Thomas Howe Log

eComm 2008 - The Stars Come Out

2008-03-14T11:53:00.001-05:00

I've had the ridiculous pleasure of sitting in the audience at the eComm show this week. I'm trying to write some mashup software for the show next week (more about that soon), but I just can't seem to keep my head down in my laptop when people like this keep distracting me:

Martin Geddes: For those in the the know, Martin is possibly the most insightful analyst in the Telco 2.0 space. Martin's talk about the future of carriers was excellent, and an excellent preview to his conference next month in England. Martin's invited me to speak, and I get the distinct sense that I better have my A game on. Martin's talk focused on a new, two-sided business model for the carriers of the future, where the fundamental roles of carriers was akin to a logistics company.

Dean Bubbly : Dean's another analyst, but he eats, sleeps and breathes wireless. Dean's talks and analysis on the current and future wireless markets made me feel like I had a lot to learn. My sense was, I wasn't alone. Dean's analysis of Rich Miner's talk is actually better than hearing the original talk, which in itself was quite good.

Dr. Dawn Nafus : What a wonderful talk from this Intel researcher. Dawn's presentation was full of her results from real-world presence and context research, all of which I found completely fascinating. My favorite? Apparently, our conventional wisdom of when people are busy is exactly wrong. We are more likely to be interrupted when we are at the computer or on some other activity... not less.

Irv Shapiro : Irv's company, ifbyphone, looks to me like the phone mashup service provider that's closest to getting it. His presentation was right on, his message clear, and the ifbyphone business model looks like it might be a winner. Pay attention to them.

Simonie Wilson: Simonie Wilson brought a much needed injection of voice design rationality to our discussion. A great example of how the technology we need exists... if we were to just design it in the right way.

And I haven't even the time to talk about Jonathan Christiensen from Skype, Marc Smith from Microsoft, Blaine Cook from Twitter, Nitzan Shaer from Mobivox or Mark Rolston from Frog Design, because today's completely full of more people to distract me.

I'm really screwed.

Moving On Up

2007-08-27T07:11:00.000-05:00

Well, the time has come to move the blog off of Google, and on to our new site at The Thomas Howe Company. Pat and I will be posting to our blog there, and we're just going to let this one mellow with age. (I'm going to imagine that, in this allegory, I'm George because I'm shorter than Pat. Pat can be Weezie.)

See you on the other side.

Brian Mahoney and Jon Arnold Podcast: IPTV

2007-08-22T05:45:00.001-05:00

When you have a chance, check out Jon and Brian's Podcast on PulverMedia. If you are basically unfamiliar with the IPTV market, this is an excellent introduction by one of the best marketing guys out there. Brian and I worked together at Netcentrex, and now he is the Vice President of Marketing for Espial, a leading vendor of IPTV middle-ware that recently went public. I think my days of PictureTel cured me of video, so I'm not sure I'm moving into IPTV anytime soon, but if you want to see good business cases for small, niched applications and programming, I think the IPTV market has them in spades.

Ruby and The Role of Culture in Development

2007-08-21T07:20:00.001-05:00

In the Web Integrated Telephony Architecture, I identified the middle piece as being a Ruby on Rails application. It accepts data from the User Interface (commonly implemented as Voice XML forms), and then drives action through Web Services, and for WITA, telephony web services. As I thought about this component, there are actually a number of technology choices. This could certainly be a Java component, as the functionality would be equivalent. You could argue about speed (as Java does run faster), and you could argue about installed base (Java is much more prevalent in the carrier and enterprise). Each is fair, each has technical advantages over Ruby.

The reason why I advocate Ruby is straightforward : it's what the cutting edge Web developers use. When I coined the term WITA, I wanted to emphasize that this was a Web integrated architecture - not an IP integrated architecture. By integration, I mean integration of culture - the way that the community approaches, understands and tackles problems. In order for telephony to spiral into the much larger market of the Web, and therefore into the Enterprise, it needs to be introduced into the culture of Web development. Ruby is the prime ambassador for this, especially on the cutting edge of development.

This will, undoubtedly, cause major headaches for telecom engineers, who by-and-large have no experience with Ruby. (Maybe this is the Karmic payback, as the Ruby developers have no experience with phones). However, when the Web mindset is adopted and understood, then Ruby becomes a natural language for its implementation and development. In time, it may become the lingua franca of Web development; certainly Web development over time will become the definition of programming and architecture. The successful implementation of WITA applications will require the adoption of this mindset. Personally, I have pushed myself down the Ruby road primarily for culture - so that I can learn Web development in it's native tongue.

I feel there is no point where this is clearer to me than when I consider IMS. As an architecture, IMS is clearly the son of the companies that advocate it: big vendors making big equipment for big carriers with big budgets. It is a product of the culture of carrier based telecom development. The essential issue is that IMS, although making claims to enable the deployment of innovative services, makes the implementation of new applications nearly impossible because of culture. It is unreasonable to think that development of high value, niche applications is served by ever larger architectures. It is implausible to think that, with a ratio of nearly ten Web developers to one telecom developer, that the web developers will toss Ruby for P-SCSFs and HLRs. I recall a conversation with Henry Sinnreich a few years ago, where he said that he loved SBCs, as they hastened the demise of carriers because they were wasting their money purchasing them, instead of deploying pure SIP networks. I wonder if IMS has sent him into some sort of Nirvana.

Ruby is about culture. WITA is about deploying telephony architectures where that culture rules.

The Depressing Mashup of the Week

2007-08-20T14:26:00.001-05:00

Apparently, the one thing you don't want to be in LA is a male Hispanic on Sunday. Avoid that, if you can. Especially if there's a gun around.

I love my hometown on Cape Cod, and (I can't believe I'm saying this) when I see things like this, I wish it could hold more people.

Mashup Competitions (or Telephony Finds it's Tail)

2007-08-20T08:04:00.001-05:00

Well, the ten thousand dollar VoxBone competition is now over, and Oigaa from VozTelecom took first prize. Oigaa is a web based telephony service targeted towards small and medium businesses, much like Flat Planet Phone Company. My congratulations go out to them; it is an example of a service that simply could not have existed five years ago. I was considering entering the VoxBone contest, but I know I have the greatest success in my projects when they come from the heart. Personally, I like VoxBone's API for allocating PSTN numbers I can forward anywhere, but every unique and commercially useful idea I had was a bit purient. My Mom might read my blog one day, and I don't think I ought to get myself in that situation. Damn - maybe I just did.

As I'll reveal soon, the mashup contest fad is coming to our neck of the woods too. Have you ever stopped to ask why there are mashup competitions, but not VoIP design competitions? Sure, on the trade show floor they have some "best of shows", but we all know how that game is played. You don't see designs done just for competition in telecom, but you do in the Web / Mashup world. As an example, the 2006 Mashup camp mashup I liked was the blinking Google pin. Some geek took a blinker pin from the Google booth at a trade show, attached it to the serial port of his laptop, used the Google Mail API to check for mail, then it blinks the "G" when new mail arrives. So geeky. But why compete with mashups?

The knee jerk answer is: because you can. Mashups are pretty simple to put together, but more so, you can do pretty creative and impressive things with them. Mashups are more about imagination than shear technological prowess. Designing even the simplest of VoIP devices (say a phone) requires an impressive amount of time and money, much more than the typical engineer can afford. (Never mind skill set.) More so, designing even the simplest of VoIP devices for a competition is more than most companies wish to spend in time and money. Therefore, the marketing kick or product risk doesn't make sense for traditional services, but not so for mashups.

The business answer is: because every Internet technology has a long tail. Amazon proves that products have a long tail. iTunes proves that music has a long tail. EBay proves that junk has a long tail. Mashups prove that Web services have long tails. Telco Mashups prove that telephony services have long tails. And that's stunning, because it means that we finally have an environment in which we can create new services. After all our efforts since the divestiture, it comes down to the simple fact that single greatest reason that new services often fail is not because people don't want them, but they were too expensive to develop and deploy for the masses. When they are inexpensive enough so that you can make one just for yourself, then people develop them just for themselves, or rather, just for mashup competitions. Just like iPTV, if you can make a video in your house that ten thousand people want to see, it makes complete sense to make it. NBC needs what, a million viewers to break even? If you have ten thousand people who will pay ten bucks a month for your find-me-based-on-my-facebook-whatever service, you and your two technicians will make a living. In the grand scheme, a good one too. Mashup competitions are, for me, prima facie evidence that Telephony has finally found its tail.

Technorati Tags: Oigaa, telco mashups, thomas howe

Thank you for some serious link-love

2007-08-15T11:52:00.001-05:00

Wow - thanks to all of you out there for some serious link love: Ken Camp's Post, Jon Arnold's Post, Solomon Ige's Post, and Phone Boy's. As I told Ken, I sometimes feel like I'm designing in a cave, and never really know if anyone else cares. I absolutely love what I do for a living (and I know some of my clients are hoping I'm going to say that I would do it for free), but it's a pleasure to see someone else cares, too. Thanks.

What's even better, though, is that these bloggers have readers, and at least some of those readers are just like me : telephony guys trying to create cool things that people will use. Each of these guys recognizes that telephony engineers have a new tool in the box : mashups. And hopefully, because of this sort of light weight programming model (I call it the anti-IMS), the wider world of engineers have a new tool in THEIR box : telephony. Telephony was once heavy weight, now it's light weight. Telephony used to be capital intensive, now it's pay-as-you-go. Telephony integration used to mean that enterprises would buy telephony equipment and integrate it, now enterprises can integrate with hosted, online solutions. Telephony mashups provide the right sort of light weight programming models that finally lower the barrier to integrating telephony with applications that will allow all engineers, not just us deep telephony geeks, to include telephony in the application.

Sure, there are a bunch of tools in our tool box, but for me, mashups are a keeper.

Fall VON Innovator's Track

2007-08-15T10:49:00.001-05:00

Well, now that the programmable web ball is rolling, we're getting ready for the tradeshow season. A big part of that for us is going to be in our hometown at this year's Fall VON in Boston (Wait a second. Does that mean we have to buy the beer?) Carl Ford, a pretty impressive bunch of telephony guys and I have been working on a new addition to the VON show floor : the innovator's track. The innovator's track is roughly based on an unconference, and is focused on cutting edge telephony innovations. Our basic model is to have eight sessions, and we're sort of looking at the following topics :

Rapid Apps on Rails:
A discussion about the impact of Ruby on Rails, Ajax and other tools that aid the developer in building new services rapidly and how combined with Amazon and Level services represent a new era in service deployments.

Enterprise 2.X
This is a discussion that looks at how the Enterprises are finally gaining the ability to provide services across a network and how it changes service models.

Social Networking
According to Cisco its working. Social networks are eating up the bandwidth and the Internet is again growing. What makes these services compelling and who is going to gain from these changes.

The New Age of Communication
We have talked about the concept of these new services now lets look at some of them and lets talk about why this is the perfect time to
offer services in the marketplace. Is the price of rollout so low that adoption can be small and niche, or do we all need massive viral adoption?

New Services with old lines
Single Number is thing of the past, now we have disposable numbers and with the ILECs having to watch the Cable companies expand into their space the time may be ripe for these kind of services. Best of all by extracting the person from the number the service is much more intriquing.

As you might notice, there's only five topics here. That's where you come in. Not only are we looking for audience participation during these five sessions, but we need to hear what you want hear at the show. Do you have an idea for a topic that's not here? What problem are you trying to solve? Something you really need to learn? Spit it here, and we'll talk about it there. Bring your two feet with you, participate, and let's make this worth more than our time.

The Thomas Howe Company Now In Partnership with Programmable Web

2007-08-14T08:07:00.001-05:00

Well, the day is here - today we announce our partnership with ProgrammableWeb, the leading go-to place for mashup developers. I met John Musser at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 show this March, and we've become fast friends and partners. John's site is invaluable to everyone in the mashup community, and all of us at the office are flattered and excited to be part of that family. We see our position in the market as ambassadors of telephony to the larger Web community, and as ambassadors of the Web world into the telephony market. ProgrammableWeb is the capital for mashup developers, and now telephony has established an embassy.

If you haven't visited ProgrammableWeb (which is to say, you haven't written a mashup or web services based application), here's some places you ought to look at real quick:

Let's say you want to see what APIs are out there to write your application with. Here's a list of all of them.
Sure there are five hundred APIs, but which are the popular ones? Here's a great twist - mouse over the matrix, so you can drill down and see all the advertising mashups written using the Google AdWords API.
What's a mashup? You can check out the two thousand, two hundred and twenty listed here.
Do you think mashups are simply cool sites that have no business value? Check out the markets section of the site for another opinion. That's where we live, next to shopping and mapping.

So, take a spin and check out the site: you'll be amazed at how much momentum this market has already. If you haven't seen it, I attached the press release below:

THOMAS HOWE COMPANY NOW IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PROGRAMMABLEWEB
Award-winning consulting firm and application developer shares business communications solutions with ProgrammableWeb's online mashup community

W. BARNSTABLE, Mass., and SEATTLE - Aug. 14, 2007 - The Thomas Howe Company, a leading designer and developer of interactive voice and data solutions for businesses, has been named as a premium content partner for ProgrammableWeb, the leading web site for mashups, APIs (application programming interfaces) and the new "Web as Platform" approach to site development.

As a content partner, The Thomas Howe Company is providing expertise in the form of communications mashups, original articles and other materials that are posted in a new channel of ProgrammableWeb.com under the "Mobile/Telephony" section. The content will focus on telephony and mobile web services, APIs and mashups.

"Thomas Howe and team have an entrepreneur's knack for hunting down business-oriented APIs and an engineer's skill for putting them together," said John Musser, founder of ProgrammableWeb.

Howe was the first-place winner of the recent telephony mashup contest sponsored by O'Reilly Media and data-services provider StrikeIron. His entry, "After Hours Doctor's Office," transcribes office voicemails left by patients for doctors into text and then sends them via SMS to the doctor. A case study of this mashup is one of the items posted in the new section of ProgrammableWeb.

"At The Thomas Howe Company, we're interested in building real-time communications systems that help our clients save money while also increasing the quality of service for their customers," said Howe. "I hope that by sharing the information we have found useful, along with details of our own experiences, it will drive further creative thinking within the growing mashup community."

To view content from The Thomas Howe Company on ProgrammableWeb, visit www.programmableweb.com/telephony.

API of the Week : DBpedia API

2007-08-10T08:52:00.000-05:00

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.

For the benefit of everyone who actually remembers when Carter was president, I bring you the API of the week : DBPedia. It's not in any way a telephony API, and that's my point. A large number of innovative applications that use telephony will include APIs that have NOTHING to do with telephony. The DBPedia API is an effort to put a Web Services API on top of the Internet's encylopedia. With it, you can query Wikipedia from your application for structured answers such as "Tell me all of the authors born in Canada during 1954". Essentially, it allows you to access all of Wikipedia's 1.6 million articles from your application, whatever that application might be. You can learn more about it on the their site.

What does this have to do with telephony? Nothing. What does this have to do with next generation applications? Everything. Applications that use the Internet as the platform use APIs from a large number of sources, and by and large, these APIs are not telephony. However, nearly every time a telephony API is used, an API such as GoogleMaps, Amazon SQS or DBPedia will be used right alongside it. As a developer in this market, it makes a lot of sense for you to get to know your neighbors for two reasons. First, the more you can make your API play well with others, the faster the adoption of it will be. Secondly, the more you can understand your customers, their problems and how they need your part for their solution, the better you can make your API for them. I'm supposing this means that you need to get familiar with APIs like this.

Which leads me back to my original statement. The twenty-something-don't-know-or-care-about-SS7 engineer will sit down and design their version of the hot-or-not site one day, and use a whole bunch of crazy APIs to put together the application. Then, they will go have a beer, come back, and say "You know, it would be really cool if you could just call the person you want to hook up with. Is there an API for that?" They won't even consider for a minute the words "termination", "LATA" or "CALEA". They're just writing an application. They need an API for some function, and it will take a few minutes to integrate it into their application. And, there are many, many more of these guys than all the telecom engineers that have ever, and will ever, exist.

So, I bring you the DBPedia API, as an example of the hundreds of APIs that will live in the same neighborhood as the Telecom APIs. Go check it out; let your imagination run. And one day, when a web guy surfs for a telecom API, I hope it's your API they choose.

VoIP's Top Techies

2007-08-08T16:19:00.000-05:00

As I was having a conversation with a friend, I mentioned that I felt really lucky to have worked with some of the best guys in the business. He asked me who they were, and why, and it triggered something for me. In our industry, as in most, you know the company's names, and maybe you might have heard of the CEOs, but do you ever really hear of the great engineers behind the scenes? No, probably not. So, in honor of the geeks you might not have heard of, here's Tom's list of Gods of VoIP Engineering. The criterion? First, I had to actually work with you(or at least had a meaningful conversation, digital or otherwise) at some point. For instance, Richard Shockey is well known and respected, but I never had a chance to work with him. Rosenberg, too. Yet. Secondly, I tried to pick complete no brainers - practically everybody I know respects these people. Thirdly, my main criterion is that of envy : these are people who's skills I not only admire, but deeply covet. These are the folks who are my teachers, and whom I think are worthy of your respect as well. Sort of my fantasy geek-ball team. If you see one of their resume's cross your desk, jump. Finally, I'm trying to keep the list short, so if your name ISN'T on this list, I reserve the right to amend it at a later date, don't hate me, still love you, all that stuff.

That said, my personal list of geek gods includes :

Henning - One of the three writers of SIP, currently a Columbia Professor. (Just like Madonna, Sting and Bono, Mr. Schulzrinne needs only one name)
Doug Tucker - CTO of Ubiquity, and in my opinion, the whole and complete package. He even took Kung Fu back in the day. Gotta love the dangerous geeks.
Mark Reid - Editor of H.245, big shot at NMS and a perfect technical manager.
Brough Turner - Long time CTO of NMS, long time leader, long time VON show dancer.
Eric Burger - Interim CTO of BEA, founder of Snowshore and instantly credible in any room.
Daniel Biage - CTO of Versatel Networks, old school engineering at it's finest. Go to Quebec to learn how to deeply care about what you do.
Jeff Bernstein - Founder of 2Wire and PictureTel, really nice, really smart. Really nice, too. God is he smart.
Dan Petrie - Independent Consultant and smart guy at PingTel, among the first to "get it"
Ed Bassart - Founder of ShoreTel, been at it since the beginning, and deeply smart.

I'm sure there are other's I've missed (I might blog this again). Who's on your list? Give'm some love.

GigaOm says it's time to REST

2007-08-07T09:05:00.001-05:00

I know that many of my readers are telco guys, so you might not even know the difference between SOAP based web services and REST. I'll make it easier for you... In the parallel universe of SOA, SOAP is like H.323 - big, clunky, slow but complete. REST is like SIP - fast, light, scalable and composable, but incomplete. Anne from GigaOm just wrote a great article declaring a winner, and why.

Technorati Tags: Om Malix, Rest, telco mashups, thomas howe

API of the Week : Amazon Flexible Payments Service

2007-08-07T08:37:00.001-05:00

In the "Internet as platform" game, the big gorilla isn't Google - it's Amazon. Amazon announced the private beta of their payment service called Amazon Flexible Payments Service (AFPS), filling out a complete platform for deploying highly scalable, robust and feature complete web applications.

From their site :

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

WITA : Scripting Front End

2007-08-06T09:22:00.001-05:00

Let's take a look at each of the three major parts of a Web Integrated Telephony Architecture (WITA) in depth. WITA contains three basic architecture blocks : a voice scripting front end, a Ruby on Rails back end, and a collection of web services to implement telephony applications. Today, I want to talk about the scripting front end.

Summary
The scripting front end provides the user interface for the user. User interfaces may be implemented through traditional web applications or desktop clients, but WITA applications typically use as a primary interface a voice scripting language such as VoiceXML. The VoiceXML script acts exactly as a web site, but instead of filling in forms, you use your voice to fill in forms to be posted to the web site. Instead of reading web pages produced by the site, the VoiceXML script will read the results back to you. VoiceXML scripts can be localized as web pages do, and can speak the native language of the caller. Different views into the application can be rendered to the user by either a voice menu choice (analogous to web site navigation) or through different dial in numbers or SIP addresses (analogous to using different URLs). In general, the scripting front end doesn't provide much in the way of call control, as the telephony features are implemented using the web services back end.

Interfaces

Interfaces to the user through any telephony device, either from the PSTN to SIP. Can use natural language recognition, DTMF detection, or some combination of both.
Interfaces to the Web server back end (typically implemented using Ruby on Rails). Fetches VoiceXML forms based on inbound dialing information. Presents data to user as provided by Web server back end. Collects data from user as a form and uses HTTP POST to save on server or to cause some action.

Scaling Concerns
From a human to scripting standpoint, the scripting front end scales linearly with use. You need as many ports of inbound scripting as you have inbound callers. It is unimportant if each of the scripting ports come from a common source, as the scripts have no interaction with each other. Thus, you can use an arbitrarily large number of scripting engines (either hosted or platform) without any architectural impact to the application. Voice is not typically passed from the VoiceXML platform into the larger Internet, so quality of service issues are not typically important at this level. From a scripting to Web server standpoint, common and well known Internet scaling techniques of load balancing, server replication through DNS, etc, are fully available to the system engineer. No additional nor unique requirements are placed on the Web server farm in the WITA architecture.

In terms of business scaling, the WITA front end may be completely functional using a hosted provider (see below) at only a dime or so a minute of use. These hosted providers will be happy to scale with your application, or you can choose to deploy with a platform solution. Platform solutions typically make sense only for large or sensitive installations.

Suppliers
There are many hosted suppliers of voice scripting. My favorite happens to be Voxeo, because they have excellent service, they are well adopted by larger corporations in the US, they are price competitive and I happen to like those guys. There are a few other good choices as well, including BeVocal, TellMe and Angel.com.

For large corporations, there are a number of good options for platform solutions such as Convedia (now Radysis), Snowshore (now Cantata) and Voxeo (another reason I like them). In large measure, VoiceXML scripts are pretty portable, and only small code changes should be required when moving from hosted solutions to platform solutions.

Ruby on Rails Screencasts

2007-08-03T09:58:00.001-05:00

If there was a moment for me where the light went on for Telco mashups, it's when I saw the Ruby on Rails Screncasts. They are a bit goofy, but if you actually sit through one, and realize what you are seeing - it's earth shattering. It's earth shattering especially when you realize that the other parts of telephony applications, such as scripting front ends, and web services back ends, have very similar productivity gains associated with them. Just check these out... especially the Flickr screen cast. Be careful that you don't drool.

Technorati Tags: Ruby, telco mashups, thomas howe

Getting Ready for the VON Show

2007-08-03T09:52:00.001-05:00

Pat and I had a wonderful surprise yesterday, when Carl Ford and Bill Kelley stopped by for lunch. I'm always talking about how "Brigadoon-ish" I think the VON show is, and it was actually pretty nice to have a friend from the show come to my hometown on Cape Cod for a meeting. I suppose the water view doesn't hurt, either.

As I've said in the past, instead of complaining, I'm committed to helping out at this year's VON show, and as part of that, I'm taking a pretty active role in the "Unconference" potion of VON. More about that later, but as part of that, Carl and I thought that a real cool thing to do was to show the audience, in real time, how much the new web technologies change the game for new services development. Sometimes, you just gotta see it. So, we're going to show you.

I'm planning a two hour session where we are going to develop, from scratch, an WITA (Web Integrated Telephony Architecture) service from scratch, in front of the audience. Three of us are going to work together on each of the major pieces : a scripting front end, a Ruby on Rails framework and a number of web services below us. As we work, we'll work out something were either the developer is explaining it as he goes, or another talks as he works. At the end, it will be an application that not only works, but can scale as high as you want it to - just like a web site.

The application? I like this one : my mother's memory is failing her. I'd like a reminder service that will call her cell phone with a voice message sometime in the future. For instance, you call a phone number, give your Mom's phone number, a voice message, and a time when you want it delivered. Maybe somebody will have another idea that's better, but that's what I got.

For you, if you don't really know how Telco mashups work, or what they look like, or why they are so revolutionary, come and join us. Grab a beer, kick off your shoes, and watch.

Technorati Tags: Carl Ford, telco mashups, thomas howe, VON

Oooma Tech Update

2007-08-01T08:38:00.000-05:00

Alec Saunders did a fantastic job digging into some of the tech issues in this entry his blog.
Alec, I thought YOU were the marketing guy and I was the engineer. Good job, old man.

An example of a good Ooma feature!

2007-08-01T06:22:00.000-05:00

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.

So, I'm not going to go into too much depth here about our conversation. Andrew promised me my own Ooma box to play with, and I'll give you an honest appraisal of it when it arrives. We couldn't talk long (as my cell phone kept dying), but I frankly didn't hear anything from Andrew that was earth shattering from a business perspective. I hope that Andrew's sudden "I have to go" response to "Tell me why your customer acquisition costs will be substantially less than Vonage's" was about schedule, and not about an uncomfortable question. We've planned to speak again after the box arrives, and I'll tell you how that goes.

No, what I want to mention is a good Ooma feature. According to Andrew, one Ooma feature is that when you are on the phone, if another call comes in, the other phones in the house ring. I love that feature - and I'll tell you why. It's a feature that doesn't require customer education, and doesn't require the customer to change his habits : the two killers of value added services. And, as Andrew rightly states, it works almost by surprise, which might be the best way that consumers learn about their product.

The second reason why I love that feature is because I'm getting excited to see some good engineering. What I mean is, I can't wait to see how they pulled that one off without causing serious head-aches for the installers. Near as I can tell, you need to drive each wired phone in the house independently to pull this off. If you had a multi-line wireless phone driving your house, it would be pretty easy, I suppose, but how many people have that? Typically, don't those Comcast installers cut the main line into the house, and then drive all the phones from their set top box? I don't think most houses have a system where all the wired phones go to the same place in the house, then are bridged together. Andrew told me these guys are the best in the business. I am truly excited to see how good their product is, and how innovative their solutions to problems like this will be.

iPhone Marketing

2007-07-31T14:24:00.000-05:00

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.

I personally find this fascinating, as Apple plans to differentiate the iPhone not by features, but by price and performance. If you recall, for most of era of competitive phone service, market success was found only through variations in price, as the basic service was essentially feature complete, and value added services had benefits which were only marginally valuable. Could it be that Apple has already caught on to what took telecom 100 years to understand?

WITA : An Architecture Standard for Telco Mashups

2007-07-30T06:54:00.000-05:00

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.

The telco world has organizations such as the ITU and ANSI; indispensable tools in creating standards that telephony vendors need to design their equipment. An ITU standard takes several years to ratify and formalize, and a typical vendor cycle of development lasts around eighteen months. The Internet community runs off of the IETF, and creates nearly all the web standards used in networking, such as TCP, HTTP and FTP. The IETF is a bit different than the ITU, in that the IETF documents stuff that's already working, so that the standards lag the availability of a product. IETF standards take much less time to appear as drafts, and Internet application development lasts three to six months.

Another sort of standard is an architecture standard. Strictly speaking, IMS is an architecture standard, not an implementation standard. In the Web world, AJAX is an architecture (or web development technique) that uses Asynchronous Java and XML to make rich, interactive web sites. Ajax is a standard because that's how people normally them together - there is no committee and there are no plenary sessions. What is the telco mashup standard? What is an application that uses WITA? I'll define it today, and we can delve into it over the next week. I use WITA for nearly all my telephony mashups, and I've seen many others do the same.

Web Integrated Telco Architectures use the following standard components:

Voice XML: WITA uses VXML to handle inbound interactions with human beings, and most outbound voice messaging applications use VoiceXML to make those messages rich an interesting. The VXML scripts are delivered by a web services application, and post the inputs the collect to a web services application.
Ruby on Rails : WITA uses Ruby on Rails to implement the web services application. It's responsible for putting the logic on top of the database, and for rendering views to the user in the form of VxML scripts, Web Services APIs and graphically intensive web pages.
Telco Web Services : WITA uses telco web services to deliver telephony features such as outbound messaging, conference calling, click to dial and SMS messaging. These web services are called from the Ruby on Rails frame work, and provide the scaling and reliability components of the architecture.

VxML + Rails + Telco Web Services == WITA.

The Game's Afoot

2007-07-25T09:07:00.000-05:00

A massive shout-out to my man Dean at Cognation, who has taken up my recent challenge about the future success (or lack thereof) of Ooma. From his recent comment :

Ok Thomas I'm prepared to step up and take that bet from you, easy money in my books.

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.

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.

Paprika

2007-07-25T06:02:00.001-05:00

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.

Paprika

To use voice in a compelling way, recognize that voice is a spice, not a main ingredient. Voice and other real time communications brings out the flavor in some other application, but it isn't the star. A compelling application starts with solving a real customer problem, and unless your customer happens to be a telco, carrying voice probably isn't the issue. The issue is something else. Take any vertical and check to see if I'm right. Here's a classic example: entertainment. American Idol had an innovative idea, which was to make a TV show where the people emotionally enroll in the outcome. If you think about it, it's just like sports: people watch because they care about their team. But how did they deeply involve the audience? They made them vote. How did they make it compelling and unique? They made them vote using text messages, which made the process unique and pandered to their core, young audience in one fell swoop. Brilliant. Compelling.

Why do we have such a voice services focus? My bet is that telephony has been so hard, for so long, that the people involved only know the telecom industry. We don't know the problems faced in other verticals because we've been so focused on the problems in ours. I bet you that if you spent just the smallest amount of time looking at transportation, or financial services or education, you'd find all sorts of places you could sprinkle basic communications into the mix to make it more delicious. Because we haven't done that, Jeff's food is bland and boring. He deserves better, you deserve better, and most importantly, customers deserve better.

Apparently, I'm irrelevant, repetitive and nonsensical

2007-07-25T05:54:00.000-05:00

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.

Shoot. You know you're in trouble when even a Google robot thinks that your posts are irrelevant, repetitive or nonsensical. Did I say that they were irrelevant, repetitive or nonsensical?

Aspirin or Penicillin?

2007-07-23T08:07:00.001-05:00

Is your business selling aspirin or penicillin?

Is it aspirin? Does your customer have a headache, and if he would just take your product/service, he'd get rid of it? Does your customer have achy muscles, and a few pills would put him at ease? Or is it penicillin? Does your customer have a life threatening illness? Is he more than uncomfortable, more than achy? Is he truly sick, and in trouble? Without your product, how in trouble is he? I'm sure it is obvious by now, you want to sell the anti-biotic, not the analgesic. If you avoid taking aspirin, you can get through the day. It's optional. If you avoid taking your penicillin, you might not have another day.

So, let's take that filter against today's whipping boy, Ooma. Is there any customer in the world to whom Ooma will be penicillin? (Not from where I sit.) And if so, would the medicine be generic? (Yup).

Ok - that's the easy part. Why is this so? I firmly believe that Ooma is aspirin because they have a horizontal product in an unregulated space, and it's really hard to differentiate the service to create any sort of brand loyalty. Outside of branding, horizontal products and services very, very rarely have points of competitive advantage other than price. In an unregulated space, businesses and consumers have choice. Although every business or home needs phones, they don't need Ooma phones. In phones, it's hard to make a brand. Apple is going to have the best shot of anybody, ever, of doing this, and the jury is still out.
Simply put, Ooma, and every company like it, sells aspirin, because it's an aspirin market. The basic issue with Ooma, and the cap on their success, isn't the team, or funding, or even their feature set. The basic issue is in the market they pursue.

Is your business selling aspirin or penicillin? Here's a hint - the first step is to find the market where the customers have a fever.

Technorati Tags: ooma, telco mashups, thomas howe

Enterprise Telephony Business Case : Morisky Surveys

2007-07-20T11:29:00.000-05:00

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.

Morisky surveys ask four questions that can determine, with fairly high accuracy, a patient's probability of adhering to a course of drug treatment. In other words, the survey can tell the doctor what the likely hood is that you'll finish your bottle of pills, take your shots, etc. The health impact to patients, and to the health care companies that provide his care, of NOT sticking to the plan can be critical. For instance, in people with diabetes, tight blood glucose control is correlated to reduced complications, and control is affected by medication adherence (Medication Adherence, Journal of Diabetes Nursing, Feb 2005). 26.9% of people with Type 2 diabetes have poor medication adherence. 20% of the elderly in the United States have this form of chronic illness. Both patients and health care companies have vested interests in reducing the complications from the disease, which can be reduced through compliance. Those patients that may not comply with the course of treatment can be identified using the four question Morisky survey.

In comes mashup telephony, which can use elements such as Voice XML platforms and services, database driven web sites and social networking features to identify which patients are likely to need extra help with their medication. Patients can be called with the survey to determine which ones need a visiting nurse, reducing costs for the HMO (which can be monetized) and increasing quality of life for the patient. This drives the financial model for the business case.

The fact that it's a mashup architecture makes it practical to implement on many fronts. First, the costs of demonstrations are amazingly low, with the only costs of demonstration being the engineering time to create the survey (a week, at most), the costs of hosting ($100.00 a month) and the incremental cost of making the calls (0.10 to 0.25 cents per minute). Secondly, since the demonstration architecture is identical to the deployment architecture, it scales very nicely. Since it uses a web services architecture, integration into the current enterprise back end is straightforward and achievable with internal staff or external consultants.

The Morisky Survey is only one of about ten such integrations that we at my company have found in the past three months, and that's only counting health care. Since the barriers to entry in terms of up-front investment and ongoing costs to implementing telephony solutions have fallen so far, these ideas are now practical, and I hope one day, wide spread.

Application of the Week: Ooma -Yes! We've hit the bottom!

2007-07-19T06:47:00.001-05:00

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.

Technical : C. No, C-. I wonder if anyone told the investors that the Chinese could produce the exact same phone for fifty bucks, or that it simply isn't that hard to write a peer-to-peer VoIP network. Of course, if Ooma makes any connection to the PSTN (such as DIDs), Ooma has to pay for that somehow, so they have an incremental cost for each customer, no matter how peerish they get. If they don't, why would you make a bet on yet ANOTHER walled garden? Maybe the phone rocks, but so did PingTel's. And you know how they turned out. Let's face it, do you think any phone that attaches to a wall is that compelling? How much better would this be: don't make a new phone. The old one works fine. Use the same old phone to do something valuable, like Jott is doing.

Business : D From a business perspective, when do you think the investors will learn that business plans that start out with "Yes, we won't make any money on the basic service, but we can monetize it later on by doing..." are like something that's too good to be true? Right - it usually IS too good to be true. Ooma (minus five points for stupid Web 2.0 name) will rely on selling value added services to their subscribers to increase their profits from the phone sale. Value added services? Did anyone check to see the adoption rate for new services with cell phones? The most popular VAS available for phones are ring tones (you want that in your kitchen) and text messaging (does this thing have a keyboard?) How much better would this be: find something so valuable that I'd be willing to pay for it, like GrandCentral. Give it a smart name, like GrandCentral. Get a real business plan, like GrandCentral.

Buzz : B. Well, compared to Ashton Kutcher's acting career, this might be a real step up. He typically entertains me for an hour or so at most, but now I can watch Ooma blow through 20 million dollars, it will take months! Maybe even a few years! Nice. Best thing about the company is imagining my retirement with commercials from Ashton encouraging me to make phone calls. I met Demi in 1986 when she came to the restaurant I was working in, and let me tell you, she's not just pretty - she's 100 foot pretty. I might buy the damn phone if she signs the box.

Overall : I so wish I could short a private company. Anyone want to bet me?

Will it blend?

2007-07-19T06:23:00.001-05:00

Well all know that the iPhone will mash, but will it blend?

Hello to the VON Show?

2007-07-18T18:21:00.000-05:00

I think I should make an honest apology for underestimating Jeff Pulver and his organization. I was wrong.

As you might recall, I did not attend last Spring's VON show that grew from a conviction that the venerable conference's best days were now behind it, and for content, it had gone off the tracks. I surely missed seeing all of my friends, and was quite sad about it all. I believed then, as I believe now, that the future of innovation is far from telephony carriers, and far from technologies such as IMS. So, in a fit of whatever, I boycotted the conference.

To his everlasting credit, Carl Ford rang me up and challenged me to help him understand where I thought the market was going, and if I would, help the community learn about the new opportunities provided by Web services architectures and mashups. I committed to him then, as I now share with you, that I would do my best to help bridge the worlds between my 20 year old, Ruby hacking, Adhearsion writing, mashed-out friends and those 50 year old, SS7 and CALEA scarred grey beards. (I'm growing one myself!) You see, my young friends really don't know how to make money with telephones... and my older friends really don't know the tremendous productivity and functionality gains now available because of Web 2.0 architectures, development approach and tools. Thus, I am taking an active part in next Fall's VON. I hope you do, too.

I'm moderating a panel on next-generation mashup applications, and we are running a fifth-track at the show to be run as an un-conference. Carl has assembled an excellent group to help him with this, and I'm so happy to have a chance to work with them. Our goal is to try to make the conference more than a business development show, where partnerships are made. If we do this right, we'll show you how important and revolutionary this new light-weight architecture model is for your career and your business. And maybe you'll say "Damn", just like we used to back in 2000.

It has to start with your participation, though. Call or write to me to tell me what you want to learn about - what you want to see. I have an idea for myself, and I'll share it here. I'm thinking that I am going to assemble two or three other hacks, and we'll make a date to go into a conference room for a few hours to put together an application using only open source or openly available tools that you simply couldn't do a just few years ago with a month and a hundred thousand dollars. You can see it when we're done, (what the hell, you can visit us as we write it, just bring wine, beer or pizza) and we'll show you how we did it. And then, with your imagination, you can go off and do the same. I want to show those unfamiliar that it's real, not just hype, and what better way than to just do it.

And to Jeff, Carl, and all those in his organization : I wish I was the one who picked up the phone and said "I would love to help you out here." Instead, they were the better men, and I'm glad of it.

SunRocket c'est fini

2007-07-17T07:58:00.001-05:00

According to CNN, Om and Andy - the end is here for SunRocket. Yesterday was their last day in business, and I think with it goes the dreams of a VoIP generation. The consensus opinion is that the triple play offerings from the Cable companies are too competitive for players like Vonage and SunRocket, but I have a hunch that the answer is a bit more direct and simple : there's simply not enough unique value for a VoIP carrier to establish good margins.

It's not unique enough because the cost to establish a carrier is effectively zero, and the flip side of being able to offer the service to anyone is that all your competitors can too. Other than price, I have yet to see any land-line or VoIP carrier truly differentiate a service. These days, and IMHO, only GrandCentral, Iotum and the new iPhone actually make telephony services that are differentiated and valuable in a mass market. And none of those is a carrier, per se. If you were to measure brand loyalty for VoIP services, you would not need all the numbers on your keyboard, since it's practically zero. Number portability is the only sticking power of a telephone service these days, and that has nothing to do with brand.

I remember reading a book about entrepreneurship a long time ago, and I think the first or second rule was to methodically grow from a profitable base business. Exactly what was the profitable base business of SunRocket? Do a little test, and pick a handful of long term, substantial companies on your favorite stock market. Can you identify what their small, profitable base business was? I bet you can find it out. They nearly all have it. Is it all surprising when you see a company fail when it tried to make up with high volume what they couldn't make in margin? And unfortunately, this is the lot of VoIP carriers, and from where I sit, forever will be.

API of the Week : Adhearsion

2007-07-13T10:08:00.001-05:00

OK, so maybe Adhearsion isn't a Web API, but it certainly is a programming API, and if you're involved in emerging telephony, you ought to know what it is.

Adhearsion is a Ruby library that takes over Asterisk's internal processing of calls and puts them into the Ruby framework. You setup the dial plan of an Asterisk server to forward all calls to the Adhearsion server, either running locally or an a remote server. Once the call hits the Adhearsion server, you have the call in Ruby Land, and the world is your burrito. What can you do from there? Tons. You have at your disposal all of the Ruby integration with databases, UIs, web services calls, etc.

An example would be a hyper dial plan, that would connect calls, but also provide a gateway out to a Web Services function that would retrieve the latest weather report. Here's what it looks like :

#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
}

Now, here's a proof point. When I was at the Cluecon show, I told the crowd about the demonstration application I wrote to do a daily collection of body weight for Congestive Heart Failure cases. As I was describing it to the crowd, Jay - the author of Adhearsion - implemented the same application in Adhearsion as I was speaking. It didn't have the insane scale that my Amazon EC2 and Voxeo implementation did, but it was an amazingly complete implementation. Completely impressive stuff. Check it out.

Technorati Tags: adhearsion, thomas howe, thomas howe

Congratulations, Andy and Helene!

2007-07-11T09:06:00.001-05:00

technorati tags:andyabramson, andy, abramson, wedding

What I really want for my summer toy

2007-07-11T08:46:00.001-05:00

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

Two steps ahead....

2007-07-10T10:29:00.001-05:00

Apple to launch cheaper, "nano-like" iPhone in Q4 07?

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.
Kevin 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.

Link

technorati tags:iphone, thomashowe, thomas, howe, mashup, apple, nokia

Time to brag yet?

2007-07-09T12:56:00.000-05:00

No, I don't think so, but boy do I want to.

I caught a link from mashup meister John Musser from Light Reading called Telco Web 2.0 Mashups. In it, Caroline Chappell speaks about the impact Web 2.0 technologies are having on IMS deployments in her new report. I think Caroline what has is mostly right from a technology standpoint, but misses on some critical cultural points. For instance, the mashup phenomenon has, at it's core, this idea of the perpetual beta. Without regard to how mashable the carriers make their offerings, it won't make them any more fleeter of foot. That said, I am in complete and violent agreement with Caroline, and I hope my industry has the good sense to listen to her advice.

Now, if I were to brag, I'd point my readers back to something I wrote nine months ago....

Is Facebook the Promised Land?

2007-07-09T10:36:00.000-05:00

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?

I went back and checked the original piece by Tim O'Reilly, and I found what I remembered reading :

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.

Now, here's what I'm looking at. LinkedIn has something like 11 million users, and nearly all the fortune 500 is represented in that group by at least one leader. It's a big group, and it's a well known group, especially to business users. If there's a mass exodus to Facebook, doesn't it sort of suggest that the creation of these large databases of information isn't THAT hard to replicate? That the Web 2.0 promise of monetizing hard to replicate data using other people isn't as valuable as we thought? Now, if LinkedIn keeps going, and keeps going up in membership, we'll know just how valuable that data is. If not....

What time of year is it?

2007-07-06T06:27:00.000-05:00

What am I doing these days?

I'm reading Garrett Smith's blog about the bad signs from SunRocket. SunRocket has shut down their affiliate program, and admits to owing commissions to their partners from March, and can't guarantee when they can pay. Ouch.
I'm following Andy's blogs from France, as he prepares to tie the knot. I think that the South of France might just be the only place in the world prettier than Cape Cod in the summer.
I'm waiting for my iPhone to arrive this afternoon, so by next Monday, my friends can stop asking me why I haven't mashed it up yet.
I'm wondering how the h*ll Moshe got that close to Joanne from Rocketboom. I tell you, there's no justice in the world. Joanne might be the prettiest thing in the world other than my wife on Cape Cod in the summer.
David Galbraith has me laughing and rolling on the floor with his iPhone meets the book of Job article.
It may be the 114th year that the Cape Cod Baseball League has played, and it may be that 1 in 7 MLB players are alumni, and it may be that this all-free, all-volunteer league is the best and last place where the true game of baseball is played, but I'm just waiting for Sunday, where I'll get to sit at a Kettleers game and talk the night away with my kids. I think Jon should get his Canadian butt down here and join us. Bring the beer, Jon. It's summer on Cape Cod.

API of the Week : 411Sync

2007-07-05T05:48:00.000-05:00

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.

There's a large number of providers today that you can sign up for to send text messages. I use Strike Iron's Global SMS Pro, because it's reliable, easy to setup and and simple to pay for. Sending text messages, however, is a much easier task than receiving them. Since text messages use the PSTN's SS7 network, it's a pain not only because of the equipment requirements, but the regulatory requirements. Signing up to receive text messages is a commitment and an investment, and typically costs over a thousand dollars to register your inbound number (called the short code) and a over a thousand dollars a month to maintain it, and that's before you start paying for traffic. Sending is typically much cheaper, since you only pay your ten cents or so a message to your provider.

This is where 411Sync's service comes in. 411Sync provides the developer with a free, and fairly easy, way of accepting inbound text messages. The 411Sync service provides a freely customizable way of enabling mobile search, but you can extend it to whatever your needs are. When you send a text message to the service, you specify a keyword (such as 'red_sox_score') and whatever parameters you desire (such as 'today'), and it will pass it to a standard Web CGI script that you specify when you create the keyword. Your program takes the parameter, calculates an answer, and passes it back as a formatted RSS or Atom message. 411Sync passes that answer back to the phone, with an ad attached. In our Red Sox example, if you sent a text message to 411Sync of red_sox_score today, it would respond with something like Red Sox 10, Yankees 0. You would register a program with red_sox_score, and it would be called with the parameter "today".

The business example? How about mobile workforce automation, with the target audience being a service technician. After you finish a job, you could send a message to your service like "wrico tom 5083649972 complete". Tom would be the technician's name, and the number would be the contact number of the job, and the keyword would tell the front office that the job is complete. The CGI script might record the time spent on the job for billing purposes, then as an answer, provide the address of the next job. In fact, for mobile status reporting, 411Sync is the best, and cheapest game in town. Check it out.

Happy 4th of July --- Cape Cod Style

2007-07-05T05:40:00.001-05:00

Walled Gardens... End of an Era?

2007-07-03T16:31:00.000-05:00

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.

From the start of telephony, every major carrier has protected its network behind a series of barriers: technical, legal and financial. Although some of the reasons for keeping their networks closed have some credence, such as security and reliability, it's pretty clear that carriers hold the opinion that opening up their network does not benefit them. As time has gone on, and technology has matured, the closed nature of networks is less and less about technical concerns, and more and more about carrier fear and an inability to present compelling business cases to customers.

With the GrandCentral acquisition, this has now changed. Google now owns a company that is a legitimate PSTN service with strong integration into open VoIP standards, and did it in a very Voice 2.0 way. GrandCentral currently supports free and unfettered SIP connections to Gizmo accounts, unlocking the entirety of the SIP architecture, benefits and approaches. And more so, GrandCentral has done this in a completely Web 2.0 manner, freeing itself from the chains of a technology play and firmly focusing on a valuable application that people will pay for.

Is this is the end of an era for closed telecom networks? Yes, I think it's the beginning of the end.

Jott : A Diamond in the Rough

2007-07-03T08:57:00.000-05:00

Jott is a true diamond in the rough.

The premise is quite simple. Sign on to Jott, upload your contact list, call their number and leave a message. The message is translated and forwarded to the contact, or group, as an e-mail. So, if you're driving down the highway and you want to leave a quick e-mail for your wife, you pick up your phone and leave the message. I've been using it on and off for a bit, and the translations are fairly accurate and certainly usable. Like Twitter, Jott sits at the intersection between real time communications and social networks. You can create groups that you can Jott too, and I see that Andy Abramson uses Jott as well. It keeps a history of all my Jotts, and could almost serve as a to-list archive. All very cool.

Jott is still in Beta (what does beta mean these days, anyways?), so I suppose I should feel some reluctance to bash them for not having an API. I don't. They need one, because if they had one, I would be in telephone mashing Valhalla. The current system only works on e-mail, so although it's great that I can communicate quickly with my friends, family or take notes for myself, the interface to the rest of my workflow is clunky. If I had an API, then it would be a simple matter to Jott myself tasks for my 30boxes calendar. As it is, I'll have to go through hoops to get that integrated. Any cursory glance into mobile workflow automation shows you how important Jott's functionality is, and their lack of API hinders that important, and lucrative, market adoption. I'd also ping them for having a "I simply scaffolded this in rails" contact management solution. I have about 500 contacts in Jott, and I'd like to erase them, so I can load up a more current set. I have to page through 20 pages of 25 contacts each to delete them, and unfortunately, I've seen speedier web sites. A little more sophistication here would be nice.

There's a kid in my Karate class who's so excellent when he concentrates and pays attention. A true natural. When I catch him looking anywhere but in front, I want to smack him - because I hate to see such talent wasted by stupid stuff. The Jott implementation is a bit rough, but a diamond, nonetheless.

Technically, I'd give them a B. They could be an A, and I think nothing hard is stopping them from getting there. Give me a more mature contact management solution, I'll give them a B+. Give me a good API, they earned that A.
From a business standpoint, I give them an A-. The service is valuable, and over time, because of their social networking angle, hard to replicate. I don't see them charging money yet, but they could.
From a buzz standpoint, a B+. I'm buzzed about them, and think they have great things in front of them. In the circles I travel, Jott isn't spoken of with awe and respect, but they should be. It's a great idea whose time is come.

Tom's Tools : Ruby on Rails

2007-07-02T05:53:00.001-05:00

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.

I wanted to call your attention to Ruby and Ruby on Rails because it's fast become the standard implementation language for the Web 2.0 community. Companies such as Twitter and Basecamp, use Ruby to implement their sites, and we at the Thomas Howe Company use Ruby to create nearly all of our applications, and are using it for our new service. When I learned about Apple's iPhone development strategy, it was clear that they were telling us to use Ruby for the development.

There's downsides, as it runs pretty darn slow. In the great computer language shootout, Ruby comes in nearly in last place. How slow is slow? Ruby runs three times slower than Python, and about 60 times slower than C. However, there's some things to mention. First, it is getting faster all the time. I know I'll get slammed for being impertinent enough for saying so, but Web sites really don't have the same performance requirements of DSPs. And there's always EC2. Besides, as you grow past a hundred thousand subscribers, and you need five servers for your application, that's called a good problem to have.

Vaguely Disturbing, Yet Compelling : Liarcard

2007-06-28T14:23:00.001-05:00

For those of you with significant others, I don't recommend that you share this information. Not that I have anything to worry about.

I was lucky enough to catch the end of Teltech's presentation at the Cluecon 2007 show in Chicago, and I heard about their new service called LiarCard. Essentially, Liarcard listens in on phone conversations, and detects if one of the parties is lying. Honestly. (Oh God, could this get bad, quick.) You arrange a call through Liarcard, and it records the conversation and then uses voice analysis to determine the probability of dishonesty during the call. You can even go back afterwards and tell which parts of the conversation were more dishonest than others.

Is it accurate? Well, according to them it is :

Essentially, if the quality of the voice is reasonably good and the operation and preparation is proper, the emotional analysis component will be almost 100% accurate. In this case, the technology will properly present how the tested subject is feeling in terms of emotional charge, cognitive conflicts and general stress ("Fight or Flight" syndrome). If the intention to deceive is genuine and this poses jeopardy on the tested subject, (assuming the tested party falls within the standard range of "sanity" or "normality"), then the Inaccuracy and Lie determination will also be accurate more than 90% of the time. (In the latest field research study conducted on 500 passengers in an airport, LVA -the security version of the technology- was able to render an overall accurate analysis in all 500 cases.)

Ok - I'm not sure if this is the most amazing service I've seen, or the most disturbing, but I'm sure that Liarcard could read my emotional response. Hmmmm... I see they also have a site called LoveDetect... I wonder what THAT's about.

Anyways, I normally give out report cards for places like Liarcard, but I think I'll choose my words carefully this time. I'm sure you understand.

Walter Mossberg on the Breakthrough iPhone

2007-06-27T10:21:00.000-05:00

Walter Mossberg has spoken - the iPhone is a break through. As I was telling my Judo club last night, you had to somebody like Walter to get your hands on one. Check out his completely thorough review.

At the end, he mentions that the iPhone isn't a good choice for somebody who needs a simple phone, but for those that need high end features, it's a beautiful device. I think there's another user who would benefit : the corporate worker who doesn't need a ruggedized platform. The large iPhone screen and the simple integration with Web 2.0 applications make it the perfect mobile computing platform for many low-impact, yet mobile, jobs.

Cluecon 2007

2007-06-27T09:06:00.000-05:00

Well, off I go to the ClueCon 2007 Conference. If you will be there, I will be speaking with John Hibel, VP of Marketing for Voxeo, at 1:30, and we'll be describing the demonstration voice mashup I wrote using Voxeo's Evolution Designer, Amazon EC2 and Ruby on Rails. If you can't make it to the show, and still want to hear the demo, why don't you give it a ring at (407) 982-5896? It's not perfect, but I think it gets the point across.

If you want to see how I did the first part of the demonstration, I did up a quick screencast here. I'll make it more formal after the show, and add in some Ruby and EC2 stuff. See you there!

June 26th - The Sound of Silence

2007-06-26T06:10:00.000-05:00

No, William, it was very different when I was a kid.

You only had two choices when you wanted to listen to music. You could turn on your radio, or you could play your records. Radio was sort of fun, really, but where I lived, we only had three or four stations worth listening to. The people who ran the stations picked the songs they played, and they would run these commercials between the songs to pay for the station. Sometimes, on special days or nights, you could actually call into the station and request that they play a song, like "Don't Fear the Reaper" or "Funkytown". Of course, they wouldn't play just any song, because maybe no one else would like it, and they would lose listeners, and they couldn't charge so much for the commercials.

If you really liked a song, you could go to the store and buy it. I remember when I bought my first album - I played it all day for a month. AC-DC. Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. I didn't have anything else to play, actually, but that was OK. Most record stores were pretty small, and I bet they couldn't hold a thousand records in them. No really, a thousand. That's it. You see, the store keepers only carried albums that they could sell a lot of, and they didn't have the space to keep the ones that wouldn't sell quick. No, you couldn't just go in and purchase any song you wanted. Well, they could order it for you, but that was a pain, and you had to know it existed before you could. I remember trying to sing the song for the guy behind the counter, and ... Yes. I know. I can't sing.

The Internet really helped. People started sharing their songs everywhere. They used to have this site called Napster that people would use to tell other people what songs they had on their computers, so that others could listen to it too. Really easy, sort of what iTunes is like. You searched for the music you liked, and you downloaded it. What happened? Well, there was this group of people called the RIAA that thought that they owned music - all music. You see, they made Napster shut down because a lot of the music that was shared was under copyright, and RIAA were the people who represented all the record companies. They asked the court to make Napster stop, and the court did. No, not all the music was copyrighted. Yes, people made the point that the RIAA had no business in telling people they couldn't share music that they owned themselves. Yeah - it was stupid. The judge must have been low on his medication or something. You know that the ends don't justify the means, right?

What happened? Well, soon after the whole Napster thing, a bunch of new companies came on the scene and started doing some really good stuff. iTunes started, and there were others, but people could purchase music on the Internet whenever they wanted - just like today. Radio stations started putting their music on the Internet too, so that you could choose between thousands of stations. It was an excellent time to love music. Except for one day.

The big corporations were still afraid of the Internet. They were afraid of all these Internet radio stations - I'm not quite sure why. So, they came up with this plan to charge the Internet radio stations so much money to use their music, that they couldn't stay in business. Yeah - pretty short sighted. So, on June 26th, 2007, all the radio stations shut down for an hour in protest. Yup, all of them. They wanted to get people to pay attention to what was happening to them. Sort of worked, too.

Well, you know the rest. Like everything else, people like their freedom, and a thousand record company executives simply can't defeat hundreds of millions of music fans. It sort of sucked for a while, but it's all good now. Hey, have you ever heard Howlin' Wolf? Search for "Built for Comfort". It's a riot.

Drug Trials and Voice Mashups

2007-06-25T07:05:00.000-05:00

According to BCC Research, spending on clinical trials in the United States was almost $24 billion dollars in 2005. According to Microsoft:

Pharmaceutical companies can spend 12 to 15 years and up to $900 million to bring a drug to market. About 45 percent of this cost is accrued during the clinical trial phase. Additionally, studies indicate that 75 percent of all trials conducted in the United States are behind schedule by one to six months. Because improving time-to-market for new drugs is critical for pharmaceutical companies, managing the clinical trial process is one of the most significant areas of opportunity for improvement.

Critical to the success of any trial is the consistent, streamlined and reliable collection of patient data. Exacerbating the problem are logistics, for most trials involve hundreds and thousands of medical personnel and patients. Pharmaceutical companies must leverage technology to help teams communicate and to collect patient data not only for cost reasons, but quality as well.

I believe that this problem begs for a solution based on programmable web technologies. Using the phone as a input device, patients involved in the trial can give consistent feedback that is instantly available to researchers. Using the web as a platform allows for simple and reliable integration with existing equipment in the phamaceutical vendor's systems, especially when issues such as geography or inter-company communication are involved. Using technologies such as Voice XML and Ruby on Rails, reliable and scalable systems may be custom designed to collect data from patients in very rich ways, decreasing the time to analyze results from trials, speeding time to market, while lowering costs.

A real life example of Vonage's Voice Mail to Text

2007-06-22T21:01:00.000-05:00

One of my most favorite. Boy match ups and I've seen lately is the new bondage text feature that automatically converts my voice mails in to taxed and then important to me as an email I think this is really kinda cool. Because then I can save them in my email inbox and search for them. And I'm always trying to search for things which I her emails I'm sorry I'm sorry we're smells so anyways this is an example of what it looks like when it comes into my in the in box that also include the way if out here she could see how accurate it was. so anyways. See

p.s. Evidence of how poorly I speak? You tell me.

Alec Saunders from Enterprise 2.0

2007-06-21T11:16:00.001-05:00

Alec just got back from the Enterprise 2.0 show, and has an excellent post about social networks in the Enterprise space. What I found fascinating is how employees are bringing their services, in particular their communcations services, with them in the business. I think it has some pretty major implications for Enterprise IT managers, if not the larger organization. You should read it, if you have a minute. Oh, and know you know what I was doing while I was watching Will play little league.

iPhoney Simulator

2007-06-21T09:58:00.001-05:00

Chopi, the Thomas Howe Company designer, caught this link today of an iPhone UI simulator. Steve Jobs has announced that the API for the iPhone will be Safari (after bashing the browser as an interface just a few weeks earlier). As I wrote about earlier in the Jaduka post this morning, you can do some pretty neat things with phone/web integration, but my suspicion will be that the choice of Safari will be initially limiting.

How limiting? Well, now you can know. The iPhone UI simulator will show you exactly what you can do with the iPhone, on your OS X laptop. Funtionality includes :

Test your iPhone-enabled Web 2.0 applications and compatible web sites.
Open any website that works with Safari.
Rotate to see websites in either portrait or landscape orientation
Show or hide the location bar for a full-screen iPhone experience.
Simulate the iPhone user agent, to test browser redirection scripts.

So, how does it look? I checked out some Telephony 2.0 sites to see how they fared....

Telephony API of the Week : Jaduka

2007-06-21T05:56:00.000-05:00

Jaduka is a web services company aimed at allowing Mashup developers to trigger phone calls from web applications. Essentially, if you want to deploy a button on a web site, so that customers can click and call you or your business, Jaduka has a great offering. I put mine together in about five minutes; you can too. I picked the button I liked the best from their copious gallery, and off it goes. It's working, and I've pointed it at my Grand Central account, if you want to try it. I picked the button below, as I bet Jon Arnold will call me and I don't want to have him dive for his headset again :

Jaduka also provides an API, which has two basic parts. The first manages calls, either calls to the account holder's phone number, or calls between two arbitrary numbers. The second part of the API manages voice mails, so that you can manage them as wave files. As an example of the call management solution, you easily bridge calls between two numbers whenever it makes sense. Let's say you have a scheduled call with a partner. You could make an application that calls you when the appointment starts, then calls your partner. You can also make that functionality point to different places, so that you can implement a find-me, follow-me system, or a skills based routing engine. As an example of the voice mail management solution, you could take your Jaduka account and aggregate reports from remote salesmen by having them call into your number, then taking those voice mails as WAV files and attaching them to your CRM system.

Finally, let me say that whoever is doing product management at Jaduka is doing a great job, because the Jaduka API is small, easy to learn, and provides real value. I didn't have to spend more than fifteen minutes to read the documentation before I felt like I grokked it. Definitely part of my toolbox going forward.

Gaboogie

2007-06-20T05:42:00.000-05:00

Gaboogie is a pretty cool idea. How often, in your professional life, do you find yourself trying to setup a conference call? Gaboogie aims to make that easier for you, in classic 37 Signals fashion. Gaboogie's service makes it easy to setup a conference call between a small number of participants, and then when the time comes for the conference, dials everyone on the list. It keeps dialing until it gets you, and if you miss the call, you simply call back the number that you missed. Add a dash of modern design, a few nice features like call recording, and presto - you've got gaboogie. Gaboogie has a simple, volume based pricing structure, going from around 12 cents a minute down to 2.

I know that I rail about horizontal services all the time, and frankly, I think that gaboogie will have the same issues as well. It will suffer from the twin challenges of customer education (most people won't know it exists) and customer habituation (people have to change their habits to use it). In my book, the saving grace is the Internet's long tail effect, which would be since the cost of incremental delivery is nearly zero, there may be enough scattered demand to make a decent business for them. I hope so, as I think this is a real problem that begs for a simple solution.

How does it stack up?

Technically, my first impressions are a B+. I love the simple design, and I caught wind from a job posting that they are using Freeswitch in their network. (Rock on with that one). The mapping of functionality is sparse, and I hope it stays that way, as it eases customer education. As a rapidly aging telecom geek, I have the suspicion that ease of use will be dashed upon the corporate IVRs that will inevitably be in the call flow. The fact they give you a dial in number will really help here, but I gotta think that it will be a jarring experience for those involved. No API yet, or I would be mashing it up with 30 boxes this morning.
From a business perspective, a solid B. Getting conference calls started on time is a real problem, and they have the basic right solution for it. In time, I'm sure it will be an excellent solution. I have a marketing issue though, as I believe that they have a consumer company name for what is essentially a business offering. (I'm not the only one with the opinion.) It won't be that difficult to reproduce the service today, but there's opportunities to create community and hard to replicate data with time - I hope they exploit that.
Buzz, another B. They have today's look and feel, a sense for the problem, and a decent approach to solving it. They certainly aren't leading the charge, but they are solidly in the pack.

Web Ware 100 Announced - Grand Central Winner

2007-06-19T07:10:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to Grand Central, one of this year's Web Ware 100 award. Grand Central is one of the products I personally use daily, and it's good to see them get some larger recognition in the market. Another one of my favorites, Meebo, takes an honor as well.

The Web Ware 100 is decided by user votes, so I my initial reaction to seeing Microsoft Messenger as a winner needs to be checked (I muttered something unflattering about PR departments. Now I am wondering how many people voted from Mississippi.) Rafe has a good summary of the results, with an interesting element. Apparently, nearly 91% of the votes went towards the winners. As I am wondering about the broadband adoption rate in Mississippi, I am also wondering about the long tail phenomenon. I would expect to see a large group at the beginning, but more spread-out near the tail. From his post :

Overall, 91 percent of all votes cast were for winning products.
In many categories, there was a very steep drop-off between the top vote-getter and the No. 2 (and lesser) winners. In Browsing, for example, Firefox received 50 percent of all votes in the category, and the second-most-popular product, Opera, got only 13 percent.
The greatest disparity was in the Community category. Gaia Online won a staggering 91,293 votes--60 percent of the votes in its category and 19 percent of all votes cast in the awards.

How much is an hour worth?

2007-06-18T17:00:00.000-05:00

I had to share this with you from Paul Kedrosky:

Apple closed up 3.8% today, gaining $4-billion largely on word that its battery life will be about two hours longer than expected. Apparently an hour of battery life is worth $2-billion these days. That's good to know.

More than IVRs, Part II : A Real World Example

2007-06-18T06:04:00.001-05:00

Just because you could, doesn't mean you should. If it is much easier to blend in speech recognition, IVRs and SMS messages into your software, should you? My theory is that there are three positives from blending real time communications with the business process : it makes businesses faster, it makes businesses more efficient, and it makes customers happier. Let's look at an example that shows each.

Many delays in business are human delays. Finding the right person to answer a question, sign a form or move a phone line can take as long as doing the task itself. Integrating real time communications into the business process makes the job of finding the right person a matter of software, not people-ware. My example for making businesses faster is the review cycle for reports, designs or other plans. If the review cycle were handled by a piece of software, it could coordinate all the comments, aggregate them and post them for the team to see. It would be faster if, as the deadline neared, the software would actually call your cell phone and ask "Your attention is required on a review due tomorrow. If you have any comments, just speak them now, and I'll add them as text to the review document. If you don't have the time to review this, say 'I don't have time'. If you need 30 minutes to review the document, say 'Call me back in 30 minutes' ". Reviews would happen quickly and predictably.

Keeping with the example, I think it's easy to see how this makes business more efficient. How many times have you been to a review meeting, which for most people for most of the meeting, a complete waste of time? Yeah, me too. How about the time to coordinate the meeting? The time to aggregate comments and post them to a site, if you ever did? Answer this honestly: can you go back and get the comments for any work you had reviewed two years ago? Integrating real time communications into the business process makes the business more efficient by coordinating feedback, by making it easy to forward comments back and by (frankly) nagging appropriately.

Happier customers? Yes, I'd say this qualifies as well. As a manager, and the customer of this process, I would be happier to see a predictable schedule, with a well formatted and organized output. Our studies show that one way to make customers happier is to increase visibility into the process itself. If you can see what's going on, you can make judgments about progress and success, and that will help you relieve your anxiety. Same deal here, as you can see how the review cycle is moving, who has responded, and who has not.

I think a fair question to ask would be at this point, "Well sure, Tom, but I could have done this with Lotus Notes and a workflow." Yes, but I think the addition of voice and real time communications has made it even better, and valuably so. By giving the option of offering a review over the phone means that I don't have to wait for the boss to get back to get feedback, even if it's "I don't have any." By giving the option to nag your teammates for their feedback means that I don't have to hope they read their email. For those outside your company, I don't have to fear the SPAM filter. Never mind the nuance of emotion that can be communicated easily with voice, and gets lost with text. Blending in voice to does this for you.

This is a horizontal application, but nearly everywhere I look I see the same effect. Disease management has similar issues, credit calls, transportation, inventory and purchasing as well. You may claim that these are small issues, but I would disagree. But even if they were, costs of deployment for these technologies have fallen so far that to deploy these solutions won't break any company's budget.

TruPhone Gets Blocked

2007-06-15T16:02:00.000-05:00

You'd think that T-Mobile would have better things to do than to mess with Truphone. According to Andy and Om, T-Mobile UK is refusing to connect calls from it's subscribers to Truphone's inbound numbers, and according to Om, T-Mobile is refusing to connect to low cost carriers like Truphone. Instead, they have offered a financial plan to Truphone which guarantee's that Truphone will lose money.

For the record, Truphone's core business is enabling their customers to use VoIP enabled cell phones to provide very low cost service. Apparently, T-Mobile has a different business model, and apparently has to do with their inability to compete on value and a ruthless treatment of a competitor at the expense of their customers. Or something like that.

But that's not the whole story, because the investment arm of T-Mobile's parent company just invested serious money into Jah-Jah. Makes you sort of wonder if these guys talk. Or, maybe the VC guys use Truphone, so that the T-Mobile UK guys can't talk to VC guys, because they blocked the lines to the phones.

So, for all my Truphone using friends, why don't you have some fun at T-Mobile's expense:

Encourage all your Doctor friends to get Truphones, to maximize the chances of medical malpractice suits that can be tagged to T-Mobile.
Ask anyone you see if they have a T-Mobile account, and wonder aloud who they are going to block next.
Take a picture of Stalin (or whatever censor-happy dictator you happen to like), write something on it like "I like T-Mobile because they share my opinion on freedom of speech", mail it in. Mail in two.
Try to call a Truphone number, then call customer service to complain. Repeat.

More than IVRs

2007-06-15T05:19:00.001-05:00

"OK, so let me understand this... you guys do IVRs, right? I don't really understand what's new here. We've had IVRs forever."

To live in the real world means to live with constraints. I am unable to jump over a tree. I will live less than 100 years. I am unable to add numbers as fast as my computer. I cannot fit three cars in my bedroom. As we move through our lives, we make decisions based on these constraints so often, we no longer understand that we do it. Good thing too, because if we did have to run through the list of what we couldn't do all the time, we would be paralyzed. (I have to be in the Cape Cod office in 90 minutes, so there is no time to swing by Paris for breakfast.) Our minds are honed to consider the possible by a clever method: we tend to construct our understanding primarily based on our current knowledge, giving rise to an endless series of deltas. I remember an English class where we were working on a dictionary entry formula : you define a noun based on two parts, the first being what the noun is like, the second is how it's different. A tiger is a 1) CAT that 2) has stripes, a big body and large fangs. You define a tiger using what you know (a cat) and then describing why that first thing is insufficient (which can eat you for lunch.)

Of course, engineers are no different, except that when we design, constraints are quite at the top of our attention. I would even posit that we understand and describe our designs through constraints. Like a sculptor, removing the stone to reveal the statue, we draw boxes on whiteboards to explicitly limit the functionality of what we design. We understand that, unless we limit our tasks aggressively, we will be unable to see our design come to life. It why we cringe when the marketing man comes in the room, as his motivations are quite different than ours. They make us draw more and bigger boxes, removing our constraints and adding to our worries.

What might not be apparent from the outside is that an amazing has happened recently in the world of technology. The combination of web services, lightweight programming models and Internet architectures based on open source tools radically reduces the constraints on hosted application development. The advent of Web Services means that you can publish your functionality to the Internet in a controlled, standard way. Since the cost of publishing is so low, the amount of customer traction you need to break even is low, making the amount of web services that are available to you as a designer to be much larger. An example would be a web service that verifies that a person's name matches an address, and will be valuable to any company looking to avoid fraud. Lightweight programming models radically reduce the cost to create web applications by reducing the skills required to write them, and the number of people required to author and maintain them. Internet architectures are naturally resilient and scalable, removing many of the stability constraints that dog other forms of software development. As a concrete example, I would have you consider that both Yahoo! and Google run their infrastructures on off the shelf hardware and open source software, versus Verizon who runs their infrastructure on gold plated, multi-million dollar telecommunication switches. The difference is in architecture, which removes the constraint of having each element be bullet-proof and stable. In the Internet architecture, servers can go down because there are multiple paths to your web page. In telecom architecture, the phone on your wall is connected to exactly one central office.

The combination of these forces makes the development and delivery of hosted services much, much less expensive, for services of all kinds. My career interest is in telecommunications, thus, I am looking at how the constraints of typical voice services are lowered. IVR is a good example, of course there are many others. Using an online service from a place like Voxeo, I can draw a box on my white board called IVR that I can implement quickly and inexpensively. How might I use it? In any way I wish, blended into any sort of application I wish. I am no longer constrained by having to purchase equipment, or by having to learn an esoteric language to run it, or to be locked into a particular vendor, or to have troubles interfacing it to my software. It is no exaggeration to say that I am now able to make function calls that retrieve data from an IVR script as easily as I can that retrieve information from a database. In fact, given that it takes me a couple of hours to setup a database, the IVR might be easier. I can tell you the same thing about a whole host of telephony services, like SMS. I could also make the same argument about any other web service used from my IVR, like I could call a phone number and make my google maps on my screen do things if I wanted. I could - any up-to-date software engineer could.

So, given that these constraints have fallen through the floor, what does my company do? We are figuring out exactly which hosted solutions, especially those that use real time communications, work inside businesses to make the business faster, more efficient and makes their customers happier. Then, we work with businesses to implement these new services into their business process. IVRs are a part. So is SMS. So is Google Maps. So is.... you get the point. What is different is not the functionality, but the constraints. The implications are endless.

Telephony API of the Week : Vodafone's Betavine

2007-06-14T15:24:00.000-05:00

About a week ago, Vodafone announced their new mashup API called betavine. Using it, you can send SMS messages and push WAP pages out to cell phones. I love to see big companies that seem to get that our market is quickly moving to a web services architecture, but my worries about developing mass-market horizontal services still hold. Big companies like developing large, horizontal services, not small nichy ones. I DO think there's a market for companies like Vodafone to be amazingly good at providing development platforms, and I hope that's where they are going. So far, as an API, the Betavine API is pretty ho-hum. SMS is a simple service to provide, as evidenced by the dozens (and dozens) of SMS providers in the market already. I happen to like StrikeIron, but I'm sure you have your favorites. That said, when you sign up for their service, and poke around their site, they tease you with gold.

The gold, and it's 24k gold to the service provider that does it, is location. The Betavine site alludes to supporting location based services in the future, and when they do... watch out. You'll see incredible applications spring up. I'm not sure if they will support location based services for Vodafone handsets only (my bet is that will be restriction), or for all handsets, but I predict it to be such a compelling addition to the toolkit that developers will flock to the API. I know I will.

The first, and easy one is.... Where am I? I send a text message, and it pushes down a map of where I am. Where is the nearest gas? The nearest, cheapest, gas? Where did my daughter drive to? I am travelling, and I call for directory assitance. If it knows I speak English, it will connect me with an English speaking operator, even though I am in Mexico. Concierge services. Avoiding traffic. Knowing the client's location is super, super critical, and it just might be that Vodafone gets there first.

iPhone Mashups

2007-06-12T10:16:00.001-05:00

Just picked this up on the 37signals blog... the iPhone SDK is called Safari. Essentially, the strong rumors are that if you want to write an application for the iPhone, write it for Safari. Steve has been speaking about this for a bit, as he said he wanted a "safe environment for deployment of applications." Well, I suppose Safari would fit the bill for that.

However, it doesn't meet all the needs for communications mashups. For instance, it doesn't directly address how applications would work without a network signal. Also, how would you be able to find your location for GPS enabled services? Browser based systems are fine, but they aren't optimal for services that rely on local data or stuff you can't stick in a session. I'm in line to get my phone, but I'm skeptical about Apple's third party developer's strategy so far. We'll see.

The 37signals folks also picked this up from the Apple site, and as I am putting together my Ruby on Rails VoIP mashup for the Cluecon show, made me smile, too :

Mac OS X is now the ideal platform for all kinds of script-based development. Ruby 1.8.6 and Python 2.5 are both first-class languages for Mac development, thanks to Cocoa bridges, Xcode and Interface Builder support, DTrace monitoring, and Framework builds — plus AppleEvent bindings via the new Scripting Bridge. Leopard is also the premier platform for Ruby on Rails development, thanks to Rails, Mongrel, and Capistrano bundling.

Tom's Tools : Voxeo

2007-06-12T06:43:00.001-05:00

One of the best pieces of advice I've ever heard for software engineers is "Use the tools". Like words for an author, tools help define how you think, and how you develop and ultimately, what you can develop. One of my best tools, and one that I find myself relying on time, and time again, is Voxeo. Voxeo is hosted provider of IVR solutions in Orlando, run by a really decent and talented group of people led by CEO Jonathan Taylor and CTO (a geek's geek) RJ Auburn. Using Voxeo, it's really easy to throw together IVR scripts and deploy them for demos, betas and production. And, I can integrate the results from, or use it drive data to, database driven web sites. Voxeo handles inbound and outbound calling, and integrates easily with standard and VoIP phones.

I'm actually doing a mashup right now using Voxeo that (I hope) is ready for Cluecon in a few weeks. I'll post the details when I'm done, but here's the idea. The Cluecon audience is pretty dense with geeks, so for fun, I was wondering if I could find the geekiest one. I'm writing a Voxeo script that will call each attendee (or they can call into it, if they want), and give them a survey. For instance, I might ask them if she-bang was a Unix script thingy or something that Gomer Pyle says. I'll take all the answers, profile them, and find the person who's answers were closest to the norm. Maybe we'll even find the person who's answers are furthest from the norm, and give him the Prom King award or something. Anyways, using Voxeo, this demo is pretty easy to put together, including the database site, and won't take me more than a few days to put together, host and test.

RJ - I'm afraid you're not eligible for this contest. I'll send you an O'Reilly book as a consolation prize.

Insanely Great: Grand Central

2007-06-07T10:12:00.000-05:00

As regular readers may have figured out by now, I'm not a big fan of most carrier applications, as I am unconvinced of their long term value due to commoditization, and customer eduction and habituation issues. For me, it's got to be really (really) good before I'll fall in love with it. Iotum gets my nod, and now GrandCentral joins that illustrious crowd.

Grand Central is a one-number service done (nearly) perfectly. You can take your GrandCentral number and point it to all your numbers. It does automatic call screening, forwarding and voice spam handling. During a call, you can simply press 4, and the call is now recorded. Like any good iPBX or VoIP carrier play, you can see all your calls, contacts and messages online. I especially like the Web 2.0 look and feel of the site, although I wish they would go all the way with a Web 2.0 approach (more about that in a bit). It's even adroit enough to put the call on hold for you as you switch from one phone to another. As a personal call solution, I have never seen better. Insanely great.

How does GrandCentral stack up?

Technically, a definite A minus. I love how they have solved the problem of call handling, and takes a hard problem and makes it easy. Almost on the order of the iPhone UI design, from where I sit. I give them a minus because I think they should go whole hog and publish an API so I can mash it up. I can't begin to tell you the good ideas I have for that one. Otherwise, perfect, perfect.
Businesswise, a strong B+. Real value here, and well worth my investment of time to learn how to use (and it's really easy to use.) I'm going to knock them for two points : they should start charging for this service... I would pay $20.00 a month for this. Come'on guys - make some money. Secondly, it is still a horizontal service, and replication of it isn't rocket science, so sustainable competitive advantage from the features looks difficult. However, it's easy for me to see how it might become entrenched in people's work flows, and there's many Web 2.0 data mining / social networking opportunities there too. They'll do alright.
Buzz, A+. Call me jaded, but this level of excitement over a telephone service doesn't happen too often to me. Anyone who isn't jazzed about this service isn't paying attention.

Telephony API of the Week: Voxbone

2007-06-06T08:59:00.000-05:00

Wednesday is NOT Prince Sphagetti Day... it's API day. APIs connect service providers to applications in Web services architectures. Application designers use the functionality provided by the API to build their mashups or to build their business process applications. Service providers make money with their APIs in a number of ways, including directly paying for their use, by expanding their business base, or by providing the API for free, and deriving value from the data that they gather. Today, most Web APIs are free, but are expected to have licencsing costs for commercial deployments. Most communication APIs have some pay-per-use associated with them, since they expose transactions, such as SMS, which cost money.

Today's API is Voxbone, a provider of DID numbers to the VoIP community. DID stands for Direct Inward Dial, and essentially, it's how you get a phone number. With the Voxbone API, you can find phone numbers and purchase them for your VoIP service. Once you purchase your phone number, you can set it to point to any SIP (a common VoIP protocol) address you wish. This has some direct business implications, because it allows providers to offer phone numbers world wide, without keeping an inventory of them, increasing functionality for the users, and saving money for the providers.

Why would you, the application designer, wish to do this? I'll give you one, and I'm sure you can fill in the rest: temporary numbers. Wouldn't you like to have an anonymous phone number? Classified ads are a fantastic place to use a temporary number. With the Voxbone API, you can get a phone number, assign it to your cell phone using a SIP URI that maps into a direct line into a PSTN number, and off you go. Return it when you're done. I'm going to take my number and point it to a Voxeo script.

So, in your toolbox, you can now get a phone number, whenever you want, and put it back when you're done.

$12,107.09

2007-06-05T09:31:00.001-05:00

I might be misquoting here, but I believe I once read in Playboy Interview with John Kenneth Galbraith that his biggest disappointment with people was that they sought out data that supported their currently held postions and opinions, and rejected all other data. With that firmly in mind, I nonetheless want to share Guy's post entitled : By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09. In it, he details what he spent, in time and in money, to launch his often reviled, and often visited, new site called Truemors. Of course, his initial success has a lot to do with the fact that it's Guy Kawasaki that launching it, but let's face it : $12,107.09. As I recall, that was probably the monthly fedex bill for the smallest of the 2000 class of VC funded startups.

I call your attention to it to illustrate my currently held belief, that service providers are so easy and simple to deploy that the game for all businesses has fundamentally changed, not only for service providers. As the costs to deploy these sorts of services goes down, the required market share to support a busines is much smaller, allowing much more targeted businesses to be created. This drives my focus into the new Web services based architectures, which are ideal to support businesses exactly like this. I was not surprised to see an Amazon Web services URL flash by on Truemors...

As I look at the recent crop of Voice Over IP startups, I use this picture of the future to predict the success of my industry peers. It's why I like Twitter as a small, bootstrapped place, but have a hard time seeing valuations that would support massive investment into it. The technical implementation of Twitter, to telecom standards, is nearly trivial. The mob effect and it's value to the mob seems marginal to me, but the service and infrastructure are useful, and if they stay close to customers that will pay, they'll do quite well. Apparently, Twitter is out to raise some dough. For their sake, I hope they fail there, and succeed by sticking to their knitting.

I think I ought to get some sort of report card together to help me keep my thoughts. How would Twitter fare?

I'd give them a B for technology, as they did a good job with integrating existing technologies, but have not really made any new technology or architecture improvements. A decent job there, but not exactly Stanford or MIT.
I'd give them an A- for business if they don't take investment (and a definite C if they do). Twitter's service is still very horizontal, and as such, can be commoditized. However, the service itself is quite cool, and has many applications, and they have first mover advantage.
We need to give the Twits an A for buzz. Like a friend of mine in the Valley says, they love Twitter because they showed that using text messages was something that people might even like to do. I agree. I'm a fan.

Microsoft Adds Voice to Apps

2007-06-04T13:04:00.001-05:00

In sales, what kills deals? Time. Microsoft just enabled more sales to see the light of day.

I read today on Andy's blog about the recent partnership announcement between Microsoft and Verizon. Sponsored search on Microsoft's Live Search will now include a link that enables Click To Dial between the business and the browser. Since this is only available for sponsored search, I wasn't able to check it out, firsthand. From the article, it seemed as though the partnership provided free calls from the business to the desktop, as opposed to free calls from the business to your handset. So, how does this stack up?

From a business perspective, I think it makes sense for all parties. I play this game with mashups all the time... take a new light-weight application, and ask yourself these questions:

Does the service make the business faster?
Does the service make the business more efficient?
Does the service make customers happier?

In this case, I think they've got three for three. The customer gives his permission, and gets
instant satisfaction. Not bad. More so, they've just radically lowered the time it takes to make the sale. The business makes an outreach to a self-qualified customer that's waiting for the call, and it can't get too much more efficient than that. And the customer is in charge of the interaction, its schedule and the mode by which it happens. In charge customers are happy customers.

From technology view, though, I have some worries. I think the computer makes a crappy telephone. (Sorry, if I offend all of you Skype lovers out there, but I gotta call it as I see it.) Where's my headset? Click, click, ring ring... it's a very aggressive and unfamiliar interface, for many, it not most, people. I'm sure my mother would be quite confused if the computer started talking to her. What does she speak into? All I can imagine is Scotty in that Star Trek movie where he picks up the mouse like a microphone and starts talking into it. No guarantee that the person on the other side of the phone knows that you're calling from a browser... he'll have fun trying to explain that one. Yes, there's a certain percentage of users for whom the computer is a wonderful communications tool - and I suppose I'm one of them - but as a broad based endpoint? I'm unconvinced, and that's after my fourteen years of VoIP softclient development. If Microsoft only depends on a browser based approach, I'm thinking that the upside is limited.

What makes a good telephone interface? A telephone. With mashups, that's an easy fix. Click on the link, ask the user for their phone number, and ring it. Simple and easy. You could even have an option to use the browser for those 5% of our population that would actually prefer it.

What I want to know is how and when Microsoft will start mining all this call data. I suppose there's an off chance they won't, but only because they are still a few years behind Google. They will, at some point, to great advantage to themselves and their advertisers. Perhaps that's why they (apparently) are going for the browser play, so they don't have to deal with all of the call recording legal issues that vary per state.

Light Weight Programming

2007-05-30T15:06:00.000-05:00

Well, it's almost summer here on the Cape, and as is the Cape tradition, time to get the kids to work. When I was a kid, it was really the only time you COULD get work, so you ended up spending all summer working seventy hours a week, because when Labor Day comes, your job goes.

This summer, my boy Jacob and I are doing a little bit of light weight programming. I won't make him work 70 hours a week (he's got it so cushy!), in part because in this new web model, you can write some pretty cool applications without working 70 hours a week. The traditional idea of the Internet's Long Tail is that, since distribution of products is so much cheaper, you can provide a longer list of products that appeal to more niche markets. It also means that, since development is so much cheaper, smaller projects become practical. Practical in an economic sense, and practical from a skills sense. To wit:

Our summer project? I'm going escape from AOL mail. AOL mail uses IMAP, and doesn't support forwarding, which means it's currently impossible to read in Google Mail. More than that, when I forward the mail from my laptop client, it's not formatted right. Ick. I like Google Mail. I don't like AOL mail. And, I have had my AOL address for so long, that to move it would mean no end of grief. So, Jacob's using his new Python chops to read my e-mails from the IMAP mailbox and put them directly into my POP mailbox, which I read from Google Mail. I'm not sure that we can get the recipients right - but we're going to try.

I tried a couple of products like this on the Internet, didn't like any of them. So, Jacob's writing it for a customer base of 1. Now, that's a long, long tail.

The Thomas Howe Company

2007-05-24T09:06:00.000-05:00

I had the pleasure of working for a man named Chuck Holland in the mid 90's. Chuck is a wonderful, bright and generous man, now semi-retired after a wonderful career as a high tech entrepreneur, even including a part in Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer Winning Novel "The Soul of a New Machine." Chuck told me something I have never forgotten, and I'm happy to pass it over to you. "The only thing you should expect from a startup is that, when it's done, you can do it again. If that's not enough for you, then don't do startups in the first place, because that's all you should expect from it."

Well, Chuck, I want to introduce you to The Thomas Howe Company, the third company I have started. I am pleased to announce that my business partner and I have signed a lease on some space in Osterville, we've hired our first people, and most importantly, we've signed up our first four customers. In the coming weeks, we'll introduce ourselves to the world. Wish us luck.

Our mission is simple: we want to help our customers integrate real time communications with the business process. Why? Because it makes businesses faster, makes businesses more efficient and makes customers happier. How are we doing this? We take our own assets, including a yet-to-be-announced service and software components, along with our partner's assets and provide professional services to integrate them into our customer's infrastructures. Our customers? Enterprises of all sizes, especially in the healthcare and financial verticals. We long for the day that carriers will understand this new world of communications and offer it to their customers.... but I hope you'll forgive me if I seem dubious about that possibility.

To all of our friends, family, partners and well-wishers - thank you for all your support. We've appreciated it in the past, and we'll depend upon it in the future. If you are ever in Osterville, we'll buy the coffee.

Web 2.0 Data

2007-05-18T07:07:00.000-05:00

I admit to having a rocky history with data.

It began back in 1981, when I was a freshman in high school. At the time, I had been programming in basic for a year or two, and I was learning C at my father's office at Raytheon. There were a few kids I grew up with who were geeks, and we really divided our group using two dimensions. The first was the platform, and I'm sorry to say that I was NOT one of the Apple guys. My mom bought this Tandy RadioShack Model I with 16k Extended Basic - so my lot was cast there. The other dimension was data. There were those of us who hung around the mainframe doing COBOL, and those of us who simply didn't. I didn't. My friend, Ed Kirwin pictured above on the right, next to my best friend Peter DiPippo, did. I remember giving him a good dose of grief about it, as I thought the real studs went into scientific programming. How hard could those data centered applications be? I still have the plaque from my father's desk that says "Forgive us our transducers, as we forgive those that transduce against us." Of course, Ed went on to have an excellent career at Oracle. And me? Well, I'm not willing to call this game over yet, Mr. Kirwin. I don't care if you are still the dungeon master.

I'm not alone in my data blindness. When I was the editor for the first draft of the ADSL Forum's Internet Access Specification, it was clear they were giving it to the young guy because the Internet was the least important specification they had. (Video on Demand was the killer app. Ooops.) The Web model in 1994 was straight-forward. You clicked on a web page, the page streams to your server. One little tiny click up, one massive file of 100k down. ADSL was perfect for that, right? Lots of downstream bandwidth, a little upstream bandwidth. (Never thought of P2P, Flickr or Torrents. Ooops.)

Of course, now we are in a very different place with data. We are now in the era of the collaborative web... the programmable web... the literate web. For the vast majority of Web 2.0 startups, the data is what is monetized, not the functionality. From the (now famous) What is Web 2.0? article from Tim O'Reilly :

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.

If you feel like you don't have a good handle on Web 2.0 data, here's the video you need to see. It's only five minutes, and you really ought to take a quick look. As for me, I need to get off to work, and install that PostGres package for the new gateway I'm designing. I hope Ed is doing OK.

Yes, I'm working...

2007-05-16T13:20:00.000-05:00

Do you ever hear something about yourself, and say "No, I'm not like that!", then after some reflection realize... I AM like that!

So, for all of you who have been asking, I've been programming my little heart out. Which is why I'm not blogging so much, as I can't seem to get my head shifted out of programming mode, and into blogging mode. Many dear friends have accused me (no so wrongly, apparently) of being single threaded in my work habits. Hmmm. Guilty, as charged.

Which really sucks, as I want to tell you all about the visit I had to 30 boxes, and the microformats work I've been doing, and all that happy stuff - but I will. I swear I will.

Now, if I can just figure out how to get that static pointer to my Postgres connection over to this other module without making it too much like a cludge....

What is the deal with patents?

2007-05-10T22:22:00.000-05:00

My god, what has happened to the patent office?

Perusing a blog tonight, I caught a post that made my jaw drop. Apparently, somebody recently patented the linked list. Seriously. Click the link.

Now, come on. What brain-dead patent lady let this one through?!? Mary Steelman. If you're that brain dead woman, and you are reading this blog, I'd like you to look to your upper left. That guy's name is Donald Knuth, and I am sure you have never heard his name. I am also sure that you aren't a degreed software engineer, because every software engineer I ever met in school studied his books. There is no accredited institution in the United States granting a degree in Computer Science that doesn't have "The Art of Computer Programming" as a text book in some class, somewhere. Not one. Not a single one. Aren't linked lists in, like, the second chapter? When did he write those books? Wasn't JFK still alive? I hate to call you out by name, Mary, but let's get real here. Donald's not mentioned in the prior art, anywhere. How did you miss this one?

Let me give you a hint for the future: google. What I claim is:
1) A method for discovering information on the Internet entitled "searching" for it.
2) A method for using Google, a search engine that you can use to "search" for information on the Internet.
3) A method for determining information about prior art, by placing the term "linked list" into "google".
4) A method for not looking like a complete fool by reading the very first link it returns, and reading the very first paragraph entitled "History" (See Exhibit A).

Linked lists were developed in 1955-56 by Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw and Herbert Simon at RAND Corporation as the primary data structure for their Information Processing Language. IPL was used by the authors to develop several early artificial intelligence programs, including the Logic Theory Machine, the General Problem Solver, and a computer chess program. Reports on their work appeared in IRE Transactions on Information Theory in 1956, and several conference proceedings from 1957-1959, including Proceedings of the Western Joint Computer Conference in 1957 and 1958, and Information Processing (Proceedings of the first UNESCO International Conference on Information Processing) in 1959. The now-classic diagram consisting of blocks representing list nodes with arrows pointing to successive list nodes appears in "Programming the Logic Theory Machine" by Newell and Shaw in Proc. WJCC, February 1957. Newell and Simon were recognized with the ACM Turing Award in 1975 for having "made basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing".

Aren't patents supposed to encourage innovation by protecting the investments that companies and people make to develop them? Software patents like this subvert this principal in the most egregious way. I, for one, am becoming polarized against patents, not because I believe that investments shouldn't be protected, but because patents are granted in such stupid and ignorant ways.

And, no no no no no. Voice Over IP was not invented by VocalTec in 1996.

R,S,T,L, N and E Copyright (c), Thomas Howe. All rights reserved.

Telephone's Long Tail

2007-05-09T10:32:00.000-05:00

Had a wonderful time last night before the Gigantes game doing a podcast with Narendra from 30 boxes. (I'll post it when I get back home next week) I met with Nerendra a couple of weeks ago at the Web 2.0 show in San Francisco, and I had this lingering thought about Web 2.0 culture... the attitudes and the approach. 30boxes is an online calendaring service, that's trying to be more Mac than Mac. It's very simple, straightforward design - built for people who aren't Outlook power users.

In a completely parallel thought, I've been learning Ruby on the side. I absolutely love Ruby, and it's good for this old DSP programmer to dive so deep into a very different world. Ruby is the language of choice for cutting edge Web applications designers these days, and breaks so many ingrained rules of design that it makes my head spin. (Excellent.) Ruby is opinionated software, and quite proud it. By opinionated, we mean that Ruby language designers and implementers make decisions that optimize their own personal productivity at the cost of generalization. From a recent interview on O'Reilly Radar, Ruby on Rails creator David Hansson, explains:

But let's focus on just one of the keys: Rails is opinionated software. It eschews placing the old ideals of software in a primary position. One of those ideals is flexibility—the notion that we should try to accommodate as many approaches as possible, that we shouldn't pass judgement on one form of development over another. Well, Rails does, and I believe that's why it works.

With Rails, you trade flexibility at the infrastructure level to gain flexibility at the application level. If you are happy to work along the golden path that I've embedded in Rails, you gain an immense reward in terms of productivity that allows you to do more, sooner, and better at the application level.

Isn't this interesting for the telecom industry? What sorts of decisions have we made about passing judgement on communications methods, products and services? If we could break the rules, and make radical decisions about how telephones are integrated into other technologies and processes, what new gains could we make?

One beautiful thing about the long tail is that, due to the radical lowering of barriers to entry for new services and to the widening of delivery mechanism, it doesn't take as many subscribers before a new service makes economic sense. You could indeed have a service that only 20,000 subscribers would pay for, but that might be a million dollar a month business, which would more than pay for three geeks in a room. And in this world of a billion cell phones, there aren't 20,000 who would pay for it? Yes, there probably are. Get opinionated. Somebody will agree with you, somewhere, and they'll see and pay for that value.

SQS: Messaging Backplanes in Communications Architectures

2007-05-03T13:51:00.000-05:00

For me, 2007 looks like the year of messaging backplanes. As an architect, it's a wonderful thing. Long a staple of enterprising messaging architectures, such as financial transaction applications, I believe it to be a very valuable addition to the standard telecom architecture. I'm doing two independent designs at the moment based on enterprise messaging technologies. The first is a gateway between two messaging architectures, designed to help customers migrate legacy messaging applications. An excellent project for me, as if you want to truly understand a protocol, do a gateway that converts it to something else.

The second project is an internal project we'll announce sometime later on in the year. For this one, we are using a hosted messaging backplane from Amazon called Simple Queue Service. (In fact, we are using nearly all of the Amazon APIs in the hosted version of this project, including the elastic computing cloud, simple storage service and, of course, the Turks.) Simple Queue Service, or SQS for short, is a simple, but extraordinarily powerful idea. SQS allows software to send messages between applications in a reliable and scalable way, using Amazon's hosted service. Messages are created by message producers, stored in the queue, and read by message consumers. Many different message producers may add to the same queue, as many different consumers may read from it. Amazon guarantees that a message is read at least once, and will hold a message for at least fifteen days. In practice, messages tend to be consumed nearly instantaneously, but it's good to know you've can go get a cup of coffee and not worry too much about missing a message. Messages can hold any data and, when combined with Amazon's simple storage service, can hold any data of arbitrary size.

An example might help here. Imagine you are designing a billing system for a large telecom carrier. If you have a switch creating call detail records, you could store those CDRs as an XML records in a local database. You could also take that XML data, and put it into an SQS queue to be read by a far end billing system. The billing system would wait for the XML record, and when it arrives, record it, bill it, invoice it, whatever. The calls to SQS are very simple and straightforward, and the service itself is quite inexpensive. Today's alternative implementation would probably use a standard such as Radius, which is supported in the billing world, has no traction outside of ISP billing in the Web world. SQS is a simple and straightforward alternative.

The advantages are numerous. First, since many producers can add to the same queue, you could use SQS to aggregate information from several sources. So, to extend our example, you could aggregate CDR data from many switches into a single outbound stream. Since SQS carries data only, different manufacturers can submit their XML into the queue without any impact to the billing system that consumes the data. Let's keep with the CDR example, and imagine that one of your twenty switches uses a different XML format than the other nineteen. Pretty simple with SQS. Create a piece of software that reads all of the XML from the aggregated stream, looks for the messages that need to be translated, translates and puts them back on the aggregated queue. Worried about the bottleneck? Don't be, as you can have as many instances of translators as you wish, as SQS guarantees that a message is read at least once, and if you wish, only once. The same argument is made for redundancy. You can have as may consumers or producers as you wish. If one fails, your throughput does drop, but the rest of the system is unaffected. (By the way, this is where the elastic computing cloud just rocks. Throughput dropping? Take 60 seconds to spin up a hundred or so servers to take care of it until you catch up, then give the servers back. Since a server costs about ten cents an hour.... well, you do the math.) This also makes components that hang off the message stream safer to deploy in production environments, as you can fractionally deploy components without affecting the core system.

The downside? Messaging backplanes do introduce a bit of delay into the system, and are probably inappropriate for communication between components where real time operation and response times must be guaranteed. As I think about the heuristics of real time design for web services based communications infrastructures, my gut tells me that the logical place for components is where real time communication is critical, where bottlenecks would occur, or where linear scaling is critical. Those components would then be best implemented in an Web Services, or SOA, architecture with messaging backplanes as the scaling and communication backplane.

We've been talking about Amazon SQS, which is undeniably the only reasonable hosted choice we have today. In a platform environment, there's a number of good choices ranging from legacy offerings from Tibco, down to the open source ActiveMQ offering. But honestly, the Amazon web services suite is so easy and inexpensive to use, it would take a lot for me to deploy my own platform. I suppose if you're Verizon, you could match the Amazon platform. Maybe. Either way, I expect to see communications architectures move from the inherently fragile legacy telecom designs towards new, service oriented designs, all on the backs of messaging solutions.

Digg Revolt and Greenhouses

2007-05-02T08:42:00.000-05:00

I am super interested about today's story about the Digg revolt, not so much about the story itself, but about the management reaction. The short story : some users posted the security key for unlocking HD-DVD movies, and Digg deleted them before the AACS Licensing Authority sued them. Users revolt, Digg capitulates and (apparently) are now awaiting the summons. Perhaps if they made no attempt to delete the posts in the first place, they would have a better argument about the lack of responsibility. The fact that they restored the key might be seen as an action equal to that of the original posters. I'm no lawyer, but I wonder if Digg ever signed a confidentiality agreement with the AACS (I doubt it), and I wonder if you could possibly copyright a 16 digit hexadecimal number. If so, I wish to copyright the letters R, S, T, L, N and E. Anyways, it appears as though the Digg management recognized that without the users, they don' t have a service, so as far as this goes... the users have the power. Lesson learned.

A smart, smart man once told me that marrying the right woman was like living in a greenhouse, where you would grow faster than in any other environment. Marry the wrong one, and you live in a desert, and your very existence is threatened. I have only worked at small companies, and almost exclusively inside startups. I started at PictureTel when it was clearly a startup, and my exit was a statement of how large it had become. My thought early in my career was that I wished to start my own company one day, so by hanging around startups, I would learn how to do it. As I've grown older, I see a richer truth : I grow faster in small companies. They are my greenhouse. At a small company, you are challenged from every side, every minute, every day. If you see my e-mail address change to "Mitre" or "Raytheon", please come to my retirement party... or should I say wake... because it will be a sure sign that I have stopped growing.

It was good to see the management team at Digg grow just a little bit. Victor Frankl said that life didn't have meaning, instead it asked you what your meaning was. I believe that Digg, and the management, have a deeper understanding of what their meaning is. Good to see they are living in a greenhouse, too.

R,S,T,L,N and E are copyright(c) 2007, Thomas Howe. All rights reserved.

Motivational Video....

2007-04-26T11:03:00.000-05:00

David Galbraith just dug out this video. It looks like somebody at Ernst and Young really thought this would motivate somebody. Were Dante Allegheri alive today, he would include elements of this video as one of his circles of hell, for sure. So, let me get this straight, if you want to work at Ernst and Young, you have to be between 30 and 45, white and you can't be able to dance. Did I get that right?

Gets Boost From 'Triple Play', Comcast Posts 80% Rise in Net,

2007-04-26T08:33:00.000-05:00

Today in the Wall Street Journal, Comcast reports an 80% rise in profits due to the bundling of voice, video and data.. aka the Triple Play.

While I was at Netcentrex, this is the story we would continually tell our customers. Bundling these services creates a convenience for the customer, but it also radically reduces churn, a substantial cost for carriers. Netcentrex, under the capable direction of marketing Guru Brian Mahoney, captured and held the triple play position in Voice Over IP for the last five years. Now, Comcast has capitalized on this business model, proving Brian and the Netcentrex team correct. I hope all of the current Netcentrex customers are seeing similar returns, and that future clients will enjoy them too.

My emotional response is one of surprise, frankly. I'm not surprised we were right, I'm just surprised that we were THAT right. Gotta go buy some lottery tickets. Back in a bit.

Earth Day 2007

2007-04-24T08:51:00.000-05:00

RocketBoom's Earth Day episode was just perfect. You gotta check this one out.

My Web 2.0 Talk

2007-04-23T09:20:00.000-05:00

Thank you to Jack Ivers who put up this review and a link to my talk at Web 2.0.

My speech pathologist wife, who attended one of my talks for the first time said, "You didn't swear once! Good job, honey. Now, let's try to get you to slow down a little bit."

Good Thinking, Moshe

2007-04-23T09:12:00.000-05:00

Check out this latest post from Moshe. Thank you for dreaming that we might live in a world where we can actually provide some value to customers, and that they might pay for it. Honest to God, I sometimes think our whole industry has this collective self-esteem problem.

Cure for Vonage's Woes?

2007-04-23T08:22:00.000-05:00

Interpid reporter Andy Abramson digs this one up... Perhaps there's some movement in the Vonage patent matter, as 3Com apparently filed a patent in 1996 (patent number 6,529,501), which references the same approach, but might be considered prior art. I'm not a patent lawyer (don't even play one on TV), but if it's true that the Verizon patent's don't even list this one, it might mean trouble for the patent defense. It strikes me as a little odd though, as it was trivial for me to use google to figure out what patents it itself referenced, or those that mentioned internet telephony. Why didn't the lawyers see this one coming a year ago?

Here's an answer : it's muddy. A few weeks ago, a blogger gave a quick history of Voice Over IP. Trouble is... it's basically wrong. VocalTek no more invented voice over IP than Gutenburg invented books. (And that's giving a lot of credit to VocalTek, whom I respect nonetheless.) Just like Ana Nicole's baby, VoIP has many, many fathers - and it mucks up prior art big time. Let's look at some of the happy fathers not mentioned by the bloggers, and probably not mentioned by the patent attorneys, either :

H.323 was finalized in November 1996, written by many of my fellow employees at PictureTel, firmly establishing that nearly all of the ideas it contained were known in the community for at least two years prior, including naming conventions, gateways, etc.
Of course, H.323 was not born in a vacuum. It's father, H.320 was developed in the late 1980's, introducing packetized media and call control over WAN networks. It's where most of the G.7xx codecs come from. H.320 has gateways, and admission controls, conversions between synchronous networks.... sound familiar at all?
And of course, H.320 wasn't the first one either. How could it be? Px64 predated H.320 and was used as a major part of the spec, along with tight integration with Q.931. Yes, that SS7 spec. Anyone in Peabody at that time knew all about voice, video, packets, synchronous streams. I'm pretty sure that Regan was president.
I remember listening to "geek of the week" in College around 1985-1986. Audio? Yup. Internet? Yup. Real time? Well, maybe not. I'll give you that one.
Who could forget the ATT PicturePhone in 1970?
World's Fair anyone?

I could go on all day, but I have this funny eating habit, and I need to go make some money to keep it going. Engineering and technology is much more like a Wiki than a Word document. No one person invented voice over IP, and it's been here forever. If anyone tells me that the new thing with Voice Over IP is video, I'm going to barf. Literally. I've been at this since the early 90's at PictureTel, and I know people who I think are the old timers - and they view me rightly as a newbie. Expect a patent lawyer to understand that one? Yeah, me neither.

StumbleUpon Snapped Up

2007-04-18T19:28:00.000-05:00

Do you remember when VoIP companies actually had some sort of liquidity event? Well, if you DON'T work for Acme Packet, maybe you don't! The Web 2.0 finance world continues to bubble with today's news that StumbleUpon was snapped up by eBay for north of 40 million.

Favorite Link of the Web 2.0 Show

2007-04-18T18:42:00.000-05:00

Area code. I heard these guys ran around Manhattan dressed up as PacMan.

Web 2.0 Show Wrap Up

2007-04-18T18:25:00.000-05:00

Well, the show is over, but the show head-spin hasn't ended yet. Here's some of my highlights I wanted to share with you.

Finally got to meet John Musser of Programmable Web fame. John runs (in our opinion) the premier site for finding state of the art mashups and APIs. Nice guy. Pat wanted to go to Seattle for another meeting, and we will, but I think Pat just wants to get a cup of coffee.

I think I scared the FatDoor people when I claimed to know my neighbors and be involved in my community. After a blank stare, the nice lady said, "Well, you can use FatDoor too!" And I will, right after I get back from the YMCA.

Finally met Andrew Turner and Mikel Maron, fellow Web 2.0 speakers and geo-location geeks. Brady Forrest put us together for my mashup, and it was good to meet them in person. If you're looking for geo-location web applications, start with them. They rock.

I took a quick field trip to meet up with Jack Dorsey from Twitter and Narendra Rocherolle from 30 Boxes. I really appreciated the time they spent with me, and I plan to do podcasts and a profile of both companies. If you haven't heard of Twitter, please press up with your hands to move the rock you're living under. 30 Boxes is a personal favorite of mine, where I first came to admire the service, but now starting to admire the crew, too. If there are any social anthropologists out there, please go visit these guys, take a camera and start shooting. This is exactly what the 2.0 culture looks and feels like, right down to the floor. In 200 years, the geeks will thank you.

So much more to say, but it's dinner time in old San Francisco, and there's a trolley awaiting.

Om Malik has a New Site

2007-04-17T20:11:00.000-05:00

Personal hero Om Malik has a new addition to the GigaOM family... found read. It's a site for startup founders and stakeholders, to share ideas and advice. Check it out.

Here's the the best advice I ever got on startups, from my boss Chuck Holland, the manager from the book "Soul of a New Machine" :

The only reward you should expect from doing a startup is that you'll get to do it again. If that's not good enough for you, don't do them in the first place.

Thank you!

2007-04-17T19:57:00.000-05:00

Thank you to everyone who attended my session today at the Web 2.0 expo. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did - I am always amazed at how amazing the things you do are.

A few people asked me for the slides, and I have uploaded them on SlideShare here. Jack Ivers was also so nice as to record the podcast, and I'll put a link to that on the site as well when I get it.

Again, thank you!

Vonage is stuck?

2007-04-16T12:22:00.000-05:00

A long time ago, I worked with a completely brilliant man named Bernard. I wish I had taken more careful notes while we worked together, because I find that I continually hear his voice in the back of my head giving advice. When I caught that Andy Abramson blogged about Vonage not having a work-around for the Verizon patent, Bernie's voice appeared yet again. Unlike all the other times disembodied voices appear, I welcome his voice.

"There are two kinds of engineers - those that know how to get unstuck, and those that don't. All engineers get stuck on problems, and some stay that way." We used to hire and team up engineers on this principal, making sure that the junior engineers were paired with a senior engineer to forestall this very phenomenon.

Is Vonage stuck? I can't believe it. How is it possible that, given all of the heads up, given the time in court, given the nearly infinite possibilities of implementation choices, that there is no workaround. I wish that I was not so full-out on all of my current designs, because I would take a crack at this one for free. (Oooohh.... Bernie's voice again. Not for free - right. Thanks, Bernie.) I simply cannot believe that there isn't a senior engineer in Vonage with the WD-40 to get this problem unstuck.

Somebody, please read that patent for me and tell me what the big deal is.

Off to the Web 2.0 Expo

2007-04-14T07:48:00.000-05:00

Well, off I go to the Web 2.0 show. Considering how much I learned at the ETel show, I'm sure that this is going to be another mind blowing experience. I really can't pick which of the sessions I would like to attend - they all seem so necessary. I'll tell you how it works out.

The current plan is to meet up with a few companies I really admire, including the team behind 30 boxes (apparently they share office space with Twitter, so I'll have to address my current anxieties with them - perhaps they will be assuaged) and the guys behind programmable web. Since I've been deep in the IPCentrex space for a while, it looks like Sylantro is the only company of the big four (Sylantro, Broadsoft, Comverse/Netcentrex and Tekelec) that really understands the Web 2.0 mindset and approach, so I am willing to bet you that they will be around, and the others won't.

To get me (and you) in the mood, here's a post giving the top ten Web 2.0 startups - betcha you know at least half of the list.

Who Has the Advantage? Handset Vendors

2007-04-11T09:55:00.000-05:00

I truly believe that presence is an important enabler for applications, and the example I was thinking about in the last presence post was Iotum's Talk Now. (In full disclosure here, I am on their advisory board, which means that I really believe in what they are doing. I expect no material benefit from the Iotum relationship other than the satisfaction of seeing good people and good technology succeed.) For those of you not in-the-know, Talk Now is an application that you use to tell people when you want to speak with them, and when you can take their inbound calls. Essentially, it helps to make sure you connect with the people you want to. This helps you reduce anxiety around your communications, because you can have some confidence that the calls you want to take, you won't miss, and that you have some power to control when that happens.

Due to disintermediation, I expect that the handset vendors will have an outsized portion of the value chain in next generation communications. FMC efforts will ensure that the transport layer is quite generic and reliable, giving large wireless carriers little room to charge hefty connection fees. The handset, and applications that run on them or are enabled with them, will be where the game is at. Any application that leverages that is gold.

This is a powerful thing, really, and just like Ken Camp said, I would expect the likes of Nokia or Motorola to jump on this bandwagon by snapping up places like Iotum. This is a double win for each presence enabled application they can snap up. It gives them real value that can be leveraged without the permission of the carrier, and it keeps it out of the hands of their competitors.

Twitter vs. Jaiku? I'm worried...

2007-04-09T14:09:00.000-05:00

Call me a big party pooper, but my gut reaction to this "Jaiku" vs. "Twitter" argument is worry. I'm worried because I have become to be a real flat-earther, and have a hard time seeing how either service can become super-unique or super-sticky over the long haul. I'm worried about the founder's and the investor's wallets. Here's why:

The infrastructure costs to put together a similar service provider are miniscule, or at least, so small as to be a rounding error on the size of any sizable company. Give me a good team, a million or so bucks and a few months - I have a knock off ready.
Given the flexibility of our fast-becoming-literate web, it's hard to see that any provider would have a hammer lock on your presence. Who has a hammer lock on your presence? You, and only you. I can't imagine all of us running backwards to give it to somebody else, either. It's simply too easy to put up an RSS feed, or to aggregate other's RSS feed. If the service goes down, or becomes painful, I can switch really easily. And so can my friends. Damn, I might just run a couple of them at the same time... why not?
They both have (basically) horizontal services, so the level to which they can add insane application value is limited. Seems like a bad combination - an easily replicated service targeted towards horizontal, high churn markets. They will have to play the market share game, and race the other participants to the bottom. (Sorry, been there and done that.)
Twitter is simply annoying from my handset. It's nice that you just caught a cab, but after the fifth week of it, I'm heading for the Motrin. My team uses twitter to speak between ourselves, and that's about it. If Twitter goes away, we'll use Jaiku, or RSS, or e-mail lists, or.... you get the point. Sure, it's cool, but it's so damn chatty. Feels a bit like pet rocks and mood rings. At some point, somebody will say "Do you remember when everyone was so f*cking bloggy, chat web 2.0 happy that they posted to Twitter two dozen times a day?" If you really want to know how boring it might be to be the Almighty, go to http://www.twittervision.com for an hour.

I use both services, and like them. It is good stuff. But my gut tells me that the era of first mover advantage, especially with Web 2.0 sorts of social networking applications, is over. It's simply too easy to move to another provider, and too easy to put those providers together in the first place. I imagine a good life for both companies, but have a hard time wishing that I put my money into them when they started. Maybe they have some great geo-targeted location based advertising angle up their sleeves, but it seems like stretch and off their natural course. For their sakes, I hope they prove me wrong.

The New Voice of Presence

2007-04-06T08:55:00.000-05:00

The New Voice of Presence
Deep in the DNA of every living being grows an irrepressible desire to control and modify the world that surrounds it. Every fall, whales migrate from the coast of Maine south to warmer waters, while chickens huddle on cold winter nights in the corner of the coop. Tonight, a teenager in Denver is dying her hair, while a parent screams and a friend smiles. Perhaps there is nothing more embedded in our subconcious mind than this need to control our physical world. All animals feel stress when their environment becomes out of their control, and these needs come in all sizes. Do we purchase the candy bar, or do we purchase the right to control our emotional health for the following five minutes? I know someone who keeps her candy bars in the freezer, as an insurance policy against feeling too bad. Simply put, the more we can control, the happier we think we’re going to be. Just like the mythical “Please, just do what I wanted you to do” application, no piece of technology will be able to read our minds around our anxieties, and it’s up to us to manage this. The matter is as personal as it gets.

If you look carefully at the evolution of the phone experience, you can see a steady stream of innovation around this very subject. As evidence, I give you the receptionist, who’s major function is to control inbound phone conversations. Caller ID, find-me services and profiles on cell phones all testify to our attempts at avoiding phone calls, and as we all know, we still fail in our attempts. The problem is not restricted to inbound calls, as we have as many problems trying to reach our intended audience as they do trying to reach us, providing a unique stress of its own. The essential problem is familiar to any child in a sea of adults: the telephone tells us when it wants to talk, but we have no opportunity to say when we want to talk. In traditional telephony, there is no real opportunity to express our needs and desires; our control is limited.

Next generation communications, provided today in the form of instant messaging services like Yahoo! or AOL, solve this fundamental problem with Presence. Presence provides a subscriber with the ability to talk back to the network, to describe wants and desires. This may not be apparent from the outset, as our current experience with presence is setting a status on a buddy list. But, in practice, it’s how we express our communications desires to the people to our buddies. This is derived from your status - “On the phone” means don’t call me and “Away” means that I’m hiding. Next generation communications means we are no longer babies, and we can talk back, but with a limited vocabulary.

New Presence is more mature, and stops playing these adolescent games. Instead of playing diplomat, New Presence allows the direct expression of these needs - “I want to speak with you, but not now... I would like to speak tomorrow at 5pm.” and “I’m in a place where I can’t talk, but text messages are OK.” What a new power this is for us, since it is the first time in human history that we have a socially acceptable, ubiquitous and easy to use method to throttle our interpersonal communications. New Presence does this in a complex and sophisticated way. Unlike first generation presence systems, which only work on crude measures such as how long it’s been since you’ve moved your mouse, New Presence uses items like your schedule, your contact list, your past behavior and even your physical location to communicate your presence to the network. Once you know your GPS location, it is a simple matter to correlate it with a web service to shut the ringer off whenever you are within 100 feet of a church, a library or a movie theatre. This sort of rich control of communications is what New Presence is about, and provides the sort of environmental control which subscribers value and crave.

This drive towards personalization, aided by democratizing technologies such as New Presence, will make subscribers claim their voice, taking this power closer and closer to themselves. Although there will still be network based services and applications, the ones that will be successful will be network based only for reasons of efficiency and economics. They will still have to provide ample control for users. Gone will be the days of Orwellian carriers owning and controlling a user’s communication experience. Instead, carriers and other service providers will be forced into openness and flexibility, in order to support the sorts of control that customers demand.

The challenge to the carriers is a boon to handset vendors. Since presence is so powerful, and so personal, it will likely live in a piece of network equipment nearest the user; either the desktop or the mobile handset. Until we can truly mobilize our desktop, perhaps by way of some implant behind the ear, it appears as though our mobile handset will be the platform that we use to control our presence, and therefore our communications. Other factors support this movement, as evidenced by the healthy ring tone market, and the fact that handset sales are more driven by style then by functionality. The handset vendor that maximizes New Presence, and makes it an integral part of the experience, will provide the sort of control that reduces stress, and firmly establishes customer loyalty deep in the subconscious.

The new voice in the network is an old one. The new voice in the network is yours, now fully able to speak not only to your friends, but to speak to the phone itself.

Aikido, Retreat or War

2007-04-05T16:32:00.000-05:00

I understand that most everyone else in the country is celebrating Maunday Thursday or Passover... I'm celebrating Alec Saunders Day. I suppose the vacation did him some good, as his blog is roaring away these days.

You should check out his analysis of the newly announced Office Communications Server, where he concludes that we now have a world where communications and productivity applications are inextricably entwined. I could not agree more, which really hurts, because I although I deeply respect and fear the Microsoft machine... take your hands off of my Mac or die. Microsoft really has it right this time, and shows that they really do have a trick or two left up their sleeve. In fact, I will amplify Alec's point : we now have a world where the business process and communications are inextricably entwined. At this point, only Microsoft and the Internet world have credible platforms for transforming the business process through communications technologies.

At the end of the piece, Alec talks about three strategies for coping in a Microsoft world. You can practice Aikido, and use Microsoft's momentum to your advantage, you can go to war and hit them head on, or you can retreat and go vertical. Iotum likes Aikido, which I believe is the only decent strategy for any horizontal-looking service. If you have a horizontal offering, you better start studying O-Sensei yourself, because it's the only way to survive. For the others, I would retreat and go vertical, very vertical, and very quick. Microsoft consistently fails in verticals, for an obvious reason : they ARE omnivorous, and verticals are all about focus. You'll be safe there.

For the bigger boys, let me suggest that you go to war with Microsoft. Why? It will amuse me, and all the other bloggers. You will not be so amused, but just like large carriers who are busy hastening their demise with IMS, you don't have very many other options.

Alec Saunders : VoIP Not a Category Anymore

2007-04-05T08:36:00.000-05:00

An excellent post from uber-blogger Alec Saunders today, talking about "VoIP not being a business category anymore." From his post:

Perhaps the real issue is simply this. VoIP isn't the reinvention of the telephone which we all foresaw five years ago. At least, not the VoIP peddled by the likes of Vonage. It's ordinary telephone service… delivered on IP. While popular, it has failed to deliver the revolution industry types envisioned. "Innovations" like web-based dashboards are long in the tooth, and the truly revolutionary applications which could have been delivered have never seen the light of day.

I agree with Alec, and I think I know the reason for the lack of innovation: education and habituation. Even if you have the world's best telephone service, if people don't know about it, they won't use it. And even if they DO know the service exists, habits are hard to change. That's why Iotum is my bell-weather... the canary in the coal mine, as it were. To me, the Iotum applications are super valuable. If these guys don't make it, it's hard to see how anyone in the carrier services market will.

Enterprise Mashup of the Day, Voxeo Style

2007-04-04T15:22:00.000-05:00

I had the immense pleasure of meeting the Voxeo team today - truly customer focused, truly cool people. I love to meet companies like this, because their commitment to the customer and to each other is inspirational. I also love to meet companies like Voxeo because they are finding business success by applying technology to solve their customer's problems. They told me a story of a customer that I wanted to pass on to you.

A big problem in the retail and fast food worlds is employee turnover. It's not only a problem because it's difficult to instill quality in employees that only stay for a week, but it takes a lot of time to interview them by the hiring manager. The solution? Tell new hires to dial into a service that will pre-screen them prior to asking them in for an interview. You can gather personal information such as name, telephone number, etc. to do background checks. You can ask a series of questions to establish skills, education, personality types, etc. The results may be saved in a back-end database, where your hiring manager can give the high scoring applicants a quick call.

The benefit to the enterprise? They can do a more consistent job at qualifying applicants. The hiring manager spends less time speaking to felons and more time training the existing employees. Over time, you can tweak the questions to make better hiring decisions based on previous experience. It's faster and costs less.

The benefit to prospective applicant? You can automate the "Dear John" process, and make it faster for everyone.

The future rocks too. Imagine the library of expert quizzes you can have. For instance, you are looking for an IT guy that knows Microsoft Exchange, but as the hiring manager, you don't. Simply give him the number of the quiz to take, and see how he does against the average.

Wake N' Bacon

2007-04-03T14:59:00.000-05:00

I hope that I don't offend any of my Jewish friends with talking about this one on Passover, but I need one of these: the Wake N' Bacon. Kids, if you're reading... Father's Day is around the corner.

From the site :

WHAT: An alarm clock that wakes you up with the smell and sizzle of cooking bacon.

WHY: No one likes to wake up, especially by an alarm. This clock gently wakes you up with the mouthwatering aroma of bacon, just like waking up on a Sunday morning to the smell of Mom cooking breakfast. Unless you're Jewish.

HOW: A frozen strip of bacon is placed in Wake n' Bacon the night before. Because there is a 10 minute cooking time, the clock is set to go off 10 minutes before the desired waking time. Once the alarm goes off, the clock it sends a signal to a small speaker to generate the alarm sound. We hacked the clock so that the signal is re-routed by a microchip that in responds by sending a signal to a relay that throws the switch to power two halogen lamps that slow-cook the bacon in about 10 minutes.

What Was Once Hard is Now Easy

2007-04-03T11:52:00.000-05:00

A week or so ago, I blogged about this coming storm in our industry, and I've been working on an article that details the stuff I've been thinking about. I wanted to at least speak about the prime mover for my bold declaration: what was once hard is now easy. What used to take a serious effort is now nearly trivial. I mean this in a radical sense, in the...

"I can now create a telephone application with twenty hours and $50.00 that I couldn't have written in six months and a staff of seven for a million a few years ago " sense.
"These guys from know nothing about telephony, but just created a service that's nearly as good as mine" sense.
"I can start my own service provider in my basement" sense.
"If I only have a thousand people who use my $100 dollar a month service, I can retire" sense.
"It's so easy to do, that there is no risk in trying" sense.
If it took me $10,000.00 to do, then it's hard to argue there's a lot of barriers to entry" sense.

Been really busy designing this week

2007-03-29T10:14:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the drop out in posts... just been working really hard. So, as a complete dodge of my blogging responsibilities, let me clue you in to Tom's favorite, but probably useless, mashup of the day... Twitter Vision.

Twitter vision mashes up Twitter text messages with google maps, so that when anybody sends a message, it shows up with their picture on a world map. It's really pretty cool, and in some small measure, what it must be like for God to be listening in on our thoughts. (Shoot... God, ignore that last thought.)

I suppose the general concept is pretty cool, and may even have some applications in a battlefield sort of scenario. Each soldier has a headset, it runs through speech to text and a GPS unit, and the commanders get real time, geo located battlefield intelligence. But, for Twitter Vision, it's more about hearing twenty somethings whine about their hangover.

I'm sort of fascinated. I wonder how many ignorant Americans are wondering why there are no Twitter messages coming from Nigeria. Like my friend Auri says, all these personality disorders are an American invention. In Belarus, people are too busy trying to find something decent to eat to worry about being depressed. Suppose they're too busy to Twitter too.

Verizon Patent Analysis

2007-03-23T15:24:00.000-05:00

Given the exploits of my ancestors, you might think that I would be a big fan of patents. In fact, I am, but I have to admit, some of the patents I see look pretty darn sketch.

Which brings me to this wonderful analysis of the patents that Verizon used against Vonage. The most troubling one is the thought that Verizon actually patented the TDM to Packet Gateway. Remember that story about the guy who patented the XOR chip that made the blinking cursor? I can just imagine that "Can you hear me know?" guy knocking on every gateway and service provider door saying something different.

I should thank all those customers who have retained me in the last few years to work on their defense against the VoIP patent trolls, but that fact is that I am not, nor will ever be, a patent attorney. (Unlike patent attorneys, I laugh. A joke! It's a joke! You gotta tell them when it's a joke.) If I wasn't so darn busy, I would read it through and figure it out. Anyone out there bored? Let me know.

Is this a joke?

2007-03-23T11:59:00.000-05:00

Gosh, I don't even know where to start with this one....

So, my mother calls me up a few weeks ago, before I left Comverse, and says, "Tom, I'm really confused about the differences between the P-CSCF and the S-SCSF... I know one is has something to do with replacing session border controllers, or is it a replacement for the HLR? No, that can't be right, can it? You really need to help me. I gotta get this done before my bridge game tonight."

"Well, Mom... I'm not quite too sure myself, as I don't even know what rev of IMS I'm designing to. Besides, why don't you leave all that IMS development to the Tier 1 NEPs. It's why they invented IMS in the first place, so that the smaller vendors could get locked out, while at the same time, locking in those large carriers to many more years of big, expensive iron. Besides, IMS is just an architecture, not a definitive specification, so why don't you call your bridge game an IMS compliant activity, and everyone will be happy. "

The title is so true, in so many ways.

p.s. I am pretty sure that if you took the entirety of the IMS specifications, in all the variances and splendor, and printed it out and put it in a big pile, the average human being standing upon it would not be able to survive the fall.

Next Generation Communications Primer

2007-03-21T21:23:00.000-05:00

Now that I've stuck my foot firmly in my mouth, it's time to come clean on what I think the future of our industry is. I'll put together a comprehensive article about it soon, but as a preface to it, here's my "Next Generation Communications Primer". Each item in the list is critical to understand, because I believe it will have a deep impact on every aspect of our technology and our business. You may not agree with some of the items on the list, but I encourage you to at least become passingly familiar with them, so that your head will be clear when the arguments are made. This list is not exhaustive, and I cannot say which are the most important things on it, but I can say that each is critical to understand.

Web 2.0 : This takes the cake for the most overused marketing term of the decade, I know, but the concepts behind Web 2.0 are absolutely critical and real. Tim O'Reilly wrote "What is Web 2.0" more than a year ago, describing what it really means. Read this article, and commit it to memory. When Om recently said that there was nothing Web 2.0 about Grand Central, this paper describes what Om meant. Even though the paper itself doesn't address voice specifically, it does provide a basic understanding of the current state-of-the-art of web technologies. Web 2.0 does not mean "whatever we do next on the web"... it has a specific meaning for the design and deployment of web applications.
Amazon Turks : I've been blogging on this for a while. The concept behind turks is that it is artificial artificial intelligence; it's a way for a computer program to call a function that is performed by a real, live human being. Even more so, it does so in a way that can use a thousand people for a single hour, and then never again. Amazon Turks makes human labor available at Internet scale. The implication for telephony? Here's a quick one: how about professional receptionists that you rent out for a minute at a time? Another one - do you want to test out your new service with ten thousand people calling at once? Another one - how about near real time transcription of conferences and messages? Another one... do you get my point? The applications are endless.
The rest of the Amazon Web services : It is important that you understand the implications of storage and computing power on demand. So much of our industry depends on capacity... both over and under. With the Amazon Web Services, you only need what you need. You can nearly instantly ramp it up, and down. You may argue that Amazon will not be the final vendor for this sort of technology... whatever. Somebody will.
New Presence : Alec Saunders and his crew at Iotum developed an application that finally gives presence back to the user, and away from the service provider. Presence is so earth shattering because it's the first time human beings can express, in real time, their preferences for how, when and from whom they would like be contacted.
Long Tail : The long tail refers to the phenomenon for large distributions, where there are a small number of very heavily weighted items in the distribution, and the rest of the items in the collection have, by comparison, a small weighting. As an example in music, something like 80% of the sales used to be in the Top 40. Since the Internet radically lowers the barriers to entry and costs of sales, it becomes possible to be profitable with a much smaller audience. In addition, since it's possible to offer a wider selection of products and services, increasingly larger amounts of sales go to the tail than the head. The implication for telephony is clear - services like voicemail which are big sellers remain that way, but the bulk of revenue is in the smaller services, now possible because of VoIP.
Ruby On Rails and The Geeks : The technical and cultural shift of web development outside of our industry is massive. I could go on about how blindingly fast web development has become, but it's only half of that story. Today's geeks live with a different ethos about asking permission, content ownership and architecture, which results in massively scalable applications which are simple to write and deploy. Because of web services and VXML, telephony development is now web development. You don't need a million dollars or months of development to deploy innovative services. No one does.
The carrier-class argument no longer holds. It used to be that innovative applications for telephony were difficult to scale because you could only stack so many Dialogic cards in a server, and so many servers in a rack, before it became silly. Packet based architectures are intrinsically more stable and robust than TDM architectures, scale better, are easier to deploy and are less expensive to develop and maintain. In fact, architectures such as TDM and (in some ways) IMS actually contribute to lower reliability and innovation. Pure SIP, and it's son P2P SIP, are systematically better.
Programmable Web : Please visit programmable web. The web is now the platform, not a 2 million dollar piece of iron. When's the last time you heard of an interesting application being delivered on any other platform? If you think that mashups are the province of geeks, I would remind you that every successful travel site is now a mashup. If you think there are no good web APIs for telephony, I would have you visit PhoneGnome, TellMe, Voxeo, FlatPlanetPhoneCompany, JaJah, Jaduka...

Goodbye to Von : Part 2

2007-03-21T17:36:00.000-05:00

I realized I only told half of the story during part one, but before I get to that, a little bird told me that my last post about VON might upset Jeff Pulver. Let's hit that one right away.

If your name ISN'T Jeff, then let me be absolutely clear that Jeff is in every way a decent and talented man, in my own personal pantheon of gods, a visionary, brilliant and worthy of every respect he's given and worthy of every dollar he makes. I have the deepest respect for Jeff, and don't challenge me on that one. I'm a wimpy geek by day, but I'm a Tang Soo Do Cho Dan by night.

If your name IS Jeff, and my post upset you, then I have wronged you in the most egregious way, and please accept my deepest apologies. I draw a clear line between you and the show, and even though the show isn't where I'm at, it is clearly where a lot of people are productive, happy and fulfilled. You are the reason the show exists, and in large measure, why our industry exists. My family, and the families of thousands of others, have, in part, you to to thank for the jobs we have due to your vision, hard work and good character. Truth be told, I am growing more upset by the day that I am not out there in California, as I miss seeing all of you. Andy is quite right - VON is still where business is done. But there are dark clouds on the horizon, and I don't think I'll hang around for the rain to come.

The second half of the story is filled with negative emotions. Scared... upset... blind-sided. I feel as though I've woken from a fog. There's a market force that's growing outside of our VoIP world that will wash away those that aren't looking for it, and will challenge those that do. Since the mashup camp this January, it's come into clear focus in my vision, and I'm afraid for my career, and those of my comrades. It's time to move, and move right now. My honest, strong and deep feelings are that the majority of players in our market are really missing what's happening in communications today. From my view of the speaking topics and theme of this VON show, I can only assume that this problem extends to the show itself. I understand why the show has taken the direction it has, especially into Video, and far be it from me to criticize that. There's a lot of money to be made in them hills... I wish all of those involved good luck. My blog, and my day to day work, are to educate those around me about the future of communications. It's what I do.

For me, from the very first day of my career, and I hope every day since, I have constantly sought out ground zero of communications technology. In my opinion, I am sad that it's no longer at the VON show, but I'm speaking more about my needs and opinions than my estimation of others. The VON show, Jeff Pulver, and all of my friends have their own agendas, needs and wants. God bless them.

Jon Arnold on DiamondWare

2007-03-19T08:34:00.000-05:00

Fantastic post this morning from Jon, speaking about Keith Weiner's work on second life. You should really check it out to get a flavor of what's new in the gaming space. And, if Brant Helf, Peter Chu, David Lindberg or any of the old PictureTel gang's out there... check this out... they are using Siren!!! Sweet.

End of an era... Goodbye to VON

2007-03-19T07:51:00.000-05:00

It's the end of an era for me.... for the first time in a decade, I am not going to the VON show. For the first time since my nine year old daughter was born, I am not attending. And that's not just the US shows, throw a couple of VON Canada's and Europe's in there, too. It's a bit sad, but we all have to move on sometime, and my time has arrived. Although it's partially because I'm doing a lot of traveling lately, and some is because I'm swamped with work, it's mostly because VON has failed to rise above the noise in my technical life. As a (hopefully) cutting edge technologist, the VON show is simply not where it's at, especially with regards to communications. Today's VON show is ruled by business development arms of increasingly larger companies, not by thought leaders driving real communication innovation. I'll miss all my friends, heck... I'll even miss Jeff Pulver's stupid purple shirts. I probably won't miss the Herding Cats. (Are they playing again?) I'll miss Carl Ford's witty banter and I'll miss giving Diana my presentation about five minutes before I give it to the audience. But more than that, I miss the feeling of walking around technologists that are doing things that blow my mind, which is why I'm hanging around the O'Reilly show these days.

And there were some pretty good times :

I remember the first time I was a speaker in 1998, where I was director of engineering for NetPhone, and gave the talk for the CEO about RTP header compression in H.323. (Boy, was I wrong. For a goof, I gave the same talk in 2005. That was a hoot.)
I remember in Fall 1999, where my teams were doing the user interface work for PingTel, and the H.323 stack for e-tel, the two leading IP phones at the time. Talk about Chinese walls. Ralph Hayon from Congruency would come by the booth for a one-stop-shop for competitive information, which we never ever gave him, but he would try.
I remember in the Fall of 2000, when we were working full scale on commercializing the SIP code from Columbia, and I had those horrible talks with a senior manager about why trying to patent SIP was a bad idea.
I remember the fall of 2001, where flying to the VON show was the first flight I took after 9/11. You know, that's how important VON was back then.
I remember the lean times, where our industry was devastated, but VON was a place to go to commiserate.
I remember seeing the market come back in 2005, and seeing the show floor fill back up, and talking about "remember when"
I remember last spring looking at the Acme Packet booth, and seeing something like 19 of the top 20 carriers had purchased their equipment, and how good I felt for Andy and Pat, two of the best guys in this market.

I'll see all of you on the other side. Maybe I'm too old of a PictureTel veteran to really get excited about video now, or maybe it's just that I'm more about creating a new world than milking the old one, but either way - I will miss the people.

Happy St. Patricks Day, You Headbanger!

2007-03-15T23:36:00.000-05:00

As you've probably noticed, I love to find an image to go with my posts. Often, I can't really convey my emotions so well in words, and pictures seem to do the trick.

Anyways, I thought I'd post something for St. Patrick's Day, as I am now "Irish-by-marriage", and I wanted to show my Irish pride and spread a little cheer. So, I'm searching for a good picture of a leprechaun, and I'm not satisfied. You get the stupid line-art leprechauns, first of all. They look really dorky. Sort of this awful combination of twelve year old girl cute and trailer park dorky. (If ANY person who reads this lives in a trailer park, I apologize. However, I think the chances of that are vanishingly small). Then, you get some pictures of a drunk guy in a green suit passed out in front of a bar. Not cool for St. Paddy's day. But then, genius hits. Lucky.

In my Irish house, we have two visitors: Lucky and Seamus. Lucky is the evil one. He tips over chairs, turns the milk green... stuff like that. Seamus is cool, and leaves gold chocolate coins all over the house. So I thought, hey! Lucky. Lucky charms. Always after me Lucky Charms. So, I search for it, and that's when I find me pot of gold.

How cool is this picture? It's like I want to make that devil sign with my hands, nod my head up and down, and remember that time in 1987 when I saw Ronnie James Dio at Oxford Plains, Maine in the Monsters of Rock Tour. It's so cool that I forgot all about those kids chasing Lucky, and that's how cool I want your St. Patrick's Day to be.