According to CNN, Om and Andy – the end is here for SunRocket. Yesterday was their last day in business, and I think with it goes the dreams of a VoIP generation. The consensus opinion is that the triple play offerings from the Cable companies are too competitive for players like Vonage and SunRocket, but I have a hunch that the answer is a bit more direct and simple : there’s simply not enough unique value for a VoIP carrier to establish good margins.

It’s not unique enough because the cost to establish a carrier is effectively zero, and the flip side of being able to offer the service to anyone is that all your competitors can too. Other than price, I have yet to see any land-line or VoIP carrier truly differentiate a service. These days, and IMHO, only GrandCentral, Iotum and the new iPhone actually make telephony services that are differentiated and valuable in a mass market. And none of those is a carrier, per se. If you were to measure brand loyalty for VoIP services, you would not need all the numbers on your keyboard, since it’s practically zero. Number portability is the only sticking power of a telephone service these days, and that has nothing to do with brand.

I remember reading a book about entrepreneurship a long time ago, and I think the first or second rule was to methodically grow from a profitable base business. Exactly what was the profitable base business of SunRocket? Do a little test, and pick a handful of long term, substantial companies on your favorite stock market. Can you identify what their small, profitable base business was? I bet you can find it out. They nearly all have it. Is it all surprising when you see a company fail when it tried to make up with high volume what they couldn’t make in margin? And unfortunately, this is the lot of VoIP carriers, and from where I sit, forever will be.

OK, so maybe Adhearsion isn’t a Web API, but it certainly is a programming API, and if you’re involved in emerging telephony, you ought to know what it is.

Adhearsion is a Ruby library that takes over Asterisk’s internal processing of calls and puts them into the Ruby framework. You setup the dial plan of an Asterisk server to forward all calls to the Adhearsion server, either running locally or an a remote server. Once the call hits the Adhearsion server, you have the call in Ruby Land, and the world is your burrito. What can you do from there? Tons. You have at your disposal all of the Ruby integration with databases, UIs, web services calls, etc.

An example would be a hyper dial plan, that would connect calls, but also provide a gateway out to a Web Services function that would retrieve the latest weather report. Here’s what it looks like :

#This is an example extensions.rb file which
# would handle how calls are processed by
# Asterisk. This is all completely valid Ruby
internal {
case extension
when 100…200
callee = User.find_by_extension extension
unless callee.busy? then dial callee
else
voicemail extension

when 111 then exec :meetme

when 888
play weather_report(‘Dallas, Texas’)

when 999
play %w(a-connect-charge-of 22
cents-per-minute will-apply)
sleep 2.seconds
play ‘just-kidding-not-upset’
check_voicemail
end
}

Now, here’s a proof point. When I was at the Cluecon show, I told the crowd about the demonstration application I wrote to do a daily collection of body weight for Congestive Heart Failure cases. As I was describing it to the crowd, Jay – the author of Adhearsion – implemented the same application in Adhearsion as I was speaking. It didn’t have the insane scale that my Amazon EC2 and Voxeo implementation did, but it was an amazingly complete implementation. Completely impressive stuff. Check it out.

Technorati Tags: adhearsion, thomas howe, thomas howe

technorati tags:andyabramson, andy, abramson, wedding

Is it an iPhone?  No, although I bought two of them.  It is Dead Rising for the Xbox360? That’s what my son wanted for HIS summer toy.  I am sitting on pins and needles to get a Chumby.

What’s a Chumby? It’s a mashable toy.  A chumby is a Wifi Enabled stuffed-animal, alarm clock, picture frame hybrid thing that you can put next to your bed (or on your desk, in your living room).  It’s always connected to the Internet, and displays whatever you would like it to from the Web – pictures, news, photos, weather, whatever.  When you receive one, you set it up with a playlist of widgets from their web site, and off you go.  Chumbys go for less than $200.00 and don’t have any monthly fee.  Now, I’m sure that at least three of my four kids will want one (they might not get one, but the want will be there), but why do I want one?

It’s mashable. The chumby is open, and the fine Chumby folks make the hardware and software specs available to you. I would like to purchase one for each member of my extended family, then make a flickr channel with the family’s pictures (from my four brothers and sisters, and their family) so that we could have a distributed family picture slideshow for everybody.  How about taking the top 100 songs from each of our iTunes playlists and making the Howe Channel for music? How about using some client of our cell phones with a giant Google Maps where is the Howe Now?

The deeply amazing thing about lightweight programming models is how they radically expand the set of people who can create new services, and therefore the new services they create.  I want all my engineering friends to have the Chumby  mindset, so we can dream more and be disillusioned less.

technorati tags:thomashowe, mashable, chumby, the, thomas, howe, company

Apple to launch cheaper, “nano-like” iPhone in Q4 07?

I’m really happy I’m not running Nokia’s handset division right now.

Xeni Jardin:Snip from Reuters:

Apple Inc. plans to launch a cheaper version of the iPhone inthe fourth quarter that could be based on the ultra-slim iPod Nano musicplayer, according to a JP Morgan report.

Kevin Chang, a JP Morgan analyst based in Taiwan, cited people in thesupply channel he did not name and an application with the U.S Patent andTrademark office for his report dated July 8.

Apple filed a patent application document dated July 5 that refers to amultifunctional handheld device with a circular touch pad control, similarto the Nano’s scroll wheel.

Link

technorati tags:iphone, thomashowe, thomas, howe, mashup, apple, nokia

No, I don’t think so, but boy do I want to.

I caught a link from mashup meister John Musser from Light Reading called Telco Web 2.0 Mashups. In it, Caroline Chappell speaks about the impact Web 2.0 technologies are having on IMS deployments in her new report. I think Caroline what has is mostly right from a technology standpoint, but misses on some critical cultural points. For instance, the mashup phenomenon has, at it’s core, this idea of the perpetual beta. Without regard to how mashable the carriers make their offerings, it won’t make them any more fleeter of foot. That said, I am in complete and violent agreement with Caroline, and I hope my industry has the good sense to listen to her advice.

Now, if I were to brag, I’d point my readers back to something I wrote nine months ago….

There’s no denying an exodus is underway. So far, I’ve seen Pat, Moshe, Alec and a host of other go over to Facebook from LinkeIn, all in the space of a week. Is it just me, or do you find this remarkable? I mean, not only for the abruptness of it, or the lemming like nature by which it’s happening, but for what it says about Web 2.0 principles?

What am I doing these days?

• I’m reading Garrett Smith’s blog about the bad signs from SunRocket. SunRocket has shut down their affiliate program, and admits to owing commissions to their partners from March, and can’t guarantee when they can pay. Ouch.
• I’m following Andy’s blogs from France, as he prepares to tie the knot. I think that the South of France might just be the only place in the world prettier than Cape Cod in the summer.
• I’m waiting for my iPhone to arrive this afternoon, so by next Monday, my friends can stop asking me why I haven’t mashed it up yet.
• I’m wondering how the h*ll Moshe got that close to Joanne from Rocketboom. I tell you, there’s no justice in the world. Joanne might be the prettiest thing in the world other than my wife on Cape Cod in the summer.
• David Galbraith has me laughing and rolling on the floor with his iPhone meets the book of Job article.
• It may be the 114th year that the Cape Cod Baseball League has played, and it may be that 1 in 7 MLB players are alumni, and it may be that this all-free, all-volunteer league is the best and last place where the true game of baseball is played, but I’m just waiting for Sunday, where I’ll get to sit at a Kettleers game and talk the night away with my kids. I think Jon should get his Canadian butt down here and join us. Bring the beer, Jon. It’s summer on Cape Cod.

A vastly underused component of communications applications, especially as it relates to business communications, is SMS or text messages. Text messages have many unique practical advantages that become valuable in the real world of the mobile workforce. First, and perhaps foremost, text messages work nearly everywhere. When signals are too low for a voice call, text messages are your best bet, even better than e-mails which require a stable data connection. Text messages are a store and forward technology, so workers can read them when they are available. Text messages can be read without disturbing those around you. Text messages are the best technology for communicating detailed, but short, information such as part numbers or other phone numbers, because the recipient is not required to grab a pen to write it down on a piece of paper, which might get lost. The number is safe on the phone, and very hard to lose. The downsides are few – 168 characters per message – but surmountable.

There’s a large number of providers today that you can sign up for to send text messages. I use Strike Iron’s Global SMS Pro, because it’s reliable, easy to setup and and simple to pay for. Sending text messages, however, is a much easier task than receiving them. Since text messages use the PSTN’s SS7 network, it’s a pain not only because of the equipment requirements, but the regulatory requirements. Signing up to receive text messages is a commitment and an investment, and typically costs over a thousand dollars to register your inbound number (called the short code) and a over a thousand dollars a month to maintain it, and that’s before you start paying for traffic. Sending is typically much cheaper, since you only pay your ten cents or so a message to your provider.

This is where 411Sync’s service comes in. 411Sync provides the developer with a free, and fairly easy, way of accepting inbound text messages. The 411Sync service provides a freely customizable way of enabling mobile search, but you can extend it to whatever your needs are. When you send a text message to the service, you specify a keyword (such as ‘red_sox_score’) and whatever parameters you desire (such as ‘today’), and it will pass it to a standard Web CGI script that you specify when you create the keyword. Your program takes the parameter, calculates an answer, and passes it back as a formatted RSS or Atom message. 411Sync passes that answer back to the phone, with an ad attached. In our Red Sox example, if you sent a text message to 411Sync of red_sox_score today, it would respond with something like Red Sox 10, Yankees 0. You would register a program with red_sox_score, and it would be called with the parameter “today”.

The business example? How about mobile workforce automation, with the target audience being a service technician. After you finish a job, you could send a message to your service like “wrico tom 5083649972 complete”. Tom would be the technician’s name, and the number would be the contact number of the job, and the keyword would tell the front office that the job is complete. The CGI script might record the time spent on the job for billing purposes, then as an answer, provide the address of the next job. In fact, for mobile status reporting, 411Sync is the best, and cheapest game in town. Check it out.