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.

Cluecon 2007

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

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

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.

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.

Let's Mash Twitter!

Apparently, Mr. Pulver has found Twitter. Twitter is a pretty cool application. You can send it text messages, which it aggregates and sends to other people on your buddy list. The main application is active presence, as in, "I'm jumping on a plane" or "Sad because I'm a Celtics fan." Others who are in your group receive these messages on their cell phones when you send your message out. You can update your presence through IM, SMS or on the web page. Personally, I've had some problems updating my presence through IM, but maybe it's me. In his blog, Jeff says he likes the service, but says that it's a bit chatty. And of course it is... if you have ten friends that update their presence a few times a day... that's a lot texting going on.

So, as a help to Jeff, let me suggest a mashup for him. Instead of continuously getting feedback, why don't you setup a system where you can ask to see what Jonathan is doing by texting his feed.

It's pretty straightforward : Twitter has an API that allows you to take the data from your friends as an XML or JSON feed. Give that XML feed into a custom keyword at 411 sync. Let's call it "twitter_pull" Then, if you want to know what your friends are doing, just text "twitter_pull jonathan", and you'll get back the Twitter data of your friend. You could probably get really complicated and use Yahoo! Pipes to do the consolidation, but that's for another day, I suppose.

5 cents, please.

Do Your Own Adventure with Sue Teller

So I've been banging this VoIP mashup drum pretty hard. I came across this video with Sue Teller, and I've got to tell you, I think she gets it more than nearly any telecom executive I've ever met. As I watched this, I wasn't sure if she was serious or not - you tell me. Either way, I think you'll enjoy this.

By the way, I think the word mashup really captures what this all about. If we can take two things and re-purpose them easily, then we have blown our flexibility as application designers through the roof. The twin advantage of inexpensive development and exponentially increased freedom not only results in innovation, but cost savings.

Where are the Web 2.0 Developers?

A few days ago, David Beckemeyer asked where all the Web 2.0 developers were. David's the founder of Phone Gnome, which provides a web API for making next generation telephony applications. Since the API was released, only a few companies have taken advantage of it. In a response to comments, David clarifies his position:

My point was more to the whining by the pundits, experts, analysts, bloggers, and other net know-it-alls about the telcos not opening their platforms, about net neutrality issues holding them back, and such, when the platform for offering these apps exists here and now and requires no more capital than putting up your average Wordpress or MT blog. So now what’s their excuse?

Well, seeing as I'm a member of at least two of the whining groups that David mentions, I'd like to offer an excuse, since David's asking for one. Let me be clear that I actually INTEND to use Phone Gnome soon, and the only reason I haven't yet is that I'm busy working with a bunch of other Web 2.0 APIs right now, and there's only so much time. I like what they have. I like what they've done. It's good. Save me some, please.

We have made a big mistake in our industry by thinking that adding these additional features will revolutionize our phone experience, and if we could just find the right mix, the world would beat a path to our door. Sell on features, they say, not on price. Frankly, we better, as the price is going to zero. To the point - if you could make the best phone application in the world, I firmly believe it would not be enough to guarantee wide-scale adoption and success for the company that developed it. Why? Forrester Research answered it for the mobile market in a recent report: education. People don't use services they don't know about. If you don't know a service exists, then you won't use it. But it's worse, even if people DO know about a service, it must become habituated. Habituation is hard to do with anything that doesn't involve caffeine, heroin or redheads. It better be good. Habituated services can become viral, but you've got to get hooked first.

Look at Iotum for God's sake - you might be able to come up with a better set of Voice 2.0 applications, but I doubt it. If you listen to their pitch, or use their service, you get it. You have the problem they are solving. You really do. And they solve it. They really do. Why aren't the carriers getting it, and deploying it like mad? Well, I think it's been such a long time since there was anything of that caliber available to them that they don't believe they can get over the education and habituation hurdle. For their sake, and Iotum's, I hope they shake it off and get that service widely deployed.

If it's true that you need home runs like Iotum to get voice 2.0 applications written, then will there ever be more than ten applications written for Phone Gnome? I say it's an unqualified yes. That's because I believe that the real game for Voice 2.0 is the integration of voice into the business process. Businesses want to do it because it saves them money with a more efficient process and fewer staffing requirements. Customers want to do it because it means better customer service. There's no education requirements for the customer. No habituation. All the customer sees is that text message on their cell phone saying the plane at 4PM is canceled, and when they press the send button, the operator answers the phone saying "I've booked a seat on the 5 PM flight, Mr. Howe, if that's OK with you." And that would be OK with me. And the people who write the web sites for Jet Blue will use Phone Gnome, and that's where the Web 2.0 developers are.

There and in the Comfort Inn in Sanford, Florida.

My Absolute Favorite Company of the Internet Telephony Show

From the beginning of our lives, we found that we liked little, versatile things that we can put together in great ways. Legos- what an amazing thing they are. You don't need to tell a seven year old how to put them together to make a space ship.

My interest is in VoIP mashups. VoIP mashups take voice based services, control them using Web technologies such as REST or SOAP, and add in other web based services to make really cool new applications. Mashups, in general, make fantastic point solutions that can really address the needs of a narrow group of users quickly and inexpensively. Whenever I think about the vertically integrated stovepipe designs that dominate today's telecom solutions, I can't help but imagine a bunch of mashup geeks behind them snickering at how ridiculous they seem. I know - I need to get out more.

In the back of a booth (I think it belonged to ABP, and if it didn't Mr. Messer, get you *ss over there and sign them up) was a little company called CyberData Corporation. CyberData makes VoIP enabled ceiling speakers, paging gateways and loudspeaker amps. They even had a lock that you could dial into and give it a DTMF string to unlock it. I was completely enthralled. I know - I need to get out more.

Can you see what they are doing? CyberData is making these little Lego blocks that you can use for your own VoIP mashup. I imagine that I am an owner of a company that has multiple locations, but I want to have a paging system that I could deploy over the entire system without upgrading anything. I imagine that I am automating the floor of a hospital, and want to use voice prompts to remind the nurses about a particular patient's care schedule. With these sorts of products, I can just whip it together very easily. Cool? It gets cooler.

Stay with me on the hospital thing for a minute. As you thought about that hospital application, you might have imagined that the paging system was owned by this software reading the patient schedule. What happens when you want to add another application that wanted to use the pager as well? Let say we've got this disaster response program that was going to direct staff to the appropriate stations. In the OLD way of engineering, you would have to figure out how these two applications should talk with each other, so that they would share the paging system. In the NEW way of engineering, the endpoint is naturally smart, and would handle taking a request at time from any application, eliminating the need for integrating these two otherwise unrelated applications. Very cost effective, very scalable and very stable.

With the sort of stuff that CyberData is putting out, I know that I have a simple way in my new applications to send one way voice messages to any physical space, anywhere at any scale. Not only is that a tool that I know enterprises can use, it is an excellent example of the tools to come. Congratulations to them!

A sick thought...

I just had a sick thought.

I'm presenting tomorrow in the "VoIP Spam : Challenges and Solutions" panel, which means (of course) I'm writing it now. The other distinguished members of the panel appear are vendors, so my supposition is that they are selling solutions. Since I'm not a vendor, I'm writing about challenges. So, here I am thinking about VoIP Spam challenges, and I had a sick thought.

I remember hearing once that, after years of building SPAM filters for e-mail, a very effective method of determining SPAM was simply looking at people reporting SPAM from their inbox. If a bunch of people reported an e-mail as SPAM.... it was probably SPAM. Of course, this makes some sense.

Forget that approach for a second, and you are only using SPAM filters. Imagine that, to increase the chances of getting through the filter, you just changed spelling and smaller parts of the text. That would help get the SPAM through, but in general, there are only so many permutations because you are dealing with a fairly small field of possibilities, and in the end, you still had to have some sort of HTML link in there, and how much could you vary that?

My sick thought was that, with voice, I can vary it nearly infinitely such that it would be impossible from simple correlations to determine if two voice messages were the same. As a human being, I would hear them as the same message. As a computer, forget it. And even if the computers got better at correlations, I would simply need to add more noise to the message, knowing that human ears are really good at picking out the voice from the noise. Any Aerosmith fan will tell you that. This is really hard stuff. That takes away a very powerful tool that we have with e-mail SPAM.

On the good side, I have a brand new application for Amazon Turks! You could pipe all your voice mails through a real person who would throw away that voice SPAM. Don't laugh - it might be what this all comes to.

Internet Telephony Show - First Day

Welcome from sunny Fort Lauderdale and the Internet Telephony Show! For all my friends at home in Boston, I'm not rubbing it in. Really, I'm not. Unless you are talking about sun tan lotion, and then yes, I am rubbing THAT in. But I digress.

I had exactly two hours on the show floor last night, and that's exactly enough to get some basic impressions:

1. I'm seeing much more innovation around business model than technology. It used to be that, when you walked into a booth, the first thing out of someone's mouth used to be something about functionality or technology. Not today, as every one I spoke to talked about innovative channel strategies or business models. A good thing, really.
2. Where have all the big companies gone? To the VON show? You would claim that this might be an enterprise show, but then where are all the large PBX vendors? I remember walking around Fall VON asking, looking for the new entrants. I suppose they come here now.
3. I found exactly ONE iPBX vendor and ONE application vendor so far that understands deployments of real time voice services in a services oriented architecture, or honestly, could spell mashup. My antenna's up with this one... I'll give you a full report at the of the show.
   

Jon Arnold and I are planning to record a podcast together tonight about the show, so I won't disclose my "Best of the Show" just yet. Stay warm all you Yankees.

Business Drivers for VoIP Mashups

Don Van Doren is a regular columnist for VON magazine, and his recent article in his regular "Focus on Contact Centers" column put into a few short sentences what I believe are the business drivers for VoIP mashups. I believe that the next big wave of real time communications lies in the integration of technologies like VoIP and presence into the larger business process. This will increase business efficiency and customer satisfaction in a single move, and is a no-brainer for businesses of all sizes. Here's a concrete example: If my plane is canceled, I'd like an SMS message that tells me so, and says "Sorry your plane is canceled. Press SEND on your phone to reschedule now." When I press SEND, I call an operator that already has information on hand, and answers the phone with "Hello Mr. Howe. I'm sorry your plane is canceled. We can put you on a 4:30 or 7:30 plane. What one would you like?" That would be awesome service, and when you integrate real time communications with business backends, you can provide this service.

What Don said in the article was that there are three distinguishing characteristics of successful implementations of IP contact centers. I would amplify that by suggesting that successful VoIP mashups for enterprises would have the same three. I quote directly from his article:

1. They are customer facing. That is, the investment facilitates direct communications between a company and its customers or business partners.
2. The communication links... become embedded in an established or new workflow or process.
3. The effect of implementing the communication link is to reduce cycle times or latency by eliminating or reducing the time waiting to reach someone.
   

The canceled flight example has all three, and is therefore valuable to both the customer and the business. From the larger perspective, this is why I believe that with the advent of service oriented architectures, integration of real time communications into the business process will be successful and inevitable.

And the winner is...

Remember the speed geeking post from Mashup Camp last week? I am now ready to reveal my favorite mashup. But first, the final FINAL results are in. The speed geeking winner of Mashup Camp 3 with 18 nickels is..... drum roll please..... The Hype Machine!

The Hype Machine (http://hypem.com) combines music blog discussion, tracks, youtube video, concert and sales data to create a unique music discovery experience. (Powered by a healthy mix of Perl & PHP). Congratulations to Anthony Vlodkin - geek of the day.

My favorite? GBlinker by John Herren. gBlinker takes a Google blinky pin, interfaces it to a laptop via serial port, and uses a hacked a Gmail widget (using the Yahoo! widget engine) to make the pin blink when you get new mail.


Why is it my favorite? Simple, the big deal behind mashups is re-purposing. As creators of technology, you simply don't know exactly how it will be used in the real world. Mashups recognize this fact by a clear delineation between the service and the application. In Voice Over IP, I think that's been traditionally seen as a 'bad thing', as business models are hard to see in that environment. However, in the 'Internet World', there's apparently more of a willingness to throw caution to the wind. That's why this was my favorite mashup. That and, I suppose, the complete and sheer geekiness of this one was too much to ignore. Serial port hacking? Very nice.

Speed Geeking!

What's speed geeking?

Twenty eight mashup developers open their laptops in a large conference room. The other 200 people, in groups of four or five, line up behind each one. For five minutes, the geek shows you the application, you ask questions, etc. A siren sounds to tell the people to find another geek to listen to. Like speed dating, but substitute potential sex for potential software.

This being a mashup conference, each geek had a mashup to show. And boy, were some of them excellent. We were each given a wooden nickel to give to our favorite mashup. I'm not going to tell you MY favorite one until I can get my pictures on the web - because you have to see it. Now, I'm an unabashed voice guy, and I was looking for cool voice mashups - but to tell you the truth, my favorite ones didn't use voice at all. Looking for a complete list of the mashups? Look here.

Here's some of my favorites :

1. I love Amazon Turks. What do you do when you know the melody, or a few words from a song, but don't know the rest? WhatsTheTune(http://aws.amazon.com) - by JineshVaria 3-way mashup for those who suffer from shower singing syndrome - means those who know the tune but dont know lyrics or song title/artist. This mashup records your tune, stores the wav file on Amazon S3, Creates an HIT on Mechanical Turk, Turkers listen to the clip, answers the HIT (title, song etc), the mashup looks out for the answer, takes the test and looks up Amazon (Via Amazon ECS) and tells you the price of the CD/DVD on Amazon.
2. Jinesh uses Turks to play Chess. ChessTurk(http://aws.amazon.com) - If the Nobelman in 1769 play chess with the turk, Why can't we in the 21st century. Mashup of playing a game of chess against the rest of the world where worker gets paid for every single move. ChessTurk is mashup between Amazon S3 and Amazon Mechanical Turk Web Services. The thing I asked was "What's in it for the Turks? They have no emotional involvement in the game." Jinesh said that he wants to extend the game by giving the Turk a small set of moves to choose from (like from a Gary Kasparov library).
3. I saw this really cool ambient chat mashup. It listens to your AOL IM chat using the AOL Web Services, and searches your conversations for nouns. It takes that noun, searches Flickr for that term, takes a random picture and then makes it your chat background. So, if you are chatting with me one day, and I start typing "Charo" or "Irish redhead" randomly... you know why.
4. This is a decent one - Gigul8r (gigul8r.com) - ChrisRadcliff and NateRitter: Mashup (in PHP/AJAX) of Myspace, Google Maps, and Eventful to help bands promote their gigs online. Prints a poster, directions, maps.
   
5. My favorite deep geek mashup: a Boxely mashup displaying a shared light box for pictures. The cool part is (now stay with me - this is important) it uses an IM session to tunnel the commands between the two applications. Not TCP. Not HTTP. IM. A chat message is sent, with some sort of XML formatting, and ripped from the stream before it hits the application. Oh the possibilities.

1.