Ruby is about culture. WITA is about deploying telephony architectures where that culture rules.
Technorati Tags: Oigaa, telco mashups, thomas howe
If you were to ask me, I would say the twenty year old software engineer has a distinct advantage over the older telephone guys (such as me) in the realm of innovation. Since the barriers to entry to deploying a service provider have fallen through the floor, the larger challenge is not in complex engineering, but is instead in innovation. The younger engineers are free of the legacy of the PSTN, and many things would occur to an experienced engineer won't to them, and it's not a bad thing. Technorati Tags: Om Malix, Rest, telco mashups, thomas howe
Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) is the first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers. The set of web services APIs allows the movement of money between any two entities, humans or computers. It is built on top of Amazon's reliable and scalable payment infrastructure.
Amazon FPS offers developers unmatched flexibility in how they can structure payment instructions, including standing instructions that can remain in place for multiple transactions. These instructions impose conditions and constraints on money movements and can be set by both senders and receivers of funds. For example, a sender might set a spending limit per week for a particular named recipient. Only that named recipient would be able to withdraw funds and only up to an amount per week equal to the spending limit. A piece of FPS functionality called the GateKeeper automatically enforces the constraints you set with payment instructions. When the sender or receiver is a computer system, payment instructions are set programmatically using APIs. FPS also provides a simple set of user interfaces that humans can use. From the users' point of view, they simply see terms of service and a request to accept those terms.
You can use the extensive feature set of Amazon FPS to conduct a wide variety of transactions under virtually any set of constraints. Key features include:
Send and receive money using credit card, bank account or Amazon Payments balance transfer as payment methods.
Create "Payment Instructions" to define conditions and constraints desired for a given transaction, and programmatically obtain payment authorizations or "tokens" that represent these Payment Instructions from customers.
Execute one-time, multiple, or recurring payments on behalf of customers.
Aggregate micro-transactions into a single larger transaction using Prepaid and Postpaid capabilities.
Build payment applications where you are neither the sender nor the recipient of funds. You can build marketplace applications that enable the movement of money between two third parties.
View account balances, transaction histories, and transaction details on the Amazon Payments web site.
Utilize the Amazon FPS sandbox to build and test applications without using real money or incurring any transaction charges.
Technorati Tags: amazon, telco mashups, thomas howe
Technorati Tags: Ruby, telco mashups, thomas howe
Technorati Tags: Carl Ford, telco mashups, thomas howe, VON
I had a pleasant conversation with Ooma CEO Andrew Frame last night. No, really, it was mostly pleasant. Apparently, of my three blog readers, one of them is an Ooma employee. Hey - big shout out. Hollywood in the house.
As I was being a bit lazy (on a conference call), I caught this post from the latest Apple insider. Mike Abramsky, an analyst, details how he believes the iPhone will mature :Abramsky speculated that upcoming iPhone software updates would include new widgets, peer-to-peer applications (chat, picture messaging, social networking), location-based services, MMS support, home networking, and possibly some integration with Mac OS X Leopard.
"No word however on integration to Microsoft Exchange," he wrote. "It appears to us that Apple, classically, has more pleasant surprises in store for iPhone fans and investors."
After speaking with Joswiak, the analyst also made changes to his predictions for future iPhone models. Although he spoke of "higher resolution" iPhones earlier this month, Abramsky now says he expects Apple to differentiate its iPhone lineup not by features, but by price and memory capacity. The move, he explained, would be similar to how the company grew its iPod lineup, simplifying market positioning.
"This affirms our view of a lower priced ($349-399) iPhone [in the fourth calendar quarter of 2007 or first calendar quarter of 2008], with a higher priced version at higher capacity, to expand its market opportunity," the analyst wrote.
One big difference between the Web world and the telecom world are standards. I don't mean that they use different standards (although they do), they have a different approach the standards entirely. Other than the two worlds of standards represented by the Telco and Web world, there's a third sort of standard - an implementation standard. A "this is how we tend to do this sort of stuff" standard. For instance, there's really no one PSTN standard - it's just how we have put together many other standards to make something that works. We need to establish a standard for Telco Mashups; a set of conventions as to how we tend to write these applications. Since I've been at this, I've noticed a standard pattern I'll call the Web Integrated Telco Architecture - WITA. From where I sit, the an application written to the WITA standard is more scalable, more reliable and easier to write than anything else I have seen put forward for telephony enabled services. As I put together my telco mashup applications, and see companies like Gaboogie and Twitter do the same, I see that we all use approximately the same approach. If we can standardize it, give it a name, we can build the community quicker. Ok Thomas I'm prepared to step up and take that bet from you, easy money in my books.Now, since they've raised a bazillion dollars, there's no reason why they should EVER go out of business, so we'll need a better measure than the doors closing. That aside, I'm up for this bet, partly because I think it will be fun, but partly because I love dinner in New York. I'm betting that ease of use, ease of implementation and ease of uptake will spiral into the ground because it's simply not that valuable to the target customer. I say we pick a number of Ooma subscribers, and let's see if they go over that number. I'm not going to suggest that Ooma get a five million subscriber number, like the iPhone - or even a moderate number, like a million, that Vonage had. Can anyone think of a good metric? Outside of dinner, it's not that I'm hoping for Ooma's demise. In fact, I'd be tickled pink for them to succeed. My breath? Not holding it. I'm just hoping, just like many others, that this is the last effort at a business model that seems to fail nearly every time it's tried.
In 12 months from now I bet that Ooma will still be in business and am prepared to wager a dinner here in New York.
Reply post here to your blog to accept so we have this on public record.
It may be because of some of the consulting projects I've been involved with here at www.Cognation.net but I think Ooma have capture some very interesting aspects;
1/ Ease of use and design (so sorely lacking in a large number of basic projects I see) their ATA is 'the' best ata I've seen, nothing revolutionary but it's just well designed plain and simple.
....and whats dissapointing about this fact is that with all the brains in the voip industry no one else came up with this design until now.
2/ Ease of uptake (keeping original number is such a barrier to entry to skypein and similar - yes I'm looking at you Grand Central).
3/ Ease of implementation in their business model (peer to peer using existing ethernet/internet infrastructure with zero billing - how easy is that).
Like I said easy money and I look forward to accepting your bet.
I'll set up a page on the www.cognation.net website to track developments over the next 12 months.
Recently, the man in the Purple Shirt challenged the community to finally come up with compelling real time communication services. I suppose it was spoken during a moment of frustration for Jeff, as this industry has spent a lot of time and energy making these wonderful IP based technologies, but we are still doing pretty much the same old things with them. For those that do make something that turns him on, he might provide some early-early seed capital, and more importantly, he would provide some visibility and friendship. I applaud Jeff's continuous efforts to move voice technology forward, and as I've said before, I'm here to add my efforts to his. To help developers, Aswath pitched in by providing some pointers to how he'd do it. Well, here's what I have to add to the discussion, and it's a single word.
Oh my, Google is on to me. As I logged into my blog this morning, a large red box stopped me in my tracks. Apparently, Blogger thinks that this log is a spam bog. What's a spam blog?As with many powerful tools, blogging services can be both used and abused. The ease of creating and updating webpages with Blogger has made it particularly prone to a form of behavior known as link spamming. Blogs engaged in this behavior are called spam blogs, and can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site.
Technorati Tags: ooma, telco mashups, thomas howe
I'm often asked to give an examples of a business case for a deep integration of the business process with telephones, so here's a good one for you: Morisky Surveys.
How long have you been saying that carrier based telephony is a race to the bottom? Well, you can stop saying it, as we've arrived. When you purchase an Ooma phone, you never need to pay for your minutes again. You might shell out four Bennys for the privilege, but that's it. Yes, that's it folks - no more paying by the minute ever again. We've pressed the bottom button on the ol' telecom elevator, and the doors have opened. And what I love about this story is how complete the bottoming out is. Andy is always telling me to be as positive as I can in my posts, and when I criticize, to give an example of somebody who's doing it right. A challenge here, my old friend - but I'll try.
I think I should make an honest apology for underestimating Jeff Pulver and his organization. I was wrong.#This is an example extensions.rb file which
# would handle how calls are processed by
# Asterisk. This is all completely valid Ruby
internal {
case extension
when 100...200
callee = User.find_by_extension extension
unless callee.busy? then dial callee
else
voicemail extension
when 111 then exec :meetme
when 888
play weather_report('Dallas, Texas')
when 999
play %w(a-connect-charge-of 22
cents-per-minute will-apply)
sleep 2.seconds
play 'just-kidding-not-upset'
check_voicemail
end
}
Technorati Tags: adhearsion, thomas howe, thomas howe
Is it an iPhone? No, although I bought two of them. It is Dead Rising for the Xbox360? That's what my son wanted for HIS summer toy. I am sitting on pins and needles to get a Chumby. What's a Chumby? It's a mashable toy. A chumby is a Wifi Enabled stuffed-animal, alarm clock, picture frame hybrid thing that you can put next to your bed (or on your desk, in your living room). It's always connected to the Internet, and displays whatever you would like it to from the Web - pictures, news, photos, weather, whatever. When you receive one, you set it up with a playlist of widgets from their web site, and off you go. Chumbys go for less than $200.00 and don't have any monthly fee. Now, I'm sure that at least three of my four kids will want one (they might not get one, but the want will be there), but why do I want one?
It's mashable. The chumby is open, and the fine Chumby folks make the hardware and software specs available to you. I would like to purchase one for each member of my extended family, then make a flickr channel with the family's pictures (from my four brothers and sisters, and their family) so that we could have a distributed family picture slideshow for everybody. How about taking the top 100 songs from each of our iTunes playlists and making the Howe Channel for music? How about using some client of our cell phones with a giant Google Maps where is the Howe Now?
The deeply amazing thing about lightweight programming models is how they radically expand the set of people who can create new services, and therefore the new services they create. I want all my engineering friends to have the Chumby mindset, so we can dream more and be disillusioned less.
technorati tags:thomashowe, mashable, chumby, the, thomas, howe, company
I'm really happy I'm not running Nokia's handset division right now.
Xeni Jardin:Snip from Reuters:
Apple Inc. plans to launch a cheaper version of the iPhone inthe fourth quarter that could be based on the ultra-slim iPod Nano musicplayer, according to a JP Morgan report.LinkKevin Chang, a JP Morgan analyst based in Taiwan, cited people in thesupply channel he did not name and an application with the U.S Patent andTrademark office for his report dated July 8.
Apple filed a patent application document dated July 5 that refers to amultifunctional handheld device with a circular touch pad control, similarto the Nano's scroll wheel.
technorati tags:iphone, thomashowe, thomas, howe, mashup, apple, nokia
There's no denying an exodus is underway. So far, I've seen Pat, Moshe, Alec and a host of other go over to Facebook from LinkeIn, all in the space of a week. Is it just me, or do you find this remarkable? I mean, not only for the abruptness of it, or the lemming like nature by which it's happening, but for what it says about Web 2.0 principles?The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service.And when I read it, I remembered thinking : "Oh yes, that's part of the reason social networking is such an excellent idea. Since there's a bunch of information that exists between contacts, not simply IN the contact, there's real value in owning the data. " For instance, the service can tell you when a classmate joins the service, so that you can be connected.
What am I doing these days?
A vastly underused component of communications applications, especially as it relates to business communications, is SMS or text messages. Text messages have many unique practical advantages that become valuable in the real world of the mobile workforce. First, and perhaps foremost, text messages work nearly everywhere. When signals are too low for a voice call, text messages are your best bet, even better than e-mails which require a stable data connection. Text messages are a store and forward technology, so workers can read them when they are available. Text messages can be read without disturbing those around you. Text messages are the best technology for communicating detailed, but short, information such as part numbers or other phone numbers, because the recipient is not required to grab a pen to write it down on a piece of paper, which might get lost. The number is safe on the phone, and very hard to lose. The downsides are few - 168 characters per message - but surmountable.
The more I think about Google's acquisition of Grand Central, the more I see it as a watershed moment in telephony. Unlike Yahoo!, AOL and nearly every other large telephony concern, Google now supports, at the same time, open Internet standards and connections to the PSTN. This is truly valuable, and unique, and should be celebrated.
Jott is a true diamond in the rough. 
In 1995, Yukihiro Mastsumoto released the first version of a new computing language called "Ruby" to the outside world. Ruby was grounbreaking not in terms of technology per se, but in terms of audience. Previous to Ruby, programming languages had distinct directions and purposes aimed at computers. C was designed to write operating systems for computers, and was small and light. Fortran was excellent at pushing the details of equations into a procedural language. Java can execute anywhere. Ruby was optimized not for computers, but for people. In Yukihiro's words :Often people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. They think, "By doing this, the machine will run faster. By doing this, the machine will run more effectively. By doing this, the machine will something something something." They are focusing on machines. But in fact we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines. We are the masters. They are the slaves.Ruby is an optimized language that allows programmers to write code, really really fast. Ruby on Rails is a framework for writing database backed web sites, really really fast. Using Ruby on Rails, you can literally make a database backed blogging web site in fifteen minutes, including complete access to your data model : create, read, update and delete (CRUD) with complete validation. Don't believe me? See for yourself. Using Ruby on Rails, you can create a web site that will allow you to browse Flickr sets in five minutes, using Ajax. Don't believe me? See for yourself. Is Ruby hard to learn? No, it's actually a joy. It's so easy, why don't you spin it up in your browser and take ten minutes to learn some.
