A long time ago, I was a music student. My main area of study was classical music (the romantic period, to be specific), but I also attended a jazz lab every week.  I was… not as good as the rest.  Don’t get me wrong, it was a great experience, and it taught me so much about music performance and composition that my classical work became a different beast entirely.  It’s just that I’m pretty uptight. (I really want to use the terms “stiff”, or “white” as my teacher would, but I’m trying to be politically correct here.)  In jazz lab, the main teaching approach was imitation: we learned standard riffs and scales, learned a number of solos done by the masters, and were encouraged to steal, beg and borrow anything that made sense to us.  In short, just like toddlers, we learned through imitation and experimentation.

I feel like we are in tough spot when it comes to voice mashups and real time web applications. It’s such a new place for our industry that we are very few masters to learn from; no standard scales to practice.  For example, I personally think it’s a shame that David Troy isn’t part of the standard emulation toolkit for engineers. David’s voice mashup work is imaginative, ingenious and inspiring at every level.  Companies are pulling this one off too, like IfByPhone and Tropo, showing us how critically valuable voice mashups can be to businesses of every size.  I was disingenuous when I said we have a Telco API problem; we actually have several, and this is just one of them. But it’s one I think I can fix.

As you may know, the last two and a half years have been devoted to this growing this section of our industry. I first dove into it because I feared for my career – the future absolutely belongs to web technologies, economics and approaches. I stayed in it because I realized how much fun it happens to be.  My wife let me stay in it because there’s a ton of dough to be made here. (I’m nothing but honest.)  As I plot out my future, and try to figure out the intersections between what I can do, and what needs to be done, I realized that I can help our industry along by actively enjoying all the great stuff that’s happening, and helping those that are further from it than I to understand it.  Businesses and contributors of all sizes want to participate in our own personal jazz lab, if they just had masters to learn from; stories that they can make their own.

You see, once you get the building blocks, then you can apply your own imagination to your own problems. The world of voice mashups is one of the very small, where small teams can create great applications using a little elbow grease and a credit card.  The main competitive topic, the thing that makes the whole machine run, is imagination.  But imagination comes from building blocks, it comes from learning those basic riffs and scales, it comes from examples you can understand and then extend.

And so, this is what’s next for me.  I can’t honestly think of a better way to help our industry, and a better way to spend a life, than to watch and help innovation come to a hundred year old sleeping beast.  I firmly believe this will help erase at least one of the Telco API problems: the lack of imagination.  Once we’ve got the basics down, look out – great stuff is happening.

So… how do I intend to make this real? Well, lots of ways, and over the next few weeks I’m going to be blathering about it ad-naseum.  But to kick it off, I’m going to lead by example.  A month ago, Jonathan Taylor in his infinite wisdom and kindness, asked me to write a voice mashup to show off Tropo’s new feature set of handling multi-modal communications.  I personally invented a time machine to go back in time ten minutes so that I could say yes before he asked the question.

Available immediately, I am making my voice mashup available to the world as free and open source. The application is designed to allow retail facing businesses to sign customers up onto a mobile mail list, and to send them coupons as text messages. It is written in an easy to extend, simple to deploy Ruby on Rails application, and supports voice calls, SMS calls and instant messaging over any XMPP mechanism.  Over the next week, I’m going to be authoring a series of blog posts describing the application, how it runs and why businesses will want to deploy it.

And once I’m done with teaching you how it works, take it for yourself. Extend it – maybe make it so you can get customer feedback, or send advertisements, or whatever.  Use your imagination – you now have some building blocks.