Voxeo Talks

Two weeks ago out at ITEXPO West 2009 in Los Angeles, Erin Harrison from TMCnet interviewed me (Dan York) about what Voxeo has been up to and where we are going. Amusingly, it didn’t really dawn on me why we were sitting in front of a green backdrop until I saw the end result and the fact that we now appear in front of a bunch of city buildings.

In any event, those of you interested can now watch the video here:

You can also view the video at this link, although if you go there, you have to watch an ad before viewing the video.

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

This week is VON 2009 down in South Beach, Miami, FL. As I mentioned previously, we had a Voxeo presence down at VON, although with some last minute scheduling changes, RJ Auburn was not able to attend. I spoke twice on Monday, first on the future of hosted voice and the second on the future of developer ecosystems and carriers. I recorded both sessions on video and intend to post them here soon.

In the first panel, “Beyond Boxes: The Future of the PBX“, Adtran’s Chris Thompson and I discussed the future of hosted PBXs with the moderator Mike Oeth from Junction Networks. It was a good session where we discussed how hosted networks can work today, where they are and are not appropriate and what questions customers should ask of hosted application providers. Khali Henderson from VON captured some of the flavor of the talk in her piece: “Hosted vs. Premises PBX: No Contest“. (And yes, she has my title wrong, but that was my title way back at the beginning of the year when we first submitted these talks.)

As she writes, a big part of our discussion was that customers should not have to choose… that hosted, premise or indeed hybrid networks may be appropriate for different kinds of network situations.

My second panel, “The Apps Race: Building a Developer Community in the New Telecom World“, was quite a fun one in that the panel was just Thomas Howe and I along with moderator Suresh Bhandarkar from Tech Mahindra.

Thomas and I have known each other for a good number of years, are both extreme extroverts who enjoy presenting, have no issue playing off of each other and are good friends to boot. So needless to say it was a very, um, “dynamic” session. I actually felt a bit bad for Suresh because he had done an excellent job as a moderator preparing for the panel and assembling a list of questions for us to discuss – Thomas and I just didn’t exactly go along with some of the questions. Primarily because Suresh was trying to go after the viewpoint “how can carriers succeed in the apps market, differentiate and win?”, while Thomas and I took a dim view of that. In truth, we’d like the carriers to open up more so that other companies can create innovative services on top of the network.

VON’s Khali Henderson did capture some of the talk in “Can Carriers Catch Up in the Apps Race?“. And yes, Thomas did indeed say that the carriers need a lobotomy… the video of this session should be amusing at least.

As to the VON show itself, this was the first year with Virgo Publishing at the helm and it showed that it was a newer show. There were minor little things like no available WiFi (something organizer Rick Martin ensured us would be corrected for the next show), lack of available power or power strips in the rooms… those are just growing pains for tech shows. The sessions themselves seemed well-attended. Both of mine had 50-ish people in them that filled the available rooms. The exhibit hall had a good number of vendors. I wasn’t there for too long to get a sense of how traffic was on the show floor – I left in the middle of Monday afternoon to head up to Voxeo’s office in Orlando.

The VON show continued today and goes on through mid-day tomorrow. Skype’s Chief Strategy Officer will be speaking tomorrow and I’m looking forward to learning what he says. I have hints that there may be some interesting announcements… we’ll see. In any event, I’ll be curious to read other accounts of VON from folks who stayed longer.

Meanwhile, I’ll be getting the video from those two sessions up online in the next while….

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

Given my role within the VoIP Security Alliance (VOIPSA), I’ve spent a great amount of time over the last 5 years traveling to conferences speaking about the security of VoIP systems. A couple of years back, I was getting really sick of the “standard” type of presentation about VoIP security. So for O’Reilly’s ETel conference in 2007 I decided to do something completely different and tell a story that illustrated the issues around VoIP security. It was a lot of fun to do – although it took a great amount of work to put together.

This year Brian West asked me if I could give that presentation at ClueCon 2009 in August in Chicago. I did… and this time it was captured on video. Unfortunately it was a rather sad commentary on the continued state of affairs with regard to VoIP security that I didn’t need to change much. Most of the same issues of 2 years ago are still with us. I did change and tweak the presentation a bit… and actually did add a few slides.

On the slides, this is a presentation involving showing 248 slides in about 15 minutes. I can’t take credit for the style… it’s a kind of presentation method popularized by Prof. Larry Lessig – a good example is his “free culture” presentation. The Presentation Zen site also pointed to another example and also offered some commentary on the “Lessig Method”. I’ve found it a useful style… it does keep people’s attention, particularly because you’ll note that the slides sometimes have certain snide comments that do NOT appear in my actual speaking. At some point, I’d like to put together some more talks like this… particularly ones that tell a story in this way. It’s all really a matter of making the time… these are a lot harder to construct.

Anyway, here’s the video – the slides are embedded below for those who want to see the slide set. However, you really need the audio to make sense of the slides.

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

We were very pleased to see this great write-up in the blog of the New York State Senate Office of the CIO, “Dialing in to the NYSenate OpenLeg API“, that outlines the great work that independent developer Mark Headd has done.

As the article notes, Mark has used our IMified platform to let people find out the status of legislation before the NY State Senate using:

• Instant Messaging Client (Jabber): opensenate@bot.im
• Twitter Client: Send a tweet formatted as a @reply to @opensenate
• Short Message Service (SMS): Send a text message to (315) 308-1943
• Regular Telephone: Call (646) 736-2439 (see note below)

Through whichever channel people want to use, they can now query the NY State Senate legislation database and find out the status of various bills. As the NY State Senate blog post author, Nathan Freitas, stated:

These services fit very well with the Office of the CIO’s vision for a fully mobile-accessible legislative body, where everyone from elected officials to their consituents can fluidly connect with eachother around issues that matter to them no matter where they are. Access of information via mobile phones also signficantly leverages the playing field when it comes to cost… a $99 iPhone is a pretty fantastic computing device.

Mark went into more details on his own blog in a post, “Leveraging the Government 2.0 Platform“, specifically noting that the exposure of an open API by the NY State Senate was the exciting part to him:

When governments make their data available in public formats, and expose APIs for querying such data, they are throwing the door open to outside developers to build useful things. That’s significant, and the NY Senate should get some major props for being among the first (if not the first) legislative body in the country to provide an API for their legislative information.

When governments make data available through an API, they are telling developers: “Use any platform or programming language you want to access our data.” The basic requirements for invoking an API like the NY Senate’s (or the District of Columbia’s 311 API) is the ability to communicate via HTTP and to parse XML, or JSON. Since pretty much every modern programming language and development platform can do these things, it creates opportunities for developers of all stripes.

But if APIs are platform and language agnostic, they are also modality agnostic – if the data exposed through an API is compact enough, there are lots of different ways to present this data to an end user.

Mark also notes that his application actually uses two of Voxeo’s platforms. The IM, SMS and Twitter interfaces come through IMified and the voice comes through our hosted Prophecy platform (via our Evolution developer portal). As we announced recently, SMS and IM integration are now available directly to Evolution users and now creating multi-modal / multichannel applications just got that much easier!

Kudos to the NY State Senate Office of the CIO for providing their open API and to Mark Headd for the great work he did making that API accessible to people through voice, IM, SMS and Twitter.

Great to see!

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

Would you like to know whether anyone from Voxeo will be at a certain conference or event? Would you like to know where we are speaking? Or who is speaking on what topic?

Because we often get those requests, we’ve opened up a new “Voxeo Events” area on this blog server. We’re still building it out and adding information, but you can see what we have so far at:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/events/

The plan is to list shows that are coming up and provide information in advance about who is speaking when. For example, we have pages up now for VON next week and for Astricon in October.

Once a show is over, we plan to also use these pages as a repository for links to presentations, news releases, audio or video from the show, etc. The SpeechTEK 2009 page is an example although given that it is the largest show we do each year, there is more information on that page that most others will have.

In the weeks ahead, we’ll be adding more information about upcoming events. We’re also probably going to add a RSS feed containing the individual presentations so that we can feed that into some various tools that are out there.

Are there any particular items you would like to see us add to a site like this? Any particular formats you would like to see the information displayed in? As I said, we’re still building out the site so we’re definitely interested in and open to feedback.

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

Last Wednesday, on, very appropriately, 09/09/09, our engineering team completed the General Availability (GA) build of Prophecy 9. Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor celebrated with this Twitter update:

Today we are very pleased to be making the GA build of Prophecy 9 publicly available for free download at:

http://www.voxeo.com/prophecy/

It’s an incredibly simple installation that will have you up and creating applications in minutes.

Prophecy 9 is our most ambitious release to date with regard to new functionality and we’ve delivered to you:

• SUPPORT FOR WINDOWS, LINUX AND MAC OS X – Whichever operating system you want to use, Prophecy 9 works there. Better than that, it’s the same platform, so if you have developers that want to develop their apps on Mac OS X, but then deploy them on production Linux or Windows servers – that all works without any issues. You are not locked into any one operating system. (NOTE: This Prophecy 9 release today includes support for Apple’s latest Mac OS X 10.6, a.k.a. “Snow Leopard”.)
• PROPHECY COMMANDER, AN ENTIRELY NEW MANAGEMENT CONSOLE – We’ve brought you a whole new way to manage servers. It starts with our dashboard that let’s you easily see the current performance of your applications:
  

  And then goes on to provide a powerful new “wall” that redefines the way that you can measure many individual servers:

  

  Plus newer and easier ways to add applications, manage sessions and so much more. You can check out the screencast video (also high-res) we made available earlier to get a sense of what Commander is all about.

• PROPHECY LOG ANALYST – Prophecy 9 also introduces “Prophecy Log Analyst”, a feature previously only available in our hosted environment, that lets you take a deep interactive dive through your log files and also generate reports and charts to better understand the data.
• RAPID SCALING WITH COMMUNITIES – Need additional capacity for your application? Simply install Prophecy 9 on a new system and add it to the “community” where your application is running. Immediately your application will start making use of the resources on your server. An incredibly simple and fast way to scale your applications as you need more capacity.

There are many other new features… a new SIP infrastructure build on our SIPmethod technology… a new cross-platform log-viewer… much more… check out the Prophecy 9 Release Notes for more info.

All of this new functionality builds on all the other features that come standard in Prophecy, including such things as:

• Prophecy Recognizer – Voxeo’s bundled, highly accurate speech recognition features improved speech detection and noise reduction
• Prophecy Recorder – a secure, two-way call recording platform that includes support for compressed call recordings
• 100% certified compliant VoiceXML implementation
• World’s most proven and widely used CCXML implementation
• Flexible SIP-based telephony support
• Easily works with other speech engines via MRCP
• Built-in call conferencing, up to 200 participants
• Built-in PHP 5.1 and Java/JSP web application servers
• Easily works with any other database or web platform
• Built-in SQLite database engine – also works with just about any other database engine
• Built-in SIP VoIP softphone
• Easily works with any other SIP provider, gateway, or device
• Built-in Designer visual development tool
• Includes a complete speech and web-driven conference management application

Want even more information? The full documentation is available online – view the “Prophecy 9 Guide” to get all the details on the new release.

Better yet, just go to:

http://www.voxeo.com/prophecy/

and download Voxeo Prophecy 9 for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. The free download includes 2 ports for inbound or outbound calls – and when you want more capacity it is a simple matter of increasing your licenses – no re-installation necessary.

Many thanks to everyone who tried out Prophecy 9 during its early access period and provided feedback. You all helped to make this a stronger release and we thank you for all that help.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, prophecy, voicexml, ccxml, callxml

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

For any of you attending the new VON Conference & Expo from September 21-23 in South Beach, Miami, Florida, both Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn and I (Dan York) will be there at the show speaking. We now have a page up with the abstracts of the talks we’ll be giving:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/events/von-conference-expo-2009/

The quick view is this:

Monday, September 21, 2009

10 – 11:15am, Beyond Boxes: The Future of the PBX (Dan York)

11:30 – 12:30pm, The Apps Race: Building a Developer Community in the New Telecom World (RJ Auburn)

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

11 – 11:50am, Beyond Guys in Trucks: Mobilizing Enterprise Applications (RJ Auburn

This will be the very first VON show run by Virgo Publishing since they acquired the event through the demise of Pulvermedia. I personally attended and spoke a (and very much enjoyed) a number of the VON events in the past when Jeff Pulver and his team were running them – so it will be interesting to see what the event is like under different management.

In any case, if you are going to be down at VON, please drop either RJ or I an email or catch us on Twitter (zscgeek or danyork). Naturally we will be twittering on the Voxeo Twitter account from the show. See you there!

Technorati Tags: voxeo, von, conferences, danyork, rjauburn

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

After the great success of eComm 2009 in San Francisco (where we launched Tropo.com), organizer Lee Dryburgh is launching eComm Europe from October 28-30 in Amsterdam. The list of speakers looks fantastic and the schedule is shaping up to be another outstanding event. Lee just announced this week that the creators of Google Wave will be speaking, which should be interesting.

If you are in Europe and interested in emerging communications technology and where this whole communications space is going, this is definitely THE conference to attend in 2009. In fact, if you register for eComm Europe and use the promotion code “Voxeo”, you can get 20% off the registration price.

We believe in the vision of eComm and, as we did for eComm in March, are pleased to sign on as a sponsor of eComm Europe. We’re looking forward to the show and meeting any of you who will join us there. Please register and join the eComm revolution!

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

Over a past weekend I found myself in my local “big box” home improvement store (name removed to protect the guilty ) trying to find a specific part – a replacement switch for a ceiling fan. I had looked in all the places that were “obvious” to me… but couldn’t find it. I found myself wandering among the aisles looking for a staff person – but of course with it being a weekend the store was quite busy and no available staff could be found. My frustration level (and blood pressure) kept increasing as I found myself wasting more time looking for someone to help me find this part.

In that one moment, I completely understood the goal of Aisle411.

The concept is simple… pick up your phone, dial a number, ask where the product is and find out specifically where in the store it is located. No wasting time running around looking for an employee… no wandering around the aisles cursing… just getting right to where the product is and being able to keep on going. (Side benefit, I guess, of lower blood pressure!)

Now obviously there is a degree of coordination required between the big box retailer and the Aisle411 service. The Aisle411 folks need to be sure they have the latest and greatest inventory map loaded in – otherwise you’d get awfully frustrated with their service if it told you where something was and it turned out not to be there. But that’s their goal… and they have started out now with a St. Louis-area Ace Hardware and a Price Cutter grocery store in Springfield, Missouri. They indicate on their store locator page that they will be launching in more stores in the time ahead. (They also posted a video talking more about the service.)

There are a couple of interesting dimensions to this:

• You could use this service in advance of being at the store to know exactly where you need to go. You could call from home or on the way in (assuming that is allowed in your state).
• It’s pretty cool to me on a technological level that the advances we have in communications technology allow you to find out information about your local store by querying a global service located out in the cloud.

Obviously we’ll see in the time ahead how well these initial installations go and how widely the Aisle411 technology gets adopted, but as an individual consumer I can say that I’d personally like to see this available as an option. In the case of my spare part I was seeking, I eventually did find someone in another department who was able to point me to the right location, but having a quick way to call would have saved me a good bit of wasted time.

Note: Aisle411 is a Voxeo customer, but that’s not why I’m writing about them… I just think the service is a great idea.

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

As noted on our SpeechTEK 2009 page, our Dr. Dan Burnett gave a talk on August 24, 2009, on the topic of “Optimizing Speech Recognizer Rejection Thresholds“. His slides are now available from our SlideShare account:

Technorati Tags: speech, speechtek, voxeo, conferences, slides, danburnett

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