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.
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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. 
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