Disruptive Telephony

Are you are available tomorrow, Tuesday, August 26th, at 11am US Eastern time? If so, you are invited to join in to Alec Saunders' daily "Squawk Box" conference call / podcast where Alec will be interviewing Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor about all the recent news about Voxeo, including:

• Voxeo announced record growth and global expansion
• Voxeo announced a new product release with new SIP APIs, Mac OS X and Linux support
• Voxeo acquired Micromethod Technologies
• Voxeo named 2008 Market Leader by Speech Technology Magazine

The call will take place using Alec's company Iotum's "Calliflower" conferencing/collaboration application. To join in to the call, you simply need to go to either of the following links to "join" the call and receive a PIN and call-in number for the call:

• Calliflower Facebook application - If you are a Facebook user, simply go to:

  http://apps.new.facebook.com/calliflower/conf/show/37402

  You will be prompted to add the Calliflower Facebook application and then will receive the call-in information.
  
  
• Calliflower.com site - If you are not a Facebook user or just don't want to add another Facebook application, you can go to the Calliflower.com site at this URL:

  http://apps.calliflower.com/conf/show/37402

  You will be prompted to create a free Calliflower.com user account if you have not already done so.

Both links are live today so you can go right now and RSVP to attend the call tomorrow. If you do so, you should also receive a reminder about 15 minutes prior to the call tomorrow morning.

When you join the call tomorrow, you can also use the Calliflower web interface through either of the links above to see who else has joined the call and also to participate in the "live chat" area during the call itself. Typically Alec will ask a series of questions of the guest and then open it to others who are participating in the call. If you'd like to learn more about what is up with Voxeo and/or ask questions of our CEO, tomorrow's a great opportunity for you to do so.

It should be a fun time and we're looking forward to the conversation. Please do feel free to join in!

NOTE: If you are not available to join the call, it is being recorded and will be made available through Alec's Saunderslog.com site sometime later tomorrow. We'll post an update here on this blog site as well.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, squawk box, jonathan taylor

Last week was a truly extraordinary week for my employer, Voxeo. Here's a bit of what went on:

• Voxeo announced record growth and global expansion - In these economic times, it's incredible to be part of a company putting out information like this.

• Voxeo announced a new product release with new SIP APIs, Mac OS X and Linux support - To our knowledge, this is first commercial telephony voice application platform to be available on Mac OS X (as well as Linux and Windows). While our customers might not deploy production servers on Mac OS X, this means that their developers using Macs can now even more easily run our application server. Additionally, we've developed some new graphical management interfaces that are pretty incredible (and useful, too).

• Voxeo acquired Micromethod Technologies - With this acquisition of a company based in Beijing and San Jose, we've added a strong SIP Servlet (JSR 116/289) platform into our portfolio and we've already started integrating that into our core platform. Developers will now have even more ways to build VoIP applications on top of our platform.

• Voxeo named 2008 Market Leader by Speech Technology Magazine - We received an award at SpeechTEK last week in New York from Speech Technology Magazine for the best "Speech Self-Service Suite", which, when you read through the text, basically means the best voice application platform. We were pleased by the recognition. My colleague Dan Burnett also received an award as a "2008 Speech Luminary" recognizing his many years of contributions to the speech industry.

Combining all of those announcements with the crazy pace of activity at the SpeechTEK show in New York definitely made for some long days and long hours. It's certainly fun, though.

I think it goes without saying that I'm rather pleased with where I wound up last fall! (We are hiring, too, although right now only in the UK.)

Technorati Tags: voxeo, applications, voice, voip, speech, speechtek, prophecy, sip

On Sunday I'll be boarding a train bound for New York City where I'll be attending SpeechTEK for Monday through Wednesday. As I mentioned previously, on Tuesday, August 19th, I'll be giving a presentation on "Securing CCXML and VoiceXML Applications":

How secure are your speech applications? As the usage of both VoiceXML and CCXML continues to explode, and VoIP usage continues to grow dramatically, especially within enterprise environments, it is increasingly important that you ensure that applications and services are not open to attack. Learn about the potential vulnerabilities in a system using VoiceXML or CCXML, what you can do to secure these systems, and how you can develop a strong architecture.

It will be fun to expand my VoIP security commentary beyond my usual scope of networks and more into voice applications. I'm planning to record it (and have permission to do so) and potentially put it out as a Blue Box podcast.

At SpeechTEK there will also be a good number of us from Voxeo there. We'll have a booth (#804) and we've got some exciting announcements coming up... ;-)

If you are down at SpeechTEK, please do drop a note and let me know.

Technorati Tags: conferences, speechtek, voxeo, danyork, dan york, voicexml, ccxml, security, voip, voip security

This afternoon I'll be heading to the airport to fly out to Chicago to be part of ClueCon this week. Haven't heard of ClueCon before? Here's the quick summary:

ClueCon - is an annual 3-Day Telephony User and Developer Conference bringing together the entire spectrum of Telephony from TDM circuits to VoIP and everything in between. The presentations and discussions will cover several open source telephony applications such as Asterisk/Callweaver, Kamailio (formerly OpenSER), Bayonne, YATE and FreeSWITCH.

Billed as the "Telephony Developer Conference" it primarily focuses on the whole world of open source telephony.

I'll be there as part of two panels. First, tomorrow I'll be joining fellow VoIP bloggers Andy Abramson and Thomas Howe on a "VoIP Roundtable" to talk about current industry themes and trends. Then on Thursday I'll be part of a "VoIP Security Roundtable" talking about... gee... can you guess?

It should be a fun event... I'm looking forward to catching up with Andy, Thomas, Moshe Yudkowsky, Jon Todd and several others. There are also some folks on the schedule with whom I have corresponded but never physically me, so that will be nice as well. If any of you reading this will also be there, please do feel free to drop me a note so that we can connect.

Technorati Tags: telephony, cluecon, cluecon2008, voip, voxeo, open source, opensource, dan york, danyork, conferences, chicago, applications, telecommunications, developers

If any of you reading this will be out at O'Reilly's OSCON Open Source Convention next week (July 21-25) in Portland, Oregon, I (Dan York) will be there giving a talk on Wednesday on "Mashing Up Voice and the Web Through Open Source and XML". Here's the abstract:

With over 4.5 billion mobile and fixed phones out there as of November 2007, the phone represents the most ubiquitous user interface out there. As “mashups” on the Web let us quickly and easily access information from multiple data sources, how do we extend those mashups to the world of the phone? How do we bring the old world of voice and telephony into the new world of the Web, social networks, and social media? And how do we do that using open source tools and open standards? In this session, Dan York will introduce participants to the world of “voice mashups” and how applications can be quickly built on top of open source and open standards. Topics covered will include:

• The technology and architecture behind voice mashups
• The open standards in voice of VoiceXML, Call Control XML (CCXML), the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), and new standards emerging from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
• Open source tools related to voice including Asterisk and RocketSource.org
• How to quickly build voice applications that interact with web sites, databases, and even new services like Twitter.

During the session, York will demonstrate multiple applications and provide participants with sample code, tips, and pointers so they can return home and get started building voice applications with open source and open standards.

If any of you will be attending, please do drop me a note as I always enjoy meeting up with people who read this blog. If you are not attending but are interested, it's not too late... you can still register at the OSCON site. Should be a great convention for those interested in open source development. The schedule is pretty amazing as it truly has a collection of some of the best folks out there in the open source world. (The convention starts on Wednesday with Monday and Tuesday being for tutorials.) I'm definitely looking forward to the event!

Technorati Tags: open source, conferences, oreilly, development, python, voicexml, ccxml, sip, portland, dan york

I find it rather astounding to me that it was six months ago today that I announced that I had joined Voxeo. Where did the time go?

It's been a really amazing six months that has so greatly expanded my knowledge into new areas I hadn't played with before. This picture from our "VoIP Platform Overview" page perhaps best shows what I find so interesting about Voxeo's platform:

On the one hand, it's an XML-driven SIP application server... yet it's also a media server... and then there's all the speech stuff - Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-To-Speech, etc.... VoiceXML, CCXML, CallXML... and then it's a conferencing server... all based on SIP and using things like ENUM and so much more.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects for me is that on one level we are customer-focused working with individual developers to help them learn to build voice applications. But then on the back-end we have this massively-scalable, redundant hosting infrastructure and we are among the largest consumers of SIP trunks in North America. (And constantly in need of more - a colleague of mine is tasked nearly full-time with working with carriers to find more SIP trunk capacity!)

So it's fun for me to go to an IETF standards meeting because on the one hand I'm interested in SIP as it relates to end users and end user applications, yet on the other hand I'm interested in all the SIP peering standards and other efforts which make it easier for us to connect into the "cloud" of SIP service providers out there. So I get to look at the small end and the massively large end. For a guy interested in SIP, it's pretty wild.

It's also very cool to be part of an organization that has been working with many aspects of what we are now calling "cloud computing" since long before that label came into fashion. Voxeo is all about moving your voice applications into the cloud. Being able to access them from wherever. Whenever. So as there is all this newfound interest in moving computing into "the cloud"... that's where we already are. The challenge now becomes one of learning how to have our "cloud" interact with all the many other "clouds" out there. (And yes, we do have a premise product, too, for customers that for various reasons do not want to push their apps into the cloud - but the hosted version came first by many years.)

Beyond all the technology, it's also been great to get back into a "startup" mindset. Even though Voxeo has been around since 1999, it still retains so much of the passion and drive of a startup. (As well as some of the fun aspects- in Orlando they even have a barista and coffee bar!) There are a great many opportunities to participate in growing the company. The management is incredibly open with employees, too, which is wonderful to be involved with... and there's just some really great people inside the company! (And hey, we're hiring!)

So what are some of the other things I've learned in the past six months?

• Call Control XML (CCXML) is one of the most under-appreciated standards out there (and something I'll be writing about more). It basically lets you put an XML layer on top of SIP and, well, since all those web application tools speak XML it opens up all kinds of opportunities.
  
  
• WordPress Mu can be used to build a corporate blog portal (blogs.voxeo.com) - that's been both fun and a great learning experience.
  
  
• It absolutely scares me that I now know my way around downtown Orlando and to and from the Orlando airport.
  
  
• There is more to "Orlando" than simply "The Empire of the Mouse" and downtown Orlando is a rather cool place to be.
  
  
• JetBlue's direct flights from Burlington, VT, to Orlando are a truly wonderful addition that I will miss when we move to N.H. (although I understand Southwest has direct flights from Manchester).
  
  
• It is very cool (although sometimes admittedly strange) to have a manager who blogs and twitters and generally "gets" the value of social media.
  
  
• It's nice to be in a company in the telecommunications/VoIP space that is... (gasp)... profitable!
  
  
• I freely admit that ever since getting our corporate laptop, the Apple MacBook Pro, I have become a Mac fanboy!
  
  
• It's wonderful to be in a company with a strong developer focus that gives away free versions of its software for developers to use. I just really happen to like the model... mostly because you get to be surprised by the very cool and sometimes offbeat things that people will do, simply because you give them the tools. Creativity is an amazing thing to nourish.

All in all, I'm not entirely sure how six months flew by... but it's been a great block of time and I'm looking forward to the next six months and many more beyond that. (And no, I'm not just writing that because my boss may read my blog!)

P.S. Did I mention that we're hiring?

Technorati Tags: voxeo, danyork, dan york

Have you ever wanted to quickly get into a conference call with a group of people? What if you could just call a number and initiate a conference call that automatically dialled out to bring in the other participants? Would you see yourself using this for a group (or groups) of your friends? Could you see this being useful for a group of coworkers? Over on Voxeo's blog today, I wrote about a new Facebook application called "Party Line" that does exactly this.

As I outline in the blog post, Party Line, available (to Facebook users) at www.equals.com/partyline lets you create an unlimited number of "party lines", each of which can have up to five participants. To initiate a group call, you either dial in to 1-877-4-BUZZ-ME or you initiate the call from within the Facebook page. The application calls all the other participants and brings you all into a group conference call. You can talk for as long as you want. No bridge numbers to remember. No passcodes. Very simple to use.

For Equals, the company who developed this Facebook application, this is their first product and platform. They've indicated that in the end they want this app to also work with OpenSocial and be able to connect into the other social networking services out there supporting OpenSocial. I'll be very interested to see how well it is adopted.

From a Voxeo point-of-view, as I mention later in the blog post, this is the first Facebook app (that we know of) that uses our SIP/XML application platform, so it is admittedly exciting for us to see. We know we have a great platform for developing these kind of voice applications, but to see someone else recognize that and actually go off and develop such an application is rather cool to see.

On a technical level, it's great to see an example of what you can do with Call Control XML (CCXML). Before joining Voxeo six months ago, I knew absolutely nothing about CCXML but as I learned about what it could do, I was truly amazed. Essentially, it is an XML layer that lets you drive and control SIP-based applications. There's an amazing number of tasks you can do with CCXML and it's something I'll be writing more about here and over on Voxeo's blogs in the future. (If you'd like to learn a bit more now, you can look at the CCXML documentation, check out some CCXML tutorial videos or look at the recent post about sending telephony presence to Twitter.)

Anyway, for the moment I would encourage you to check out my Voxeo blog post with more details about Party Line, install the Party Line app and try it out! Please do let us know what you think.

Technorati Tags: applications, voxeo, equals, facebook, voice applications, voice mashups, social networking, voip, voice, conferencing, collaboration, sip, voicexml, ccxml, party line, opensocial

Given that I write on Voxeo's blog site, I tend not to write much here about things we are doing at Voxeo.

But I thought I'd mention here one specific post I put up recently called "Skype-ifying your voice applications" which talks about the intriguing ways in which you can use our hosted platform to make voice applications accessible through a number of different mechanisms.

As shown in the diagram to the left, an application that you write and is hosted on our platform can be called into over the PSTN, over a direct SIP connection or via Skype or FWD. Likewise calls can go out to PSTN numbers or to SIP endpoints.

This flexibility is one of the many things that intrigues me about the platform (of which I knew nothing about prior to joining the company in October).

Anyway, more information is in the full blog post. I just thought I'd mention it here. (By the way, if you'd like to try it out yourself, developer accounts are free.)

Technorati Tags: voxeo, skype, sip

FYI, I will be down at VoiceCon Orlando on March 17-20, 2008. I'm moderating two panel sessions (see the schedule). First, up, bright and early at 8am on Tuesday, March 18th, I'll be moderating a panel on "Top VoIP Security Threats". This should be a fun one as it has VOIPSA Chair Dave Endler, Mark Collier of SecureLogix and Sachin Joglekar of Sipera Systems. I know all three of the guys, particularly Dave and Mark who have both worked on VOIPSA matters, and this session should be a good bit of fun. I'm planning on making it a rather interactive session. :-)

At the other end of the show, on Thursday, March 20th, at 11:45am, I'll be moderating a panel "Open Source for Enterprise Voice: How Much, How Soon?". This would should be interesting because it has Bill Miller from Digium (makers of Asterisk), who I know well, and M Raza from 3Com... and then Tony Pereira from Nortel! 3Com's presence on the panel isn't particularly surprising given their relationship with Digium, but it will be interesting to see Nortel's view on the matter.

All in all it should be quite an interesting show. Lots of good sessions and, I'm sure, interesting people to meet. If you're going to be down there, please do drop an email as I'm always interesting in meeting readers of the blog.

Technorati Tags: voicecon, voxeo, voipsa, securelogix, sipera, 3com, digium, asterisk, voip security, open source

In a few minutes I'll be boarding a plane heading down to Orlando for several days of presentations to a number of our (Voxeo) customers. For a change, I'm not presenting, but rather capturing presentations! I'm bringing down all my recording gear and will be capturing both audio and video for posting on Voxeo's blog site. It should be a lot of fun... as well as work. The temperature will, of course, be rather different! They are predicting a major storm here over the next few days, so it will be rather messy. Thankfully today I'm on a direct flight via Jet Blue from Burlington down to Orlando. No layovers... VERY nice!

Technorati Tags: voxeo