Hats off to Anh Nguyen for his Surprise Dialer, my favorite of the student mashups (not as psychologically jarring as Summer’s) at the ETel show. Surprise Dialer accepts voice mail messages from a number of people, then delivers them all at once to someone on their birthday. Having been a recent victim of a 40th birthday surprise party, it’s really hard to deny you are loved when there’s a crowd of people screaming it at you. Anh used PHP and Asterisk for his mashup, and if you look at his web page, did a great job of packaging and explaining. I really enjoyed seeing it, and I would use that service, all the time.

Maybe if we took Anh’s business sense, with Summer’s creativity…. quick. Get a VC down there.

The most overlooked speaker of E-Tel? Moshe Maeir of Flat Planet Phone Company.

Moshe was part of Om Malik’s very excellent launchpad event, and presented his company to the audience. In the talk, I think the most exciting idea of the show was lost, and I wanted to point it out. Moshe was speaking about his company’s ability to setup a phone system in a matter of minutes, and used as an example Yahoo stores. Let’s just dwell on that one for a minute.

Can you imagine what an insane paradigm shift this would be, to provision a phone system when you would start a Yahoo! Store? Click a box, and you have the complete communication setup for your new business. No PBX to purchase, no phone lines to order, nothing. You would get an 800 number and an IVR. You could setup your own SIP phones, or make them point to your existing cell phone. Who would do this? In this case, Yahoo! might do it for you automatically. But, it could be any web designer with a talent for Java script. From where I sit, this would be a radical decrease in both capital outlay and schedule – a good deal for everyone except PBX manufacturers.

There were so many fantastic people, technologies and presentations last week at the show, that I probably won’t have time to blog about them all… but a few I just have to dish about.

The Human Race is a student project by Summer Bedard presented at last week’s O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Show, and at first I loved it, then it made my stomach twist, then I REALLY loved it. The Human Race is a voice application that you put with an IVR for people on hold. It gives them something to do while they are waiting for their turn. This part I loved.

“So, Summer…”, I asked with a jet lagged voice, “tell me about the game. What do the people do?” With a smile, she told me that they have to answer a series of questions with a psychology/personality bent, looking for inconsistencies. Consistencies are rewarded – inconsistencies are not. People who are consistent wait less; people who are inconsistent wait longer. For instance, a caller on hold is asked if they get mad when they are criticized. I press 1 for no. Then, it says, “I hate your shirt. Does that make you sad to hear me say that? “Yes, you automated piece of sh*t. This is a mercerized cotton Oxford with…” Back in the queue I go. Then my stomach twists – I realize I’m never, ever, going to speak with a human. I’m reminded of that George Carlin piece where he thinks beauty pageant contestants should be forced to come back, year after year, until they win.

My head clears, as the coffee replaces the lag. Of course, I DO love this. I would love a world where IVRs are a thing to be briefly tolerated, but that’s not happening anytime soon. There probably is a pretty cool set of games you could write for IVRs, and have some benefit to the person for playing. Maybe you could educate your customers in a way they would enjoy, instead of making them listen to inane music or obnoxious commercials. Now, I don’t know if Summer has Dogbert for a teacher, but if we could only turn her ideas into a force for good, she’d be cooking.

Well, here we are at the ETel show in San Francisco. I must admit, I barely remember when the VON show was like this, back in the day. When I attended my first VON show, ten years ago, it seemed very new and exciting. If you wanted to see really cool technology, and meet the brightest minds in the business, you hung around the VON show. But that seems so long ago now. It sort of reminds me of that commercial for MadTV’s first season : “Remember when Saturday Night Live was funny? Neither do we!”

What joy I had today meeting so many incredibly smart and enthusiastic people. I can honestly say it was was the most intellectually challenging and rewarding show I have been to in years. For instance, I had the opportunity to hear Sunil Vemuri from QTech and Drew Lanham from Nexidia speak about searching through recorded speech. The demonstrations literally dropped my jaw, and made me believe that there was a imminent future with this technology. I was very happy to hear them speak, and appreciated how they were bringing our world forward.

I’m going to enjoy this one while it lasts.

Thanks to Backpack, it was really easy to throw up a page on the mashup. I’ll update that page through the conference, and you can check back on it later to get the source for the application. Enjoy!

Mashup Goals

• To prove the assertion that integration of real time communications into the business process saves money for the business, while increasing quality of service for the customer.
• To explore the use of artificial artificial intelligence, by way of Amazon Turks, and it’s possible role in telephony applications
• To explore the interaction between modern Web 2.0 technologies and modern communications.

Business Problem

From the Healthcare intelligence network… “According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 55 percent of the 90 million visits to EDs in the United States in 1996 were unnecessary. In healthcare dollars, that means that 40.5 million people paid up to three times as much for routine care at the ED as they would have paid at a physician’s office.” According to Blue Cross, Blue Shield, an average emergency room visit costs $1,049.00, whereas the average doctor’s office visit costs $149.00. A little math shows us that we have a $44 billion dollar problem with unnecessary emergency room visits.

If a patient is sick after normal office hours, the only choices are to call the answering service to schedule an appointment for the morning, or to go to an emergency room. Many patients are unaware of which is the right choice, so they end up going to the emergency room needlessly, which not only drives up costs for the HMO, but also gives a lower quality of care for the patient and every other patient waiting in the same room. An easy-to-use, triage system to determine the proper course of care would result in faster service, lower costs and healthier patients.

Customer Experience

Mr. Kraus feels sick and dizzy, with a little left side weakness on a Tuesday night. He calls his doctor, Dr. McCarthy, to schedule an appointment for tomorrow. An IVR answers, telling the caller that it’s after hours, and asking if the call is because of routine business or because of illness. If illness, it asks if the caller is on a cell phone or not. It then asks for a voice message to be relayed to the doctor, then hangs up.

Immediately after the call is over, the patient gets an SMS message on their cell phone telling him that the call was received, and that we are forwarding the message over to the nurses. If the caller is calling from a PSTN phone, we would do an outbound call back. (I couldn’t do this one, because I’m not a real Tell Me developer, and outbound dialing is restricted for those who aren’t.) The message is sent to a bank of nurses, who listens to the message to determine if it’s urgent or not. If they think it is routine, they indicate that on their console, which results in another message being sent to the cell phone telling the patient that the matter is probably routine, and they would get a call in the morning. If urgent, the patient would get a message like “A nurse thinks you need to speak with a doctor. We are looking for one now – stay near the phone.” Urgent issues are forwarded to the doctor as an SMS message to their cell phone with a summary of the call done by the nurse. In this example, the doctor’s message would be : Mr. Kraus – 40 WM – left side weakness, nausea -508 364 9972. The doctor would simply press the send button on his phone to call the patient.

At no time would the patient be more than a few minutes from feedback, and make the prospect of going to the emergency room so slow and painful, that they would prefer to sit and wait for the text message to get back.

The Mashup Components

• Tell Me VxML for the inbound calling IVR, the outbound status messages if I was a developer and to record and post the patient voice message.
• Strike Iron Global SMS for the text messaging between patient, nurse and doctor
• Amazon Web Services to setup the bank of nurses making determinations of urgency, and to transcribe the original voice mail by the patient for the permanent medical record.

Compelling Business Ideas and Notes

• Using IVR on the front end gets the critical information from the patient quickly and without asking for new patient behaviors, all without a real human doing anything.
• Using a bank of amazon turk nurses leverages the tens of thousands of stay at home nurses with small children who wouldn’t mind making $3.00 in two minutes by listening to a voice message and determining if it’s important or not.
• A typical doctor might have ten calls a night, which is not enough volume to pay an on-site nurse. A thousand doctors have ten thousand calls a night, which supports an amazon turk community easy.
• An HMO would pay $300.00 to keep a non-urgent patient out of an emergency room.