Disruptive Telephony

I freely admit to being intrigued by all the various new tools (frameworks, platforms, etc.) that are springing up to aid in the rapid creation of web sites and services. One such intriguing tool is Node.js, a way to build event-driven scalable applications using plain old JavaScript. It's truly a fast way to get web apps up using a language known by most web developers.

So I was naturally pleased to see the Voxeo Labs team come out with a post "Use Node.js & Javascript to Write Your Tropo Apps" explaining how you could build communications apps using Tropo.com and the new Tropo Web API library for Node.js created by Mark Headd (who does not work for Voxeo but likes to develop apps on Voxeo's platforms). The Node.js library for Tropo can be found up on Github at:

http://github.com/tropo/tropo-webapi-node

You create your app using Node.js and then login to Tropo and create an app there pointing to the URL where your Node.js server is running. In Tropo you can then add phone numbers to the app for both voice and texting/SMS, add instant messaging IDs for most major networks (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber) and add a Twitter ID, too. One app connecting to all those different channels.

The Tropo team followed up with another Node.js sample app... this one showing how you could do voice recording.

All in all pretty cool stuff for JavaScript developers to build apps with!

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Just a quick note that Voxeo (my employer) is looking to add a Java guru to our engineering team ...

Coming up on 3 years that I will have been here, I can't say enough good about the company - if you know Java and are looking for an awesome company to join that's on the bleeding edge of communications, do check out the job description and apply online.

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Are you interested in creating applications that can open up government? Apps that can give people better access to government data?

If so... and if you are in the Seattle area or are attending the GnomeDex event happening this weekend, you can join in to the 24 Hour Open Government Hackathon starting at 5pm tomorrow, August 21st, at the Edgewater Hotel in Seattle. Here's the basic info:

Who Should Attend?
Ruby, Python, PHP, web developers, coders and anyone who has a passion to code, hack or kluge applications that will free (or otherwise enhance) the accessability and usefulness of government-shared data. Although the sprint takes place August 21-22 during Gnomedex10 in Seattle, you don't have to be attending the conference to join us. Participation is free and open to anyone...we just ask that you register in advance so we know how many individuals or teams we need to accomodate. What's Going to Happen?
The nature of the Hackathon will be fairly free-form. Hackathon Partners will have organizers onsite to help get things rolling initially. At the end of the 24 hours, each app will be evaluated by the Hackathon Partners and prizes will be awarded to those teams or individuals that develop the best applications in the 24 hour period.

It sounds like a great time! I won't be there... but I know many of the folks attending. (The Tropo cloud communications service, one of the services of my employer, Voxeo, is one of the sponsors of the hackathon.)

Registration for the event is free... you just have to get to the Seattle hotel tomorrow at 5pm.

Here are some posts from others about the event:

• Hackathoning Government (from the CTO of the City of Seattle)
  
  
• Announcing the GnomeDex10 Open Government Hackathon

I'm very much looking forward to seeing what applications will emerge from the event.

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Just one day left until AdhearsionConf 2010 opens in San Francisco tomorrow. The schedule looks outstanding and I know that the Voxeo Labs team is already on site getting everything ready. I've seen via Twitter that some hardcore Ruby telephony developers are already enroute.... should be a great time!

Sadly, my schedule doesn't allow me to be there, but the good news is that if you are unable to get there in person, you can follow along on the UStream channel:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/adhearsionconf

If you are in the SF area, or can get there, check out more info about the conference at:

http://adhearsionconf.eventbrite.com/

Great to see an event like this happening!

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Today we announced over on the Voxeo blogs and in a news release that Voxeo has acquired Teleku, a startup letting developers quickly create voice, SMS and IM applications using a RESTful API from common web programming languages. Om Malik had a piece up at GigaOm: Voxeo Gobbles Up Teleku. We have a page up linking to articles like that one, a FAQ and providing other info:

blogs.voxeo.com/news/teleku/

I had a chance to sit down with Teleku founder Chris Matthieu and record this video about the news:

I'm admittedly biased, but I'm looking forward to what both Teleku and Chris will bring to Voxeo. It's a fun time right now!

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This week I've been down at the SpeechTEK conference in New York and in the Voxeo booth we had a system that was running 16,000 simultaneous phone calls using our new software release, Prophecy 10. While there, I recorded a video interview with Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor where he explained what we did and why we did it.  I thought I'd post it here, because while I'm obviously biased, I think it's a fun example of making a demo system for a trade show/conference. Enjoy!

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Will you be at the SpeechTEK conference in New York August 2-4? If so, I'll be down there as part of the Voxeo team staffing our booth and speaking on Monday about unified communications security (related to my book). Details can be found on the Voxeo Event page for SpeechTEK 2010, including a discount code.

SpeechTEK was honestly a show I'd not attended prior to joining Voxeo some 2.5 years ago. It's a smaller show, focused on the speech and voice/IVR industry, which is obviously where Voxeo started and continues to have an incredibly strong presence. Excellent community of people and a great agenda of sessions, case studies, technology deep-dives and much more.

SpeechTEK is also the show we use at Voxeo as an annual organizing event to make major announcements... and so naturally we have a number of great announcements in the works. ;-)

Will be fun... and I'm looking forward to seeing folks down there.

P.S. If you are in the media or a blogger and want to get advance briefing on our announcements, please email me. Thanks.

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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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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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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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