I have NOT been writing here all that much in the past few weeks is that I've been busy in my new role with Voxeo working on a corporate blog portal. I've been covering a bit of that odyssey over on my Disruptive Conversations blog as well as in my weekly reports into the For Immediate Release podcast. It's been a great amount of work but also a lot of fun - I've been very lucky to have a colleague who does amazing things with CSS and graphics, and so the sites look a whole lot better than they would if I were left to my own devices.

I'm very pleased to say, now, that we've reached the point where I'm willing to link to our work and talk a bit about what we are doing. The main blog portal is the predictable "blogs.voxeo.com" but the weblog that we're really starting to use and could be of interest to readers of this blog is our "Speaking of Standards" blog found at:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/speakingofstandards/

I've obviously been very occasionally writing here about standards and some of that may continue, but I expect most of my writing on the subject will now occur over on this new Voxeo weblog - and I'll naturally be writing more on the subject. We'll be writing about the IETF and SIP standards, but also the W3C and standards such as VoiceXML and CCXML that I've never covered at all here. We'll be linking to events and tutorials we find and generally providing whatever information we can about standards affecting our industry, as well as Voxeo's views and implementations of those standards.

Why would Voxeo sponsor a weblog about standards? Primarily because the company and our products are all about open standards - which was one of the things that attracted me to the company after they first approached me. I've since learned that they've been leading the IVR industry in adopting open standards. As the products page says in the "Fast Facts" sidebar:

• 100% Standards based IVR
• Supports W3C VoiceXML 2.0
• Supports W3C CCXML 1.0
• Supports W3C SRGS 1.0
• Supports W3C SSML 1.0
• Supports CallXML 3.0
• First platform with XML call control
• First platform with XML conferencing
• First shipping CCXML implementation
• First SIP/VOIP IVR platform

Not bad, eh? Add to that the fact that our CTO (my manager), RJ Auburn, chairs the W3C's Working Group on CCXML and we've hired other folks involved with standards efforts... all of that is why we added a weblog on standards.

So if you would like to see our view on industry standards, find tutorials about various standards or learn about standards-related events we may be attending, I would invite you to come on over and check out "Speaking with Standards" - or subscribe to the RSS feed. While I (and others) will still be working on improving the site, it's mostly done and I'm delighted to be able to return to writing more. Let us know what you think!

Technorati Tags: ccxml, ietf, sip, standards, voicexml, voip, voxeo, w3c

Congratulations to Dean Elwood for joining Truphone as their Director of Platform Operations! I've known Dean for a couple of years now through Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast where he's commented from time to time and also provided us the SIP-based comment line (sip:[email protected]) through his involvement with the VoIPuser.org web site. We had a chance to meet a year or so ago at the first Blue Box dinner we had in London and Dean also hosted a dinner at VON Fall Boston a few weeks ago. He's a great guy with tremendous talent and I'm sure he'll be a great resource for Truphone. Speaking of Truphone, they are also a fascinating company to watch and I've come to know a good number of folks involved over time. I'm looking forward very much to seeing what comes out of their work and I wish Dean all the best in his new role.

Technorati Tags: dean elwood, truphone

By way of my Facebook NewsFeed this morning, I learned that several friends had installed a new Facebook app called "VoxCall" (must be logged into the walled garden of Facebook to see the link). A quick Technorati search brought me to Alex Saunders' blog post on the subject which clued me in to the fact that this was from the folks at Voxalot, some of whom I'd met down at Fall VON in Boston.

[Side Rant: This also shows the inherent weakness and stupidity of Facebook's current implementation of "groups". The Voxalot folks had posted info about this app in both the news and wall of their Facebook group, but of course I would never see it unless I just randomly happened to go there. Had they sent a message to all group users, I would have seen it in my Facebook Inbox, but it would be nice if instead Facebook had some way to notify you that you had new info in the groups to which you subscribe.]

The VoxCall app is basically a "click-to-call" app that makes use of Facebook's directory. You simply click on the name of someone else who has the app installed and, like many click-to-call apps, you are called first and then the other party is called and the connection is made.

An interesting aspect is that VoxCall works with SIP URIs (addresses). When you install the app you have to enter your SIP URI at which point you then receive a call on that URI where you are asked to enter the PIN displayed on the screen:

It's actually a pretty nice way of authenticating the endpoint. Given that Voxeo's a VoIP application platform company, we naturally all have SIP URIs for our extensions (sip:[email protected] for me) so it was easy for me to sign up. Users of Gizmo would likewise have a SIP address, as would users of many other VoIP services. If you don't have a SIP URI, Voxalot has a suggested path to get one on their VoxCall FAQ. (One thing I don't completely understand is why you would need to do their step #2, Register for a VoxPremium account, if you already get a SIP URI from the Voice Service Provider you signed up with in step #1. But maybe the point is that some of those VSPs won't give you SIP URIs... ?)

Once registered, the process is quite simple. You have a "Call Friends" tab that is shown below (complete with some advertisement being blocked by the local proxy server that I run that blocks ads from typical ad-serving sites):

You simply click on the person's icon and the call process starts. First it calls you, then it calls the other party. No charges incurred by anyone outside of whatever inbound connection fees we would normally pay (in my case, none). I called Alec and so my page changed to show his picture and the fact that I was calling him:

Alec and I had a good chat with surprisingly good audio quality given the convoluted path our call was taking. I was on a Polycom IP phone connected across the Internet to Voxeo's SIP servers in Florida. The call went across some network cloud to Alec's TruPhone number (which has a SIP URI) which wound up ringing his mobile as he was driving along the 401 somewhere in southern Canada. Audio quality was quite good and didn't seem to have any real issues in the 5 or 10 minutes we chatted.

The VoxCall app also has an Echo Test number you can call to hear the latency and has some conference rooms that I have not yet tried.

Overall, it's an interesting app, although I guess my basic question is simply this: will I use it? As I wrote earlier, the phone is no longer as critical of a communication tool for many people, myself included. When I think of Facebook, I think of it as a place for email-ish communication. If I need to reach someone urgently, I have used Facebook as a place to get a phone number from in the past. Will I think to use to it place a call in the future? I don't know.

There are a couple of barriers to that, really. First, the app only works with people who have it installed. Second, to install it you need a SIP URI and the whole concept of SIP addresses is only really now starting to come to people's attention (outside the early adopter crowd). Third, initiating the call requires going into the VoxCall application page inside Facebook to click on the person's icon to call. It would be nice if it could be done simply from the list of friends that you have. (Having said that, it's actually easier to simply go into the app page than it is to search through Facebook's friend list and then go into their profile to then click on a link below their picture.)

The nice thing about the app, though is that it does use the Facebook directory. As Alec puts it:

Perhaps the biggest differentiator for Voxcall is simply that it hooks into a directory that a lot of people know and use.

As Facebook continues its climb in popularity and moves onward toward the goal of being your definitive "portal" to the Internet, this VoxCall app (and others like Alec's own Free Conference Call app) help connect in voice to the communications mix (for those who still want/need to use it).

In any event, kudos to Voxalot to bringing out another voice app on top of Facebook. It's good to see the platform being used for voice. As a advocate for SIP and open standards, I applaud apps that promote the use of all things SIP. Give it a try. What do you think of it? (Feel free to give me a call if you are a Facebook friend of mine.)

Technorati Tags: applications, facebook, facebookplatform, voxalot, voip, voxcall