Well, it’s that time of year again – the Ecomm show is next week, and if you want to get a handle on what’s next in communications, then I recommend you get out to it.  If you haven’t bought your ticket yet, you can use the code “thomashowe” to get ten percent off the ticket price.  For the first time in years, I am not going to be speaking at the show (nothing that I thought was “eComm quality” that I haven’t said before), but that’s not stopping me from going. eComm is, and remains, the place where the cutting edge of communications sits – and that’s where you’ll find me everytime.  However, we do have a couple of really interesting announcements that we are releasing at the show, so stay tuned.

So – what am I looking forward to?

• Augmented reality is huge in my book, and eComm is hosting an super-strong AR track on Wednesday.  I am just finishing a BD project for a Tier 1 carrier looking to partner with AR companies, and every important company on our list is speaking at the show. So, not only do I get to do all my meetings in one fell swoop, but I get a complete industry overview, from the horse’s mouth, in one day. Sweet.
• My well known smart-redhead-fetish continues, not only because I get to hang out with Lee, but Dawn Nafus is showing up as well. I missed Dawn in the last two eComms, and very happy that she’s showing back up again on this one. Dawn is an anthropologist for Intel (how cool is that?) who is working on tech-adoption models for emerging markets. I still remember how much I loved her talk about presence from the eComm show a couple of years back, and I’m sure I won’t be disappointed this time.
• The usual suspects. The vast majority of people I seek out for advice and insight will be at the show. This alone is reason enough to show up.
• CEBP is high on the list (again!) of topics to be addressed at the show. Always up for that.
• And last, but not least, Lee.  Since he’s been hiding in Slovenia, it’s not as easy to get in the same room with him.

So – hope to see you there!

Caught news today that VoiceSage, in partnership with O2, picked up a great project with Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust. In full disclosure, I’m on the Advisory Board of VoiceSage, but that’s more of an honor to me than it is for them… these guys are seriously kicking it over there.  VoiceSage is the leading CEBP company in Europe, and rivals IfByPhone for the telephone-based business process innovation crown. Where IfByPhone concentrates on horizontal services for small to medium to businesses, or workgroups in larger companies, VoiceSage concentrates on using phones to “move metrics.” Think of it this way: VoiceSage uses the phone peer into the way businesses work, then provides the right sort of nudge to increase sales, reduce costs and make customers happier.

From e-Health Insider :

Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust has signed a deal with software supplier Healthcare Communications for its Patientxt messaging service in order to reduce its Did Not Attend rates.

Together with 02 and Voice Sage, the company will provide interactive text and voice messaging services to patients to remind them of their appointments and to reply in order to cancel appointments that they no longer need.

The contract will see 02 provide two-way messaging and a high level of audit and governance, which will enable the trust to see whether messages have been delivered to around 600,000 outpatients every year.

Portsmouth Hospitals outpatient project manager, Mandy Mugridge, said: “We are keen to reduce our DNA rate. That will reduce outpatient waiting times and increase performance against targets, such as national outpatients’ targets.”

I’ve got a first row seat on how VoiceSage is ripping it up. Do you  want to learn more about VoiceSage’s view of the market?  Their VP of Business Development, Patrick Murphy (a Thomas Howe Company Alumnus), wrote a great article for Cloud Communications : State of the Art (it’s free – go get it!) that you might want to read:

In a hyper-competitive and transparent consumer economy, every offering can be price commoditized. So, where does competitive differentiation come into play? How can a retailer or vendor maintain customer loyalty and improve their bottom line given today’s razor thin margins?

One proven answer is to begin looking deeply into the measured business processes at each point in the customer experience to understand how Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) can be used to improve these customer touch points quickly and in a sustainable manner.

“We move business metrics.” When the CTO of your company provides such a simple yet powerful description of what the “firm’s applications do”, winning in the marketplace becomes more than a distinct possibility.

At VoiceSage, our vision for the future of Cloud Communications is entirely focused on leveraging CEBP in creative and practical ways to impact our clients’ business metrics clearly and consistently.

To date, we can point to a wide range of improved business metrics helping our clients save millions in resources, impacting their profitability, while improving their customers’ experience.  By analyzing these successes we have been able to map out a spectrum of customer experience touch points. By drilling down into our clients’ granular business processes that surround these touch points, VoiceSage spurs innovation and  best practice results  that can flow across  many industries including retail, insurance, utilities, financial services, and government.

What do Alex Doyle, Evan Cooke, Dan Miller, Jon Arnold, Martin Geddes, Jim Machi, Gary Kim, Dean Elwood, Dan York, Tim Panton, Patrick Murphy, Don Van Doren, Stefan Hopmann, Irv Shapiro, Moshe Yudkoswky, Scott Wharton, and Alan Johnston have in common? They all get regular emails from Pam Shapiro, and now I can prove it.

After more than a couple weeks of wrangling, editing, herding and other various emotional outbursts, we are very happy to announce the availability of our very first book : Cloud Communications : 2010, State of the Art.  The supporting website is now up, and you can get yourself a copy of the book here.

As we planned the last Cloud Communications Summit, we wanted to do more than put on a show for a day’s entertainment. We wanted to connect a community of people working on the same area of communications. To support that, we asked our speakers and a few industry thought leaders to submit a short essay on Cloud Communications. Our purpose was threefold:

1. We wanted to aggregate the thought leaders together to compare notes and to establish what the state of the art was in January, 2010.
2. We wanted to create a more permanent source of information than the ephemeral words on a tradeshow floor – one that we could share with the wider world.
3. If there’s an underlying theme of cloud technologies, it’s democratization.  As individuals become empowered, we need new and better ways ofcommunicating critical insight and information to practitioners in the field, and not from large companies, but from human beings.

This web site supports that first effort : Cloud Communications 2010 : State of the Art.  In this book, we take those essays, along with other voices we just couldn’t ignore, and we put it in one place… bringing these very human voices to the rest of us.

… Thus, we come to the reason-d’être for this book.  In the not-so-long-ago past, the thought leadership for communications belonged to those large service providers, vendors and media outlets, as they were the only entities with the practical authority to comment on or effect changes large enough to matter. When a bright twenty-year-old kid can leverage open source technologies, decades of development, web services from any segment of the economy to create scalable, reliable and valuable services, exactly what practical authority do the large organizations have? Instead, we will do better to listen to those in the trenches; those who have traded practical authority for just plain practical experience.  Today, Nortel clearly no longer matters; the many thousands of smaller voices do.

The book is free for all, and available for download directly from this site. In addition, for a nominal fee to cover printing and delivery, it is also available in tree-killing hardcopy edition, and bit-killing Kindle edition.

A fundamental of digital signal processing is something called the “Nyquist Rate.”  In layman’s terms, it describes how often you have to observe something to be sure you don’t miss anything.  Nyquist was working with electrical signals, and figured out that if you look (or in digital signal processing terms, sample) a signal at twice the rate that it could possibly change, you are guaranteed of catching everything.  Ever wonder why CDs are sampled at 44Khz? CDs are sampled at 44Khz because humans can’t hear above 20Khz, so there’s really no point in sampling any faster. The extra 4Khz? You can save money by designing lower quality filters and sampling a little higher.

What does this have to do with services development? Glad you asked. A friend tweeted me earlier today with a joke about how I was designing fast, and how if you spent a year on specifications you could design really fast after that. That got me thinking – is there a maximum length of a modern services project? Is there a development cycle so long that it doesn’t make any sense to complete, and if so, how long would that be?

Enter Nyquist, who I think might provide the answer to this question.  Maybe the maximum length of a modern services project should be no more than one half of how fast the market can move. Stay with me here.  Perhaps modern businessmen should ask themselves how much of  a market window they have, then plan to introduce a product or service no more than half of that amount. If they can do this, then they can guarantee that the market hasn’t moved on them. Well, theoretically.

For me, this is yet another drop in the bucket that supports Web as Platform development for telecom.  Using a traditional approach, new service introductions are measured in quarters, and takes as much as two years to vet and bring to market. In that time frame, markets move, and services fail.

Four years ago, I was asked on stage by Carl Ford to speak about service creation along with the head of a European carrier. At the time, I was thinking deeply about horizontal vs. vertical service opportunities, and was concluding that carriers would always be unable to provide vertical applications – and that would be a killer. As I pressed the point with my friend on stage, it became clear that our realities were different, and I soon found out why:

What he didn’t say publicly, but admitted afterwards in a side conversation, was that the problem was in the structure of carriers – they were too large, and the opportunities too fleeting, to really take advantage of the very niched application. I hope I didn’t offend him when I suggested that the problem was with today’s carriers, not tomorrow’s.

Four years later, I see the issue, and the solution. It’s not about niched application sometimes, it’s about sampling rate.

A big shout out to Dan York for representing the Cloud Communications Summit during a video interview with TMC during ITExpo. Dan, and many of the Voxeo engineers, attended and gave us some really excellent insight into the state of the art.  If you’d like to see the video – I’ve included it below – you can also catch it on Dan’s Blog.

Dan – you rock. Thanks.

Sometime last summer, my friends at STL Partners in London approached me to help them write a new report about CEBP opportunities, and today I’m really  happy to hear that the Voice and Messaging :  New API Use Cases has just been published.  In it are twenty some-odd pages of real use cases that show how voice and messaging can improve business process, along with business drivers, examples, etc. Any current subscriber to the STL wealth of resources can go and get it, and mostly any carrier worth their salt has.  I’m really happy to have the opportunity to work with their team and to learn from them their insight to the carrier and vendor  challenges in the coming decade.

If you are unfamiliar with STL, they are the ones behind the “Telco 2.0″ moniker, devoted toward redefining the Telcos role in the next economy.  For me, their models on next generation value creation are required reading for anyone who’s tasked with service creation from both business and technical angles.  More so, their events simply have the best speakers and attendees for anyone interested in hearing from “A-List”.   In the past shows, we’ve heard from senior executives of Amazon,  Vodafone, Orange, Telefonica, RBS, Virgin, Universal Music, TeliaSonera, Nokia, Sprint, Verizon… you get the point.  More so, their analysts are top of the heap : Dean Bubbly, Chris Barraclough, Keith McMahon, and  Norm Lewis (from Orange fame) start the list, and I haven’t even gotten to Thomas or Alexander. Even the wunderkind Martin Geddes did his time in the walls.

As an added bonus, here’s a sketch that good friend Sanjay Jawhar (@sanjayjhawar and from Ideas and Plans) and I did together at the last STL event in Orlando.  Sanjay wanted to demonstrate how carriers just were not understanding the impact of how old approaches of service development constrained innovation. This was a fun one… I come in about 5 minutes into it.  Sanjay, that was really fun. Need to do that again.

Been a little overwhelmed in my personal life recently (lost my Dad), been working on some major projects to be announced soon, so I’ve been a little quiet – but here’s a pretty funny blast from the past. I’m clearing the decks for some major blogging action soon, and I was going through the old posts re-categorizing them (is that a word?) and I found this little gem from more than THREE YEARS AGO called How many voice mashup are there?:

Well, you can find out for yourself. On a daily basis, those neat people at Programmable Web scour the earth for mashups, and figure out which APIs are being used in them. Then, they tally who’s using what to figure out which web services are the most popular, and for what.

Today’s scores?
Yahoo leads in APIs, but google is running away in Mashups. The most popular APIs?

1) Google Maps
2) Flickr Photo Sharing
3) Amazon Shopping

Exactly 12 mashups using Voice, with 8 of them using Skype from Ebay.

12. 12!!!! Three years ago there were twelve voice mashups listed on programmable web. I sh*t you not. 12. 9 plus 3.

To all those wonderful people at IfByPhone/CloudVox, Tropo/Voxeo, Twilio, Ribbit, Orange, Orange Labs, meine lieben Freunde auf Deutsch Telekom (may your garden grow forever), Broadsoft and the hundreds of their customers, Jaduka and even Jicksta you hipster… love you more than I can say. You guys moved this market when the big guys failed.  As far as I’m concerned, you have entered the pantheon of engineering teams and companies that actually made a difference not to just yourselves, but to the world.  On behalf of the geeks who have written (at this point) tens of thousands of voice enabled mashups and applications, thank you for giving us the tools we needed. And wait – there’s better stuff coming.

12. Crazy.

ps. For all those VCs that told me that this wasn’t a market, and you know who you are, bite me.

Members will offer innovative products and cloud-based services that interoperate with FREETALK Connect via Asterisk, Skype, SIP, Skype for SIP, or PSTN

MIAMI, January 21, 2010 — FREETALK^® and 13 other companies today announced the formation of the FREETALK Connect Alliance, an open alliance of companies that will provide innovative applications, products and services to expand the capabilities of the FREETALK Connect communications system. The alliance is open to companies that offer products and services which build on the capabilities of the FREETALK Connect, “Voice 2.0” in concept, and can interoperate with Asterisk, Skype™, SIP, Skype for SIP or the PSTN.

The FREETALK Connect simplifies set up, enabling small business users that are not tech savvy to use it quickly and simply, without formal training. Supported telephones are plugged into the company’s network and the FREETALK Connect auto-detects and configures them. An on-screen wizard then guides the customer through a few business-related questions that help configure the company’s communication system and enables Skype calling from every supported desktop phone in the office. Adding users and administering the system after installation is just as easy.

The FREETALK Connect Alliance opens the door for many new developers, service providers, including cloud computing and Internet communications providers to offer new and innovative applications, products and services for businesses of any size. These will be available later this year in the U.S. through the FREETALK Connect Store (http://www.freetalkconnect.com) and the Skype Shop (http://skype.com/shop), both of which are operated by In Store Solutions.

The charter members of the FREETALK Connect Alliance include:

· AbbeyNet/Sitofono (Italy)

· Cloudvox (USA)

· FlatPlanet Phone Company (Israel)

· FREETALK (Spain)

· IfByPhone (USA)

· In Store Solutions (Hong Kong)

· Iotum/Calliflower (Canada)

· Jazinga (Canada)

· Skype (Luxembourg)

· Tatung (Taiwan)

· Thomas Howe’s Light and Electric (USA)

· Voxeo (US)

· Voxygen (UK)

· Voxbone (Belgium)

“The FREETALK Connect Alliance members are building an entire ecosystem of products, applications and services around the FREETALK Connect communications system,” said Andrew Hansen, B2B manager at FREETALK. “The Alliance’s products and services build on, and powerfully leverage, the strengths of each other, and the market reach of the extremely affordable, fully featured and self-configuring FREETALK Connect.”

Companies that want more information about this alliance, or want to join the FREETALK Connect Alliance should contact FREETALK at alliance@instoresolutions.com.

About FREETALK

FREETALK is a product innovation catalyst – identifying market gaps and working with its global partners to design, manufacture and quickly bring to market products that disrupt traditional categories.  Leveraging untapped market opportunities, FREETALK products are designed to be environmentally friendly, sold online and delivered globally at aggressive price-points. Always at the forefront of innovation, FREETALK is known for creating synergistic products that add unique value to its partners’ branded points-of-sale.

About Skype

Skype is software that enables the world’s conversations. Millions of individuals and businesses use Skype to make free video and voice calls send instant messages and share files with other Skype users. Every day, people everywhere also use Skype to make low-cost calls to landlines and mobiles. Download Skype to your computer or mobile phone at skype.com.

Access to a broadband Internet connection is required. Skype is not a replacement for traditional telephone services and cannot be used for emergency calling. Skype for SIP is meant to complement existing traditional telephone services used with a corporate PBX, not as a stand-alone solution. Skype for SIP users need to ensure all calls to emergency services are terminated through traditional fixed line telephone services, connected to the local exchange, or through other emergency calling capable telephone services.

Skype, associated trademarks and logos and the “S” symbol are trademarks of Skype Limited.

# # #

In Store Solutions Introduces FREETALK® Connect, World’s Most Complete Communications System Enabling Skype Calling for SMBs

Ultra-simple System Offers Multiple Options for Small Business Owners
To Save On Calling Costs

MIAMI, January 20, 2010 — In Store Solutions today unveiled the FREETALK^® Connect, the first communications system designed from the ground up to allow small and medium business owners to enable Skype calls from supported office phones. With the FREETALK Connect, companies can make free Skype-to-Skype calls with the more than 520 million registered Skype users worldwide and can view and manage Skype contact lists using their supported office phones. Companies can also receive inbound voice calls from users of Skype around the world via the FREETALK Connect. They can also participate in the Skype for SIP open beta, which will enable them to take advantage of Skype’s low-cost global calling rates for calls to landline or mobile phones around the world from their desktop phones.

The FREETALK Connect simplifies set up, enabling small business users that are not tech savvy to use it quickly and simply, without formal training. Supported telephones are plugged into the company’s network and the FREETALK Connect auto-detects and configures them. An on-screen wizard then guides the customer through a few business-related questions that help configure the company’s communication system and enables Skype calling from every supported desktop phone in the office. Adding users and administering the system after installation is just as easy.

“Simply put, this product enables Skype calls from every employee’s desktop phone (or handset) in a small business, and it gives business owners all of the advantages of Skype’s low-cost global calling rates and free Skype-to-Skype calls,” said Andrew Hansen, FREETALK’s Manager for B2B. “This quickly adds up to incredible savings.”

Designed for offices with between two and 50 users, the FREETALK Connect offers true unified communications functionality, including Find Me, Follow Me; a unified voice mailbox; automated attendant and auto call distribution. Further distinguishing the FREETALK Connect is its intelligent routing capabilities. Incoming Skype calls, as well as calls over SIP, the PSTN and IAX2, can be routed by the FREETALK Connect to any local or remote Skype user, SIP endpoint, analog or mobile phone.

“FREETALK and Skype are dedicated to developing solutions that break new ground, like the FREETALK Connect,” said Perry Teevens, director of business development & strategic partnerships for the Skype for Business team. “This solution addresses the needs of the many Skype users who have been asking for a simple way to use Skype in their small- and mid-size business environment.”

Beginning in March, the FREETALK Connect will be available for purchase in the U.S. via the Skype Shop, (http://skype.com/shop) from In Store Solutions.

For more information about the FREETALK Connect communications system or to order a unit, visit http://freetalkconnect.com.

About FREETALK

FREETALK is a product innovation catalyst – identifying market gaps and working with its global partners to design, manufacture and quickly bring to market products that disrupt traditional categories.  Leveraging untapped market opportunities, FREETALK products are designed to be environmentally friendly, sold online and delivered globally at aggressive price-points. Always at the forefront of innovation, FREETALK is known for creating synergistic products that add unique value to its partners’ branded points-of-sale.

About Skype

Skype is software that enables the world’s conversations. Millions of individuals and businesses use Skype to make free video and voice calls send instant messages and share files with other Skype users. Every day, people everywhere also use Skype to make low-cost calls to landlines and mobiles. Download Skype to your computer or mobile phone at skype.com.

Access to a broadband Internet connection is required. Skype is not a replacement for traditional telephone services and cannot be used for emergency calling. Skype for SIP is meant to complement existing traditional telephone services used with a corporate PBX, not as a stand-alone solution. Skype for SIP users need to ensure all calls to emergency services are terminated through traditional fixed line telephone services, connected to the local exchange, or through other emergency calling capable telephone services.

Skype, associated trademarks and logos and the “S” symbol are trademarks of Skype Limited.

Thanks to everyone that came to visit us at the Cloud Communications Summit at the ITExpo in Miami last week. On behalf of the speakers, Pam and myself, thank you for choosing to spend your day with us. After the first session (at the godless hour of 9:00 AM, we had standing room only, an engaged audience and (I thought) great insight and information from our speakers. Danielle from Twilio was kind enough to video many of the sessions. We’ll post them when they are available, so if you missed the opportunity to attend, you can still listen in on what we were talking about. In your underwear, if you wish.

Our first summit was sponsored by Host.net. Our entire team is humbled by your generosity and your support. We owe you one. No, two.

I would like to extend a personal thanks to my speakers. They stepped up and delivered content that you hadn’t heard at ITExpo before, and completely avoided the “marketing blather” that plagues so many of my previous tradeshow experiences. In particular, I’d like to thank:

• Jason Goecke, Voxeo
• Alec Saunders, Iotum
• Jack Rynes, Jaduka
• Pat Murphy, VoiceSage
• Irv Shapiro, IfByPhone
• Troy Davis, IfByPhone
• Dan York, Voxeo
• Don Van Doren, UC Strategies
• Dan Miller, Opus Research
• Evan Cooke, Twilio
• Danielle Morrill, Twilio
• Moshe Yudkowsky, Disaggregate Consulting
• Paul Adams, Broadsoft
• Larry Lisser

I’d also like to thank a man behind the scenes: Jamie Siminoff.   Anybody who works for you or with you is lucky, and anyone who competes with you needs his head checked.  Thank you for your encouragement and support.