Voxeo Talks

This year’s Nuance Conversations user group and customer care conference is happening next week (October 26 – 29) in Orlando. The annual event will be held at the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort, just minutes from Voxeo’s U.S. headquarters. Several Voxeo employees will be in attendance for 3 days of interactive sessions and an impressive array of networking opportunities, including dinner events at Sea World and Universal Studios. As a conference sponsor, Voxeo will also have a pod in the Solutions Showcase. If you are making the trip, be sure to stop by and check out our demos (we’ll have Voxeo t-shirts for you too!). 

The show kicks off on Sunday, October 26 with a reception in the Solutions Showcase at 5pm. Click here to learn more.

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Will you be out at VoiceCon San Francisco November 10-13th? If so, please do stop by one of the sessions I (Dan York) will be doing or drop me an email, as I’m always interested in meeting up with readers. Voxeo does not have a booth, but I’ll be there to be part of two sessions that both happen to be on Wednesday the 12th.

I’ll be starting off the day’s schedule bright and early doing an 8am Keynote Panel entitled “Morning Call: Building the New Collaborative Enterprise” where I’ll be joining VoiceCon co-chair Eric Krapf and industry analyst Irwin Lazar to talk about the new ways in which we are communicating. Here’s the abstract:

Call it Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 or call it ways in which we get to know one another, there are a whole new set of online tools and services like blogs, wikis and Facebook that are now part of the popular culture. This session will explore their role in a much different environment – within the enterprise. We start from the proposition that these new tools for accessing, collecting and storing information are already being used within the enterprise, but the question is how to maximize their value without compromising essential network security and corporate governance processes. This discussion will focus on what’s real today and what’s likely to happen in the future.

Irwin, Eric and I did a last-minute session (someone else cancelled) on this at VoiceCon Orlando earlier this year and we’re looking forward to having this discussion out in SF. It should be fun and interesting session. (I can almost guarantee corporate/enterprise microblogging will come up!

Later in the day, at 2:45pm, I’ll then be moderating a session titled “Developing Voice Applications Using Mashups and SOA ” which should be interesting because you have myself, Crick Waters, the co-founder of Ribbit, and then a person from Cisco’s Unified Communications group. Here’s the abstract:

One of the key opportunities as we move to software-based communications is the potential for application developers to readily and relatively simply build new voice applications and to combine functionalities of existing applications. This may take place in different ways?either via vendor-specific application programming interfaces (APIs), or via standard interfaces such as Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). This session will examine the different ways of creating new types of voice applications and “mashups,” and will help you understand which technical approach may be right for a given situation.
* What are SOA’s technical elements? How mature are they and the standards?
* How widely deployed is SOA today? How extensively is it being used in conjunction with voice systems?
* How does SOA differ from an API-based approach? How is each approach likely to be best employed in creating new voice applications?
* What are the most important APIs for developers and IT professionals who are interested in voice mashups and communications-enabled applications?
* What are some real-world examples of voice mashups and/or communications-enabled apps that leverage APIs and SOA?

My goal will be to make it a very interactive discussion-oriented session that is more interesting for the attendees.

In any event, if you are out at VoiceCon, please do drop me a note or look for me at one of the sessions or other events going on out there.

Technorati Tags: voicecon, social media, social networking, dan york, irwin lazar, mashups, soa, voxeo, ribbit, voice mashups, voice, voip

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Lately I’ve seen a number of questions out there about “why do businesses use Twitter?” and after writing a response to someone, I decided I’d also post it here… We’ve been using Twitter for some time now for Voxeo in two ways:

1. as another way for people to “subscribe” to what we are posting to our blog site; and
2. at actual conferences/events, to relay where we are in the conference, when someone is speaking, etc.

You can see our feed – and subscribe – at http://twitter.com/voxeo

In the first case, I observed my own 1.5 years of using Twitter and noticed that I wasn’t reading RSS feeds nearly as much as I once was – but I was reading my Twitter feed all the time. So it seemed to me that for people like me we ought to offer the option to subscribe to our blog feed via Twitter. We still have RSS feeds and the ability to subscribe via email – now we just have a Twitter feed as well.

In the second case, when Voxeo has had a presence at a conference several times this past year, I have been tweeting out where some of us have been. For example, “RJ is now speaking in room D104″ or this one:

We did have someone who found me at the Voxeo booth at one of the events and said he knew I was there because I’d been twittering it out. So part of it is an experiment in seeing if we can connect with people at the various shows and events.

Now I’ve watched other corporations use Twitter for more two-way communication and while we haven’t seen that ourselves yet, I could see how it could be useful that way. Right now it’s more part of our continued experimentation with social media. Twitter and microblogging services are part of the continued evolution of the ways in which we communicate… so we figure we need to join the experiment to see how it all works.

How do you use Twitter?

Technorati Tags: voxeo, twitter

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Last month we released a video/screencast highlighting the new features coming in Prophecy 9 and at the time only made available a smaller YouTube version of the video. That video is now available in a higher-resolution size of 1200×900 from this URL:

http://www.voxeo.com/prophecy/video/prophecy9_mc1.mov

If you’d like to try out Prophecy 9, you can download the “early access release” from www.voxeo.com/prophecy – and please do let us know what you think about the release.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, prophecy, voicexml, ccxml

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Is the role of “voice” diminished or enhanced by the availability of web services? How does voice fit into the “cloud”? Where do service providers fit into the picture?

Out at ITEXPO last month in Los Angeles, industry analyst Jon Arnold asked me (Dan York) to participate in a series of video interviews he was recording for his IPConvergence.TV site. In the interview, which is now available for viewing, we talked about “voice-enabling” business processes, web services, “cloud computing”, the challenges to service providers and customers and much, much more. Jon also asked me to talk a bit about what I see ahead of us in the next few years. It was a fun interview to do and I appreciated the opportunity.

NOTE: There is no way to currently embed the video, so you’ll need to watch it over on TMC’s site. I’ll also note that on my Mac I couldn’t watch the video in Firefox but instead had to use Safari. Now this may be due to some local configuration issue on my system, but I thought I’d mention it.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, dan york, jon arnold, itexpo, commdev

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Goodbye, Blackberry… Hello, iPhone!

Yes, indeed, we’re making the big switch.

For the past five or so years, most of our now ~100 Voxeo employees have carried a corporate cell phone and our phone of choice has been the Blackberry, most recently the Blackberry 8830. It’s been a good, solid, reliable mobile phone/Internet access device. There’s nothing really inherently wrong with the Blackberry that is causing us to make the change. It really comes down to the fact that as good as the Blackberry may be…

it just simply is… not… an iPhone.

For us as a company there are several factors:

1. APPLICATION PLATFORM – As a provider of a voice application platform currently used by over 35,000 application developers, we’re definitely interested in “platforms” for developers. (If you don’t know much about Voxeo, you can watch this video or listen to this podcast.) We’ve seen what some of our customers are doing with iPhone apps and it’s pretty clear to us that for mobile developers the iPhone is the current platform of choice for innovative and disruptive applications.  For us to understand that world and how we can assist our customers in developing apps that link to our services, we need to live in that world and use the iPhone as part of our daily work flow.

2. WEB/INTERNET ACCESS – As “cell phones” are increasingly less about the “phone” aspect and more about the ability to access the Internet, all of our early iPhone users have made it clear that this is an area where the iPhone clearly shines. (And yes, I expect someone to jump in the comments and explain to me about how Blackberry’s new Bold and other products are so much better… but they aren’t widely available yet.)

3. GLOBAL COVERAGE AND OTHER FEATURES – We live in a global economy and we find ourselves traveling all over. Voxeo has an office and data center in the UK. We have an office in Beijing. We’re planning to open data centers in Germany and Asia. We need to be able to travel globally and be able to use our phone and access the Internet. The GSM network gives us this. Sure, we had this with our Blackberry 8830 if we wanted to pay for the additional Verizon/Vodafone card, but now we’ll be native GSM. Plus we have a camera and all the other goodies that are part of the iPhone.

Admittedly, it’s also just a great benefit to be able to offer to recruit and retain employees.  Work at Voxeo and you not only get a high-end MacBook Pro as your corporate laptop, but now you get an iPhone as well!  Now we do go into the switchover with our eyes wide open – we’ve had people using iPhones for over a year now and we are well aware of the differences in battery life, the different keyboard and the smaller coverage footprint that AT&T currently has in North America versus Verizon. Sure, those will all be changes we’ll need to adjust to.  For us, though, the benefits of being able to participate in the iPhone application platform and ecosystem far outweigh the adjustments we’ll need to make.

Stay tuned… I’ll write more here about our journey into the world of the iPhone.  We’re definitely all looking forward to it!

P.S. To stay up on what we’re writing here, you can subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter and if you’d like to learn more about our voice application platform, you can sign up for a free account at evolution.voxeo.com.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, apple, iphone, blackberry, rim, mobile, wireless

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If you’ve been following this blog for some time, you’ll know that we were a big fan and sponsor of eComm 2008 as well as the O’Reilly ETel shows that proceeded it. It’s a fantastic conference where the people who are shaping the future of communications gathered to talk, learn and partner to advance the disruption.

Well, planning is now underway for eComm 2009 to be held on March 3-5, 2009, at the Burlingame Marriott right near the SFO airport. I (Dan York) am on the eComm Advisory Board and we’re already starting to see proposals come in by way of the Call For Speakers. The deadline for proposals is November 17th, but I expect the speaking slots to fill up before then.

If you’ve got an idea for a talk you’d like to share, please do submit a speaking proposal – note that eComm is very definitely NOT a place for sales presentations and such talks get quickly rejected.

And if you don’t want to speak – but do want to stay up on where the bleeding edge of telephony is – please do mark March 3-5, 2009, down to join us in San Francisco!

Technorati Tags: ecomm, ecomm2009, conferences, voip

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Want to hear RJ and I (Dan York) explain what Voxeo is all about, why open standards are important and what’s next for Voxeo?

Just watch this video from the floor of ITEXPO and you’ll hear us say all that and more:

It was fun to do.

Technorati Tags: conferences, itexpo, commdev, voxeo, sip, voicexml, voip, voice, applications, rjauburn, danyork

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