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.

In the second screen cast, we focus in on the voice script part of the Mobile Mail List application. The application has two parts: the voice script that runs on Tropo, and the web application that runs on any web server. In the next episode, we’ll jump over to the web side for a bit to see how we aggregate the data from the script, then turn around and send out coupons.

In early September, Jonathan Taylor at Voxeo asked me to write an application to highlight the capabilities of Voxeo’s new voice platform Tropo. After a bunch of chin scratching, I came up with this one: the mobile email list. It allows retail facing businesses to quickly and easily let their customers sign up for customer care programs using their cell phone, then uses text messaging to send coupons back to the customers. It’s free and open source, and it runs today on Tropo. You can download it yourself here; I also did a quick video to introduce it.

Enjoy!

Right after my presentation at the last Telco 2.0 show, I had a chance to be interviewed by Martyn Warwick (almost sounds as English as Thomas Spencer Howe) at the Convention Center in Nice.  Really nice guy – great crew around him.  In a little bit of video magic, his side of the questions were done after the fact; during my taping he just read the questions and I spoke to the camera.  As I remember, it was a really hot room and I was so wiped from my talk that I could barely keep my head up.  Anyways, although it was as painful as videos normally are for me, at least this time I like the tie I’m wearing.  Flush the rest of it.

If I had to pick one “mega trend” for our industry I would bank on, it would be the inevitable movement from getting paid to “do stuff” to getting paid for “knowing stuff”.   This was the point of my talk last November on election day in London, and Simon Torrence from STL partners recently asked me back to speak at the next Telco 2.0 show in May.  Between you and me, he did not have to move the show to Nice, France to get me to show up, but don’t tell him.  It’ll be our secret.  Simon sent me a link to my talk, which I’ve included above, and unlike most times when I positively hate seeing myself on video, I like this one – not because of I like seeing the my face now, I don’t – but being an American outside of the country when Obama was elected was a real gift for me.   And my wife bought me that tie.

Also, Simon forwarded me a few questions from the audience, pathetic attempts at answers below:

Q: Operators are not global/unique with in an area – how does a web site select one c2C over another – yes one may have better data but its still not omniscient – one web site cant have several c2c options?

A: Indeed, a web site can (and probably will) have many click-to-call options.  The fact that one carrier may have better data might very well be enough that a web site designer will select one over the other. But without regard to that fact, it may also be that the site is provided by a large enterprise that is a strategic partner of the carrier and/or system integrator with a relationship with the carrier.

Q: Where is the money?

A:  Consulting! (Couldn’t resist that, and I bet you thought that in your head.  Didn’t you?  It’s true, but it’s the tip of the iceberg. More money outside the consulting world, and you can hold me that one.)   The question isn’t actually where’s the money. We know where that is.  The current outsourced IT market is currently around $750 billion dollars, with business process outsourcing being the second largest sub-segment of that market.  The BPO side of system integrators is fast growing and for some companies, twice as profitable as the larger “turn the screw” traditional segment of outsourced IT.  Not only is this a large market, but it is still rather untouched by the advances in communications enabled business process.  The real question for carriers is “In this segment of the market, how can we extract our fair share of revenue?”

Q: So why is it so hard to extract value out of this data? The ability to the do the doing has been around for a while.

A: I disagree that we’ve had the ability to do this for a while.  To extract value, we need APIs that we can access the data, a mechanism that allows us to access that API outside of the carrier walls, technologies that make it relatively easy to create those applications in the enterprise and the mind to do it.  I would argue we have three of four now, and we had none of it five years ago.

Q: Every operator (and their dog) is talking about opening APIs / SDKs for ISVs like you. Would you ever work with just one? What would dictate who you and who you don’t work with?

A: Woof.  That’s a fantastic question.  I’ve worked with many, and it typically happens that when I arrive, the application, the customer and even the carrier is selected due to past decisions.  About a year ago, I did some work on with an API on one vendor’s equipment after doing a project with a different vendor’s API, causing them the first vendor to send me a really nasty letter.  Really caught me off guard.  One overwhelming thought I had was “How can you really expect anybody to program mashups to just one API?”, and the answer is “you can’t.”  Here’s the consumer analog : you can only call other people who use your carrier.   I’ve touched everyone else’s API since then, trying to leave goodness with each of them, but unfortunately not theirs.   So, even though I’m fine working on anyone’s API, and fully expect to, I suppose some segments of the market have a different opinion on that.  Today, most APIs have their pluses and minuses, and when I get to pick, I try to match them up right.  For machine side work, I encourage you to look at Jaduka. Got a web site? Check out IfByPhone.  Adobe? Ribbit… and so on.

Q: Are the operators going to make it easy enough to get the innovation from the developers?

A.  I’ll just say that I am soooooo amazed with Apple and how they pulled off the iPhone marketplace with the cooperation of AT&T.  Simply amazing, and I suppose you need a superman like Steve Jobs to get that done.   Now, that said, BT, Orange and Deustche Telekom are doing a great job at working with their developers as well, so it’s possible, but I think it takes a lot of effort and a bit of luck.

Q: How do you ensure the quality of the customer experience is maintained in open source api model?

A.  In time, I think it will be evident that you can’t ensure the quality of the customer experience without open source approaches.   Would you really want to deal with technology that’s well tested and widely used?

Q: Enabling the APIs increase the cost, need investments, operators have a more limited market but we can terminate a call in any market.

A.  Perhaps, and if you’re simply focusing on termination of calls, then you’re right.  My advice, start answering the larger issues of integration, smarter termination, etc.
Q: How is the resulting privacy issues addressed?

A. That’s actually quite simple, I think. iPhone customers show that they are willing to share their data as long as you ask and that they see some value to it.  If you never ask, and there’s never any value that the customer can see – you deserve the problems you create.   There’s an amazing amount of value that can be provided if you simply ask for permission.
Q: Are Voice 2.0 apps predominantly driven out of a data or Web context rather than a voice context?

A: I say they are predominantly driven out of an applications context, and rarely out of a voice application context.  The fact that they are delivered by one mechanism or another seems to be un-correleated.
Q: There are ways to answer the q ‘is my customer at home?’ e.g. using Wi-Fi or fem to cells or GPS. But we lack APIs both on the network & on the devices. There also needs to be an alert mechanism for ‘tell me when my customer gets home’.

A: Yes, there are ways of answering that, but no standard way for developers to access it, and no standard business approach to monetize it.  Need that.
Q: How do you change the culture for making the business case?

A: Successful business cases.  See VoiceSage for details. I do.

I forgot that Dan York did this at the ClueCon show.  I also forgot I owned this shirt; I bet my son stole it. Dan’s the Director of Emerging Communication Technology at Voxeo Corporation, a good friend and the host of my favorite… the blue box podcast.

Ok – time for cringing again.  The fine folks at Broadsoft forwarded me a copy of my talk at the Broadsoft Connections Show, where I demonstrated the Disaster Dispatcher. The Disaster Dispatcher is a voice mashup written on top of the Broadsoft Extended interface, Amazon’s EC2 and Twitter.  I’m making this application open source, so if you want a copy of it, just speak up.   Again, thanks to Broadsoft for their support, and to all of you who showed up for the session!