My Web 2.0 Talk

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

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?

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

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

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

Web 2.0 Show Wrap Up

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

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!

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?

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

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

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...

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:

1. 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.
   
2. 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?
   
3. 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.)
4. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

1. 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.
   
2. 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.
   
3. 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.
4. 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.
   
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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

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

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

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!

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.

The New Voice Over IP Mantra

As I restart my consulting and custom development practice, I find it useful, at all times and everywhere, to chant my new mantra. After being in the traditional carrier space for so long, feeling the suffering that only comes from seeking satisfaction from something inherently unsatisfying, I feel as though I have finally achieved enlightenment. Just like Buddha, after achieving inner clarity, I spent a few weeks ambivalent, just sort of hanging around with this new knowledge. But now, my compassion is getting the better of me, and I wish to share this inner knowledge with all you, Buddhas to be.

Sit down in a quiet spot, turn down the lights and center on your breath. Feel the breath on your upper lip as you breath out. As you sit, repeat the following mantra, keeping it close to your heart.

Integrating real time communications with the business process makes businesses faster, saves money, and increases customer satisfaction. Integrating real time communications with the business process makes businesses faster, saves money, and increases customer satisfaction. Integrating real time communications with the business process makes businesses faster, saves money, and increases customer satisfaction.

Remember, pain is unavoidable, but suffering is your choice.

Why JetBlue Will Succeed

Seems as though everyone wants to jump on the current "JetBlue really screwed up" bandwagon-to predict its imminent demise. You know, I don't think so.

I'm sitting in the Oakland Airport waiting for my flight back home to Cape Cod. I've been away quite a bit lately, and I miss my bed, my wife and home cooking. Unfortunately, I also missed my flight. You see, today is the 15th, and yesterday was the 14th, and my ticket said 14, not 15. For Caeser and I, the ides of March suck. Et tu, Brutus?

Armed with a long and honorable past of high school screwups of this very nature, my dog face was on. I shuffled up to the agent, threw myself on the counter and asked for mercy. Now think with me. If you had to pick ANY airline in the world in this situation, who would you pick? I am willing to bet that anyone who's flown JetBlue more than twice would pick JetBlue. Of course, they got me on tonight's flight, window seat and all, even though it took the manager's permission, a baggage handstand and some quick typing. Ruthie, my agent, tried to help me. She really did. And even if she couldn't pull it off, you could tell she's trying.

JetBlue isn't going anywhere but up, because Ruthie and all her clones work there. Good service is all about caring about the customer, and having the power to make them happy. For me, this is what JetBlue is. So, when I go up, I'm going JetBlue.

Over-compensation

The one thing I have noticed about myself is that, in a strange situation, I go back to what works. For instance, I practice Karate, and for fun, I attend a Judo class. If I'm in a Judo class, and I just can't seem to find a good way to throw my opponent, I just might punch him. Karate is good at that.

I'm here in San Jose (loving it, not loving the distance from family), and I think I'm going back to what works. Or should I say, I am continually amazed at the extremely high level of technical savvy out here, and I think I overcompensate by going back to my East coast roots - back to the money.

If I hear about another Web 2.0 company that's going to create some sort of social network virally, and then see someone wave their hands about monetizing through advertisements... I'm going to barf. Not that I don't like the services I'm hearing about, because I do. Not that I don't think these guys are wicked (like that Boston word?) smart, because they are. I'm going to barf because to the man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. To the valley entrepreneur, every company looks like MySpace. I just want to hear somebody out here say "I'm going to have this new website that's so valuable that I'm going to charge the mother f*ckers for using it." Just once. Humor me. There's somebody out there in downtown San Jose with the cajones to suggest that somebody other than Google AdSense pay for a service. It's almost this sort of pathological self-esteem issue, where they value the service less than the subscriber. No - sorry - it's probably more accurate to say that the service exists only to attract the subscribers, so I can do stuff to them later on, but don't really ask what that might be.

Sort of funny for a VoIP guy to say, huh? Free calling? VoIP? Hello? Internally, I'm quite clear about the dismal failure telecom companies are in technology, especially web technologies. But, declining ARPUs or not, I gotta love their business. People make a call, and they bill them. So, sweet. Lovey, let's open a bottle of bubbly and toast to our West coast brothers.

Your Blog and a token will get you on the T

My blog is worth $0.00.
How much is your blog worth?

As I was cruising the blog-o-sphere tonight, I happened upon a blog that had this banner from Technorati, claiming the blog I was reading was worth something like $4,221.00 or something. When I clicked on it, I was sent over to Technorati and it asked me for my blog address to value it. I mistyped the URL, and this is what came back. Rather than putting the real URL in there, and actually figuring it out, I think I like what this says better. Like they say in Boston, your blog and a token will get you on the T.

Podcast : Sean O'Sullivan and MySay

Just completed a podcast with Sean O'Sullivan. At the recent E-Tel Show, I had the pleasure of hearing about an upcoming service called MySay. MySay is a sort of community mailbox, where you can leave voice mail messages for others to hear. Sean was such a good speaker, with a really interesting service, that I wanted to share it with you.

Why Packet Networks are More Reliable than the PSTN

Hard to believe? Give me a minute of your time.

In a recent post, Patrick made a comment about Van Jacobson's work at Cisco, and provided a link to a recent presentation called "A New Way to Look at Networking." I looked at this video a while ago, and it was a watershed moment for me. If you are unfamiliar with Van Jacobson, here's a section from Wikipedia:

Jacobson is best known for his work in IP network performance and scaling; his work redesigning TCP/IP's flow control algorithms to better handle congestion is said to have saved the Internet from collapsing due to traffic in 1988-1989. He is also well-known for the TCP/IP Header Compression protocol described in RFC1144, mainly meant to improve performance over low-speed links, popularly known as Van Jacobson TCP/IP Header Compression. Furthermore he has co-written a few widely used network diagnostics tools, such as traceroute, pathchar and tcpdump.

Now, Van Jacobson is working on the next generation Internet. In particular, the current generation of IP networking is based on the ideas of peer to peer communication, where pair wise conversations dominate the usage patterns, and we focus on the endpoints. The next generation of internet needs to focus on the data, not the endpoints. I deeply recommend that, if you are CTO or technical professional in the communications field, that you watch this video and commit it to memory.

In this talk, he makes an excellent point, which I want to amplify here. Since the topology of the phone network depends on concentrating ten thousand pairs of wires at the central office, it became really important to make the equipment at the central office bulletproof. Why? Because you had a physical concentration of wires at one place, and it was basically impractical to run a second set of wires somewhere else. Notice that in packet networks, this isn't the case, and there are several paths to the same point. The PSTN was basically unreliable, so you needed to make the elements reliable. In data networks, this is exactly opposite.

The business ramification? You have Verizon's thousands of central offices full of multi-million dollar switches. Yahoo! Thousands of $500.00 PCs. When a Verizon switch goes down, you hear about it on the 6 O'clock news. When a Yahoo! PC goes down, well... who cares? Lots of other servers to serve you that web page.

Amazon Web Services in Telephony

With all this talk about Amazon Turks, I wanted to push another idea out there which I think is just as important : EC2 and S3.

EC2 stands for the "Elastic Computing Cloud", which is Amazon's rent-a-server service. Need a server for an hour? Rent it for an hour. You package your standard web-like program in their image, upload it, and off you go. Need a thousand servers right now? Go get them. Not now? Get rid of them. I remember a few years ago I worked on this application for a "get out the vote" effort in Utah, where we had crazy traffic, but only for a few days.

S3 is the same sort of deal for storage. Need storage, go get it. It's fairly inexpensive too. This is a pretty interesting thing for a different reason: cash flow. As a service provider, you don't need to scale your resources until you scale your business. From a technical standpoint, nothing changes. All good.

Does the name Erlang ring a bell? If you happen to be a telephone engineer, it should. Mr. Erlang figured out how many telephone lines you needed to handle the traffic from a set of subscribers. For instance, everyone doesn't pick up the phone at the same time in a town and talk at once. On average, maybe one in a hundred people are using the phone at any one time. To be safe, telephone switches are typically setup to handle ten times that amount, just in case everyone decides to let their fingers to the walking. In Israel, they call it a "Scud Event". When a Scud missile flies across the country, all the grandmothers call to make sure everyone's OK. So, you actually have about ten times more hardware than what you would typically use, just in case somebody decides to start a war, or the equivalent.

How does this apply? Well, consider EC2. If you could deploy servers "on demand", then you could ramp up capacity when you needed it. You might think that it takes longer than a few seconds to deploy a server, and it does need a little more time than that, but peak usage actually grows rather slowly on the phone system, as the growth comes not only from new calls, but longer ones. The impact? One tenth the amount of hardware? Not bad.

Doesn't stop there. A big thing in telephony is resilience, which typically means redundant hardware. (Note to self : this is the wrong time to get on a soap box about how idiotic it is that telephony guys are always fighting a fragile network through making each element stronger instead of making the system stronger. They never watched that Borg episode in Star Trek, apparently.) If you could ramp up other servers, you could radically increase reliability at a lower cost. In this, don't let your head stop at failure of hardware, keep it moving to think about distributed denial of service attacks, or military applications. For this, EC2 and S3 shines.

Web 2.0 Expo, here I come!

In a surprising lack of judgement, the nice folks at O'Reilly have asked me to join them in San Francisco from April 15th to April 19th to handle a session called "Writing Voice Mashups with Mechanical Turks and Maps". Brady Forrest asked me if I would extend the nurse's interface so to include geo-location and maps, and since I've been really fascinated with Wheel of Food, I couldn't resist.

Here's the abstract :

A few short years ago, communications applications required millions of dollars, teams of highly skilled engineers, access to networks and many months of time. Telephony Mashups rewrite that equation, and make it possible to blend communications services into applications quickly and easily.

In this workshop, led by 2007 O'Reilly Mashup Winner Thomas Howe, we look at how these mashups are created, and at the implementation details in depth. Using After Hours Doctor's Office as an example, every part of the mashup will be reviewed in code-level detail, including a Voice XML front end, the software interfaces to the Amazon Mechanical Turk nurses, and mapping displays to help direct the patient to a local health care facility. The attendees will leave with a good understanding of the technology and effort required to write their own compelling application.

A picture of my desk?

In general, I hate chain letters. It's the imperfect combination of superstition (I hate superstition), annoyance (I hate annoyance) and this sort of anxiety-control behavior (I'm not even going into that one so early in the day). However, in a temporary change of heart for a friend, I have responded to Moshe's request to blog a picture of my desk. And here it is.

I was going to clean it up before I posted this, but then it wouldn't be MY desk - it would be some cleaned up desk formally known as my desk. May I draw your attention to the details: my favorite Blue Snowball microphone in the top right, below, a single LL Bean Duck Boot on the floor identifying my as a died-in-the-wool New Englander, my wife's crazy big calculator on the left, on top of my very excellent HP reverse Polish calculator from my undergraduate days nearly twenty years ago. And, at the center, my trusty Power G4 Mac, at one time export restricted as a munition, because it's just that fast.

Phones? Find my Nokia E-62 for day to day use, my nameless $25.00 Nokia I bought at WalMart when I need to test an application using a dumb phone, and a two line ATT handset connected to Verizon PSTN and Vonage. On the desktop, Skype is open, with Gizmo in there somewhere.

Now Moshe, I hope you are happy.

New Version of Iotum Talk Now

I think the real definition of a killer application is when you'll purchase the platform just for the app.

I think the new version of Iotum's Talk Now might qualify here, as I do not own a Blackberry, but am getting to the point where I would purchase one just to use Alec's service. Iotum's talk now takes presence from a number of connected users, and allows them to express the desire to speak with each other, and the presence to tell them when it's possible. Essentially, when you use this service, telephone tag goes way down, along with interruptions from those people you do most of your communicating with. Get the details here while I think of some way to convince my wife not to kill me for buying three phones in four months.

Surprise Dialer : My Favorite "Should Be A Service"

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

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

It's not my Imagination - Canada is cold

It's not my imagination, Canada is cold. Just had dinner with Jon, where I paid my dinner debt. Silly me - I thought that I could get away with a suit coat in Toronto in March by running from car to building, and from building to car. Jon came over, and we decided to walk up the block to a restaurant. I figure hey - I can walk three blocks anywhere, any time. I suppose I did, but it was d*mn cold.

A fine bottle of Cotes du Rhone later, we left the Vietnamese restaurant and walked back to the hotel, and frankly, it took me about ten minutes to get my voice back. Why? Because Canada is cold. D*mn cold. How cold? -26 degrees Celsius. I am now convinced that those crazy Canucks use Celsius so that they don't freak out when it gets cold. -26 Celsius is -15 degrees Fahrenheit, which would freak out anyone with half a brain. Of course, anyone with half a brain would bring a down coat to Toronto in March, now wouldn't they?

The Most Overlooked Speaker of ETel

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

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

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

Amazon Turks and Phones

Many of the people who approached me after my talk at O'Reilly emerging telephony were interested in the use of Amazon Turks in the mashup. An Amazon Turk is a real human being, found through the Amazon Turk Web service, hired to do a small job. By small, I mean something they can do in a matter of minutes. In most cases, Turks are unskilled workers, and are given simple jobs to do like choosing the best picture from a series, or identifying if an item is in a picture. A poetic example is the recent, failed search for a Microsoft Fellow, lost at sea off of San Diego. Real time satellite pictures were posted into the Amazon Turk service, where real people would l look at them searching for any sign of the missing scientist.
My example used skilled workers, in particular, nurses. Voicemails left at doctor's offices by patients were reviewed by nurses, and were determined to be urgent or routine. Urgent messages were forwarded to doctors, routine messages were saved until the morning. Voice mails were automatically retrieved, and jobs for Turks were automatically posted. Amazon Turks have a facility to qualify workers using a number of methods. Some qualifications may be done online using a simple test. Qualifications may be assigned to workers, as would be appropriate for this example, as medical certifications and other licencing issues exist. Nurses would be paid for their work directly by Amazon, once the assignments were approved. A history of successful assignments provides a platform for establishing and measuring quality metrics.
Economically, this is a win for all parties. Most sole practitioners cannot afford a full time nurse to handle calls when the office is closed. For them, they only pay for the nurse when there is a message to handle, and is therefore affordable. Since most visits to the emergency room are unnecessary, and cost nearly $900.00 more than a doctor's office visit, prompt returns of urgent messages are in the best interest of both patients and health care providers. Nurses now have a high paying, work at home option. In Web 2.0 fashion, the service gets better the more doctors and patients use the service.
This mashup was only an example, and there are many other examples of skilled workers that can be used in a Turk deployment. Accountants may use it for error detection for tax forms. Software engineers can use it for code reviews of recently written software. This mashup used Turks to transcribe the voice mails, so that they may be added to the permanent record. Services that use Turks have the singular advantage that large workforces can be delivered "just in time", with measurable quality and controllable costs. Workers have advantages as well - they may live anywhere, work any hours, and spread their employment risk over dozens of employers at the same time.
This is also an excellent example of computer-to-human interfaces, where people become part of the program itself. I can recall many times, at tradeshows and in conference rooms, when I wished I had some component that had a functionality I could describe, but couldn't possibly implement. With Amazon Turks, anything I can describe, and a human can do, can be part of an application. Ultimately, this will be the unique contribution of the technology.

The Human Race - ETel 07

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

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

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

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