API of the Week : DBpedia API

If you were to ask me, I would say the twenty year old software engineer has a distinct advantage over the older telephone guys (such as me) in the realm of innovation.  Since the barriers to entry to deploying a service provider have fallen through the floor, the larger challenge is not in complex engineering, but is instead in innovation.   The younger engineers are free of the legacy of the PSTN, and many things would occur to an experienced engineer won't to them, and it's not a bad thing. 

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

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

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

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

Hello to the VON Show?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaboogie

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

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

How does it stack up?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...