Enterprise Telephony Business Case : Morisky Surveys

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.

Jott : A Diamond in the Rough

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.

Vaguely Disturbing, Yet Compelling : Liarcard

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.

Drug Trials and Voice Mashups

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.

Telephony API of the Week : Jaduka

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.

More than IVRs, Part II : A Real World Example

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.

More than IVRs

"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.

Tom's Tools : Voxeo

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.

Microsoft Adds Voice to Apps

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:

1. Does the service make the business faster?
2. Does the service make the business more efficient?
3. 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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

After Hours Doctor's Office Page

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