Voxeo Talks

FYI, I will be down at VoiceCon Orlando on March 17-20, 2008. I’m moderating two panel sessions (see the schedule). First, up, bright and early at 8am on Tuesday, March 18th, I’ll be moderating a panel on “Top VoIP Security Threats“. This should be a fun one as it has VOIPSA Chair Dave Endler, Mark Collier of SecureLogix and Sachin Joglekar of Sipera Systems. I know all three of the guys, particularly Dave and Mark who have both worked on VOIPSA matters, and this session should be a good bit of fun. I’m planning on making it a rather interactive session.

At the other end of the show, on Thursday, March 20th, at 11:45am, I’ll be moderating a panel “Open Source for Enterprise Voice: How Much, How Soon?“. This would should be interesting because it has Bill Miller from Digium (makers of Asterisk), who I know well, and M Raza from 3Com… and then Tony Pereira from Nortel! 3Com’s presence on the panel isn’t particularly surprising given their relationship with Digium, but it will be interesting to see Nortel’s view on the matter.

All in all it should be quite an interesting show. Lots of good sessions and, I’m sure, interesting people to meet. If you’re going to be down there, please do drop an email as I’m always interesting in meeting readers of the blog.

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voicecon, voxeo, voipsa, securelogix, sipera, 3com, digium, asterisk, voip security, open source

We are very pleased to announce today that we were positioned in the “Visionaries Quadrant” of Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for IVR Systems and Enterprise Voice Portals, 2008“. Given that we’ve only been selling our Prophecy premise product for two years, it’s a huge achievement in our view to be included along with other players who have been in the market much longer. As our CEO said in the release:

“We view our position in the Visionaries quadrant as further validation that Voxeo is enabling a fundamental shift in the way companies build and deploy voice applications,” said Jonathan Taylor, CEO of Voxeo. “Voxeo is only in its second year of premise IVR sales and we consider inclusion this early on in the product’s life cycle to be a significant milestone.”

Even though Prophecy has only been out in the market for two years, it’s based on the same rock-solid software we’ve used in our Evolution hosting environment for over 8 years. It’s an incredibly easy to use, extremely flexible voice platform based on open standards that don’t lock you in. Last year alone we had over 10,000 downloads of Prophecy and we know of its use in companies ranging from small innovative startups all the way up to large Fortune 500 companies. We’re delighted to be recognized by Gartner and look forward to continuing to enable even more companies to rapidly build and deploy voice applications!

P.S. If you aren’t familiar with Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant” reports, they are widely read analyses by Gartner analysts that offer a view of a specific market and the participants in that market. To read more about our placement in the Magic Quadrant for IVR Systems and Enterprise Voice Portals, you’ll need to view the report from Gartner (either through your existing access if you are a Gartner client or through purchasing the report).

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gartner, magic quadrant, ivr, voxeo

One of the fun aspects of giving your product away for free is that you really have no clue what people will wind up doing with it. So we were delighted to learn that our premise “Prophecy” product as well as industry standards we support like VoiceXML and grXML were included in a new book, “Mobile Web Development“, new available from Packt Publishing. (UPDATE: I subsequently learned that the author did contact us some time back about permission to use some screenshots, etc.)

The book’s author has a blog and in his entry today about the book writes this (I obviously added the bold emphasis):

Mobile Web Development shows you how to build a mobile presence for your web applications and sites. It covers targeting different mobile web browsers, sending and receiving SMS and MMS messages, accepting mobile payments, and developing voice- and touchtone-response systems.

The book illustrates every technique with practical examples, showing how to use these development methods in the real world. Along the way we show how an example pizza delivery business can use these methods to open up to the mobile web. The book is fast paced, yet touches upon relevant concepts. I had a great ride while I was reviewing the book. I was actually surprised at how fast the book moved - covering important topics in just enough detail, and moving on to the next!

There is a whole lot of technologies I covered in the book. The examples are done in PHP with XHTML Mobile Profile. But I also covered: AJAX, Wireless CSS, WAP 2.0, Tera WURFL, MyMobileWeb, Mobile Web Toolkit, Image Server, GAIA Image Transcoder, HAWHAW , ready.mobi, Nokia’s Mobile Internet Toolkit , SMIL, Voxeo’s Prophecy server, VoiceXML (VXML), grXML, Frost library, WALL, WURFL, SMS, MMS, mobile payment gateways, mobile widgets, Mobile AJAX, Android, Google Gears, and Dojo Offline.

The blog entry goes on to talk more about what the book offers developers. It sounds like a great book and I’m looking forward to seeing a copy (since I actually have no idea what he said about us!). We do see the whole mobile space as a huge growth area and welcome developers to look at using either our on-premise Prophecy or our hosted Evolution platform to build their apps. (Check out the docs available at either of those links!)

Technorati Tags:
books, mobile web development, nirav mehta, voxeo, prophecy, voicexml, vxml, grXML, mobile

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new weblog: “Voxeo Developer’s Corner“. In this weblog we will be giving you tips, tricks and tutorials to help you develop applications on our platforms. As you are probably aware, there is a huge amount of information available in the documentation and forums found on our Evolution developer site. What our goal is with this blog site is to point people to some of the nuggets of gold buried within the pages of Evolution. Members of our staff will highlight some of the great tips they have found and other information they think might help you build even better voice applications on our platform.

The blog is off to a great start already with Matt Henry’s initial post, “Certified Tech Tip: Using SISR-formatted grammars with Prophecy 8“, where he demonstrates what SISR-formatted grammars are all about. The post attracted some comments and Matt is already planning a follow-up post. Expect to see more along these lines from Matt and his team in the weeks ahead.

I also kicked off a series on voice mashups and Twitter today with a post “Voice Mashups with Twitter, part 1: Who will win the 2008 SuperBowl? (A mashup in CallXML.) where I show how you can create a voice application that sends its output out to the Twitter micro-blogging service. Over the next few weeks I’ll be adding more articles in that series.

If you are interested in developing voice applications, we do encourage you to check out the “Voxeo Developer’s Corner“. There’s also an RSS feed if you would like to subscribe and stay up-to-date with our posts.

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applications, voxeo, developers, callxml, xml, voicexml, mashups, ccxml, apis