ETel Telephony Mashup Finalist?

Golleee. I'm a finalist in E-Tel's Telephony Mashup contest in San Francisco.

When I met Dave Nielsen at the mashup camp at MIT last month, he told me that they were sponsoring a mashup competition at the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Show, and that I should submit something. Since I've been doing way too much business stuff lately, I jumped at the chance to strap on my keyboard and submit an application not to win, but to have some fun, prove a point and to see what happens when you take these wonderful Web technologies and smash them into the telephony world. Although I think the judges had some sort of group dementia when they nominated me as a finalist, I'll take it, just the same.

My business is in consulting and custom development. I'm really not interested in going into this space, so I'm going to post the source code and documentation after the show, so you can take it, extend it, whatever. I'm just doing this to learn and to teach. So, what's the application?

Application name : After Hours Doctor's Office

Business Problem : If a patient is sick after normal office hours, the only choices are to call the answering service to schedule an appointment for the morning, or to go to an emergency room. Many patients are unaware of which is the right choice, so they end up going to the emergency room needlessly, which not only drives up costs for the HMO, but also gives a lower quality of care for the patient and every other patient waiting in the same room. An easy-to-use, triage system to determine the proper course of care would result in faster service, lower costs and healthier patients.

Customer Experience : Mr. Kraus feels sick and dizzy, with a little left side weakness on a Tuesday night. He calls his doctor, Dr. McCarthy, to schedule an appointment for tomorrow. An IVR answers, telling the caller that it's after hours, and asking if the call is because of routine business or because of illness. If illness, it asks if the caller is on a cell phone or not. It then asks for a voice message to be relayed to the doctor, then hangs up.

Immediately after the call is over, the patient gets an SMS message on their cell phone telling him that the call was received, and that we are forwarding the message over to the nurses. If the caller is calling from a PSTN phone, we would do an outbound call back. (I couldn't do this one, because I'm not a real Tell Me developer, and outbound dialing is restricted for those who aren't.) The message is sent to a bank of nurses, who listens to the message to determine if it's urgent or not. If they think it is routine, they indicate that on their console, which results in another message being sent to the cell phone telling the patient that the matter is probably routine, and they would get a call in the morning. If urgent, the patient would get a message like "A nurse thinks you need to speak with a doctor. We are looking for one now - stay near the phone." Urgent issues are forwarded to the doctor as an SMS message to their cell phone with a summary of the call done by the nurse. In this example, the doctor's message would be : Mr. Kraus - 40 WM - left side weakness, nasuea -508 364 9972. The doctor would simply press the send button on his phone to call the patient.

At no time would the patient be more than a few minutes from feedback, and make the prospect of going to the emergency room so slow and painful, that they would prefer to sit and wait for the text message to get back.

The Mashup Components :

1. Tell Me VxML for the inbound calling IVR, the outbound status messages if I was a developer and to record and post the patient voice message.
2. Strike Iron Global SMS for the text messaging between patient, nurse and doctor
3. Amazon Web Services to setup the bank of nurses making determinations of urgency, and to transcribe the original voice mail by the patient for the permanent medical record.
   

Compelling Business Ideas and Notes :

1. Using IVR on the front end gets the critical information from the patient quickly and without asking for new patient behaviors, all without a real human doing anything.
2. Using a bank of amazon turk nurses leverages the tens of thousands of stay at home nurses with small children who wouldn't mind making $3.00 in two minutes by listening to a voice message and determining if it's important or not.
3. A typical doctor might have ten calls a night, which is not enough volume to pay an on-site nurse. A thousand doctors have ten thousand calls a night, which supports an amazon turk community easy.
4. An HMO would pay $300.00 to keep a non-urgent patient out of an emergency room.
   

Guess who's back, back again....

Well, I survived the trip to SoCal with the family. We hit the usual: San Diego Zoo, Disney World, Wild Animal Park, In-N-Out... It was the first time the two oldest kids were out in California, so it was really nice to see them soak in the California lifestyle. We were visiting family out there, which was really fun. My sister-in-law, Machelle, is a personal trainer and gave this old black-belt an excellent set of calisthenics that I'm bringing back to class. So, if any students are reading, blame her.

I really had a good time with my brother-in-law Dan McCarthy, who's a Senior Vice President of Footwear Merchandising and Design for DC Shoes. If you haven't heard of DC Shoes, or the parent company Quiksilver, ask your kids. Anyways, I'm sitting at the table in his kitchen, playing with my lovely E62 Nokia. Dan says, "Let me see that. Ick. That'll never sell big." Now, when Dan says something like that, you listen. If there's somebody who knows about things selling big, it's the main product guy at the coolest shoe company on the planet. Why? "It looks like a f-ing calculator. Who wants to wear that?"

As I hung my head, I recalled the success of the Motorola Razor. The Razor is not a very smart phone. Not a lot of features. Nothing whizzy about it. But, it looks good, and it's cheap. That sold big. Sort of depressing when you think about it, especially as an engineer.

Back in a week!

Well, it's time for school vacation, so me, Beverly D'Angelo, Corky and some girl with braces are going on vacation to Wally World in Southern California. Stay cool, and pray for me.

Mashups and Fair Use

As I was sitting at my desk this morning, writing an article for an upcoming newsletter, I happened upon the idea of fair use guidelines and mashups. An interesting part of the mashup culture is this idea of permissions... or lack thereof. Just like the DJs of the past, today's young mashup writers aren't really worrying about who owns the content they are using for their application. Indeed, in a very nice turn of events, most of the web services providers don't care that much about how their services are used - they care more that the services simply used.

That sort of mindset is different than other industries, such as entertainment and digital content. As I was researching the intersection between mashups and legal issues, I found this wonderful 11 minute mashup video from JD Lasica exploring the bounds and status of fair use in mashups.

I understand that this is really not about telephony per-se, but certainly about mashups. Let me give you a concrete example of how this might affect our industry. You are a service provider, and you allow your customers to load up a ring back tone for their account. When people call your customer's number, they will not hear ringing, but whatever .WAV file they uploaded. If the customer uploads the latest Ally and AJ song, is that fair use? If they only use 29 seconds of it, is it OK then? If not, who's responsible?

Extra credit time! I will buy the first person lunch at the finest restaurant in Hyannis if they can tell me who is in the picture on this post, and why I picked him.

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.

Web 2007 == Telecom 2000

I remember at a VON show a couple of years ago, during the bubble, somebody put out this company name generator thing. You spin three concentric wheels, and wherever it lines up, that's your name. The outer wheel had colors, the center wheel had a nice selection of landmarks, and the inner wheel had geek names like systems and networks. Spin the wheel, come up with Blue Creek Networks.. spin it again.... Red Lake Systems.

So, I'm full scale into Web 2.0, and I see the patterns already. Here's Tom's instructions on generating a Web 2.0 look and feel for your company:

1. Rewrite your company name by placing a "y" at the end, or removing the e before the R. For instance, Google becomes Googley, Hertz becomes Hrtz and General Motors becomes Genral Motors-y. Go ahead - leave letters out. They just get in the way. You can give them to other companies, so that Yahoo could become Yaaahoo.
2. Change your color palette of all your web sites to include only blue, orange and gry. I mean gray. Use only primary colors on a white background; round every curve.
3. Talk about connections and community until it makes your own community want to go postal.
4. For all intents and purposes, you can start a service provider for nothing. All you need is a giant ego, a ton of hubris, colocation space and offshore development... and you're good to go. Oh yes, you also need a devoted following (see point 3) that someone else can monetize after you cash out. You're too whatever-it-is and busy to actually monetize it yourself. Let the establishment do that.
   

And after you've done all that, in a few years, you'll have to sit down and actually figure out how to make money. And that will be good for you. I'm pretty sure that Telecom 2000 is Web 2007.

The good news? Just like Telecom 2000 gave us wonderful things like SIP and VxML, you guys are giving us mashups, and web services and structured data. Thank you!

Skyhook Wireless

In a complete coincidence, I had the pleasure of doing a podcast with Ryan Sarver from Skyhook Wireless on the same day Gig Om breaks the story of the partnership between Skyhook and SiRF. The big deal is that with the partnership, SiRF can jump start the process of GPS positioning, especially in challenging environments. We talk about this, and strange people driving around your neighborhood, in this podcast.

Web 2.0 Video

My friend, Tina Klein, linked me into this really cool Web 2.0 video from Kansas State. It's a visual history of the development of web technologies, and what Web 2.0 means for those that work with Web content. I really enjoyed it - hope you do too.

Voice Over IP Expert Series

I'm pleased to announce that the first of the Voice Over IP Expert Series of podcasts is now available on the main website. This series goes deep in a few, cutting edge areas in next generation telephony. I thought that the Internet Telephony show was a good place to kick it off. I hope you enjoy it.

Our first episode is about Spam Over IP telephony, and I focused in on the content of an draft called "The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Spam" written by Jonathan Rosenberg and Cullen Jennings last October. This draft details the possible approaches to eliminating SPIT, not necessarily how would do it. Of all the drafts I've read, this is one of the better ones. This podcast is a live recording of a session I did with Jon Arnold at the Internet Telephony Show in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Sue Teller Gets Better

I found another You tube video where she's taking a wood burning tool to customize her kicks. The fact that she's always drinking Mountain Dew seems to be the tell here...

Ok, even if it IS a cover Mountain Dew commercial, Sue is right on, and explained mashups better than I can. Get your freak on, Granny. If you had red hair, I'd marry you.

From the Strategic Public Relations :

Sue Teller is an 80-something-year-old woman who shares her arts and crafts ideas on YouTube in a show called “Do Your Own Adventure,” and it’s hysterical. In the preview of the show, Mrs. Teller is shown pimping her ride by adding crystal studs to her car door with a glue gun, spray-painting her own creation on a T-shirt, and creating a jack-a-lope by attaching deer antlers to a stuffed bunny rabbit. In the 1st show, she tells viewers how to DIY your own “kicks” with a hot wood tool; and in the 2nd show, she shows how to create a mash-up using a crochet-covered set of turntables and favorite oldie records mixed with crunk beats. In both shows, she sips on a Mountain Dew using a straw and uses pop culture expressions, i.e. “word,” while demonstrating her latest crafty adventures.

Word has it that this nugget of mash-up genius that’s quickly attracted scores of fans and the envy of the advertising world since is came out last week is indeed, Mountain Dew, but they’re not talking. Meanwhile, this crunk-lovin’ grandma continues to draw attention and a new type of hype that’s been pounced on by bloggers worldwide regarding the mystery of just who is the creative genius behind this new YouTube show/commercial. –Kathleen Gasperini

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.

Times they are a changin'

I love meebo. In honor of this weekend's Super Bowl, they took their camera out and did their own commercial. Sandy and Elaine driving around in the VW, da da da. How did I know it was Sandy and Elaine?

I know this because I use Meebo every day to consolidate all my IM accounts in one page on my browser. They put little windows on the back of their page with blog-like entries, telling me what they're up to and what they are working on. Each entry has a picture of who's writing the piece, and I know Sandy and Elaine because I've read what they've written to me. Or at least, it feels like it's written to me, because it's not stale and impersonal marketing crap. It's a real person writing like a real person. The result is that I have an emotional connection with the team, which benefits all concerned. Would I leave them and use a another service? Not without a pretty good reason.

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!

Telecom's Tsunami: Opening the VoIP community... to everyone

Just caught a link to this post by Thomas Anglero in Alec Saunder's log about the closed nature of the VoIP community: Telecom's Tsunami: Opening the VoIP community... to everyone

I can see where Thomas is coming from. There does seem to be a little clique thing going on at times. The thing that twists me about it is that the majority of the bloggers I see couldn't write a SIP stack to save their lives. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that, it's just that the VoIP blogs are fairly dominated by the business, PR and journalism types, not necessarily the geeks. Of course, Brough Turner stands out as the exception to this rule, geek god that he is. I would love to see a more well rounded discussion for the sake of the larger community; we will all benefit from it. I never go a day without reading Alec Saunders, Om Malik, Jon Arnold and Andy Abramson, but who's going to bring the deep technical analysis to the party? Brough's going to get tired, and I'm just a Paduan apprentice.

Podcasting with Jon Arnold

Last Thursday night from the Internet Telephony Show in sunny Fort Lauderdale, I had the chance to do a joint podcast with Jon Arnold. We talk about the impressions from the show, ObjectWorld, Anton, Open Source, cruise ships, viruses and more. We had a good time making this - hope you enjoy it. I think Jon and I are missing the warm weather already.

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.

Jon Arnold and Marc Robins Team Up

Just caught the press release from my old friend Jon Arnold about his new partnership with Marc Robins. My best wishes go out to both of them.

I can personally attest to Jon's analytical brilliance. I met Jon when I was the CTO of Versatel Networks in Ottawa and he was the main Frost and Sullivan analyst for VoIP. After he left there, and I left Versatel, we teamed up on a few projects such as doing a due diligence project for a second round venture capital investment. I did the technical due diligence; Jon handled the business end. Jon's reputation for independent and thoughtful analysis is well deserved.

Oh yes, and there was that time about two years ago where we ran up that impressively large dinner tab at a restaurant in Sweden during VON Europe and charged it to my boss. Something about translating Kroners to Loonies. I suppose our reputation for fine dining is well deserved, too.

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.

I'm an optimist

I really wanted to share this one with you - I found it fascinating.

The New York Times has an excellent article about Optimism and Pessimism. As most of you know (since the only people who read this blog are blood related to me, or manage my case at the parole board), I am leaving my position at Comverse to go back to consulting, and to start a small custom development firm. Of course, I'm pretty optimistic about the future, even if I do wake up in a cold sweat once and a while. (OK... nearly every night.) One thing I read in this article is the common fallacy of believing yourself to be better than average:

Optimism tends to reign when people are imagining how their own plans will turn out. Research shows that we systematically exaggerate our chances of success, believing ourselves to be more competent and more in control than we actually are. Some 80 percent of drivers, for example, think they are better at the wheel than the typical motorist and thus less likely to have an accident. We live in a Lake Woebegon of the mind, it seems, where all the children are above average.

This isn't the first time I've read this, and I have to admit, I see the truth in it. I am a better driver than average, without regards to the warning that I received this morning for running - no speeding - through the stop sign near my house. I didn't stop for it. No one in my neighborhood does. No good driver would. So, I thought I'd share this story with you, because most of you are better than average drivers. Right? Right.

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.

Introducing the Voice Over IP Literacy Podcasts

One of the best parts of my life is when I get to meet new people and teach them about the technology that I've worked in most of my professional life : Voice over IP. One thing I've noticed is that there's a lot to learn in our industry, and for some people, it's hard to know where to start. For these otherwise brilliant people, I'll be your host for a series of podcasts called the VoIP Literacy series. We'll touch on a number of basic points about voice over IP, from protocols to equipment, from the history of this industry to where it's likely to go from here. I hope that our listeners will learn the basics of next generation voice architectures, and it will provide a starting point for their own exploration.

Don't worry if you are just starting out and feel as though there's too much to learn. I've been involved in this field since the early nineties as an engineer at PictureTel, an early videoconferencing vendor that pioneered the use of packetized audio and video over all sorts of networks, and with little exception, have been in it ever since. I am continuously amazed at the sheer number things I don't know.

The podcasts are hosted from my website at ThomasHowe.com, and I've even placed transcriptions on the resources pages. Each podcast is about five minutes long, so you can probably get through one before your SIP phone rings. I would really appreciate any feedback you can give to me, because I'm sure that as much as I can help others learn, I'll be repaid ten-fold in what they can teach me.

Mashup Camp : Day 2 : Amazon EC2 Web Services

Starting out here at day 2 of Mashup Camp. This is a shorter day for us than yesterday, but I think we're going to make up for it in quality. The first conversation that I'm attending today is given by Amazon, and concentrating on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. In essence, EC2 are computer in the sky. Why have a computer working for 700 hours, when you can have 700 computers working for an hour? The EC2, you can scale capacity up and down in minutes. Developers can control their machine instances, and is very inexpensive, since you only pay for what you use. If you only use 700 hours, you only pay for 700 hours.

EC2 works with amazon machine images. You can clone these images over as many servers you want using a web services call. Typical images contain LAMP stacks, Ruby or Ruby on Rails. Once you have loaded that image to one EC2 instance, you can clone them to as many as you need, and tear them down. The example Jinesh (our speaker) is using is a typical web server farm, where a load balancer is sitting in front of ten web servers. You can increase your capacity by adding an eleventh server, or decrease your capacity by removing one. It is your responsibility to update the web balancer with the IP addresses of the server.

Now, here is (for me) a very exciting development for VoIP. With a system like amazon web services, you can quickly scale up the capacity of your VoIP service. You simply add more servers to your application. Here's an example. Imagine a SIP application server running an application like voicemail. In front of the application, put a SIP proxy server to load balance inbound calls. Instantiate a single instance of the SIP proxy server, and a single voicemail server. Run these both on an EC2 servers. (By the way, if you were using it all month, it would cost you $72.00 a month for one of these servers.) Adding subscribers? Add an EC2 server. Shampoo, Rinse, Repeat. At this point, the software you want to write will manage your server instances.

It gets better. Want to update the voicemail? Simple, take a new EC2 server, put the new image on it. From the SIP proxy server, send a small amount of calls to it. Test it. Work OK? Great - start migrating over. What about storage? You can use Amazon's S3 to store the data, with a similar dynamic nature. Want it to sync to your local database? No problem, use the S3 web services interface to synchronize it with your local data storage. And you have done ALL of this without buying a single piece of hardware. Of course, all of these things COULD be done by buying your own hardware and putting it into your co-location space. How much money are you spending on installation and maintenance of your servers?

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. 
   

LignUp

LignUp is an iPBX vendor that provides web services APIs into their box. I sat down with two of their marketing people for an excellent demonstration. Frankly, I found myself writing down SO many examples of how their switch could be used in the enterprise, I don't really have enough time right now to edit them all... speed geeking is starting up in a few minutes, and I'm not going to miss that one.

So, I do have time for at least one application. Imagine that you have posted pictures on the web. As you mouse over the picture, a helper window comes up and asks if you'd like to comment on the picture. If so, just enter your phone number. After you enter the number, you get a call on your phone asking for your comment. When you hang up, your comment shows up as a link on the page. You click on the link, and you hear your comment. I think this is a no-brainer for social networking services like Flickr, myspace, etc. How about dating sites? Yup. Easy.

How about the business ramifications? If you mashup voip with the business process, you can have the system call you on your phone to get your comments on anyone's work. How easy would that be to get feedback on the latest ad campaign? Or maybe it's better for approving business forms or purchase orders. When it's your time to approve them, you get an SMS message or a phone call, give your consent, and off you go.

Brilliant.

Eventful - Mashup Component

I'm in the first session here, and our leader is Keith from padpaw.net. Keith's service is targeted towards coordination between teams. The use case is your are soccer coach, and you want to tell your team that the soccer game is still on, even though it's raining a little bit. Or, more likely, it's raining TOO hard, and you want to cancel the game. Notifications can be given through e-mails and SMS. Of course, you can extend this problem to political campaigns, executive teams, etc.

One component of his mashup is data from Eventful. Events are managed (created, edited, viewed) though the Eventful API. This information is mashed up in padpaw's service. The benefit to Eventful is that they become a major supplier of calendars and events, increasing their subscribers and providing advertising information for them.

Of course, I'm thinking about mashing this up with VoIP. Why couldn't you use Eventful to schedule webinars, then using that information to push attendees to a conference call? Hmmmm.... You could actually have these unconferences on the fly.... Hmmmm....

Real Time Reporting from Mashup Camp

Well, the time for camp is here! I'm going to try to post as much as I can during the day, but the agenda that we are working on is so interesting, I might be able to keep up. This is my first un-conference, and it's really different than the other conferences I've been to.

Unlike most conferences, the agenda is not set before the day the conference starts. At the beginning of the day, the moderator asks the audience to come up to the front with the sessions that they are willing to lead. If you're unwilling to lead, but want to see a session, you can speak up too. I didn't see a session on real time communications mashups, so (lucky me) I'm running that one.

There are also some basic rules for the conference :
1) Whoever comes are the right people
2) Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
3) When ever it starts is the right time
4) When it's over, it's over

And the law of two feet:
If you are not learning or contributing, it's your responsibility to respectfully go somewhere you are learning or contributing.

If this isn't a good example of the mass democratization of our culture, I can't think of a better one. At other conferences, the vast majority of people who are speaking are those who paid for sponsorships. Here, there's a place for people who just want to talk. If you don't want to hear, just leave... which I suppose is where the two worlds overlap.

Venice Project has a name!

From Michael Arrington's TechCrunch page, the Venice project now has a real name : joost. You can get to it now on their site http://www.joost.com .


What is joost? Joost™ is a new way of watching TV on the internet, which uses new and established technologies to provide the best of both the internet and TV worlds. We're in the process of making it as TV-like as we can, with programmes, channels and adverts. You can also see some things that we think will enhance the TV experience: searching for programmes and channels, for example, as well as social features like chat. There are many more new features to come!

It also happens to be what Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis are doing in their spare time.

How to SPIT at the IT Expo

How do you SPIT?

Imagine going to your voicemail, and finding five messages from people selling you timeshares or Viagra. SPIT stands Spam over IP telephony, and it is one of the downsides of Voice Over IP. Since phone calls could be free using VoIP, an industrious hacker might figure out how to find all the SIP phones out there and call them and leave a voice mail message. At this month's Internet Telephony Show in Fort Lauderdale, I'm going to show you how it might be done.

Don't hate me; I'm trying to help. How? Well, I'm not the only engineer on the planet, and if I can figure it out, you KNOW somebody else can too. By describing how SPIT can be created, the more intelligent people out there can figure out how to prevent it, or at least how to minimize it. Hope to see you there.

Apple iPhone

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've heard about Apple's new iPhone. I gotta tell you, it's been a long time since I've been this excited for a new product. Apple is the best design house on the planet, and this phone shows world class design points. If you haven't seen it yet, because your jail cell doesn't have a computer, check it out at Apple . Let's dissect some of the nicer parts of the design and add some beauty to our world. Let me say from the start that from a UI perspective alone, this phone marks a watershed event.

The biggest deal? The UI, of course. Look at the bottom of the phone. There's only one mechanical button. The other buttons, right above it, are in software only. Why? Because the buttons you need change with the application you are running, and they are implemented in software behind a state of the art touch screen. For instance, in the iPhone picture here, you have buttons for your phone, your messges, the web and your iPod. When you press the phone button, all of the other buttons change to buttons you want on your Phone - favorites, recents, contacts, keypad and voicemail. When you look at the contacts, you push the contact to make phone call. No stylus, no buttons. Just point to what you want . Visual voice mail. When you type in a number, and you go past the 10 digit US number, the numbers get smaller as you add them. SMS messaging looks exactly like iChat - easy to see how you can add video to this one. The keyboard is implemented in software too, and as you type the letter, you can see the letter you pressed above your finger, reducing typing errors. For the over 70 million iPod users, synchronizing the phone to your computer requires no difference in behavior.

Visually - I think it's stunning. Not a corner in sight - only smooth, round buttons and edges. Bright and bold primary colors leverage the high definition screen. Mac users will recognize the icons from their desktop. Highlights are done by bringing inactive or non-focused buttons into muted back and white tones - the active button retains the color.

Oh, is it sweet.

Iotum has a new application

Some of you might know that I am adviser to Iotum, a Phone 2.0 company in Ottawa. Their president, and Uber Blogger, Alec Saunders just posted a demonstration of their new application called "Talk Now" on Alec's site. I think it's plain awesome. See it here.

With Talk Now, you can use your Blackberry to create a list of people you want to speak with. The application is integrated into the presence information of both you and the person you want to speak with, and when both of you are available, it will tell you and complete the call. If the other caller isn't a Talk Now subscriber, it still does a pretty good job of coordinating the call. Check out the video - it's a very cool app.

Happy New Year

Hello all!!!

From our Brady Bunch to yours, we wish you the happiest and most prosperous new year ever!!!!!

I always feel like I'm the different one.

Do you ever feel like you're the different one? Like you are the geek at the dance? I feel like that all the time, and often it's a bad thing. You see, if you are really arrogant, you can tell yourself that you ARE different, and everyone else just sucks. Unfortunately, I'm stuck with the wonderful combination of undeniable geekiness and marginal self esteem.

I'm going into this because I think I'm different about blogging. Many of my friends who blog (Jon Arnold, Andy Abramson and Alec Saunders) seem to make their bones by commenting on the news and events around them. And they do it really, really well. When something happens, and you need to know what it means, count on them to tell you. Smart people, for sure, and although I always hesitate to substitute other's judgments for my own, their's is nearly always as good or better than mine.

That said, I hardly ever spend time telling my three readers (thanks, Mom!) what things mean. Not that I don't have opinions, but I tend to be a long deep thinker, and it takes me a few weeks to form an opinion, if I ever do. Bad for blogging, I suppose. What's worse than a geek? A slow one. This makes me feel like a fish out of water.

Here's why I blog: I'm trying to be really, really transparent in my life. There are people in my life like family, friends and coworkers, and I really want to connect with them. I want them to know what I'm thinking about, and working on, and why. Here's a place they can find that out, if they are interested and (obviously) a bit bored. Until then, I'll have to let the quick thoughts come from others - and that's just peachy with me. This will stand as my professional diary crying out loud.

Hey... hold on. I saw the movie! In the end, the geeks win!

How many mashups are there?

Well, you can find out for yourself. On a daily basis, those neat people at Programmable Web scour the earth for mashups, and figure out which APIs are being used in them. Then, they tally who's using what to figure out which web services are the most popular, and for what.

Today's scores?
Yahoo leads in APIs, but google is running away in Mashups. The most popular APIs?

1) Google Maps
2) Flickr Photo Sharing
3) Amazon Shopping

Exactly 12 mashups using Voice, with 8 of them using Skype from Ebay.

Real Time Communications Mashup

Here's an article in the lastest VON magazine about the mashup between Skype and Unyte. Skype, as you probably know, is an peer-to-peer VoIP service provider with a very excellent API for delivering next generation features. Unyte is a company that provides application sharing for collaboration. When you put the two together, you can provide one button conferencing for Skype users, including application sharing. Now that's cool, but even better, saves a ton of money for the enterprise.

Don't you just LOVE the internet?

Who would have imagined couch surfing ten years ago?

Speaking about YouTube

My absolute favorite videos on You Tube are :

White and Nerdy : Yes, I understand. This is me. And I think it's completely hilarious to see Donny Osmond dancing in the back.

Goals. Gotta have'm. Love the physics explanation as well. Who said math was boring? Check the guy who pulls up at the end. Mo Do Chung Shin! (Total dedication to the task at hand.)

Ummm... that's exactly backwards, Verizon

Well, it looks like we now have the first deal struck between YouTube and the mobile carriers. If you are a VCast customer, you can now download a selected set of the YouTube library to your mobile phone. Yipeee! The blogosphere seems to be coming down pretty hard on the walled garden aspect of this... where does YouTube and Verizon get off telling us which videos we can see? And, as I've read, it's clear how YouTube and Verizon make money, but how about the people who added the content?

I think this is backwards in the extreme. I would much rather see a deal that allows me to upload my videos from my phone to my YouTube account, not just the other way around. The fact that I should have access to my YouTube account through my handset without Verizon getting in the way just seems obvious. Boys and girls, can you say disintermediation? I knew you could! And I'm sure the WiMAX and WiFI guys will give it to me, and given the big brother nature of this move, I'm going to take it.


You know what this reminds me of? AOL circa... 1995?

The Sheep Market

A not so crazy way to use Amazon Turks.

This year, Aaron Koblin from Design|Media Arts at UCLA wrote his thesis document trying to answer the following questions :

• Are the results of alienation apparent in massively bureaucratized labor systems?
• Is there/what is the role of creativity in such a system?
• And, who is responsible for maintaining culture as these systems permeate our lives.

To do this, he ran an experiment using Amazon Web Services to enlist Amazon Mechanical Turks to draw him a picture of a sheep looking to the left. For each sheep a person drew, he paid about 2 cents. His very excellent report may be read from his web site, and the ten thousand sheep can be see at here.

What I find fascinating is the outcry from people when they found out that he was going to sell the images of the sheep. Of course, this was part of his experiment - how alienated were the workers from the product of their work?

From his report :
The Amazon Web Services Blog picked up the story and embraced The Sheep Market as an exemplary use of the Mechanical Turk system, Jeff from Amazon writes,

“You might look at this and think "What's the point?" or "how does this relate to my business?" Think of this as an example of how to quickly, easily, and inexpensively get 10,000 people to do something for you. Today it is sheep, but it could just as easily be choices of color combinations for car interiors, evaluation of some logos for your business, selection of most important features when choosing a vacation spot, and so forth.”[1]

This is the important point for developers like myself. Web services like Amazon Turks answer the question "How can I make simple human labor massively scalable and available?"

I'm going to camp!

Hi all -
I'm going to camp! Mashup camp, that is. I'm going to be attending the Mashup Camp at MIT from January 15th to 18th. The first two days are a series of lectures and tutorials about creating Web mashups using APIs, the second two days are a get together. From the site:


Mashup Camp 3 will be conducted Open Space style (more about Open Space and unconferences can be found here). Much the same way Mashup Camps 1 & 2 were run, at the beginning of each day, there will be a general assembly where attendees can propose the discussion that they're interested in leading. Attendees will line up for their turn at the microphone, propose a discussion and, on a whiteboard that lists all of the available rooms and timeslots in grid fashion, slot their proposed discussion into one of the available room/times. We'll follow the same protocol as in other Mashup Camps where the details about the proposed discussion are written in magic marker on a piece of paper and then taped into an available slot (this way, they're easily moved). To get an idea of what this looks like, check out the images on the MashupCamp2Grid for Mashup Camp 2. On the second day of the event, one or more blocks of time will be reserved for Speed Geeking! Speed geeking is like speed dating. Developers and others with a technology to demo will set up stations and attendees will spend five minutes at each station before moving to the next one at the sound of a buzzer. Speed Geeking is one of the most popular parts of our events.

Anyways, I'm not sure if there's still space available, but if you show up - look me up! For more info, check out http://www.mashupcamp.com


Stay cool.

VoIP 2.0 Mashup - Project 1

Hi all -

As I mentioned in my talk out in Berlin, me and bunch of geek friends are putting together a series of VoIP 2.0 mashups in 2007. The first mashup is going to integrate Amazon Turks with Asterisk Voice Mail, and have the turks transcribe the voice mail message. The idea is that not only can you have the voicemail in your inbox, you can have the transcription too. This is cool because you can search for the contents of voicemails, just like you can for regular mail. In the future, you can integrate it with your conference calls too. When we finish it, we'll post the code and do a podcast, so that we can teach others how to do it too.

As for the team, it looks like we've got a full one. Thanks to everyone who asked to be part of this team; I'll give you a call when we do the next project.

Stay cool,
Thomas

Telephones Making the World a Better Place

If you're anything like me, you wonder what the real benefit to the world our work in next generation telephony is. Thanks to the Onion, I don't have to wonder anymore.

New Mobile-Device Purchase Makes Asshole More Versatile

NEW YORK—The new BlackBerry 8703c has allowed total shithead Robert McClain to assign more work to his assistants while he is gambling in Atlantic City.

Does it make any sense to design a broad-based communications service any longer?

At the recent VON show in Europe, Carl Ford dragged me up on stage to fill out a panel talking about the fight between 3G and and Fixed Wireless mobile carriers. One of the invited, as opposed to the dragged, speakers was Wolfgang B, the head of Internet operations for T-Mobile. As my day job has a good client relationship with T-Mobile, I sort of ducked identifying my self as much as anyone on a stage can. Carl dragged me up because Wolfgang was sort of trashing the whole mobile video space, including a "romp" through the logistics of adult content. He roundly dismissed any new mobile video service, with the flair of a German genius. At the end of his talk, he said "I wish there was a content provider in the audience", and up went my hand.


Of course, the REASON I put up my hand was that not that I claimed to be a P&R guy for Arista records, but I was one person who found himself in situations where I have taken video on the road, and wanted to share them with my friends. In my case, I wanted to capture this really neat Judo throw in my camera, and send it to my Karate teacher. What I was REALLY thinking about wasn't me, but my camera obsessed son, who takes videos of his friends with his phone constantly, and would gladly post them to myspace if he could. So, I made this point, and he conceded that you could specialize the market to such a degree that you COULD deliver that service, but the kids would become disinterested in three months, and how could you run a business on that?


What he didn't say publicly, but admitted afterwards in a side conversation, was that the problem was in the structure of carriers - they were too large, and the opportunities too fleeting, to really take advantage of the very niched application. I hope I didn't offend him when I suggested that the problem was with today's carriers, not tomorrow's.
Here's where my head went - as carriers search for new services, should you just generally rule out any service that's too general? Is it true that a general service will not have enough value to have staying power and resist commoditization? Should you go as far to say that anything that most people would need and pay money for is a non-starter? Talk about contrary thinking... maybe I'm low on my meds.

I'm a hype-ster!

Oh - I gotta tell you this...

At the end of my presentation, a person raised his hand and suggested that I was a hype-ster, and used every hype term in the book except for Ajax. I hope he's reading this....

Let me tell you, Mr. Smarty Pants, I just MIGHT use AJAX in my new Web 2.0 VoIP Mashup... and you can't stop me. And I might use OOP, and case tools... maybe even think win-win, team based, bottoms-up and get some 360 degree feedback. It all could happen.

But I absolutely WILL integrate Amazon Turks with Asterisk Voicemails, and it ain't bragging if you can do it, and it ain't hype either.

Intersection of Web 2.0 and VoIP

In a recent conversation with my wife, I lamented that I may never have another chance to work at the very beginning of a truly disruptive technology, like ADSL or VoIP. Lucky for me, I'm wrong about ten times an hour. (I better hurry up and finish this post before I get something else wrong!)


We are at the start of a major upheaval in not only technology, but in the basic business models that drive our industry. The intersection of Web 2.0 technologies and business models and the communications industry will result in a massive change in how applications are created and delivered. Don't get me wrong, I'm not shorting my Verizon stock just yet. Bill Gates put it best in 1998 - we overestimate the short term effects of fundamental technology shifts, and underestimate the long term effects. We still only at something like 10% penetration of VoIP into US households with broadband service. We are seeing this fundamental shift, and in ten years, we will point back with confidence to 2006 as the time when the shift occurred.


In essence, the real hope and promise of VoIP is that businesses can truly tailor the business and the communications processes. Make no mistake, our market is still driven by cost savings and increased revenue opportunities that arise from an increased customer base - not by truly compelling features. Name the number of new telephony services you've seen in the past five years. I like ring tones and ring back tones... the Versatel Call Pod idea was pretty cool, but it's a short list. I can name dozens of new web applications I like from this year alone. This is a direct result of the innovation and customization that Web 2.0 provides. The promised land of VoIP comes from this integration.


Tomorrow at the European VON show, I am announcing a project I am leading in 2007. Myself, and a small group of like-minded geeks, are going to spend a few weekend days to create examples of these applications. The first application is going to make a service that will automatically translate voice mails left on Asterisk into text using Amazon's mechanical Turk service. With this, you can not only have a copy of all the voice mails in your Outlook mailbox, but you can have TEXT copies, that you can search with Spotlight or Google Desktop.


The point behind this effort is only to prove that we can do it, and to learn from the experience. We will take what we learn, and publish it to the industry in the form of a Wiki and a podcast. With a litle luck, we'll see somebody take this and add it to their conferencing engine, so I can stop taking notes when I attend a conference call.


I posted my presenation to the right; I tried to record my talk too - I'll see if I can clean it up enough to post.

Stay cool,
Thomas

Missing some of the FMC point

I never comment on other blogs, because it seems too recursive for my defensive programming blood. That said, I was reading a fairly good criticism of FMC in the Telco 2.0 blog, but I think there's some FMC points that was missed, and in fairness, should be mentioned.

1) As I understand it, the largest customer complaint about current mobile service was that signal quality was low inside many houses. This is a big deal, since a very large percentage of cell phone use (something like 10-20%) occurs in the house. FMC directly solves this problem, and in my opinion, is worth the effort.
2) FMC means more than modal transparency - it means service transparency as well. I really would like to have my mobile phone appear exactly as my business desk phone. I would like both to ring at the same time, have the same voice mail, have the same features, work extension, DID, auto-attendant... everything. For me, this would be valuable.

That said, the Telco 2.0 blog is very cool - but I think just a bit out of bounds on this one.

IMS applications

Hi all -

Well, summer is over, and it's time to get back on the stick. I wanted to share something with you. If you're like me, you always hear that the future of telephony is in applications. Well, here's some data from a VDC report on the future of IMS. In the report, they ask a number of carriers what applications they plan to deploy on their IMS networks. The results :

1) Fixed mobile convergence : 80% of carriers
2) Music streaming : 79% of carriers
3) IP Centrex : 69% of carriers
4) Gaming : 68% of carriers
5) Video streaming : 63% of carriers

I find these numbers completely fascinating. For instance, three of the top five applications are based on entertainment. Also, we hear so much in my industry about FMC, but nearly as many carriers are looking for music streaming. The gaming one is fairly surprising to me, as I also have access to current gaming numbers from the mobile industry, and they aren't really that compelling.

As always I'm on the hunt for new applications - let me know what you are seeing.

Thomas

IPTV Blogging

Hi all -

Just a short note. As I am working furiously on Ernie, I am also doing some triple play blogging over at the Triple Play Blog at TMC. For those of you that are lazy, here's what I said :

========================================================

We all know that service providers that deploy a triple play radically reduce customer churn, but they also set themselves up for new and exciting services.


I caught this one today and said to myself, I would so use this! UK incumbent telco, BT, has signed an agreement with Video Performance Ltd. (VPL), a UK music industry organization that licenses the broadcast and public performance of music videos. With this agreement, a subscriber can access music videos on demand from his living room. I can't tell you how long it's been since I've seen Devo's Whip It, but it's been too long. As Apple has shown, there is a real appetite for increasing the richness and spontaneity of our entertainment choices. I think BT is on to something here, and I'm sure it's not the last neat value added service that triple play will deliver. Now, if I could just find out how to watch some of those old Cars videos....

========================================================

For those of you that attended the triple play symposium and heard my talk, I have the presentation posted on this blog, right over there ==>.

Stay loose.

Thank you to the MLAC

Hi -

I wanted to thank all of the employees of the Massachusetts Legal Aid Corporation that I met with today in Boston. I spent a few hours with them to speak about Voice Over IP and deploying it in their system. If you are unfamiliar with the organization, or their misssion, The Massachusetts Legal Assistance Corporation is the state's largest funder of civil legal aid programs. MLAC-funded programs provide free legal advice and assistance to low-income Massachusetts residents with non-criminal legal problems. You can check them out at http://www.mlac.org.

They had some questions for me, which I promised to answer for them. Here's the first few :

Q: Can VoIP work in conjunction with an older phone system?
A: In general, yes. Devices called VoIP gateways translate between older phone systems and VoIP based systems. They work well for most purposes. The biggest problems come in when you need to have a "feature" work between new and old systems. As an example, if you have a phone system on one side of the gateway transfer the call, it may have problems on the other side. You've probably got to test those feature interactions pretty carefully.

Q: Will the cost of VoIP outweigh the benefits of the system?
A: Well, VoIP is pretty much a slam dunk for nearly all applications. It either makes sense because of the cost savings in toll charges or maintenances, or it can do things that your old system can't. If you have to get a new phone system, you probably don't have any other reasonable choice.

Q: Can you name reliable sources of information of independent information on the VoIP industry?
A: There's so much out there, the basic problem isn't necessarily in independence - it's in digestion. If you are considering deploying VoIP, get an expert to help you understand the issues and guide your purchases. In general, find someone independent from vendors if you can.

Ernie site is launched!!!

Hi all -

After months of threats, and months of head scratching, the Open Ernie site is now up and running at OpenErnie.org . Off we go to the races - I make the formal presentation at the VON Europe show tomorrow.

So, Ernie's mission is to enable LAMP developers to quickly develop VoIP applications using an architecture that scales. I've been looking at other open source efforts for raw material, including Asterisk, Yate, Shtoom and the offerings from SIP Foundry. Although the design stage will take some time, here's my thoughts on how things should be put together :

0) Ernie is open, free, standards compliant and quite SIPPY. Open means only open source will be used. Free means that no one should become the God of Ernie (that means me). Standards compliant and quite SIPPY means not only do we only implement with published and reviewed standards, but that we follow standard SIP and 3GPP architectures.

1) The SIP stacks from SIP Foundry are as good as it gets, commercial or open source. I can't think of a good reason to use anything else. There's too, too many SIP implementations already, so making a new one is just way out.

2) My personal feelings about Asterisk architecture are well documented, but the Asterisk developer community is large and vibrant. Many of them are taking Asterisk to make new applications. We need to find a way to integrate these efforts without inheriting the architectural problems.

3) Ernie should not be in any way a switch. It should be an applications platform, and that means that calls are present during the applications time, then should be ended or passed off. B2B = BAD

4) I think the basic top level API should be very close to TAPI in view and model, but implemented in Python/PHP/Perl. I happen to like Python very much. Es muy bueno.

Ernie's First Applications

The point behind Ernie is that we need a framework to create server based, presence and VoIP enabled applications for next generation service providers and enterprises. Our first applications should be able to highlight these uses. After some internal debates, here's a list of Ernie's first applications, given in order :

1) An automated testing application for service providers. Ernie servers will sit on the edges and the boundaries of service provider networks, and will provide an active testing platform for them. Probably forward testing information to a Nagios system for display, monitoring, etc. We'll make it work with analog phone adapters as well, so you can test complete IP to PSTN connectivity. Ernie will test completion rates, voice quality, etc.

2) A basic contact center application that will handle inbound calls, agent interfaces, queing, etc in a SIP based network.

3) A find-me, follow-me service that can integrated into web pages. Presence and VoIP enabled.

Getting the Ernie Juices Flowing

Hi all -

So, now that I'm all married and stuff, let's get back to the grindstone.

Here's some prinicples of Ernie's architecture and design:
1) It should be standards based, as much as it can be.
2) The components should be naturally distributed and scalable. For instance, we should be able to add in a Convedia or Snowshore media server to accelerate and enhance media processing.
3) As much as possible, it should be fully redundant and fault tolerant.
4) It should be multi-application and multi-user friendly. Someone should be able to login to an Ernie server and manage (start, restart, stop, check, pause...) the applications that are running there.
5) People may want to make money with the Ernie applications they have written. Billing interfaces should be built into the platform.
6) The highest interface should be as simple as possible. Simple things should be simple to do. The ultimate customers are the millions of web programmers.

The Best Two Things I Saw at the VON Show

1) A hearing impaired man is setting up a VoIP network for other hearing imparied people. In this case, the "V" stands for "Video" not "Voice". I was really inspired here, because I think it is an excellent example of how our hard work will make somebody's life much better. With the global reach of broadband, and narrow-band switching technology, we now have a way to tie in this large, but not geographically dense, group of people.

2) The industrial design of the Polycom attendant phone. I am an unashamed PictureTel alumni, and seeing how slick this design was did my heart good. Design matters, and the lucky people who have this design on their desk will certainly be a little happier in their day to day lives.

I'm back again...

Whew - I've been busy. I've been traveling, writing, speaking, working, everything but sleeping. But, most importantly... Missy and I got hitched... eloped to be precise. I was going to lean the ladder up against the wall, but I'd probably fall or something like that. Our announcment letter below :

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Dear friends and family,
Last Friday night, in the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, and with the greatest joy and happiness, we were married. Our wedding was very simple, with just the two of us, a justice of the peace and an old family friend, Marie McHugh, who served as chauffeur, photographer, witness and general go-to person. For us, it was a beautiful moment, and was everything that we could have hoped for. We are blessed with an ever-expanding family, one that is scattered all over the globe. Since we felt it would be impossible to gather all of our loved ones together in one place, and that we really wanted a simple day, we decided to elope. Frankly, in retrospect, it was an excellent decision for us. We tried hard to keep our plans secret to everybody, and didn't even know that February 17th would be the date until three weeks before. We are so happy to have that date, as it was Missy's grandmother's birthday. We know that our timing might be a surprise to you, but I can't imagine that our deep love and affection are. We are very happy.
We will be living in Missy's house in West Barnstable, on Cape Cod. We've both gone from being parents of two to four children, with the final child roster being Zephan (4), William (7), Abigail (8) and Jacob (12). No new sisters for Abby, but new brothers all around. Thomas has legally changed his last name to McCarthy-Howe, and Missy has kept her last name as McCarthy-Kraus. Go team McCarthy! We haven't planned a celebration yet, but imagine that this summer might be a good time for that.
Thanks for all of your good wishes; we are blessed in more ways than we can count. We are heading off to Florida in a few days to tell Thomas' parents, and Jacob and Abby get the good news when we come back on Friday.

All of our love,
Thomas and Melissa

p.s. We've posted pictures here... http://homepage.mac.com/thomasspencerhowe/PhotoAlbum6.html