From the beginning of our lives, we found that we liked little, versatile things that we can put together in great ways. Legos- what an amazing thing they are. You don’t need to tell a seven year old how to put them together to make a space ship.

My interest is in VoIP mashups. VoIP mashups take voice based services, control them using Web technologies such as REST or SOAP, and add in other web based services to make really cool new applications. Mashups, in general, make fantastic point solutions that can really address the needs of a narrow group of users quickly and inexpensively. Whenever I think about the vertically integrated stovepipe designs that dominate today’s telecom solutions, I can’t help but imagine a bunch of mashup geeks behind them snickering at how ridiculous they seem. I know - I need to get out more.

In the back of a booth (I think it belonged to ABP, and if it didn’t Mr. Messer, get you *ss over there and sign them up) was a little company called CyberData Corporation. CyberData makes VoIP enabled ceiling speakers, paging gateways and loudspeaker amps. They even had a lock that you could dial into and give it a DTMF string to unlock it. I was completely enthralled. I know - I need to get out more.

Can you see what they are doing? CyberData is making these little Lego blocks that you can use for your own VoIP mashup. I imagine that I am an owner of a company that has multiple locations, but I want to have a paging system that I could deploy over the entire system without upgrading anything. I imagine that I am automating the floor of a hospital, and want to use voice prompts to remind the nurses about a particular patient’s care schedule. With these sorts of products, I can just whip it together very easily. Cool? It gets cooler.

Stay with me on the hospital thing for a minute. As you thought about that hospital application, you might have imagined that the paging system was owned by this software reading the patient schedule. What happens when you want to add another application that wanted to use the pager as well? Let say we’ve got this disaster response program that was going to direct staff to the appropriate stations. In the OLD way of engineering, you would have to figure out how these two applications should talk with each other, so that they would share the paging system. In the NEW way of engineering, the endpoint is naturally smart, and would handle taking a request at time from any application, eliminating the need for integrating these two otherwise unrelated applications. Very cost effective, very scalable and very stable.

With the sort of stuff that CyberData is putting out, I know that I have a simple way in my new applications to send one way voice messages to any physical space, anywhere at any scale. Not only is that a tool that I know enterprises can use, it is an excellent example of the tools to come. Congratulations to them!

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 11:40 pm | Filed Under Internet Telephony Show, voip mashup | 1 Comment

I met up with Jon Arnold at the Internet Telephony Show in Fort Lauderdale to talk about all the cool things we saw.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 6:30 pm | Filed Under Podcasts | Leave a Comment

Just caught a link to this post by Thomas Anglero in Alec Saunder’s log about the closed nature of the VoIP community: Telecom’s Tsunami: Opening the VoIP community… to everyone

I can see where Thomas is coming from. There does seem to be a little clique thing going on at times. The thing that twists me about it is that the majority of the bloggers I see couldn’t write a SIP stack to save their lives. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that, it’s just that the VoIP blogs are fairly dominated by the business, PR and journalism types, not necessarily the geeks. Of course, Brough Turner stands out as the exception to this rule, geek god that he is. I would love to see a more well rounded discussion for the sake of the larger community; we will all benefit from it. I never go a day without reading Alec Saunders, Om Malik, Jon Arnold and Andy Abramson, but who’s going to bring the deep technical analysis to the party? Brough’s going to get tired, and I’m just a Paduan apprentice.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 12:29 pm | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

Last Thursday night from the Internet Telephony Show in sunny Fort Lauderdale, I had the chance to do a joint podcast with Jon Arnold. We talk about the impressions from the show, ObjectWorld, Anton, Open Source, cruise ships, viruses and more. We had a good time making this - hope you enjoy it. I think Jon and I are missing the warm weather already.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 10:42 am | Filed Under Internet Telephony Show, jon arnold, mashup voip conference | 1 Comment

I just had a sick thought.

I’m presenting tomorrow in the “VoIP Spam : Challenges and Solutions” panel, which means (of course) I’m writing it now. The other distinguished members of the panel appear are vendors, so my supposition is that they are selling solutions. Since I’m not a vendor, I’m writing about challenges. So, here I am thinking about VoIP Spam challenges, and I had a sick thought.

I remember hearing once that, after years of building SPAM filters for e-mail, a very effective method of determining SPAM was simply looking at people reporting SPAM from their inbox. If a bunch of people reported an e-mail as SPAM…. it was probably SPAM. Of course, this makes some sense.

Forget that approach for a second, and you are only using SPAM filters. Imagine that, to increase the chances of getting through the filter, you just changed spelling and smaller parts of the text. That would help get the SPAM through, but in general, there are only so many permutations because you are dealing with a fairly small field of possibilities, and in the end, you still had to have some sort of HTML link in there, and how much could you vary that?

My sick thought was that, with voice, I can vary it nearly infinitely such that it would be impossible from simple correlations to determine if two voice messages were the same. As a human being, I would hear them as the same message. As a computer, forget it. And even if the computers got better at correlations, I would simply need to add more noise to the message, knowing that human ears are really good at picking out the voice from the noise. Any Aerosmith fan will tell you that. This is really hard stuff. That takes away a very powerful tool that we have with e-mail SPAM.

On the good side, I have a brand new application for Amazon Turks! You could pipe all your voice mails through a real person who would throw away that voice SPAM. Don’t laugh - it might be what this all comes to.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 9:29 am | Filed Under DSP, SPAM, SPIT, amazon turks, voice SPAM, voip mashup | Leave a Comment

Welcome from sunny Fort Lauderdale and the Internet Telephony Show! For all my friends at home in Boston, I’m not rubbing it in. Really, I’m not. Unless you are talking about sun tan lotion, and then yes, I am rubbing THAT in. But I digress.

I had exactly two hours on the show floor last night, and that’s exactly enough to get some basic impressions:

1. I’m seeing much more innovation around business model than technology. It used to be that, when you walked into a booth, the first thing out of someone’s mouth used to be something about functionality or technology. Not today, as every one I spoke to talked about innovative channel strategies or business models. A good thing, really.
2. Where have all the big companies gone? To the VON show? You would claim that this might be an enterprise show, but then where are all the large PBX vendors? I remember walking around Fall VON asking, looking for the new entrants. I suppose they come here now.
3. I found exactly ONE iPBX vendor and ONE application vendor so far that understands deployments of real time voice services in a services oriented architecture, or honestly, could spell mashup. My antenna’s up with this one… I’ll give you a full report at the of the show.

Jon Arnold and I are planning to record a podcast together tonight about the show, so I won’t disclose my “Best of the Show” just yet. Stay warm all you Yankees.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 11:54 pm | Filed Under Internet Telephony Show, voip mashup | 1 Comment

Just caught the press release from my old friend Jon Arnold about his new partnership with Marc Robins. My best wishes go out to both of them.

I can personally attest to Jon’s analytical brilliance. I met Jon when I was the CTO of Versatel Networks in Ottawa and he was the main Frost and Sullivan analyst for VoIP. After he left there, and I left Versatel, we teamed up on a few projects such as doing a due diligence project for a second round venture capital investment. I did the technical due diligence; Jon handled the business end. Jon’s reputation for independent and thoughtful analysis is well deserved.

Oh yes, and there was that time about two years ago where we ran up that impressively large dinner tab at a restaurant in Sweden during VON Europe and charged it to my boss. Something about translating Kroners to Loonies. I suppose our reputation for fine dining is well deserved, too.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 7:53 pm | Filed Under jon arnold | Leave a Comment

Don Van Doren is a regular columnist for VON magazine, and his recent article in his regular “Focus on Contact Centers” column put into a few short sentences what I believe are the business drivers for VoIP mashups. I believe that the next big wave of real time communications lies in the integration of technologies like VoIP and presence into the larger business process. This will increase business efficiency and customer satisfaction in a single move, and is a no-brainer for businesses of all sizes. Here’s a concrete example: If my plane is canceled, I’d like an SMS message that tells me so, and says “Sorry your plane is canceled. Press SEND on your phone to reschedule now.” When I press SEND, I call an operator that already has information on hand, and answers the phone with “Hello Mr. Howe. I’m sorry your plane is canceled. We can put you on a 4:30 or 7:30 plane. What one would you like?” That would be awesome service, and when you integrate real time communications with business backends, you can provide this service.

What Don said in the article was that there are three distinguishing characteristics of successful implementations of IP contact centers. I would amplify that by suggesting that successful VoIP mashups for enterprises would have the same three. I quote directly from his article:

1. They are customer facing. That is, the investment facilitates direct communications between a company and its customers or business partners.
2. The communication links… become embedded in an established or new workflow or process.
3. The effect of implementing the communication link is to reduce cycle times or latency by eliminating or reducing the time waiting to reach someone.

The canceled flight example has all three, and is therefore valuable to both the customer and the business. From the larger perspective, this is why I believe that with the advent of service oriented architectures, integration of real time communications into the business process will be successful and inevitable.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 10:57 am | Filed Under business model, voip mashup | Leave a Comment

I really wanted to share this one with you - I found it fascinating.

The New York Times has an excellent article about Optimism and Pessimism. As most of you know (since the only people who read this blog are blood related to me, or manage my case at the parole board), I am leaving my position at Comverse to go back to consulting, and to start a small custom development firm. Of course, I’m pretty optimistic about the future, even if I do wake up in a cold sweat once and a while. (OK… nearly every night.) One thing I read in this article is the common fallacy of believing yourself to be better than average:

This isn’t the first time I’ve read this, and I have to admit, I see the truth in it. I am a better driver than average, without regards to the warning that I received this morning for running - no speeding - through the stop sign near my house. I didn’t stop for it. No one in my neighborhood does. No good driver would. So, I thought I’d share this story with you, because most of you are better than average drivers. Right? Right.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 3:19 pm | Filed Under geek, life | Leave a Comment

Remember the speed geeking post from Mashup Camp last week? I am now ready to reveal my favorite mashup. But first, the final FINAL results are in. The speed geeking winner of Mashup Camp 3 with 18 nickels is….. drum roll please….. The Hype Machine!

The Hype Machine (http://hypem.com) combines music blog discussion, tracks, youtube video, concert and sales data to create a unique music discovery experience. (Powered by a healthy mix of Perl & PHP). Congratulations to Anthony Vlodkin - geek of the day.

My favorite? GBlinker by John Herren. gBlinker takes a Google blinky pin, interfaces it to a laptop via serial port, and uses a hacked a Gmail widget (using the Yahoo! widget engine) to make the pin blink when you get new mail.

Why is it my favorite? Simple, the big deal behind mashups is re-purposing. As creators of technology, you simply don’t know exactly how it will be used in the real world. Mashups recognize this fact by a clear delineation between the service and the application. In Voice Over IP, I think that’s been traditionally seen as a ‘bad thing’, as business models are hard to see in that environment. However, in the ‘Internet World’, there’s apparently more of a willingness to throw caution to the wind. That’s why this was my favorite mashup. That and, I suppose, the complete and sheer geekiness of this one was too much to ignore. Serial port hacking? Very nice.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 10:05 am | Filed Under google, mashup, voip mashup | Leave a Comment

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