Voxeo Talks

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!

While Voxeo holds regular technical Jam Sessions for our VoiceObjects developer community, this month we’re really jamming with a special-edition session on the business advantages of personalization. With personalization, self-service applications can automatically adapt to individual preferences and recent transactions for an improved customer experience, lower costs and untapped revenue opportunities.

Industry veteran and VoiceObjects founder, Michael Codini, will talk about how you can:

• Delight callers with personalization
• Determine if your applications are meeting caller needs
• Learn from customer behavior
• Adapt applications on-the-fly based on customer preferences, recent transactions and more
• Deliver targeted offers
• Leverage investments in business intelligence

The online Jam Session will take place on Tuesday, June 16^th at 11:00 AM EST, 8:00 AM PST, 5:00 PM CEST.  You can register here.

Click here to learn more about our regular, monthly technical Jam Sessions.

Over on the Emerging Communications Conference (eComm) blog, organizer Lee Dryburgh has started releasing videos of the eComm 2009 presentations. All the presentations were recorded and are currently going through post-production to be uploaded to the eComm site. Lee indicates that they’ll be released over on the eComm blog as they are post-produced over the weeks and months ahead.

The first one out is the fun presentation by Ge Wang, called New Expressive Social Mediums on the iPhone which talked about his work at Smule to produce iPhone applications like the virtual lighter and more importantly the Ocarina musical application. I enjoyed his presentation because it was, well, just so different from what you typically find at conferences in our space. Here it is for your viewing pleasure:

And okay, how many of you went to your iPhone and bought Ocarina?

Keep an eye on the eComm blog to see more videos appearing soon…

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Technorati Tags: ecomm, apple, iphone, smule, ocarina, ge wang

It seems rather amazing that it was only a week ago at eComm 2009 that we announced the launch of Tropo.com, Voxeo’s new platform for developing voice applications in common programming languages such as JavaScript, PHP, python, Groovy and Ruby.

It’s been a crazy yet wonderful week! We’ve been thrilled by all the positive feedback we’ve received and even more so by the number of Tropo developers we’ve seen sign up. If you missed out on the announcement last week, here are some pointers to learn more:

• a video of Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor announcing Tropo at eComm and the set of slides that accompanied the launch

• the Tropo.com website where you can sign up for a free developer account and also learn about the simple pricing
• the Tropo documentation, including the quick introduction, the API Reference and the Tutorials
• slides from the Tropo tutorial given by Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn at eComm
• over 140 sample Tropo applications written in JavaScript, PHP, python, Groovy and Ruby and covering a range of different application types. Some voice-centric apps like an auto-attendant… some voice mashups that give you voice access to certain services (like traffic reports, top music download lists, New York Times articles)… and some, um, “interesting” apps like the Monty Python quote server or the role-playing game someone wrote. We also announced the availability of these applications via git and Github.
• a developer contest where we will pay $100 for each selected sample app
• the Tropo FAQ which answers many questions we’ve received
• new ways to receive support for writing Tropo apps, including web forums, IRC and Skype chat
• and, of course, The Tropo Blog, where we’ll be bringing you all sorts of news about Tropo, examples of applications, sample code and much, much more.

Here at Voxeo we’ve been very excited about the reception of the Tropo launch and are already looking at how we can enhance the platform and what additional languages we’ll be adding (believe it or not, we’ve had several requests for Lisp!). We do hope that you will sign up for a free Tropo account and get started creating voice applications in programming languages you already know. And please… do send along any feedback you have, either through the web forums, as comments to this blog post or even as email. We’d love to hear what you think of it and also where you would like to see the Tropo platform go. Most of all we’re excited to see what you do with the platform!

P.S. And if you would rather develop voice apps in VoiceXML, CCXML or CallXML, you can of course sign up for a free developer account at our evolution.voxeo.com developer portal and get started there. With the launch of Tropo we are in no way reducing our award-winning support for XML telephony. We’ll be continuing to enhance and expand XML support as well… but with Tropo we’re now opening up development of voice applications to a whole new range of developers.

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Technorati Tags: tropo, voxeo, voice, applications, mashups, ecomm, python, php, javascript, groovy, ruby

A great aspect of eComm last week was that it had the services of an excellent photographer, James Duncan Davidson, who uploaded a series of eComm 2009 photographs:

Duncan, who was also one of the photographers at TED (and captured the now-famous image of Bill Gates releasing mosquitoes) provided some excellent photos of each of the many speakers at eComm. Here are some of (Voxeo CEO) Jonathan Taylor (click on any of these images to jump to larger versions in James’ photo collection):

Here are some of me (Dan York):

And here are some of (Voxeo CTO) RJ Auburn:

(Note that in all cases I am sending you to the first photo of the set in James Duncan Davidson’s collection – you can click on the other thumbnails on the right side to see the other images larger.)

From a speaker’s perspective, I have to say that it’s also great that Duncan will allow us to use these shots for our blog sites, social networking images, etc., basically any use except “commercial” usage such as brochures, etc. It’s nice as a speaker to have photos like these available.

He was also just a really nice guy and we had a couple of great conversations about photography, his use of Apple TV to display photos in the hallways, and other topics. You can find him online at his main website or his photo gallery.

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Technorati Tags: ecomm, photos, images, photography, duncandavidson

At 12:27-and-a-half Pacific today (and yes, eComm organizer Lee Dryburgh insisted on the “half”), we will be announcing a new and powerful way to create voice applications…. that’s all I’m going to say for now…

But at that time, I’m going to try live-streaming out of here (let’s see just how good the eComm WiFi network is!) on uStream. You can watch at:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/voxeo-ecomm-launch

Hopefully that will all work fine, but if that doesn’t work, we’ll have the video up later today. The presentation will run 7.5 minutes.

Also, stay tuned to our main blog site: http://blogs.voxeo.com/

You’ll see some announcements there around the time

If you are interested in developing voice applications… voice mashups… etc…. I expect you’ll be quite pleased with what we are announcing…

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Technorati Tags: applications, voice, voxeo, voip, mashups, development, programming

Over on the eComm blog, organizer Lee Dryburgh dived into great detail about Voxeo’s history, present and future plans in this interview with our CEO: Jonathan Taylor on the Origins and Near-Future of Voxeo. It’s a great interview in that Jonathan goes into his own history and what brought about the formation of Voxeo in more detail that I personally knew. (I knew his past was “interesting”, but didn’t know the details…

And yes, we have some extremely exciting announcements planned for the Emerging Communications conference (eComm) next week in San Francisco… and there’s a few glimmers in Jonathan’s interview… but that’s all I’m sayin’…

As noted, Jonathan will be out at eComm, as will I (Dan York) and a good number of our team. It’s not too late for you to join us – you can still register for eComm – and you can save 20% off the registration fee with the discount code “Voxeo” (uppercase V is important).

Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did.

Note: Jim Courtney also offers his view of Jonathan’s interview over on his VoiceOnTheWeb.biz blog

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Technorati Tags: ecomm, jonathan taylor, voxeo, voicexml, ccxml, callxml, xml, telephony, voice, applications, voip

Over on the eComm blog, Lee Dryburgh has been doing a series of podcast interviews, for which he has also very nicely provided transcripts for people not wanting to listen to a 45-minute podcast, and one of Lee’s latest interviews is with Irv Shapiro, CEO of IfByPhone, on the subject of “Cloud Telephony”. It’s an interesting interview and one I’d recommend to readers.

If you’d like to meet Irv and other folks like him, please do consider attending eComm - Early Bird registration ends today!

P.S. And yes, IfByPhone has been a partner of ours for over a year and uses Voxeo technology within parts of their infrastructure… but regardless of that, I would still recommend the interview. IfByPhone is doing some great stuff to make voice apps very accessible to web developers.

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Technorati Tags: ecomm, ifbyphone, voxeo, mashups, voice, voip

TODAY IS THE FINAL DAY for the big savings of the Early Bird Registration for the Emerging Communications Conference (eComm) 2009 March 3-5 in San Francisco.

If you are interested in the whole emerging communications space, this is truly a “must attend” event. The people and companies that are creating the evolving new communications applications and infrastructure will be there. The speakers list is pretty much a “Who’s Who” of the people bringing about this change.

Will you be there, too?

As I mentioned previously, you can get a 20% discount by using the promotional code “Voxeo” (with a capital “V”) which will bring the Early Bird price down to $1,190… if you sign up today! (The discount code does work after today, but the Early Bird pricing is only until tonight.)

We’ll be there… and we’re looking forward to meeting up with many of you as well!

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Technorati Tags: ecomm, communications, emerging communications, conferences

As I mentioned previously, we’re big fans (and a sponsor) of the Emerging Communications (eComm) conference coming up March 3-5, 2009, out in San Francisco. We’re delighted to note today that registration for eComm is now open.

In fact, if you use our super-secret discount code you can get 20% off of the conference registration fee… AND… if you register before December 22nd, the fee minus the 20% discount will take your registration cost down below $1000. Which, for 3 days of the best possible information about emerging communication technology, is awfully hard to beat!

What is that super-secret discount code? Wellll…. if you go into your browser and do “View Source” or “View Page Source”, you’ll be sure to find it…

Look here ->

If you look at the list of eComm speakers and the (still evolving) eComm schedule, it’s really shaping up to be an amazing show… we look forward to seeing you all out there!

P.S. There’s really nothing “super-secret” about the discount code, so once you know it feel free to share it with all of your friends and colleagues. And yes, I could just state the code here… but what fun is that?

Technorati Tags: ecomm, voxeo, conferences