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 :

------------------------------------------
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

I sort of got in a fight...

No, not with fists or anything like that. I save that stuff for Tuesday nights and Saturday mornings. During the show, I had an opportunity to speak with Mark Spencer a few times, and I think we disagree about a few points. I'm going to think pretty deeply about it and maybe write about it later, but here are the points of contention :

1) Mark said that, in software, anything is possible, so it is not unreasonable to think that Asterisk can be all things to all people. I say that software isn't magic, and nothing can be all things to all people. My question was, "How do you design a car to have ultimate speed and acceleration, while at the same time having the best fuel economy?" His answer is, "Software isn't the same as cars."

2) Mark said that open source changes all the rules, and that is what enables Asterisk to be all things to all people. I say that open source doesn't change any fundamental rules, period. He said that with Open source, you can now make anything at all you wanted. I replied "With an assembler, you can make any software you want as well, and that didn't require open source."

So, here's a fundamental question that needs to be answered. In the absence of any monetary motivation, is software engineering still relevant?

I say yes, of course.

Back from the Internet Telephony Show

Hi all!

I'm back from the Internet Telephony show, and it was really hopping! I was really surprised at the amount of really good customers I met while I was in the Netcentrex booth. Thank you to everyone who attended my sessions - I put PDFs of the presentations on the bar to the right. I didn't get to catch up with everyone I wanted to, so I suppose we'll see each other at VON in about a month and a half.

January Letter

Happy New Year!

I hope this letter finds you well. I'm still hacking out a living as a consultant. In fact, I'm pleased to annouce that I've signed on a new consulting client : Netcentrex. I'll be working with them over the coming months to work in a pre-sales and product management role. This is a great job for me, as it increases my direct customer exposure. It's been a few years since I've been able to concentrate this much on sales, and I'm very excited about the team I'm working with. I have a lot to learn; they have a lot they can teach me. If you are coming down to Florida next week, I'll be in the Netcentrex booth for much of the show. Please stop by and say hello!

I'm also speaking at the show next week - three times! I'm speaking about the impact, both from a technical and business perspective, of transparency and walled gardens in next generation architectures. I'm also speaking on the session border controller panel, as an interested outsider. Finally, I'm speaking at the open source panel, about how open source can be used to meet customer needs.

To keep my brain balanced, I'm working on an open source application I call Ernie. Ernie is a Web 2.0 platform, designed to enable web designers to easily create and integrate applications that use real time communications. I'm still painting the picture for myself and others, and coding hasn't started yet. One thing, though, it's certainly not a technology in search of an application. We've been collecting dozens of very interesting services that Ernie can enable. If you want to follow our progress, check for updates at http://www.thomashowe.com.

Netcentrex is a big job, but not full time. I've already had two due diligence jobs for two different venture capitalists in the last two weeks! I have another one in a few weeks... a good sign for the entire business food chain. I've also had two small research projects I've worked on - one on the integration of voice and instant messaging and another on soft clients.

Finally, the open source report is really humming along now. I'm writing it with Jon Arnold, formerly of Frost and Sullivan, who now runs his own company. Jon has been deeply involved in our industry for a while, and is an excellent analyst. We're spending most of the day on Tuesday interviewing people for our report. It's my first official analyst report; new horizons everywhere.

Good luck to all of you! I hope to see you in Florida, and if not, I'm sure we'll catch up sometime.

As always, I am very grateful to everyone for their continuing support and friendship.

Free 411 is the future.

Here's a little quiz for you...

Most cell calls in the US cost 11 cents per minute. How much does a 411 call cost? Mine costs $1.50 for about three minutes. Your's much better? Didn't think so. And you thought margins were going through the floor!

So, if you haven't heard of it, there's 1-800-free-411. From their site :

1-800-FREE-411 revolutionizes the 411 (directory assistance) marketplace by offering consumers a FREE alternative to the high cost service provided by traditional carriers. In addition, FREE411.COM on the Internet provides consumers with an easy to use Web-based destination for telephone number lookups. National and local merchants sponsor this service with a 12-second audio jingle about their services, which are played to consumers at the point they make a 411 request for a business in their category.

So, you call, it costs 11 cents a minute, and you get connected. You listen to the add, and off your call goes. Now, here's the great part. If you ask for the local pizza shop, they give you a number, but Domino's pays for their add to play before you are connected. Maybe they offer you a free pizza deal or something. If you like what Domino's is selling, you press 1, and the call is sent to Domino's instead. Good deal for Domino's, huh? They have the ultimate targeted add - this person is hungry. Good deal for you too, right? It costs much less, and maybe you'll get a better deal for your pizza. And, most importantly, good for the Free 411. I hear rumours that they get something like a 5-10% take rate on their advertisements. That's better than Google, by a factor of ten.

Here you go - an excellent voice enabled application.

I'm back!

Hi all -

Sorry for the dropout - pushing to get some stuff done around here.

Here's a really, really interesting arcticle from Yahoo :
Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that relies on volunteers to pen nearly 4 million articles, is about as accurate in covering scientific topics as Encyclopedia Britannica, the journal Nature wrote in an online article published Wednesday.
ADVERTISEMENT

The finding, based on a side-by-side comparison of articles covering a broad swath of the scientific spectrum, comes as Wikipedia faces criticism over the accuracy of some of its entries.

Two weeks ago prominent journalist John Seigenthaler, the former publisher of the Tennessean newspaper and founding editorial director of USA Today, revealed that a Wikipedia entry that ran for four months had incorrectly named him as a longtime suspect in the assassinations of president John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert.

Such errors appear to be the exception rather than the rule, Nature said in Wednesday's article, which the scientific journal said was the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia to Britannica. Based on 42 articles reviewed by experts, the average scientific entry in Wikipedia contained four errors or omissions, while Britannica had three.

This is really important, because it says that community efforts can stand aside commercial efforts, and be of equivalent quality. Of course, this is what Ernie is going to depend on.

Joe Batista and Commoditization

Well, I had the most interesting morning with Joe Batista, the "chief creatologist" of Hewlett Packard. A quick bio :

Joseph (Joe) Batista, Director & Chief Creatologist at Hewlett Packard (HP) Corporation, is responsible for building new business realties leveraging HP’s portfolio of assets, and driving new growth, strategy and implementation agendas that deliver real business results.

As you might know, I'm a former chairman of the Cape Cod Technology Council, which sort of sounds like "President of the Orleans Kiwanis". In a way, it is, but with a twist. Tons of successful Boston area executives and engineers have houses down here on the Cape, Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard, and they all have a vested interest in seeing high tech on the Cape flourish. So, we tend to have excellent speakers come to our breakfasts. As an example, we had the director of NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC), who has a house here, speak to us about all the neat 10 to 40 year projects that NASA is working on, including anti-matter drives and hopper bots. And yes, it does sound like Star Trek. That's because the producers of Star Trek make regular visits to NIAC for TV show fodder. Yes, anti-matter drives are a real project, ableit nascent, at NASA. Cool, huh? But, I digress.

Joe was speaking to us about the new economy, where the real asset is ideas. As part of this, he spoke about commoditization, and used as real world examples Clorox and coffee beans. Now, here's an excellent take away based on coffee beans. It doesn't take a creatologist to relate this to today's world of telephony:

Commodity == coffee beans, 1-2 cents per pound
Product == Maxwell house coffee, $1.25 per pound
Service == Dunkin Donuts Coffee, $1.25 per cup
Experience == Starbucks Coffee, $2-$5 per cup

I'll leave you with a quote from Pulp Fiction :

                                 BUDDY
                     How 'bout you, Peggy Sue?

                                MIA
                     I'll have the Durwood Kirby burger
                     -- bloody -- and a five-dollar
                     shake.

                                BUDDY
                     How d'ya want that shake, Martin
                     and Lewis, or Amos and Andy?

                                MIA
                     Martin and Lewis.

                                VINCENT
                     Did you just order a five-dollar
                     shake?

                                MIA
                     Sure did.

                                VINCENT
                     A shake?  Milk and ice cream?

                                MIA
                     Uh-huh.

                                VINCENT
                     It costs five dollars?

                                BUDDY
                     Yep.

                                VINCENT
                     You don't put bourbon in it or
                     anything?

                                BUDDY
                     Nope.

                                VINCENT
                     Just checking.



Later...
                            VINCENT
                     Can I have a sip of that?  I'd like
                     to know what a five-dollar shake
                     tastes like.

                                MIA
                     Be my guest.

      She slides the shake over to him.

                                MIA
                     You can use my straw, I don't have
                     kooties.

      Vincent smiles.

                                VINCENT
                     Yeah, but maybe I do.

                                MIA
                     Kooties I can handle.

      He takes a sip.

                                VINCENT
                    Goddamn!  That's a pretty fuckin'
                    good milk shake.

                                MIA
                    Told ya.

                                VINCENT
                    I don't know if it's worth five
                    dollars, but it's pretty fuckin'
                    good.

      He slides the shake back.

Made me fall off my chair!!!!

Ok - this has nothing to do with anything, but this was SO funny, it made me fall off my chair. Anyone who's ever been an engineer has a story like this one, but this is so over the top, I just had to share....

No matter how much resolve you could muster, it was still difficult to quit Apple if Steve wanted you to stay. You'd have to sit down with him for a reality distortion session, which was often effective at getting people to change their minds. One day, a few of us were talking about strategies to overcome Steve's persuasiveness.

"I've got it!", said Burrell. "I know the perfect way to quit that will nullify the reality distortion field."

Of course we wanted to know how he could do that.

"I'll just walk into Steve's office, pull down my pants, and urinate on his desk. What could he say to that? It's guaranteed to work." We laughed, thinking that not even Burrell would have the guts to do that.

A year and a half later, it finally was time for Burrell to quit, after months of scuffling with Bob Belleville and some of the other managers, who wanted to cancel the "Turbo Mac" project (a redesigned, faster Mac based on a semi-custom chip, with an internal hard drive) that Burrell was working on with Brian Howard and Bob Bailey.

Burrell told Bob Belleville (who was probably relieved, since he knew that Burrell didn't respect him) and the human resources department that he was quitting, and then made an appointment to see Steve that afternoon. When he walked into Steve's office, he was surprised to see Steve grinning at him.

"Are you gonna do it? Are you really gonna do it?", asked Steve. Somehow, word about the urination threat had gotten back to Steve, and he was genuinely curious if Burrell would go through with it or not.

Burrell looked Steve in the eye. "Do I have to? I'll do it if I have to."

Steve's expression gave him the answer, so Burrell turned and walked out of the office, no longer an Apple employee.

It's Mobicents day!

One question that might come to mind is, if Mobicents exists, why would Ernie?

Well, that's an excellent question. From where I sit, I would answer it like this: If C++ exists, why then have Visual Basic? Well, the answer to both is that sometimes you need to script a solution, and sometimes you need to build it from the ground up. Scripting is excellent for smaller applications and for integration with a bunch of technologies, components, etc. Fully featured development environments are a must for any sort of large feature development, or ones that involve many developers. Mobicents is an implementation of JSLEE, as are offerings from Ubiquity and others. Chances are though, in my office inside a small ISP, the web developer would really, really rather see a Python or TCL API than Java.

There's really room for both.

Open Source IMS

Well, I found this excellent post quoting the leader (Ivelin Ivanov) of Mobicents.org. For those of you who don't follow it, mobicents is an open source implementation of a JSLEE platform. From their site:

Mobicents is the first and only Open Source VoIP Platform certified for JSLEE 1.0 compliance. Mobicents brings to telecom applications a robust component model and execution environment. It complements J2EE to enable convergence of voice, video and data in next generation intelligent applications.

In his post, he makes an excellent argument why telecom providers need an open source solution, and the success that open source has had in making services horizontal, radically increasing the amount of applications available for a market. Of course, I couldn't agree more.

Ernie's been PodCasted

Sometimes speaking is easier than writing - Adam Uzelac interviewed me for his podcast. I've tried to put down some of where I think Ernie is going - have a listen.

Ernie has it's first sponsor!

Hey - a big shout out to cape.com, for agreeing to sponsor the Ernie server. Currently got plans to unveil the big Ernie site right after New Year's... so now Ernie has a home. Thanks!

Ernie Application : *P

This is an excellent one from Alec. Basically, a standard way to make payments from your phone using a PayPal Web 2.0 API. Just press *P.

Om Malik's Applications

More examples of great applications that Ernie could enable, and supporting Adam's thoughts, this time described by Om Malik. The future will certainly contain multi-player games.

Jon Arnold with an Application

Jon's looking for those applications too... from his blog:

The best takeaway message for me was the importance of having applications that cater to the specific needs of a law firm. Peter explains how it's great to use VoIP to replicate what they had before - law firms are not early adopters, and are not looking for the multimedia richness of IP - at least now. However, what he's looking forward to are third party apps that can help him address specific problems, such as billing - something lawyers are quite fond of. In the TDM world, this simply wasn't possible or practical, but with IP it's easy, and Peter looks forward to being able to pick and choose apps from various developers that suit him just right.

Peter certainly echoes the importance of apps being the real drivers of value, and the same story will hold for countless other vertical markets. So, for all the developers out there, this podcast should be a good listen.