Dear Carriers :

It’s quite easy : they didn’t need you. Not good.

At last February’s Emerging Telephony Conference in San Francisco, I wrote a mashup to prove to myself and the audience that someone could write a compelling business application using voice that didn’t require large investment in equipment, a huge development staff, customer education or mass marketing. In short, I didn’t really need to work with a particular carrier. I think I succeeded, and I wasn’t alone - every other entrant proved it as well. The recent Skype mashups contestants prove it. I’m flying off to Las Vegas to announce the winners of the Thomas Howe Company’s mashup competition with our partners Amazon and Voxeo at the Sylantro Gobal User Summit. Our contestants proved it. They didn’t need to get close to a carrier to create a compelling voice application. In fact, not to rub it in your face… but not involving you was a good thing for all concerned.

Let me emphasize the totality of my statement. They didn’t use your new services standard IMS. They don’t use the application layer API : Parlay. They don’t use SS7. They don’t speak AIN. They don’t go to the same shows you do - they don’t read the same magazines. I bet they have never called you. They didn’t call Verizon - they didn’t call AT&T. They certainly used some Internet connectivity in the colocation center, but I absolutely guarantee they don’t know or care who provided the bits. I can guarantee that the services running on those bits are much more compelling, and have business cases that will knock your socks off. My dear carriers, this should get your attention, because I challenge you to list for me the last ten new voice services that were not only compelling, but made serious money. Did your entire list appear in the last twelve months? Didn’t think so.

I know there’s somebody reading that’s muttering about scalability. One word for ya : Google. Look’em up on Yahoo. These mashup guys use the same technology as Google. That technology scales. That technology is free, open and runs of commercial off-the-shelf hardware. If you’re an Amazon Web Services customer, you really don’t need the hardware, actually. You can rent theirs. But I digress.

There’s probably somebody else saying something about needing a carrier somewhere to carry the voice. And yes, we needed SOMEBODY when we didn’t want to solely depend on Skype, Gizmo or whatever. We’ll send them their two pennies for our two minutes, whoever they were. Didn’t really matter to us who it was, actually.

Please don’t get me wrong - I’m not picking on you. I’m here to help, and not by trying to sell you a box to solve your problems. Vendors do that. I’m not one of them; I’m just your local geek. I have a better answer for you than IMS. I’m talking about some real help. Consider me an ambassador - the emissary sent by the barbarians who are camped at your gate. Take a minute to count how many web scripting guys are out there. Our message is quite simple : if you would just simply provide some compelling APIs that we could use in our voice mashups, we just MIGHT start to need you. Or at least we’d use you. Really, we would.

What sorts of APIs? How about an API that I can use to get the location of a cell phone? What about one that will let me send a simple voice message to any phone? How about one that gives me click to dial? One that lets me setup a conference call? I could use those as I’m extending a business process for some fortune 500 company. It would be cool - and it would pay the bills. For both of us!

An example? Yesterday, I got a call from UPS making sure that I knew a package was to arrive on Monday that needed a signature. They used an outbound messaging API to send that message, and they traded a quarter to avoid an unnecessary truck role. Super valuable for UPS. Applications like that. APIs like that.

So, listen. You’re just not selling what I’m buying. I didn’t need you. They didn’t need you. Not good. How about we fix this?

Thanks.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 9:52 pm | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

Congratulations to one of our media partners John Musser at ProgrammableWeb on his terrific collaboration with IBM. Here is the link to the ZD NET article and Video Cast.
One of the cultural challenges facing CIOs and IT departments is the fact that more and more employees aka digital natives are coming to work with their own tools. Yes, many of those tools are for entertainment or social networking purposes. But, why use the out of date LAN locked project management tool when a free or cheap web tool works so much better. The “because I told you so” answer doesn’t work on so many levels anymore.

It is thrilling to envision libraries/archives/toolboxes filled with mashups, widgets, ingredients that are available for all the employees in an organization to use and share creatively. A CIO or IT department that finds ways to empower employees to improve or customize internal business processes will have little trouble justifying their own departmental budgets or building needed organizational alliances.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 4:12 pm | Filed Under Lead Stories | 1 Comment

Many fields and endeavors enjoy the benefits of using templates to provide ways of building solutions quickly. Software engineering greatly benefits from the development of design patterns, allowing the designer to see effective strategies early in the development process. From nearly the first class, Karate students are taught templates of punching and kicking - three and four move combinations that accelerate their learning and enable them to create an infinite amount of responses to an inbound attack. As our industry approaches the new field of light weight telephony application development, it is useful to come up with some templates for their application. Although architectures technical approaches are important to understand and socialize, business templates are probably more important right now, because we are early in our understanding of how and where this technology can be applied. In short, when we are looking at using voice mashup technology, what should we be looking for? Where and when do they make business sense? There are a few, here’s one to start off with.

Voice mashups make sense when you are trying to extend a business process outside the firewall. By and large, business process is enforced through training manuals, paper forms and computer based interfaces. What happens when none of these devices are available? In particular, let’s look at what happens when you have a business process that involves a customer interaction. You cannot explicitly train your customers. Read more

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 8:25 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

Jon Arnold, great pal and fantastic analyst, just announced his new content site called IP Convergence TV, backed by a truly impressive list of community partners including heavy weights Audio Codes, BEA, Comverse and Intel. From the site :

IP Convergence TV is about community and shared interests. We are passionate about IP convergence, and believe the communications industry needs a focal point to support it. Our mission is to create a focal point for service providers and key industry influencers. We strive to become a recognized source of information on key IP convergence issues and trends. This includes education about IP convergence, thought leadership, industry analysis, industry opinion and best practices guidance.

Our target audience includes both technical and strategic decision makers actively engaged in using convergence technologies to bring new services to market. We see these new services as being end user-centric rather than network-centric, and usable across all types of networks and devices. These services and solutions encompass a number of technologies, and IP Convergence TV will have a particularly strong focus on multimedia IP communications (triple play, quad play), IPTV, FMC (Fixed Mobile Convergence) and IMS applications.

We’re really proud that Jon asked us to write an opinion piece, and we’re even prouder that he used it! Our best wishes go out to this truly class act.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 8:59 pm | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

One of the hottest spaces in the Web 2.0 world is referred to as the consumer review space. Basically, a group of startup companies are all trying to become the go to place for independent consumer reviews and recommendations.

I view this all as the How’s My Driving bumper sticker coming to the web.

Read more

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 12:11 pm | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

Here’s a neat little add to your enterprise or web application : phone number verification. I just signed one of my customers up for a trunk’s worth of SIP for some product testing. It asked me for the usual stuff, like user names, addresses and credit card information… and it asked me for my phone number. Then, as part of the signup process, their application called my cell phone, and gave me a confirmation number. I plugged that confirmation number into the web site, and I was confirmed and good to go.

How did they do it? Of course, I’m not sure, but I could do it pretty easily with an Asterisk Box, a service like Voxeo, or I could use our up-and-coming-but-still-under-wraps Outbound Messaging application. Verifying phone numbers on sign up is smart business, and with Voice mashups - it’s pretty easy to do.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 11:34 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

I’d like to personally thank everyone who turned out today to for my “Enterprise Voice Mashups” talk at the Internet Telephony Show. I’m really happy to meet other people who are interested in the next generation of telephony innovation; it’s nice to know other people care.

Like I mentioned in our talk, here are some resources for you to learn more about Enterprise Voice Mashups:

• The slides from today’s talk are now available on slideshare.
• The authoritative site on mashups is ProgrammableWeb.
• In my opinion, Dion Hinchcliffe has the best blog on Enterprise / Web 2.0 Integration - he’s brilliant

Again, thank you all for showing up. There’s no place like the TMC show for meeting real end-users and customers, and I had the pleasure of meeting many dozens over the years.

As the tradeshow season marches on, the next stop is Sylantro’s Global User’s Summit in Las Vegas. We are running the mashup competition, but this time we are looking at carrier class, scalable and valuable stuff. Then, at this year’s Fall VON, we’re going to sit down in front of an audience and throw a mashup together in real time. If you want to see some telephony innovation in real time, you need to be there.

See you all on the road.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 11:14 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

To the man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. To the marketer needing sizzle, is every application a mashup? Apparently so. Just like the unfortunately named Web 2.0, which says it all, and therefore says nothing, I see the name mashup applied to lots of things that really aren’t mashups. It’s a shame, really, as mashups enable an entire new category of applications and ways to write them. When people start naming their guinea pigs mashups, it’s time to start putting some definitions together. So, exactly, what is a mashup?

A mashup is an application that uses
1) modern Web integration technologies
2) to take content or services from two independent sources
3) to solve a unique or niche problem.

In general, you’d have to have all three to qualify in my book.

Read more

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 6:43 pm | Filed Under Lead Stories | 3 Comments

Richard Karpinski of Telephony Online, otherwise a man of great talent and judgement, decided to waste a few minutes last week by doing a podcast with me, where we discussed the long tail of telephony. Many carriers read telephony online, and although I’m not shy about sharing my opinion of their long term prospects, I tried to be on my best behavior for Richard. I only swore once (I think I said “sucked”), and then only as it applies to broad-based, horizontal carrier applications and value added services - not about carriers themselves. I said that the carriers themselves were ultimately doomed to be dumb pipe vendors, but maybe the smart ones could position themselves to become really good dumb pipe vendors.

Listen in, and feel the love.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 7:58 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

We had an interesting call late last week from a company, and from the sounds of it, they sounded a lot like us. Like us, they were focused on light weight programming models, and were looking at the impact of integrating real time communications with the business process. We have more of a Web 2.0 flavor to what we do, but they seemed like close cousins. Pat and I were pretty happy to hear about them, not only because misery loves company (it’s a joke!). We feel like good ideas are common, good execution rare, and a good combination of the two are nearly extinct. To have another group tackling the same problem is reassuring, and I look forward to sharing what we know with them and the rest of our industry. In the open source world, they say that when there are a thousand eyes looking at the software, all bugs are shallow. Probably the same with business models. (I admit, though, that there’s a little voice in the back of my head that says that the Venus Di Milo could never be designed by committee, but I digress.) Were they happy to hear about us? Well… not so much. Something about competition. Read more

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 7:11 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment