When people mention consumer oriented voice applications, I only have two responses that feel honest. I either shrug my shoulders or cringe. I shrug my shoulders because I really don’t know what consumers want from a phone that they don’t get now. I realize that they want easier to use phones, better cameras, style and price. Yes, of course. All you have to do is look at the success of the Motorola Razr to see the power of style. What I mean is that I don’t know what extra functionality that is particular to phones is important to consumers. To me, I think we’ve got the basic phone functionality covered, just like countless other consumer devices such as blenders, shoes and mailboxes. I just don’t know… so I shrug.

My other response, the cringe, normally comes when I see others who don’t know either, but their ignorance is not stopping them. I see their attempts to make telephony better for the consumer, and I feel like they by-and-large fail at it. There are a few success examples I could name (Skype, for one), but even then, the basic innovations aren’t with voice. Skype’s basic innovation is ease of use paired with toll-free calling; in the marriage of the computer, chat and voice. Skype would not have been successful without toll-free calling, and would probably not have been successful without chat. No voice innovation involved.

Imagine my delight with the iPhone store! Finally, a place where developers can write applications for phones without the huge barriers put up by large operators. I have not been disappointed, as it busts past the 1,000 application barrier in a matter of weeks. The perfect sandbox for phone applications. Of course, we are very early in the process, but let’s take a look at what we have for phone applications:

• The top five categories are : Games (262), Books (119), Utilities (95), Entertainment (89) and Productivity (65). Even when you discount that the Books are hard to count as applications, you have to admit that at least 80% of the applications have nothing to do with phones.
• There is no “phone” or “communications” category whatsoever.
• I would expect to see phones in the productivity category, where we have Speech Cloud Voice Dialer, Jott and TalkingPics (maybe). But they aren’t there.
• It looks like phone applications are stuck in the “Utility” category (I suppose phones ARE utilities), where we have: AsteriskC2D, SpeedDial, VoiceDial, Favorator, Note2Self, Telegram, Rotary Dialer and PhotoDial. IfByPhone got themselves in the “Business” category, which might be a good placement for them, as it seems to have the highest number of high-cost applications.
• Of the top 25 paid applications, 21 are games.
• Of the top 25 free applications, all of them are consumer based.

My takeaways?

1. Less than 2% of all the iPhone applications are phone applications. Even those that are “phone” applications are personal productivity enhancers like dialers, with the exception of IfByPhone and AsteriskC2D.
2. If I was a RIM product manager, I would be banging the fact that there are practically no Enterprise applications for the iPhone. I would also hope that no one in Apple was listening to me.
3. As a general developer, if you want to write an application for the iPhone, write a utility, as games are crowded and books are low value.
4. As a telephony developer, keep your eyes glued to ifbyphone – they are first out of the gate.

Does this make me feel any differently towards consumer facing phone applications? Not one bit.

As I reported a few weeks ago, Ribbit has indeed been sold to BT, and as many thought, it wasn’t for 55 million. It was for $105 million… which makes complete sense to me.  I know I’m going to cross over into the report I’m writing again if I’m not careful, but here’s the math that makes that work:

• British Telecom has relationships with over several thousand large companies in Britain: British Air, BBC, HSBC, Barclays, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, RBS…  you get the picture.  Each of these companies will one day demand (if not already) that their telecom provider offer APIs so that they can integrate their business process with the communications infrastructure.  Thus, the BT21C APIs are born.
• As a round number, assume that each large company has between twenty and forty large applications that require integration and management. We can count six areas that all have right off the bat : CRM, ERP, HR, logistics, inventory management, IT automation. No stretch to imagine that each area has several applications in it, or different divisions have different needs, etc.
• Again, as a round number, business efficiencies of 20% are commonly seen in CEBP applications, providing ample reason to integrate communications systems with enterprise applications.
• So, from simple multiplication, we have several thousand companies with 20 to 40 applications each, giving us about 30,000 CEBP applications for BT’s large customer base alone.
• From a world-wide market perspective, just multiply that number times the number of large carriers.

So, what are the chances that there are 30,000 CEBP engineers in the world? Would you say about Zero? I would.  What happens when you have a tool that any web developer can use, like Flex or Flash? You’ve got a fair sight more than the 100 or so CEBP engineers that exist now.   By aquiring Ribbit, BT acknowledges that there’s a severe go-to-market issue with CEBP deployments: there aren’t enough engineers to do them.

Who’s next on the block?  Maybe that’s a good item for my report.

Exactly a year ago, I predicted the demise of Ooma… pretty much equating them to one of the horsemen of the apocolypse. Dean challenged me on my prediction, we made a bet, Alec agreed to be the judge, and now the day of reckoning has come.   Dean’s claiming victory (nice graphic, by the way):I’m going to ask the judge for a ruling on it.  Not because I think I won, because they’re still in “business”, but because I am going to claim that Ooma is hardly worth a steak.   At best, it’s worth a hot dog from a vendor cart… and even then it’s a stretch.

My evidence?

• ValleyWag’s article claiming that Ooma is falling apart
• The continuing questions about the nonsensical business model
• No press releases during the first half of 2008
• Weak distribution… Best Buy selling the box in LA only is hardly a channel.  Just for fun, I’m tempted to log on to Amazon to purchase an Ooma box and a Pooper Scooper on the same day, just so that whenever anyone looks at Ooma on the web, they’ll have the right product recommendation next to it. You do it too. It’ll be our equivalent of typing miserable failure into Google.
• Even Om is unconvinced (and as a testament to his writing prowess, he thrusts it home with a single comma: “Ooma is not dead, yet.”)

In short, your honor, if you believe Ooma’s performance is steak worthy, I’ll pony it up.  I  would simply ask the court to consider the facts, and to consider that a more appropriate remedy would include parts of a cow that simply can’t be eaten alone.  In conclusion, if you do pass judgement that a steak is in order, I will comply without delay, but would like to point out that Dean will be the only person profting from Ooma’s performance, including their customers, their employees… but most importantly, their investors.

but I’m close.  Even if I wasn’t, I’d have to take exception with Alec’s iPhone post this morning, where Alec was comparing RIM to Apple:

It’s as if Apple is the Washington Capitals with one very talented star player in iPhone and RIM is the Detroit Redwings with a full line of talented and deep players.  We all know who won the Stanley Cup.

With all due respect, which is very due and very respectful, I’d say Alec is exactly wrong. It’s almost as if RIM has a talented star player, the BlackBerry, and Apple has a full line of talented and deep players: the iPhone, the iPod, the Macintosh, iTunes, mind share, global distribution, excitement, buzz, hundreds of thousands of developers…  My overwhelming sense as I use my iPhone, and look at the iPhone applications is : this isn’t a phone, it’s a really small computer.  They’ve convinced me to buy their really small computer by telling me it’s a phone.

I’m not telling anyone that the iPhone is in anyway an Enterprise tool. It’s not. I get that.  Here’s what I think is missing from the debate: how the technology comes into the Enterprise.  If what I’m hearing and seeing is the how the future looks, people will bring technology into the workplace, not the other way around. If that’s true, RIM is toast.

And who is Stanley? And his Cup, what does that have to do with anything? Did he win it? Tell me more, I’m intrigued. I’ll look it up on my iPhone now.

CloudVox goes public today, and from where I sit, the games have begun.   CloudVox is a service from a company lead by nice guy Troy Davis that solves a fundamental problem: connect up my voice application to the PSTN.  Without CloudVox, you would have to take your wonderful adhearsion application and install it into a physical server somewhere in the network, then install asterisk, then configure the dial plan to point at your application, then get some PSTN connectivity from somebody, then integrate it and test it.   With CloudVox, I simply create a new service, point it at my adhearsion appplication, then I’m done. I’m calling it from any phone, and it’s running my app. Whamo. I officially declare CloudVox as the first out of the gate.

What’s supported?

• Native language bindings in Java, Ruby, Perl, C#, Python
• Call flow lives with your code, data, and state (Rails, J2EE, Django, Catalyst, others)
• Functionality in a few lines, not a few weeks
• Up and running in seconds
• No long-term commitment
• Capacity ready as volume grows
• Full power of Asterisk, AGI, and open source APIs
• Optimized, tweaked, tested, and documented
• Every app has traditional and SIP phone numbers
• Lightweight plain text TCP connection, not raw audio
• Text-to-speech with industry-leading voices
• Kick off a conference call, controlled by your app
• Call recording, DTMF menu navigation, MP3 playback

I’ve already kicked off an app to these guys, loaded it onto an Amazon EC2 server, and got it talking in less than 60 minutes to any PSTN phone.

Now,  here’s my new issue.  A lot of my voice mashup work was done with Ruby and Adhearsion, but the problem was that it always lives in a box behind a firewall.  When I had to stick my application outside the firewall, I had to write Ruby and integrate it into VoiceXML from Voxeo, or pick an API from somebody like Jaduka or IfByPhone.  Now I have to rethink all that stuff.  Damn you, Troy, for making me think. I don’t like to think… it’s unnatural.

Now for something completely different… Since this is a week where I’m only coding (yes!), I thought it would be nice to go over some of the snippets of code that I thought  other voice mashup guys would want to have around.  Here’s one: ActiveDirectory and Ruby.

The short story is Microsoft rules the Enterprise, and there’s nothing anyone can do about that, and Web technologies rule mashups, and never the twain shall meet… without a bit of pain.

The long story: When you sign up to do an Enterprise development, you have to buy into the fact that only Microsoft elements are likely to be available to you.  Don’t expect to see MySQL… expect to see Microsoft SQL Server.  Don’t expect to see Apache… expect to see IIS.  And, if you are dealing with a employee database, expect to see something called ActiveDirectory.  ActiveDirectory is Microsoft’s approach to centralizing employee information and security.  And, as you might imagine it’s pretty darn close to proprietary. So, how do you take that wonderful Web goodness, all condensed for me in Ruby, and stick it into a Microsoft architecture?  Bit by bit.  I needed this little piece of hackery when I did the password reset application: the passwords are all kept on an ActiveDirectory server, yet the voice application is written in Ruby, and sits on Adhearsion and Asterisk.  I needed to be able to:

1. Read employee data to verify that the inbound caller is who they say they are
2. Reset the password to some value when they answered the right questions

Luckily, somebody at Microsoft deployed ActiveDirectory on LDAP, which closer to an open standard than they normally get, so we’ve got hope. We’ll use Ruby’s LDAP support to attach to AD.  Here’s my first bit of code. If you want to log in to an Active Directory Server to get information, this will do it for you.  Make sure you include ldap into your script.  Based on an employeeID, this will print out the complete hash of the matching record.

require 'pp'
require 'ldap'
include LDAP

connection= Conn.new('192.168.111.100')
connection.set_option(LDAP_OPT_PROTOCOL_VERSION, 3)
connection.bind("cn=prtldap,ou=accounts,dc=blahsystems,dc=net", "passwurd") do |conn|
base="ou=accounts,dc=blahsystems,dc=net"
results = conn.search2(base, LDAP::LDAP_SCOPE_SUBTREE, '(employeeID=73737)')
results.each { |entry|
puts "------------------"

puts entry.class
entry.each {|k,v| puts "#{k} ==> #{v.inspect}"}
}
end

Let’s clean this up a bit, and then use it to reset somebody’s password. I’ll define the variables up front, and I’ll use SSL to connect up to the server.  Notice the funky Microsoft password encoding block…. scares me.

username = "howethomas"
admin="admin"
password = "passwurd"
newpassword = "neverguessthis"
server_location = "192.168.1.100"
base_dn = "ou=accounts,dc=blahsystems,dc=net"

# require 'rubygems' (required if using outside of rails)
require 'net/ldap'
ldap = Net::LDAP.new
ldap.port = 636 #must be 636 for SSL
ldap.host = server_location
ldap.encryption :simple_tls
ldap.auth admin,password
ldap.bind

# encoding password in format Microsoft wants
newPass = ""
newpassword = "\"" + newpassword + "\""
newpassword.length.times{|i|
newPass+= "#{newpassword[i..i]}\000"
}

#finding location of the user, as the change password operation requires the full path to the user
dn = ldap.search(:filter=> Net::LDAP::Filter.eq("samaccountname",username), :base=>base_dn)[0].dn

#Replace the password

ldap.replace_attribute dn, :unicodePwd, newPass

All there is to it.

Phone Boy has a great post in GigaOM today answering the question “Is there money in Voice APIs?” I simply can’t let it go by without comment.

I’ve been covering the VoIP space since 2004, and lately it seems like every other press release sent my way is from a company announcing the addition of an application programming interface (API) to its telephony platform. The promise of APIs is that they make it easy to integrate different services — even those provided by different vendors — into a single application. The press release from one carrier even went so far as to claim that its API would “boost innovation and development of new apps exponentially.”

But is simply providing an API to your telephony infrastructure enough to prompt the world to beat a path to your door? Don’t count on it.

Indeed.  I’m working on a report with Jon Arnold and Marc Robins on exactly this topic, so I’m not going to spill all the beans here, but here’s a taste of how I would answer that question:

1. From a  technology perspective, there is no better alternative to voice applications built on APIs, and for most applications, there never will be.  I mean that in terms of reliablity, performance and economics.  Voice APIs address a fundamental architectural problem to which there is no better solution.  I predict that practically all voice minutes from operators and service providers will traverse a web services API in the future, so the question isn’t so much is there money in Voice APIs, as all the money will be in Voice APIs.  The question is, why will my Voice API be used over the others?
2. Every large operator has established relationships with large Enterprises, to whom they deliver specialized applications.  In time, they will all use the Voice API of their operator.  Lots of money there.
3. The more important part of a Voice API is the API part, not the voice.  Operators will evolve to become providers of many services, not just voice.  IfByPhone and Jaduka are fantastic examples of companies climbing the API food chain.

I’ll leave it at that, or we’ll have nothing to sell.  Geoffrey Moore was right as he identified the chasm, and Voice APIs are no different.  Developers and companies will not beat a path to your door if you simply have an API.  You need a complete product, which is more than an API. It’s an API, a developer program, a compelling business case for you AND your customer…

Shoot. Somebody’s knocking. I think it’s Jon.

Yup. That’s about right.

My gut reaction when I saw the iPhone numbers today was disbelief, then I couldn’t help laughing. According to Apple, since July 11th, they’ve sold a million phones and ten million applications. In three days. I wonder if McDonalds could sell ten million hamburgers in a weekend. Let’s see how laughable this is:

• Just last year, Compass Intelligence estimated the entirety of the US mobile application market to be $3.8 billion dollars. Recent reports estimate an easy $1 billion dollars onto Apple’s top line in twelve months in application software sales alone, establishing itself (in the first year) as a quarter of the market. I don’t know who manages mobile applications at Microsoft… but they really ought to fire him, don’t you think?
• Just open the App store on your iPod and look at what you have… comments from users. Yes, users who actually care about the application and took the time to give some feedback about it. Thousands of them. Name another mobile application ANYWHERE where the general public is commenting on it, providing feedback on it, and paying for it.
• Take a look at some of the companies and people who wrote those applications. Do you see names you don’t recognize? Do you see names that must belong to a company over a garage, or to a company safe and sound in Minsk? I do, and it makes me think of a local company that raised seven figures to write a mobile app. Ooops.
• The last mMetric report I saw (which was a while ago, I admit) had something like 20 or so value added services on it’s spreadsheet. Ummmm…. what’s the app count now? 800? It was 800 this morning, probably something like 820 by the time I go to bed.

Here’s my image, and it’s from 1986. It’s of Larry Bird coming down the court, in the fourth quarter, setting himself up for yet another three pointer. Everybody knows he’s going to sink it, and everybody knows he can’t be stopped. Yes, everyone on the court is wearing the same sort of uniform, shooting the same ball with the same rules, but nobody is doing what Larry is doing. He’s risen to an entirely different level. In the Garden, even His Airness Michael Jordan couldn’t stop him. For now, just like the opposing team, all you can do is watch and wonder.

TechCrunch reports today that BT has acquired Ribbit for $55 million to build GrandCentral competitor. The article states that the company has denied the rumors, but wouldn’t comment on wether or not the merger discussions were occuring or not. Given that Ribbit recently raised $13 million dollars, it’s interesting that they exited so early, and if the more than three times valuation seemed to be enough of a win for the investors and management. In any event, good job to all involved.

The story goes on to state the the primary reason behind the acquisition is to build a GrandCentral competitor. I say bullsh*t:

1. You could replicate GrandCentral for way less than $55 million. All praise due to Craig Walker and his team, but a web integrated find-me-follow-me application doesn’t take $55 million to build.
2. I’m a GrandCentral user, and really enjoy it, but GrandCentral has been languishing for the past year. There’s no sense in competing with something that isn’t winning.
3. It doesn’t pass Occam’s razor: there’s a simpler reason why BT would buy Ribbit. If BT recognizes that their Enterprise customers will deploy communications enabled business process applications, and Ribbit has some 3,000 developers already, and it looks like Adobe Flash has more traction than (ick) SOAP… you get the picture.

Congratulations to Crick, Don and the crew at Ribbit. Well done.