Voxeo Talks

If any of you will be in Miami next week for Internet Telephony Expo, I will be speaking at Ingate’s SIP Trunking Seminar Series held in conjunction with IT Expo. It probably comes as no surprise, if you know my background, that I’ll be speaking in the session from 8:30-9:45am on Thursday, January 24th, titled “Seminar/myth 1: VoIP is not secure“.

These SIP Trunking Seminars have always been very well attended and have had a great amount of information included. They are free, but if you’d like to be sure to have a spot you can pre-register.

If any of you are attending either IT Expo or the SIP Trunking Seminar Series, please do drop a note as I’m always interested in meeting readers.

Technorati Tags:
sip, sip trunking, ingate, itexpo, conferences

As we noted in our press release on Tuesday, we were delighted to be one of the recipients of Internet Telephony magazine’s “2007 Product of the Year” awards for our Prophecy product. As we state in the release:

Voxeo Prophecy 8 is the easy-to-install and openly downloadable platform for speech, VoIP and IVR applications. Before Prophecy, most telephony application platforms were complex “cast iron” systems that pre-dated the open era of the web. In stark contrast, Prophecy is built entirely on modern standards including VoiceXML, CCXML and SIP. Prophecy is as easy to install as a piece of consumer software, avoiding expensive on-site vendor installation. Prophecy is free for anyone to try, and is available at http://www.voxeo.com/prophecy.

We thank TMC.Net and look forward to seeing Rich Tehrani and many of the others in the TMC crew down at the Internet Telephony Expo in Miami later his month.

And please do check out Prophecy. You have basically all the incredible power of our hosted Evolution service - only in a version on your own premise!

Technorati Tags:
applications, prophecy, awards, rich tehrani, voxeo

What do you think of our new “Comment Policy” for our blog site?

When we launched the site a few months ago, we didn’t put up a “comment policy”, largely because I’ve been blogging for now almost 8 years and have never had such a policy on any of my blogs (although I’m going to be adding one to my other blogs now). It simply didn’t occur to me to do so. However, some of the recent comments we’ve received have made us concerned that we don’t have a policy in place. We’re all for “free speech” and we want strong opinions to be voiced, but we also want to keep our corporate blog portal “work safe” and “family friendly” (i.e. we want people to be able to browse our site when they might be at home with a young kid looking over their shoulder) and encourage an atmosphere of civil discussion.

Obviously, this site is ours and we can realistically do whatever we want to do with it, including deleting/censoring comments we don’t like. But that’s not the spirit of the blogosphere and certainly goes against our interest in having open and honest dialogue. Bring on the negative comments… we’re glad to hear them. (We definitely like the positive comments, too!) Our intent is to continue publishing any and all non-spam comments we receive… but we also want some guidelines in place so that if we do some day feel the need to delete or censor a blog comment, we have a publicly stated rationale for why we are doing so. We may never choose to do this, but then again we may have someone leave a comment that we feel goes too far over one of the lines we’ve stated.

So I’ve put together our first “Comment Policy” and would love to hear any comments about it. We’re definitely open to feedback. Is it reasonable? Are there things there you think we should delete? Are there things that we should add?

FYI, in creating this comment policy, these were some of the resources I looked at:

• “Does Your Blog Have a Comments Policy?”

• “The Legal Issues with Comments”
• The Blog Herald’s Comment Policy
• EFF’s “Legal Guide for Bloggers”
• Cisco Blog Site Legal Disclaimer
• Microsoft’s “Rules of Conduct” (more than just about blogs)
• Neville Hobson’s “Terms of Use”

Comments are very definitely welcome. (If you know of blog comment policies out there that you particularly liked, those would be welcome as well.)

Technorati Tags:
blogging, voxeo, comment policies, comment policy, comments

We just put up a few more job openings. Now we are looking for:

• Netowork Operations Cisco Engineer
• Tools Engineer
• NOC Engineer

The positions we mentioned previously are still open, although we’ve had some great resumes already come in.

If you’d like some background on Voxeo, the job description text we posted previously should give you a taste of the company.

As we noted before, all submissions need to be made through the CareerBuilder.com links provided above.

P.S. Stay tuned… we have even more job descriptions in the queue…

We’ve been called many things over the years but being labeled a tool of the Israeli defense industry is certainly a new one on us! There is a thread making the rounds of various blog sites over the past few days that asserts that we are somehow owned by the Israeli defense industry and are somehow involved, potentially nefariously, in the Iowa caucuses. Most of this seems to stem from an article by writer Christopher Bollyn titled “ELRON - VOXEO: The Israeli Defense Firm That Tallies the Iowa Caucus” and crossposted on several other sites.

After we first saw these articles - and stopped laughing, we admittedly thought the assertions were so far out there that they wouldn’t be taken seriously. However, we have had a handful of email inquiries and have seen the text continue to be cross-posted to other blogs, so let’s just set the record straight for anyone searching on the topic…

First, Voxeo is a privately held, employee-owned company, and is not affiliated with, owned or controlled by any outside companies or interests. No Israeli defense firms, Russian mafia, aliens from Area 51 or anyone else like that.

Second, Voxeo specifically doesn’t program and run applications. The customers do that themselves and have complete control. Voxeo’s platform, if you will, is a slave to whatever the customer programs it to do. Any application programmer who understands the distributed XML model would know that Voxeo doesn’t “tally” a vote count for anyone. Neither our people nor our platform “tally” votes. A customer has to collect the data and interpret it themselves. Because Voxeo is one of the world’s leading VoiceXML hosting companies and is the only company with a 100% uptime guarantee, our application platform is the choice of a lot of organizations, political or otherwise. We’ve had over 55,000 applications built by our customers that do pretty much anything you can imagine being done with a phone. If you would like to check it out, visit our developer site at evolution.voxeo.com. You can set up your own account for free and see how easy it is to create applications (and how they remain under your control).

Finally, as to specific questions about who our customers are and what they do with our platform - like most businesses, we don’t disclose such information publicly. It’s up to our customers to disclose anything they do with us. Voxeo has experienced phenomenal growth over the last 5 years thanks to the opportunities brought to us by our customers. If we started talking about them and what they do without their permission we’d lose business quickly.

Feel free to leave us comments, though. As a company we’re very open and we’re glad to talk about anything other than the confidential interests and information of our customers.

Technorati Tags:
voxeo, elron