I’m happy to announce that I’ve become a regular contributor to Fierce VoIP. Every other week, I’ll be writing a column about Telco 2.0. I’m very happy to be a member of the fierce family, and I’m looking forward to exploring all those thorny Web 2.0 issues with all of their readers.

My first column was published today called “Congratulate Failure”. The point of the article is to question our perceptions of risk as viewed through the recent demise of Jangl. My contention is that the greatest risk we face as an industry is to sit back and wait for the smoke to clear. Instead, we ought to be asking ourselves how we can fail faster and cheaper, bringing on a future where voice enablement is no longer unique or surprising.

Thank you to all for joining me in the journey. Even though I only write about the things I believe are true, I absolutely know that I’m wrong as much as I’m right. Please forward your ideas, comments and “helpful” suggestions along - we won’t get there unless we get there together.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 1:58 pm | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

Alec pens a thoughtful piece today taking the results from a recent report from Jajah based on their interviews with C-level telecom executives and findings from IBM and postulating what they mean for the future of our industry. Check it out, it’s very nicely done.

The interesting part for me comes in Alec’s analysis:

And, touching on another very old theme from this blog, carriers are
finally understanding that they cannot hope to do it all themselves. My
friend Chris Wood first constructed this chart of Chris Anderson’s Long
Tail applied to telecom three years ago. Today’s carriers are duking it
out amongst themselves on the left side of the chart, but the potential
for rich new telecom applications in the blue area — applications which
marry dating, classifieds, travel and other web based services to
telephone — is immense. Monetizing that long tail is going to require a
platform based approach, and a focus on engaging the developer
community. Those that are afraid of the “talkification of the web” need
to find a way to embrace it.

And doesn’t that last sentence distill the problem? Those that are afraid of this need to find a way to get over it. It’s sort of like what happens in my house at bedtime. My youngest child is sitting in bed afraid of something ridiculous to us, but very real to him. (We’ve been through aliens, tornadoes, robbers and yes… the Bermuda Triangle.) My fatherly response is “Hey listen, the problem is that you are afraid of the wrong thing. You’re afraid of aliens that don’t exist, but you’re not afraid of your mother who’s going to be pissed when she sees that you’re still awake. Aliens don’t exist. Your Mom does. Go to sleep.”

Web technologies exist. The age of software based telecom has arrived. Traditional barriers like geography, regulation and walled gardens are fading. Let’s all make sure that we’re afraid of the right thing. Don’t be afraid of the web, be afraid of not being able to support the innovation it provides, because if you don’t, your alien competitor will.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 10:45 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | 2 Comments

Here’s some take-aways from my last Enterprise Voice Mashup project. Thought I’d record them for posterity… share them with who cares

• The up-front planning was very critical, and helped the back-end go much smoother. Our program manager was excellent, and put together a cross functional team that really covered the bases. Our team included a security team member, the Active Directory engineers, the phone engineers, a representative from the IS and IT departments, the support team, a test engineer, our team and the manager. As you put together your teams, remember these departments.
• It really took about a day to integrate into each enterprise system, even when the specification was pretty good. Issues like inconsistency in the databases and directories, legacy issues like dial plans and overloaded active directory servers, and issues with connecting non-Microsoft devices all added to the delays. In the future, good projects will allocate a day to each interface, then a half a day to test the interfaces after installation.
• Our interfaces into the Enterprise IT system included Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft SQL Server and the Cisco telephone system. H.323 and Skinny were the deployed protocols in this implementation. SIP was not.
• It’s possible that our Linux box was the first our brothers in the IT and IS departments needed to manage. Everything is from Microsoft. From a political and business perspective, it’s probably a better solution to provide them with a “box” than a software solution. Organizations know how to purchase and maintain “boxes”. Non-Microsoft software… not so much.
• We used Adhearsion on top of Asterisk as the heart of the application. It’s been rock solid. One really, really good choice for us was to use the Ruby exception handling to catch any errors in the code, and then to dial a real human being in response to any program error.
• Recording voice prompts is pretty straightforward, but took us five iterations before we were happy with the results.
• Using a “dial by name” like approach to inputing remote data works fine… unless you have a Blackberry. If you do, then you look at the keypad and say “Hey! There’s no letters on this thing!”

As LignUp expected, there’s a market for deploying Voice Mashup boxes… When the Enterprise starts to put that line item on a budget, companies like them will do a fine business. So far, though, those lines don’t exist. The work that we find is work that we create. The CIO simply does not have voice mashups on the top of the IT list. The good news is that the CFO will love the savings, and will eventually demand the CIO add one.

Technorati Tags: adhearsion, Rest

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 10:09 am | Filed Under Lead Stories, ruby, voip mashup | Leave a Comment

The top 50 android applications were announced this week. From Silicon Alley - “Each of the 50 finalists will receive $25,000. Another 10 of them will get $100,000 and 10 will get $275,000, for a total of $5 million.” Not bad for a little app. Now I’m thinking I should have done one. As I read through the list, a few of them got me pretty excited:

• SynchroSpot - Shaun Terry: This application does location based personal reminders and location based ads. So, you can drop information about a location, and as someone else enters it, it will be displayed back to you. I’m sure there’s advertising possibilities here, but I’m more interested in the geo-overlay possibilities. Imagine being able to annotate a great campground for the next campers, or linking a location into your CRM for field applications. Even though it’s an android app, there’s no reason it couldn’t be ported using the new iPhone SDK…
• gWalk - Klaus ten Hagen, et al: This application enables tourists to to discover a destination individually using context sensitive information. I love how this blends data discovery with 3D space. I’m thinking about emergency services applications, where data may be changing dynamically and emergency workers need to access it in real time. BreadCrumbz is almost as good: allows you to navigate using pictures of what you should be seeing.
• BioWallet - Jose Fernandez: This application does biometrics to identify people using Iris scans. The example given is for securing your phone; I’d use it in homeland security applications.
• FreeFamilyWatch- Navee Technologies: Mashes together a location with known crime data, showing you in real time how safe your family members are. I like the dashboard nature of this, but I will say that if you live somewhere were you need this… move.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 11:26 pm | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

Andy penned a thoughtful piece yesterday on what’s next in communications. Taking the dual news of the carrier “Skype Killer” and the recent blockbuster WiMax announcement, Andy speculates that perhaps what’s coming next is video:

Instead of simply being another voice play to battle Skype or the mobile operators, the WiMax companies and the cable operators, and heck, even Ma Telco may all may find that they may be better off looking in another direction.

That direction is real-time video communications bundled up along with other IP related services like voice and text, all in one neat little package.

Why video when selling voice to their already installed user base is already there for the cable guys?

Because it is different.

In essence video is the next level of real-time communications to be nurtured and embraced, not only because its ready now, but because it also gives the WiMax, Telco and cable players a very different value proposition to offer and lead off with.

By offering and delivering video, along with voice and text as the new universally used platform for real time communications voice gets to come along for the ride via a real standard, SIP (session initiation protocol.) On the other hand, Skype with their self-created stigma with P2P remains further anti-telco That goes hand in hand with already being perceived by the cable MSO’s as the enemy too. Both factors makes the opportunity around making a lot to do around SIP standard based video the perfect way for the cable folks and the telcos to unite around a common bond. You see, if they don’t join hands and play together no one really wins at all.

Rrrrrr. Andy might be right; I can’t tell. It feels so much like Brittany Spears to me. There’s somebody in the world that’s a talent agent, who can look at some singer and say “you’re the next big thing” and be right about it. Not me - not that much imagination. I always hated Brittany’s music, all the way through her mega-stardom, and as she crashes a Mercedes Benz a day…. I don’t. She wins. (Well, if she learns to take her medicine and has some decent quality of life, she wins. As it is, I’ll take my 94 Volvo and a happy home life. But you get the picture.)

I’ve got a VoIP famous friend that’s doing a video startup, and I love what he’s doing, and I’m going to help him however I can. It’s a very exciting product, and if I weren’t on my mashup mission, I’d probably beg him for a job. I say that because I’m a video geek. I admit it. How many more of us are there? I’d like to think there are, and it’s compelling enough for me…. are there enough of me? I can’t tell. Not that much imagination.

But that’s what it’s going to take, I’m afraid. Unlike voice mashups (gotta get that plug in), I can’t make ten thousand hard core businesses cases for video. I can make… ten. Twenty on a good day. That’s more than enough for my friends company… is that enough for Sprint? You don’t have to like voice mashups, because wether you like them or not, they save insane money for enterprises, they like saving money, so boo-hoo for you. Video needs customer adoption and acceptance, and I hope they do.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 9:14 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

Many told me that they liked it, I find it painful.

As I sit in my chair and write this entry, I don’t picture myself as a hyperactive, fast talking geek who acts as though his entire diet is coffee. As I sit in my chair and watch this video, I wonder why I lack such fundamental self awareness. This is all probably better if you go to slideshare and bring up the slides that go with the talk.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 9:43 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

I’ve been avoiding writing about the challenges that PulverMedia currently face. I’m not sure that anything I could do or say, except to extend my support to all those involved, would really make a difference. On Friday, friend, fellow-blogger and definitely-a-nice-guy Luca lets it rip. Right before it became public, Marc Robins reported it, and I growled at him because I didn’t think he was being supportive. Supportive or not, apparently, he was right. Since then, we’ve seen goodbye messages from Carl Ford, dis-avowals from Jeff Pulver, and stories from Andy Abramson and Om Malik. Shoot, I even called an end to the show a year ago, but I came back because of love.

I think most of us are shocked at the loss of our girlfiend VON. We loved her, and even when she did stupid things, we valued our relationship and were willing to do what it took to remain with her. As it turns out, she had different needs than we did, and the relationship is at a turning point yet again. Nobody knows if she’s coming back, or when, or what she’ll look like when and if she does. As for me, I’m enjoying my new relationship with EComm, and had a great date with Telco 2.0 last month. New horizons always.

As Lee Dryburgh so exactly put it when O’Reilly canceled the emerging telephony show, you can’t cancel a community. The VON community isn’t to be cancelled either. I’m not so sure if we stay together on Facebook, or we end up being EComm buddies or what, but the community isn’t being cancelled. It’s just changing. As for Jeff and Carl, and everyone else who spends their lives with these “telephone geeks”, the VON community not only supports you, but we thank you for how you’ve supported us. If the investors who own the rights to the VON show currently have different needs than we do, that’s their prerogative - we need to acknowledge that. Unfortunately, it’s becoming crystal clear that one of their needs isn’t to ingratiate themselves to our community, and our community members like Luca are suffering because of it.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 9:25 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | Leave a Comment

I’ve been avoiding writing about the challenges that PulverMedia currently faces. I’m not sure that anything I could do or say, except to extend my support to all those involved, would really make a difference. On Friday, friend, fellow-blogger and definitely-a-nice-guy Luca lets it rip. Right before it became public, Marc Robins reported it, and I growled at him because I didn’t think he was being supportive. Supportive or not, apparently, he was right. Since then, we’ve seen goodbye messages from Carl Ford, dis-avowals from Jeff Pulver, and stories from Andy Abramson and Om Malik. Shoot, I even called an end to the show a year ago, but I came back because of love.

I think most of us are shocked at the loss of our girlfiend VON. We loved her, and even when she did stupid things, we valued our relationship and were willing to do what it took to remain with her. As it turns out, she had different needs than we did, and the relationship is at a turning point yet again. Nobody knows if she’s coming back, or when, or what she’ll look like when and if she does. As for me, I’m enjoying my new relationship with EComm, and had a great date with Telco 2.0 last month. New horizons always.

As Lee Dryburgh so exactly put it when O’Reilly canceled the emerging telephony show, you can’t cancel a community. The VON community isn’t to be cancelled either. I’m not so sure if we stay together on Facebook, or we end up being EComm buddies or what, but the community isn’t being cancelled. It’s just changing. As for Jeff and Carl, and everyone else who spends their lives with these “telephone geeks”, the VON community not only supports you, but we thank you for how you’ve supported us. If the investors who own the rights to the VON show currently have different needs than we do, that’s their prerogative - we need to acknowledge that. Unfortunately, it’s becoming crystal clear that one of their needs isn’t to ingratiate themselves to our community, and our community members like Luca are suffering because of it.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 9:25 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | 3 Comments

As the stories about the demise of Jangle (Luca and Om) run through the blogosphere, and questions about the bursting of the Voice 2.0 bubble are raised, I’m reminded of an event from my past.

About ten years ago, give or take, I was a software engineering manager at a company called PictureTel. I was managing the next generation set-top box video conferencing product, and we had a mandate to include ALL of the various video-conferencing protocols available. At the time, this included H.320 (the ISDN standard), H.323 (you better know what that is) and H.324 (the POTS standard). It would have been my second H.323 design, as I had been early involved in our LiveLan product back in 1993, which is why I keep smirking when I hear the stories about the first voice over IP products being delivered two and three years later. In any event, as happens in corporations, our eyes were bigger than our stomach. There was no way we could implement all three protocols in the schedule we were given, so it was time for hard choices to be made. My hardware manager partner and I floated a then radical idea - discard POTS and ISDN, let’s go all IP and make it a H.323 product. The product manager (who will go SO nameless) made it very clear that this was unacceptable: all of our customers had installed H.320 devices, so we couldn’t leave it out. At the time, PictureTel was selling over 200 million a year (in fact, it could have been as high as 400 million) in H.320 equipment, so I understand his reasoning. I was arrogant enough at the time to blurt out “If you don’t recognize that the world is going to IP, you simply aren’t paying attention.” Oh, the impetuousness of youth. I lost that argument, and in short time, Polycom purchased mother Picturetel, and I contend that this was due in no small part to this particular bad decision. Market goes North, PictureTel goes South.

I’ve been looking at this whole Voice 2.0 thing for a while now, and there’s something I think we’re missing. In order for a bubble to exist, it has to be big and over-valued. If people think the Voice 2.0 thing is big…. they simply aren’t paying attention. Like a pimple on a gnat’s ass, voice 2.0 companies, revenues and projects are microscopic. Truly. Jangle going out of business has the same effect (no that’s overstating it but still) as Verizon deciding not to deploy a particular handset in Puerto Rico. I admit it’s difficult to comprehend just how small the Voice 2.0 market is compared to the telecom market as a whole, but I can tell you that every voice 2.0 market sizing uses numbers that start with “m” (and small amounts of “m” at that) and telco market sizing needs uses numbers that start with “t”. Voice 2.0 doesn’t rank.

What’s the big deal? If you don’t recognize nearly all voice applications will be deployed over the top, and that they are blended into ten thousand non-voice applications, then you are simply not paying attention. This is what Voice 2.0 is all about, not some silly HTML badge. Voice 2.0 is about insane value add for corporations, and equally insane permeation of voice into other applications. In this world of MacDonald’s and VC mentalities, fast isn’t fast enough. The telephony market is incredibly large and entrenched, and it’s not an aircraft carrier, it’s the whole damn fleet. Voice 2.0 will take ten years to get here, and that might be optimistic. H.320, the precursor to the first VoIP protocol H.323, was the first packet media protocol developed. It grew out of PictureTel’s p x 64 protocol in the late 80’s. If you (as I do) recognize the rise of the first generation of VoIP startups happening ten years later, then you’ll get some sense of this.

Bubble? They simply aren’t paying attention, but I suppose this is nothing new.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 8:35 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | 5 Comments

When I first delved into the world of voice mashups eighteen months ago, my then-boss challenged me about business models. At the time, I maintained that mashups, and for me voice mashups, were going to be huge because they were relatively simple to put together and they saved tremendous money for the enterprise. His question was simple; sure it sounded great for the professional services firms, businesses that deployed them and even the tool vendors that supported their efforts… but was there a real play for the people that provided APIs?

The thoughts went like this: if it’s so easy to write a mashup, there’s no reason why the developer couldn’t use a new API for every project. With that sort of churn, and given that providing voice APIs is not that hard, the provider of the API was screwed. For my bosses’ business, he was out of luck. I say not so fast.

There’s more to an API than just functionality - there’s data. If your API provides functionality to a developer, you might also want to think about including data as well. For instance, if you have a click-to-call API, you should also include data based APIs as well. Perhaps the data you provide is simple, such as a history of all the calls made through your system. Maybe the data you provide is clever, like a history of when people answered the click to call, so you can do more intelligent call scheduling. Maybe the data you provide is essential, like recording all the conversations made through your API for governance issues.

In today’s world, it’s increasingly easy to provide the exact same service as your competitor. However, if you have hard to replicate data such as calling records or patterns, it may be impossible for your competitor to replicate that, reducing your churn and making your API sticky.

Posted by Thomas Howe @ 9:02 am | Filed Under Lead Stories | 1 Comment

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