Disruptive Telephony

If you aren't aware of Phono, back in October Voxeo released the Phono SDK, letting you easily add in voice or chat directly into your website. The way to think about is this... traditionally, websites have had a "click-to-call" button that would call you and call a call center and bridge the two calls together. For this to work, you have to typically enter your phone number into the phone.

Phono changes that by running a softphone client directly in your web browser. So instead of entering your phone number, you simply push the button and start talking to your browser. (For those interested, we posted about the architecture, which uses a mixture of XMPP/Jingle and SIP. Phono itself is a jQuery module/library/app/whatever-you-want-to-call-it that you reference in your web page.)

Phono received a good bit of attention and we posted a lot of content about it online, including sample apps, tutorials, videos and more. The source code, too, is all available online.

One thing that always bothered us, though, was that you needed a headset for Phono to really work well... and so we spent a great amount of time working on echo suppression so that people could ditch the headset and just talk to their computer. Given that on the development side we're all Mac users, we're used to apps like Skype where you don't really need a headset. We wanted Phono to be the same.

So now we've done it... PhonoSDK version 0.2 is out! We're thrilled with how it came out and are looking forward to seeing what people build with it. If you want to try it out, simply go to Phono.com, check out the documentation and get started!

Full disclosure: In case the "we" usage above wasn't enough to clue you in, Phono is a product of my employer, Voxeo. But even if that weren't the case, I'd still write about Phono simply because it's cool... and it's disruptive.

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Through it all, though, my ability to call Google Voice numbers via SIP kept working perfectly fine, while it stopped working (or never worked) for pretty much everyone else who had tried it. (except for one other person who saved my sanity!) Several people on Twitter thought I must have some kind of "magic"... but all I knew was that it kept on working.

Until this morning.

It's dead now.

Using SJphone to call the exact same number that has worked fine for the past two days now only gets me a constant ringing.

So whatever "magic" I may have had is gone... gone, gone, gone...

Let's hope that Google will in fact bring back this capability... and maybe even go on to provide the other side of SIP interoperability that Todd Vierling wrote about (and others have agitated around for some time). The key point being to let us point our Google Voice numbers to SIP endpoints in addition to regular PSTN phone numbers.

It was great, Google, to get a taste of SIP interconnection to Google Voice... if only for a few days. Can you please bring it back? And even make it better?

We're out here waiting...

P.S. For those not understanding the "It's Dead, Jim" reference in the title, it goes back to the original Star Trek.

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By way of a tweet from Aswath Rao (crediting @truvoip) today I learned that you could simply take your Google Voice number and append "@sip.voice.google.com" to get a perfectly working SIP URI that you could use with any SIP phone. I naturally tried it out with my own GV number using the SJphone SIP phone:

The call worked great. I answered it on one of my other phones and the conversation was fine - both audio streams intact, etc.

YATE?

What's interesting to me here is that SJphone reports that the remote client is YATE, a.k.a. Yet Another Telephony Engine. Yate has been around for a while (the voip-info wiki has some history) but hasn't been as widely known as, say, Asterisk or FreeSwitch. I subsequently made several calls using the Blink softphone on my Mac and again could see in the SIP traces that YATE was receiving the call on the Google end.

Looking over at the Yate News page, I see this note with regard to the January 31, 2011, release 3.1 of Yate:

Yate client calls can use Google Voice service.

The Yate client is a soft client for both voice and IM and in looking at their tutorial on using the client with Google Voice it would appear that this is about using XMPP (Jabber) to connect from the client over to Google Voice (I'm guessing it is using Jingle, which has been supported for some time by Google Talk (which is different from Google Voice)).

So the Yate client support is really something different... but the key point here is that Google appears to have chosen Yate to use on the receiving end of SIP calls into a Google Voice number.

WHY A SIP ADDRESS MATTERS

For some of us who have had Google Voice numbers for quite some time (mine dates back to the pre-Google-acquisition GrandCentral days), it's always been a bit frustrating that the only way to call a GV number was through the good old PSTN. Particularly because the PSTN is so... well... limiting. When I've been building apps in Tropo or Voxeo's Evolution platform, I've wanted to route them to my GV number... and I have to do this via the PSTN side. No big deal on one level, but it's just inefficient. If the call is already all on the IP side, why not just keep it all IP!

As we're off building the future of communications over IP, I've wanted to include Google Voice into that mix.

Now we can!

At least... unofficially. Perhaps at some point Google will come out and formally promote this capability.

Once a GV account has a SIP address, we then have to wonder what else we will be able to do with it. Could I, for instance, use wideband audio to my GV number?

For that to work, of course, I'd need to be able to register a SIP device with my GV number, which I can't do... and is the other side of the frustration with Google Voice. (Or at least be able to give GV a SIP URI as one of the addresses to call when a call comes in.) But conceivably once that happens I would be able to receive wideband audio calls. Ditto making video calls...

The first step is getting a SIP address that is workable... we now seem to have that.

Kudos to Google to making this inbound SIP connectivity available... and I look forward to seeing what else they will do with regard to SIP.

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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?

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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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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• Skype connectivity for all phones.
• Auto-provisioning works with almost all models of desktop and conference IP phones
• Install wizard configures all basic networking, telephony system and user functionality on the FREETALK Connect
• Remote administration capabilities that enable the system to be administered from anywhere Internet access is available.

I'm intrigued by the system because it integrates an Asterisk-based IP-PBX with Skype - and is "certified" by Skype. I'm looking forward to hearing what Jim has to say about it.

If you'd like to listen live, there are regular, SIP and Skype contact phone numbers to dial into the VUC. You can also jump on #vuc on IRC to join in the text backchannel.

If you can't join live, a recording of the call will be posted to the episode's web page sometime in the next few days.

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With Voxeo Labs' launch of the Phono software toolkit last weekend that lets you turn any browser into a phone or IM client, one of the more interesting sample applications released along with it was "Facebook Telephone", a Facebook application that lets you make phone calls from directly inside of Facebook.

In a post on the Phono blog, Chris Matthieu goes into detail about the application, how you can use it to call your friends... to call regular (PSTN) phone numbers... and also to call SIP addresses.

In using the app, I've found a couple of things rather cool:

• The "phone-in-the-browser" has been seamless for me in the sense that after I approved the initial Flash security warning (and told it to remember my setting), it "just worked" and I was able to start speaking to people without any problems.
  
  
• I like that you can call a friend on Facebook and if they don't have Facebook Telephone running in a browser it will automatically connect through to their mobile device.
  
  
• It's cool that it works over WiFi... I'm looking forward to trying it out in various different locations. (like the next plane I'm on with WiFi ;-)
  

On the point about calling your friends, if you click the "Friends with Telephone" button you see a list of all your friends who have installed the application. If you click on their image you will call them right then from within your browser. As noted above, if they don't have the Facebook Telephone app running right then, it will ring through to the phone number they have set up in the application:

One interesting point is that they never see my phone number - nor do I know theirs. Facebook Telephone combines the Phono client with the Tropo cloud communications service and creates an abstraction layer between you and the person you are calling.

You don't need to know the recipient's phone number... as the app just takes care of that routing for you. They see an incoming phone call from a number up on Tropo... preserving a level of anonymity between callers. Essentially, your Facebook friends list is already a master directory for messaging... now it is also that for telephone calls.

All this isn't to say the app is perfect... there can be some echo sometimes (a fact acknowledged by the Voxeo Labs team with this first release). And the current reliance on Flash means I can't use it on my iPad or iPhone.

Still, I think it's a cool use of Phono and I know Chris and the team have some even greater plans for the app.

If you'd like to try it out yourself, simply go to app.facebook.com/telephone (great URL, eh?) and step through the process of approving the app to connect to your FB account.

If you'd like to play with the technology behind the app, you can go to Phono.com and learn how to use the jQuery plugin ... and can go to Tropo.com and sign up for a free account to build multi-channel (voice, SMS, IM, Twitter) communications apps using web programming languages like ruby, PHP, python, JavaScript and Groovy.

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Cisco, Avaya and RIM are all rushing out "tablet" devices now for the enterprise market - but will they actually matter?  Will enterprises really want to use these high-end and high-priced tablets versus all the new consumer tablets like the iPad and all the various Android and Windows tables in the queue?

Don't get me wrong ... it think it is awesome that Cisco, Avaya and RIM are all coming out with new tablets. Ever since getting an iPad back in early May it has become a constant companion on my travels around and I use it for so many different purposes.

The touch interface is also so incredibly "natural"... I watch my daughters using the iPad and just have to think: "Why shouldn't computers just work this way?"

Any user interface improvements that improve the communications user experience are very definitely a GOOD thing!

So I commend Cisco, Avaya and RIM for coming out with tablets.

I just still find myself wondering why I might want to pay to buy one of these tablets. I had this exchange yesterday with analyst Brian Riggs on Twitter:

As I said, I already have a SIP client on my iPad (and there are several options, in fact). I already have Skype. I already have WebEx and GoToMeeting for collaboration (and many other apps). Sure, I don't have video on the iPad - yet - but there are a range of Android consumer tablets coming out that do, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple announces an iPad with a video camera sometime soon. Apple loves FaceTime right now... I wouldn't be surprised to see the iPad join the game.

I think Brian's point is the key:

avaya, cisco are betting they can do comms on tablets better than apple, etc.

And to a point, they are probably right. Real-time communications IS different than traditional web communications. This is very true.

There is, though, this one wee minor detail:

Apple has an entire ecosystem of developers building apps!

If Apple can deliver a hardware platform that provides the necessary devices (like an embedded camera for video), I would see the developer community rushing to use it. (And the Android community already has multiple devices coming out.)

On a more personal level, I've found my iPad to be much more like my mobile phone... it's a device I take with me to both personal and business functions/meetings/events. It's a "converged" device in that it reflects the blurring of the lines between my personal and business lives. I don't know that I'd want yet-another-device to carry around.

There is certainly the case that in large enterprises where you go to work on a "campus", the ability to have a work-specific device like this that you carry around could be valuable. But even there I'm not sure that I wouldn't also want my personal information, etc. with me. And isn't part of the value of a tablet that you could bring it home with you or while you are traveling?

Again, I commend the vendors on trying out a new form factor and user interface... I just find myself wondering why people won't simply want to use the consumer devices that are rapidly proliferating.

What do you think? Would you use a tablet from a communications vendor? Or would you want them to instead have apps that run on consumer devices?

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What are Skype's plans for the enterprise? What do they see as their target market? On Saturday, TechCrunch posted an interview, with David Gurle, Skype’s General Manager and Vice President of Enterprise, focusing on these questions: "Skype’s VP Of Enterprise On Future Strategy, Products And Competitors.

While not deep on details, the interview did offer a few interesting glimpses into their plans. For instance, Skype is looking at industry-specific business-to-consumer apps:

For example, Skype will soon be offering businesses a way to establish Skype-powered virtual video call centers, allowing enterprise customers to talk to their own customers across multiple devices, platforms, geographies, and more.

Such an offering could certainly be interesting. I was also intrigued by this:

When I asked him about Skype’s future, Gule says it is in creating a one-click solution to allow you to reach a partner, friend, manager, employee, or business contact from any platform.

The "directory problem" has always been a challenge, i.e. where does your master directory live... it will be interesting to see what Skype comes up with for their answer.

The interview has more info and is worth a read for those of us continuing to track and monitor what Skype is doing. As they push into the enterprise, it will be fun to see how their disruptive influence does as it meets the well-entrenched (and well-financed) players of the enterprise space.

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What if you could have customers call in to your call center from directly within your web browser?  No "click to call" that calls them back on their cell phone... but literally just press a button on your web site and start talking?  And get connected directly to the team appropriate to the web page rather than a generic inbox?

What if you could do this with more than just voice... but also video?  screen sharing?  with better audio quality than the legacy telephony network (the PSTN)?

What if you could also add in live chat sessions directly from your website? Giving you true multi-channel interaction with your customers?

And what if you could do this without any downloads by the customer?

Even better... what if this could be done with your branding? and connecting to ANY IP communications system?

Announcing Phono

Today at the JQuery Conference in Boston, the Voxeo Labs team is announcing Phono a new software development kit that lets you create apps just like the ones I mentioned. It's free, it's "skinnable" and it works with any systems that use SIP or XMPP (Jabber). More info here:

• Phono.com is Live!
• Hello PhonoSDK!
• PhonoSDK Demo

The Phono SDK is free to download and use. You can also naturally follow Phono on Twitter or Facebook.

You can use it to connect to your IP-PBX... to applications on platforms like Tropo... or really any other IP communications / Unified Communications platform.

FAR More Than Just A Softphone

That last part is really the point... the Phono SDK being shown today is far more than "just" a softphone. Sure... that's what some of the first reference implementations are all about. Things like Twelephone that let you easily call all your Twitter friends... or Facebook Telephone that lets you call your Facebook Friends. You'll see some more apps like that in the coming weeks.

But Phono is more than that...

Phono is a toolkit for Rewiring the Real-time Web

We as an industry need to drop the shackles of the legacy telephone network... we need to move beyond the PSTN in true rich collaboration between people... wherever they may be.

Voice, chat, video, screensharing... whatever mode they want to work in... from basic web browsers to mobile devices...

Phono is our contribution to that... and to taking away friction from developers wanting to build communications apps that make the most of the new tools and media we have available to us.

Try it out!

We're excited to see what you'll do with it!

Extra bonus... here's a video intro:

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