Speaking of Standards

This week in New York City, Tim O’Reilly gave a keynote at the Web 2.0 event that I definitely put in my “must-see” category. Not because of anything visual… I mean, it’s just Tim standing on stage talking… but because of his message.

There is a war on out there on the Internet.

It’s a war between those who would like to keep the Internet as the open platform for innovation that it has been for decades… those who champion “The Internet Way” – and those who would like to return the Internet to the world of walled gardens from which it emerged. In his excellent piece published on Monday, “The War For The Web“, Tim speaks of the sides as “Small Pieces, Loosely Joined” and, of course, “One Ring To Rule Them All”. He concludes with:

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we’ll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we’ve enjoyed for the past two decades. But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

And it’s time for developers to take a stand. If you don’t want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don’t wait till it’s too late.

This IS the battle that will frame the Internet in the next years. As I wrote a few months ago in ‘Of DDoSs and SPOFs: How Twitter and Facebook violate “The Internet Way”‘, the way of the Internet is to use “distributed and decentralized” services. That’s how email works… that’s how the “web” works… that’s what excites me about the promise of Google Wave – not just that it’s a great platform for collaboration (and as I show here, it is), but that the Wave protocol has been designed from the start to be about federation… to be about distributed and decentralized services.

This war is a large part of why I work here at Voxeo, where one of our core values is “Unlocked Communications“, where we are huge believer in open standards (and chair/co-chair many of the standards committees), where we do things like open source our Tropo cloud telephony platform (“The Cloud Must Be Open!”) and where, in contrast to Nuance and TellMe as Tim mentions at 13:22, we give away our speech recognition engine for free as part of our Prophecy IVR/application platform… that’s why I’m here at Voxeo. It’s a war for openness that I believe we must win!

But listen to Tim… and then ask yourself – which side of the war are you on?

---

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS, becoming a fan on Facebook, or following us on Twitter.

---

Want to learn more about Peer-to-peer SIP (P2PSIP)? If so, I’ve now put up a video podcast episode where I’m interviewing David Bryan, chair of the IETF working group on P2PSIP. As long-time readers are probably aware, I’ve written about P2PSIP here a number of times – and also explained my particular interest. I continue to find P2PSIP a fascinating area of research… and so you can probably expect to continue to see more articles on it in the future.

Meanwhile, enjoy the video – and if you have visited my Emerging Tech Talk video podcast, you’ll find other videos there dealing with emerging technology issues:

---

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS or following on Twitter.

---

Technorati Tags: sip, p2p, p2psip, voxeo, emergingtechtalk, ett, davidbryan, danyork

---

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS, becoming a fan on Facebook, or following us on Twitter.

---

At SpeechTEK in New York City a few weeks ago, our own Dan Burnett was recognized by Speech Tech Magazine as one of the “2008 Speech Luminaries” for all his years of work on industry standards relating to speech. We were delighted for Dan to receive the (well-deserved!) recognition and I had a chance to record a brief video interview with Dan at SpeechTEK:

As Dan mentions, he is Director of Speech Technologies in our Office of the CTO (OCTO) reporting in to our CTO, RJ Auburn, and is responsible for looking at how to constantly improve our speech recognition technology and also ensure it is compliant with standards.

Congratulations, Dan, on the recognition by Speech Technology Magazine!

---

P.S. And yes, for those following along at home, Dan Burnett and I were both hired into the OCTO at about the same time… we thought about instituting a rule where all new OCTO employees had to be named “Dan”, but thankfully that rule was ignored with the recent excellent addition of Wei Chen!

Technorati Tags: voxeo, dan burnett, standards, w3c, voicexml, mrcp, speech, speechtek, speechtek2008

---

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS, becoming a fan on Facebook, or following us on Twitter.

---