Disruptive Telephony

To get a sense of why I completely enjoy working for Voxeo, simply listen to this interview (or read the transcript) from Lee Dryburgh over on the eComm blog: (Voxeo CEO) Jonathan Taylor on the Origins and Near-Future of Voxeo

Do I need to say anything more? There is an immense amount of fun in being part of a company whose focus is on disrupting existing players and in the end helping people developer better voice applications... and hopefully bringing about better communication.

For those of you going out to eComm next week in San Francisco, I'll see you there. And if you haven't registered yet, there's still time - check out this blog post for a 20% discount code.

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, jonathan taylor, ecomm, interview, voice, voip

You may have noticed that I haven't been blogging much lately... or podcasting..... I've certainly been twittering since it's fast to do... but I haven't been writing much here or across any of my blogs and podcasts lately.

Several good reasons... mostly that today is the last day of two weeks of travel, broken only by about a 40-hour visit home over the weekend. Last week I was down at ITEXPO in Miami and then spent the end of the week with one of my periodic check-ins at Voxeo's corporate office in Orlando, FL.

This week I've again been at Voxeo's office in Orlando, although not for meetings but instead to participate in a week of in-depth training in the VoiceObjects service creation environment for creating voice applications. You may recall that Voxeo acquired VoiceObjects back in December and so we've had a series of training sessions in Orlando for our development and support staff to learn all about the product.

It's the first time in a while that I've spent a week in a training session where my time is focused on a topic (or at least is supposed to be). I've come away from it very impressed by what the VO tool can do to help people very easily and quickly build very complex voice applications. It's also been a great way for me to learn more and more about the Eclipse tool, which continues to impress me with the plugins that are available for it. (Probably the most common way to use VoiceObjects is as an Eclipse plugin, although it can also be used through a web interface.)

I'll be writing more about VoiceObjects and what it can do - although probably over on the Voxeo Developer's Corner blog - but I'll mention here that if you'd like to try it out yourself, you can download a free copy of the VoiceObjects "Developer Edition" from the VoiceObjects Developer Portal.

Of course, during this week of training, all the other normal work tasks don't stop... so the nights and mornings have been long... and much of my blogging and podcasting has had to be put on hold.

Next week I'll be back up in my home office in New Hampshire and would like to hope that the pace might be a tad bit better... but... well... the Emerging Communications (eComm) conference is only 2.5 weeks away, and there's a lot to be done before that! :-)

Somewhere in here I should be able to start posting more again...

Technorati Tags: voxeo, personal, voiceobjects

Will you be down in Miami at ITEXPO February 2-4? If so, please feel free to drop me a note and perhaps we can connect somewhere there.

I'll be arriving Monday afternoon and then on Tuesday, February 3rd, I'll be donning my VOIPSA VoIP Security hat to participate in a SIP Trunking Workshop sponsored by Ingate Systems on "SIP Trunking And Security". These workshops are always fun to do and as they are free to anyone attending ITEXPO (even just with an exhibit pass), they are usually well-attended. I'll be bringing my recording gear, too, and the talk will eventually go out in my Blue Box Podcast feed so you will be able to hear it later.

Speaking of recording... I'll have my video gear, too, and so if you have some new product or service in the "emerging communications" space that you think I might be interested in recording for my "Emerging Tech Talk" video podcast... well... pitch me. :-) I know I'll be recording a number of videos down there and I would certainly consider doing some more.

Wednesday evening I'll be driving back to Orlando and in Voxeo's office on Thursday and Friday so if you're in the Orlando area, please feel free to let me know as well.

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Technorati Tags: danyork, itexpo, miami, orlando, voxeo

In about 2.5 hours, at 11am US Pacific / 2pm US Eastern, I (Dan York) will be participating in a "Hosted Speech Solutions" webinar sponsored by Speech Tech Magazine. I'll be joining colleagues from Microsoft (TellMe), Angel.com and Convergys. We'll be talking about each of our hosted offerings and then answering a series of questions before then throwing it open to questions from the audience.

If you would like to join in and learn about our solutions (and those of our competitors), you can register for free.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, dan york, danyork, speech, hosted, cloud, cloudcomputing, ivr, voice, voip

While out at ITEXPO in Los Angeles last month, I had a chance to meet up with Jeb Brilliant (yes, that's his real name), someone who I had come to know through all the various Squawk Box conference calls/podcasts that I had participated in. He joined me as I was walking the show floor and then back at the Voxeo booth he asked if he could record a very brief 30-second video interview with me talking about what Voxeo does. He has now posted that video and you're welcome to check it out.

Technorati Tags: ccxml, commdev, dan york, danyork, itexpo, sip, voicemail, voxeo

Is the role of "voice" diminished or enhanced by the availability of web services? How does voice fit into the "cloud"? Where do service providers fit into the picture?

Out at ITEXPO last month in Los Angeles, industry analyst Jon Arnold asked me (Dan York) to participate in a series of video interviews he was recording for his IPConvergence.TV site. In the interview, which is now available for viewing, we talked about "voice-enabling" business processes, web services, "cloud computing", the challenges to service providers and customers and much, much more. Jon also asked me to talk a bit about what I see ahead of us in the next few years. It was a fun interview to do and I appreciated the opportunity.

NOTE: There is no way to currently embed the video, so you'll need to watch it over on TMC's site. I'll also note that on my Mac I couldn't watch the video in Firefox but instead had to use Safari. Now this may be due to some local configuration issue on my system, but I thought I'd mention it.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, dan york, jon arnold, itexpo, commdev

As I wrote about recently both here on Disruptive Telephony and also over on the Voxeo weblogs, my employer, Voxeo, has made the switch from the Blackberry 8830 to the Apple iPhone as our corporate mobile phone. Employees in our Orlando office have already been receiving iPhones and mine just arrived last Thursday. Given that I've now been using it for a few days, I recorded these initial impressions:

Initial impressions of the iPhone 3GAs I've documented on http://www.disruptivetelephony.com/ my employer recently made the switch from Blackberry to iPhone - these are some initial impressions...

The quick summary is:

• Typing - Better than I expected with the touchpad typing and Appple's correction routines.
• Coverage - Pretty much what I expected. AT&T's coverage here in southern New Hampshire is much less than Verizon's. However, it wasn't terribly bad and I did actually get better coverage in a few places like a local grocery store.
• WiFi - Very nice!
• Camera - While it's clearly not as good as my normal digital camera, it seems to be adequate for pictures for posting to blogs, etc.
• Browsing - As expected, the browsing experience is excellent. I do like being able to switch the phone to a horizontal display. Watching YouTube videos is great as well.
• App Store - Very cool apps available. I've installed a number related to social media / social networking and so far been quite pleased.

All in all, I've been quite pleased with how well it works. I'll write more as I use it more...

Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, dan york, voxeo, rim, blackberry

Over on one of Voxeo's weblogs I wrote a piece yesterday, "Goodbye BlackBerry... Hello iPhone!" that speaks to our vote in the evolving "RIM vs Apple" battle going on out there in the enterprise marketplace. It will be an interesting move that I'm very much looking forward to.

From what I've seen, we join a growing number of companies that are now using Apple's iPhone for a corporate mobile phone.

Interestingly, RIM is today announcing the impending release on Verizon (US) and Vodafone (UK) networks of the Blackberry "Storm", RIM's touchscreen entry against the iPhone. Some links today:

• Engadget review
• Comparison with the iPhone
• Boy Genius Report post with pictures and Verizon/RIM news release

Alec Saunders also has it as the topic for today's Squawk Box at 11am US Eastern time.

Will it be enough to stop enterprises from defecting to the iPhone? I don't know... I'm sure it may stop some, but until RIM can come out with a development platform and distribution system rivaling Apple's AppStore, I think you'll see more developers choosing to go the iPhone way. We'll see.

Regardless, it certainly is good for us as users to have the increased competition out there... in the end, we'll all wind up with much better devices, methinks.

Meanwhile, I'm personally looking forward to receiving my corporate iPhone and joining in the iPhone fun. :-)

What do you think? Is the Storm enough to keep you on Blackberry? Or will you (have you?) move to the iPhone? (Or don't you care?)

Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, mobile, wireless, blackberry, storm, voxeo

As I note over in my Voxeo blog post, I'll be out at the Communications Developer Conference (co-located with ITEXPO) this week in Los Angeles. I will be speaking twice. First on Wednesday morning I'll be talking about SIP Trunking and security as part of the Ingate SIP Trunking workshops from 10:15-11:15am. Next, on Thursday, I'll be speaking about "Developing Voice Applications in the Cloud", a favorite topic of mine these days.

Voxeo will also have a booth and I expect to be there. I'm also doing some video interviews and other media work (actually on both sides of the camera). I'm looking forward to catching up with a good number of folks out at the show.

If you read this blog and are out there at either the Communications Developer Conference or ITEXPO, please do come by and say hello. I posted the schedule of talks over on Voxeo's blog site. You should be able to find out more about where precisely I am through either twitter.com/danyork or twitter.com/voxeo.

Technorati Tags: conferences, voip, itexpo, communicationsdeveloperconference, los angeles, dan york, voxeo, danyork, cloudcomputing, sip, sip security, voip security

Given that I've written here a good bit about Voxeo since joining the company 11 months ago, I thought I'd point to an excellent interview that Voxeo's CEO, Jonathan Taylor, did with host Alec Saunders on Alec's Squawk Box podcast. You can listen to it by either using the audio player on the show web page or alternatively you can download the MP3 file directly and listen to it in iTunes, Windows Media Player or whatever MP3 player you wish.

It was an enjoyable call (I was listening) that went for about 45 minutes. Jonathan spoke about how and why he started the company, about the new release of Prophecy 9, the acquisition of Micromethod, our recent financial results and much more. I think you all will find it a great introduction to what Voxeo is all about.

11 months later, I'm still extremely glad I made the choice to join the company...

Technorati Tags: squawkbox, voxeo, voice, voice applications, voip