Susan Scrupski tweeted this today: the opening video intro for Information Architected’s session at Enterprise 2.0 show. Pretty clever.

For months now, management teams have been struggling with understanding how the CEBP market matures, how to create sustainable value chains, and how each actor in the ecosystem survives (or not). I’m really honored to have the chance to put some ideas to paper with Dan Miller from Opus Research. Over the past two weeks, Dan and I had a chance to collaborate on a report called The Recombinant Telephony Ecosystem that identifies the landscape, sizes the opportunity, names the players and makes educated guesses on how each can thrive in this new opportunity. If you’d like a copy of the report, you can visit Opus’s site here, and you can read a summary and table of contents here. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be taking some key points from the report as blog post fodder, so stay tuned.

After a couple of months in “stealth” mode, I am happy to announce the formation of my new company “Light and Electric“. Light and Electric is a management consulting firm supplying expert advice and custom development services to businesses and their partners. Our efforts center on the intersection of business communications and web technologies, such as social business, mashups and open source software. Unlike traditional management consulting firms, our advice comes from our real world experience solving businesses communications problems. Our approach is holistic: our business insight drives our technical solutions, and our technical competence uncovers new business opportunities. Above all, we seek to be a trusted advisor, providing both business and technology views that are valuable, unique and radically unbiased.

Today, I am very happy to announce our first public partnership. Light and Electric will be partnering with TMC, producers of IT Expo and other events, to provide education and training to their 3.5 million readers every month. The first tangible result of this partnership is a new section of the IT Expo show called “The Cloud Communications Show”. This one day event will gather the best and brightest minds working on API based development of applications and services, CEBP experts and social business advocates to discuss what’s working, and what’s not. Just like our practice at Light and Electric, the Cloud Communications show will be very light on hype and very heavy on real world experience, lessons and opportunities. We are honored to work with a company with the audience reach of TMC.

In the coming weeks, we have a number of other announcements as well. Light and Electric is partnering with major suppliers of APIs and cloud services to supply professional services such as custom development, integration, needs and readiness assessments. In addition, Light and Electric is working on several analysis reports with our analyst partners. In all things, our basic approach holds: our primary research is the work we do in the field, and our primary value is the real world knowledge about what works, and what doesn’t.

Stay tuned.

Webinars, Screencasts, Sessions at TMC’s ITEXPO Planned for Coming Months
Norwalk, CT, (November 11, 2009) — Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC®), a leading global media company, today announced a partnership with Light and Electric for joint participation in a series of Webinars, screencasts and in-show sessions covering the benefits of cloud communications. The initial workshops and sessions are scheduled to be collocated with TMC’s ITEXPO East 2010 in Miami Beach, FL this coming January.

Combining TMC’s powerhouse media with the award winning and practical experience of Light and Electric will deliver a truly rich and valuable experience for all attendees and participants.
The series of Webinars, screencasts and live sessions will address a growing need of businesses to integrate and leverage cloud based communications applications, process enhancement techniques, and network based communications interfaces and architectures.

Business professionals will learn the fundamentals of cloud based communications business models, market trends and current large efforts and deployments. Sales teams can benefit by learning real life cloud communications success stories and interacting with other ecosystem members. This series of educational sessions online and at ITEXPO will explore how communications as a service drastically lowers capital expenditures, reduces project risks and increases service agility and value.

Thomas Howe, CEO, Light and Electric, will be moderating the sessions both online and at the training session at ITEXPO.

“Thomas is a foremost expert on cloud communications and there is no one better suited to deliver the content than he,” said Rich Tehrani, TMC President. “As with the rest of the technology landscape, there is a definite need to have more cost-effective and powerful deployments of communications technology in the cloud. We are excited to offer educational opportunities that help businesses become increasingly efficient through the use of emerging technologies like cloud communications.”

“Partnering with TMC was a strategic decision based on their massive outreach across multiple platforms. TMC is perhaps the most respected media outlet covering communications and technology, and provides the best outlet to reach the professionals who will benefit the most from this exciting and fast growing area,” said Howe.

The Cloud Communications Show will take place January 20-22, 2010 collocated with the ITEXPO East at the Miami Beach Convention Center. Registration for the Cloud Communications Training sessions will be available on the ITEXPO Web site.

More details on the Webinar events and the screencasts will be forthcoming.

For more information, please visit www.tmcnet.com.

About TMC
Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC) is a global, integrated media company helping clients build communities in print, in person and online. TMC publishes Customer Interaction Solutions, INTERNET TELEPHONY, Unified Communications, and NGN magazines. TMCnet, TMC’s Web site, is the leading source of news and articles for the communications and technology industries. TMCnet is read by as many as three million unique visitors each month worldwide, according to Webtrends. TMCnet has ranked within the top 3,000 in Quantcast’s Top U.S. sites, placing TMCnet in the nation’s top .03% most visited Web sites. In addition, TMC produces ITEXPO, 4GWE Conference (in conjunction with Crossfire Media), Digium|Asterisk World and AstriCon (in conjunction with Digium), and Communications Developer Conference.

James Siminoff, Scholar and Gentleman

I wanted to thank everyone who came out last night to the Orange Partner Event in San Francisco last night. I, for one, really enjoyed hearing all of the presenters, especially my friends from Voxeo, RebelVox, LiveOps and PhoneTag.  In fact, the only part of the night that was better than the presenters was the audience, as any one of them could have taken our place on stage.   For those of you who asked, I will put my presentation up here on the blog as soon as I can for your enjoyment and/or derision.

For those of you who missed this august meeting, Mark Plakias from Orange Labs SF and Dan Miller from Opus Research hatched the plan to get all the people “in the game” in the room at the same time to discuss what’s happening, what’s real and what we need to fix.  Dan York took videos, but I’m not sure if and when he’s going to post them. I’ll poke him to see if he’s got plans for that.  I’m happy to announce that I’m deep in development doing a demo for Orange Labs (ssshhhhh) and Dan and I are about to release an opinion piece on the ecosystem of CEBP. Keep an eye out for both.

The picture? Ask Jamie. We had taken bets on the side on how many f-bombs Jamie would let loose. And, in the end, he didn’t say f*ck once.  We had a bullsh*t, but no f*cks.

In the second screen cast, we focus in on the voice script part of the Mobile Mail List application. The application has two parts: the voice script that runs on Tropo, and the web application that runs on any web server. In the next episode, we’ll jump over to the web side for a bit to see how we aggregate the data from the script, then turn around and send out coupons.

In early September, Jonathan Taylor at Voxeo asked me to write an application to highlight the capabilities of Voxeo’s new voice platform Tropo. After a bunch of chin scratching, I came up with this one: the mobile email list. It allows retail facing businesses to quickly and easily let their customers sign up for customer care programs using their cell phone, then uses text messaging to send coupons back to the customers. It’s free and open source, and it runs today on Tropo. You can download it yourself here; I also did a quick video to introduce it.

Enjoy!

A long time ago, I was a music student. My main area of study was classical music (the romantic period, to be specific), but I also attended a jazz lab every week.  I was… not as good as the rest.  Don’t get me wrong, it was a great experience, and it taught me so much about music performance and composition that my classical work became a different beast entirely.  It’s just that I’m pretty uptight. (I really want to use the terms “stiff”, or “white” as my teacher would, but I’m trying to be politically correct here.)  In jazz lab, the main teaching approach was imitation: we learned standard riffs and scales, learned a number of solos done by the masters, and were encouraged to steal, beg and borrow anything that made sense to us.  In short, just like toddlers, we learned through imitation and experimentation.

I feel like we are in tough spot when it comes to voice mashups and real time web applications. It’s such a new place for our industry that we are very few masters to learn from; no standard scales to practice.  For example, I personally think it’s a shame that David Troy isn’t part of the standard emulation toolkit for engineers. David’s voice mashup work is imaginative, ingenious and inspiring at every level.  Companies are pulling this one off too, like IfByPhone and Tropo, showing us how critically valuable voice mashups can be to businesses of every size.  I was disingenuous when I said we have a Telco API problem; we actually have several, and this is just one of them. But it’s one I think I can fix.

As you may know, the last two and a half years have been devoted to this growing this section of our industry. I first dove into it because I feared for my career – the future absolutely belongs to web technologies, economics and approaches. I stayed in it because I realized how much fun it happens to be.  My wife let me stay in it because there’s a ton of dough to be made here. (I’m nothing but honest.)  As I plot out my future, and try to figure out the intersections between what I can do, and what needs to be done, I realized that I can help our industry along by actively enjoying all the great stuff that’s happening, and helping those that are further from it than I to understand it.  Businesses and contributors of all sizes want to participate in our own personal jazz lab, if they just had masters to learn from; stories that they can make their own.

You see, once you get the building blocks, then you can apply your own imagination to your own problems. The world of voice mashups is one of the very small, where small teams can create great applications using a little elbow grease and a credit card.  The main competitive topic, the thing that makes the whole machine run, is imagination.  But imagination comes from building blocks, it comes from learning those basic riffs and scales, it comes from examples you can understand and then extend.

And so, this is what’s next for me.  I can’t honestly think of a better way to help our industry, and a better way to spend a life, than to watch and help innovation come to a hundred year old sleeping beast.  I firmly believe this will help erase at least one of the Telco API problems: the lack of imagination.  Once we’ve got the basics down, look out – great stuff is happening.

So… how do I intend to make this real? Well, lots of ways, and over the next few weeks I’m going to be blathering about it ad-naseum.  But to kick it off, I’m going to lead by example.  A month ago, Jonathan Taylor in his infinite wisdom and kindness, asked me to write a voice mashup to show off Tropo’s new feature set of handling multi-modal communications.  I personally invented a time machine to go back in time ten minutes so that I could say yes before he asked the question.

Available immediately, I am making my voice mashup available to the world as free and open source. The application is designed to allow retail facing businesses to sign customers up onto a mobile mail list, and to send them coupons as text messages. It is written in an easy to extend, simple to deploy Ruby on Rails application, and supports voice calls, SMS calls and instant messaging over any XMPP mechanism.  Over the next week, I’m going to be authoring a series of blog posts describing the application, how it runs and why businesses will want to deploy it.

And once I’m done with teaching you how it works, take it for yourself. Extend it – maybe make it so you can get customer feedback, or send advertisements, or whatever.  Use your imagination – you now have some building blocks.

With a heavy yet hopeful heart, I wanted to let everyone know that I’ve moved on from Jaduka. From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to thank my team while I was there, and to state for the record that our time together was way too short.  While we were together, we did some really fantastic stuff, including announced partnerships with some really good companies, some fantastic lead customers and a market opportunity that could not look brighter.  The Jaduka team goes forward with all my best wishes and hopes; I am confident in their eventual success. I pray that our paths cross, and cross soon.

Since my resignation almost six weeks ago now, I’ve been holed up in my office in Hyannis working diligently to draw out the future – not only for myself, but to where I think the market is going.  I’ve got a few thoughts here, which I wanted to share with you this week.  The most important thing I’m working on is what I’m calling the telephone API problem….

The telephone API problem is sort of like this: an API isn’t a product, an application, and therefore not a business.  In general, there are two approaches to this problem. First, you can take your API and stick it into an existing application. Offerings from BT/Ribbit, Orange, DTAG and Jaduka are perfect for this sort of integration.  The second approach is to introduce a new application that runs on these APIs… except I’m not sure how many of them exist.  Well, let’s just say that I’m pretty sure how many there are, and there aren’t that many.  And that’s the funny thing, as I look at the landscape of our industry, my eyes turn straight towards companies like IfByPhone and VoiceSage – companies that provide a complete solution for CEBP work, companies that are doing quite well, thank you.  Should these guys start to move their offerings onto the telphone APIs of the bigger carriers?  Or, in other words, why would they?  What’s the fundamental advantage to them to run on top of the BT API, instead of their own?

And there’s a bigger problem: without addressing the specific and valuable offerings from the CEBP guys, do we have an opportunity to move the common applications onto the APIs in a way which is beneficial to most in the industry? What does that look like?

And that’s what I’m working on. And some other stuff.

I had the pleasure of speaking at the recently revived VON show in Miami yesterday, and had the greater pleasure of sharing the stage with Voxeo’s Dan York, where we had a conversation about the carriers and applications. I’m not sure if our moderator, Suresh Bhandarkar from Tech Mahindra, was ready for the level of (pick one: anarchy, candor, swearing) that Dan and I can whip up, and whip it up we did.  Alec Saunders was supposed to be on stage as well, but was unfortunately held up in the airport. Good thing, as I’m pretty sure he would have been the match to our gas.

During the conversation, I had yet another frontal lobe failure where the unvarnished truth all comes spilling out of me, this time documented by Khali Henderson:

Howe said he thinks the biggest issue is carriers’ mindset. “They need a lobotomy,” he said. “Carriers feel they need to bring end-to-end service and QoS, etc. But for the reasons we have been talking about they can’t do that anymore. They don’t know the end service. …They have to say, ‘We are going to care up to this point.’ And, after that, they have to stop caring.”

Let me amplify that.  I really and truly believe that a fundamental issue that stands between solving long standing problems with communications technology is simple: the wrong people are trying to do it. For me, the reasons are obvious: you can’t solve problems you can’t see, don’t know about or simply don’t care about. Solving problems is hard, and takes investment and work, and efforts often fail.  The real recipe for solving problems is this: give the people who understand and care about the problem the ability to solve it and get out of the way.  Applications are, in essence, solutions to problems.  Carriers, and by that I mean both the employees that work there and the organization they belong to, fundamentally fail in this respect: they can only understand problems that apply to people in general, not roles in particular.  For instance, a carrier can solve the problem of connecting two people to have a conversation. Every person has this problem; carrier employees are people.  A carrier has a snowball’s chance in hell of solving the problem of auditing a drug trial’s results using phone technology; medical researchers are the only ones who can express and understand the problem to a significant degree.

Hold on, you might say: you can assign a domain expert (a medical researcher) to a development team, can’t you?  Yes, of course you can – but there’s another problem.  Even though problems like this can be solved with communications, they simply don’t represent enough revenue to become interesting to any carrier, anywhere.  Even if there were enough medical researchers to make a decent addressable market, the cost of sales would be wicked (New England Yankee here).  Game over? For carriers interested in making these applications, yes.  For programmers with access to APIs… not at all.  Which is why APIs are so important for solving those small problems using communications – there’s no other economical way of addressing it.

But, why is this important to the carriers?  That’s a simple one too: if you are a person with a problem that can be solved with communications, and if your carrier doesn’t provide an API, you’ll find one that does.  This officially exists today, and a developer like me has several excellent choices for API providers.  If carriers don’t see increased revenue with APIs (and I firmly believe they will), they will see increased churn soon without them.  Either way, APIs are coming to a carrier near you.

The existence of an API provides a challenge to the long held mindset of carriers.  They started, they grew and they exist dedicated to providing services to end customers, both business and consumers, and guaranteeing their proper operation.  When carriers expose the core of their networks through APIs, a very scary proposition to anybody in the carrier, they lose the ability to guarantee QOS, functionality, stability… In short, everything that they used to guarantee.  That’s why they need a lobotomy, because that mind set will forever keep them from providing the tools that problem solvers need.

But hey, as they say, I’d rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy.  Alec, what do you say? Doing anything tonight? Dan and I will be waiting at the bar.