Archive for December, 2007

Introducing a new Voxeo blog… “Behind The Blog”

Monday, December 31st, 2007

BehindTheBlogBanner.jpgI am pleased to note on this final day of 2007 that we’ve recently added a new blog to the site. With “Behind The Blog“, our goal is to tell the story of what we had to do make this blog site work using WordPress MU - and to continue to write about what we do as we improve and enhance it in the time ahead. We’ll write about the plugins we add, the modifications we make and the challenges we deal with - and answer any questions raised by readers. More details - and information about why we are publishing this blog - can be found in the introductory post to the blog. If you are interested in creating a blog portal like blogs.voxeo.com, or are just interested in the technical details behind a site like this, feel free to join us as we explore the world of running a corporate blog portal using WordPress MU.

If you use a feed reader, you can subscribe to the direct feed for the blog or simply get new posts as part of the “all Voxeo blogs” feed. (Behind The Blog posts also appear in our new Twitter feed.)

Come along and join in our little adventure… we know there are bound to be challenges ahead!

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Do you use Twitter? If so, you can now follow our blog posts…

Monday, December 31st, 2007

twitter.pngDo you use Twitter? If you do, you now can follow “twitter.com/voxeo” and keep up-to-date with articles we post to these blogs. Why do this when you can also simply subscribe to our RSS feed for all blogs? Well, as I wrote about recently, some people who use Twitter a lot find they don’t use RSS subscriptions as much, instead relying more on what the read in their stream of Twitter updates. So, we’d like to help those folks out and provide a way they can stay up-to-date on all the articles we post here.

If you are interested, the gory details of what I did to connect our WordPress MU site to Twitter are available in our “Behind the Blog” weblog.

P.S. If you don’t like all these automatic notification thingamajigs and just want to keep returning to blogs.voxeo.com and hitting the refresh/reload button on your browser, you are perfectly welcome to continue doing so!

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We’re hiring! New positions posted…

Friday, December 28th, 2007

We’re hiring! Check out the positions we have listed on Careerbuilder:

As our job descriptions say:

Challenging work at an open-culture, profitable, pre-IPO, cutting-edge technology company in downtown Orlando.

• Are you the go-to person for your company’s most challenging issues?
• Do you love to “teach a man to fish” and take time to teach others how to use technology and solve its problems?
• Do you get frustrated by bureaucracy that keeps you from getting work done and making customers happy?
• If so we should talk. We’re building a world class company and need more people like you.

Company Background

Voxeo’s mission is to make it easy for anyone to create and deploy voice applications that can run on any home, mobile, office, or VoIP phone. Leading analyst firm Gartner says Voxeo is part of a select group of companies that “will have a business impact on the future of IT”. Voxeo is a profitable, pre-IPO, international, employee-owned, Internet software company. Our technology is at the cutting edge of Voice over IP (VoIP) and web 2.0 applications, standards, and mashups.

We want to revolutionize the telephone industry and are doing so every day. We run the world’s largest voice application developer community (over 30,000 members to date) and have hundreds of enterprise customers in fields including telecom, consumer services, healthcare, retail, government, and more.

At Voxeo we focus on building a team of incredible people and making our customers extremely happy. We work hard, but we believe in balance. We have numerous perks and benefits, including the best health insurance in Florida, incentive stock options, free snacks and drinks, an employee football team, catered lunch on Fridays, and poker and movie nights.

Voxeo employees work in our 100% cubicle-free open-environment office on the 20th floor of The Plaza – downtown Orlando’s newest office building. Our culture is just as open as our office. Voxeo employees are encouraged to ask for help from and offer help to anyone at any time. Our culture comes from our roots in Silicon Valley, where many of us helped start and build companies including Netscape, Yahoo, TellMe, and OpenWave.

Voxeo is built on a spirit of entrepreneurship. Many of our employees have previously founded other successful tech companies, and you will work directly with Voxeo’s co-founders on a daily basis.

Come join us!

P.S. You need to apply online through CareerBuilder.com so please do not leave any information here as comments.

A tale of two different cities…

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

200712271150.jpgAfter RJ clued me in to the fact that I could add two different calendars to my Mac’s Dashboard, I’ve done so with one showing my location (Burlington, Vermont) and the other showing the corporate office in Orlando, Floriday. Today the difference was just way too stark that I just had to post it! It will be a good number of months before we see 77 degrees again! (On the other hand, the snow coming down hard right now is quite beautiful…)

SPEC power benchmarks

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

The data-center power geek in me was excited to see that SPEC has released a power benchmark for servers. As a company that has to manage the power draw of thousands of servers these days in our data centers power is now often the largest issue we run into when planning growth. We often find ourself fighting companies like google to reserve power and cooling from our colo providers for new racks of equipment.

This extra attention will make it a lot easer to evaluate the total power draw that servers draw under typical work loads for us and will help pressure venders to think about power draw when combining components into a complete server platform.

Arstechnica has a nice overview of what is covered in the benchmark.

Web-savvy teens prefer the old landline phone

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

When it comes to communication with teens it still seems that the old school phone is still king of the media channels based on this USA Today article. While I would have expected that cell phones would have taken the crown by now it seems the old wired lines still have some life in them for at least a bit longer (or until mom and dad fork over the cash for the kids to get a cell phone). Interestingly teens least favorite method of communication was e-mail.

Wanted: Routing Ninja

Monday, December 17th, 2007

We are currently looking for a kick ass telecom routing guru to lead up the management of our carriers and external routing systems such as SMS/800. If you or someone you know is someone who understands what SMS/800 is and knows the difference between a CAD and a CPR (or would like to learn) please take a look at the job listing below and drop us a line as we would love to hear from you.

Summary

Work for an open-culture, profitable, pre-IPO, cutting-edge technology company in downtown Orlando.Are you great at organizing things and pushing tasks and vendors to complete projects?Do you like building good relationships with vendors to make orders flow smoothly?Do you have experience with or enjoy accounting or telecommunications?Are you up for doing anything possible to make customers happy?Do you like solving problems and coming up with innovative ways to get things done?If so, we should talk. We’re building a world-class company and need more people like you.

About Voxeo

Voxeo’s mission is to make it easy for anyone to create and deploy voice applications that can run on any home, mobile, office, or VoIP phone. Leading analyst firm Gartner says Voxeo is part of a select group of companies that “will have a business impact on the future of IT”. Voxeo is a profitable, pre-IPO, international, employee-owned, Internet software company. Our technology is at the cutting edge of Voice over IP (VoIP) and web 2.0 applications, standards, and mashups.We want to revolutionize the telephone industry and are doing so every day. We run the world’s largest voice application developer community (over 30,000 members to date) and have hundreds of enterprise customers in fields including telecom, consumer services, healthcare, retail, government, and more.At Voxeo we focus on building a team of incredible people and making our customers extremely happy. We work hard, but we believe in balance. We have numerous perks and benefits, including the best health insurance in Florida, incentive stock options, free snacks and drinks, an employee football team, catered lunch on Fridays, and poker and movie nights.Voxeo employees work in our 100% cubicle-free open-environment office on the 20th floor of The Plaza – downtown Orlando’s newest office building. Our culture is just as open as our office. Voxeo employees are encouraged to ask for help from and offer help to anyone at any time. Our culture comes from our roots in Silicon Valley, where many of us helped start and build companies including Netscape, Yahoo, TellMe, and OpenWave.Voxeo is built on a spirit of entrepreneurship. Many of our employees have previously founded other successful tech companies, and you will work directly with Voxeo’s co-founders on a daily basis.

Responsibilities

  • Create, manage, and track call routing plans through various carriers
  • Create, manage, and track toll free call routing plans
  • Place and track local and toll-free number orders through various carriers
  • Place and track Local Number Portability orders through various carriers
  • Think of and suggest ways to improve our number ordering process
  • Do everything possible to make our customers happy with the number orders and setup
  • Escalate and push issues with order delivery as necessary with the appropriate carrier
  • Build relationships with appropriate carrier personnel to enhance productivity
  • Help organize and maintain internal systems to track number inventory, orders, and status
  • Help others on the Network Operations team as required

Requirements

  • Excellent oral, written, email, and IM communication skills
  • Great process of elimination and other problem solving skills
  • Ability to work in a fast-paced office environment where multi-tasking is a must
  • Ability to work full time (40+ hours/week)
  • Experience with number ordering, Local Number Portability, or toll-free SMS / Resporg systems is highly desired

Benefits

  • 100% company-paid health, vision, dental, and short-term disability insurance
  • 100% cubicle-free, casual, open office environment with great views of Central Florida
  • Incentive Stock Options and bonus plan
  • Three minute walk to popular restaurants, bars, and a brand-new 12 screen movie theatre
  • Challenging work and significant career growth at Orlando’s fastest growing tech company
  • The opportunity to revolutionize how people use and create applications for any phone
  • Free education and certification in highly desired technologies such as VoIP and VoiceXML
  • Work directly with top experts in SIP VoIP technology and W3C web standards
  • Free parking at our downtown Orlando office

Interested

Then please, contact us by emailing us at jobs@voxeo.comPlease include the position you’re applying for in the subject line of your email so we can find your application quickly. Thank you!You can learn more about Voxeo by checking out:

From our Employees

We asked all our employees what they thought we should mention in our job postings. Here’s some of what they had to say:“This company would be a hot commodity in Silicon Valley, but having an opportunity to work for a company like this in Orlando is rare and a huge thing for folks who don’t want to have to move out of state.”“I applied for a job here, but definitely got more than I bargained for, I found a place I can call home”“The item that really hooked me in my job interview is the health benefits. That’s a huge difference in Voxeo compared to other firms.”“One of the great points about working at Voxeo is the opportunity to work and learn directly with the company’s top engineers and executives”“Corporate culture is one of the perks that has kept us from being a “turn and burn” company … a large factor in our hiring process is a good culture fit, we would be remiss if we didn’t stress the fact that we are looking for cool people to work with”“I think you should say that Voxeo provides all of the tools that allow you to perform the challenging work, including telephone, laptop and the software you need to excel at any position”“To a lot of people in IT right now, the “MacBook Pro” has become the “hot” laptop to have and most people will never dream of getting one because they are stuck in a space where all they will ever see are Dell laptops of various vintages”“The great thing here is the opportunity to learn. The chance to increase your skill set exponentially in a cutting edge field and to feel truly needed and satisfied at the end of the day. Hard to quantify that sort of job experience but it is invaluable.”“I think a key point that we are trying to capture is that everyone at Voxeo works hard but we love what are working on. I think if there is some way to put down that the entire company loves what they are doing and you don’t have dead wood around is a nice thing. ““Speaking as a relative Voxeonoob, the office was a definite selling point in coming here. The view and top-floor-prestige aside, you can’t understate the importance of clean bathrooms”“We definitely have a fun and fabulous group of people.”“Everyone that works here has such a great personality and makes you feel right at home. The employees at Voxeo are accountable and extremely intellectual individuals, but they also know how to enjoy the day and laugh at the lighter side of things.”“I think the ‘can do’ culture should be in there, every employee is empowered to help the customer and to create a better solution”“The fact that the company (and some of the people) are Silicon Valley transplants has a certain sex appeal. We should consider mentioning that”“For me, the best part about working at Voxeo is our team family, and the culture of voxeo. We are intensely technical, and we work very hard, and we don’t take it all too seriously.”“I think Voxeo is a rarity for the Florida market. Opportunities to work with a successful, high-tech, industry-leading company are few and far between in this area”“One of the most attractive benefits for many people is our 100% company paid health insurance. That benefit alone can be the deal breaker for a potential employee. I would put that at the top of the benefits list”“I’d add that the office is located in the top floor of the Plaza, and perhaps market it up with “featuring spectacular views of I-4″ –replacing “I-4″ with whatever is truly spectacular”“One of the best things about being a Voxeon is that you have access to the highest level of management in an open and laid back setting. Often times people care more about who they work worth and enjoying coming to work each day then pay, benefits, etc.”“I like the ‘Teach a man to fish’ reference. I would find a way to emphasize that management is just as involved in the technology as the employees are.”“I think the all-hands and quarterly financial meetings are something that not all companies offer, and are seen as a benefit to many as they expose the insides of the company, show that Voxeo is very open about the state of the company, and allow the employees to participate in discussions that affect the company on the whole. ““The fact that you (the CEO) are asking us (the employees) for input on this job posting should somehow be conveyed in there as well. And it’s not just the job posting, you send out things like this all of the time, showing how much you value all of our input.”

Evolution Designer updated to 8.0

Monday, December 10th, 2007

Over the weekend we updated the version of the Evolution Designer application creation environment to version 8.0. This is the same version that shipped with Prophecy 8 earlier this year (with a few bonus fixes). Anyway if you have not seen the new version before you should definitely check it out as it greatly improves the usability of the product. It sports a brand new user interface and gets rid of the crusty old java applet and replaced it with a nice web 2.0 buzzword compliant UI.

Blogs.voxeo.com portal page re-ordering - and site-wide comments feed

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

Two minor updates to our overall blog site that I thought I’d mention. First, you will notice that we’ve changed the main portal page at blogs.voxeo.com to show the latest posts across all blogs. Before today, we displayed the latest post in each blog. So for each of our blogs, you saw the latest post. While this is one way to display our latest posts, it doesn’t really show the fact that we may be posting more frequently in some blogs than others. For instance, with RJ and I both out in Vancouver at IETF 70, we have been posting quite often in Speaking of Standards. However, the previous way of displaying posts only showed the last post. Today Rick had some cycles to work on the PHP and MySQL code and successfully changed the portal page to show the last five posts across all blogs. We think this gives a better reflection of the content we are creating on the overall site.

What do you think? Do you like this format better? Is five the right number of posts to display? Should we have more? (10?)

Second, while we previously posted about making a site-wide RSS feed available on the main blogs.voxeo.com page, the site-wide feed was only for posts. You will now notice that we also have a RSS feed available for all comments across all blogs. If you would like to see comments left to any of our blogs, you can now subscribe to that feed. We will be adding easy subscription to comments feeds to all of the individual blogs as well.

Comments and feedback about these items - or anything else about the site - are definitely welcome. Thank you for visiting.