Voxeo Talks

Last week at eComm Europe, Voxeo Lab’s Jay Phillips spoke on “Entrepreneurial Advantages with New Open-Source Technologies” and as usual providing an entertaining set of slides complete with LOLCats and other pictures that… well… make you think you kind of had to be there to understand! Along the way he outlined the state of a number of different open source telephony and communication tools… and made an announcement in the middle, too….

You can see Jay’s slides on SlideShare or here:

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Today out in Glendale, Arizona, Jason Goecke, Voxeo’s VP of Innovation for Voxeo Labs, will be speaking at the AstriCon 2009 event. As outlined on our events page for Astricon 2009, Jason’s talk is today at 10:00am:

Wednesday, October 14, 2009
10 – 10:35, Devloping AGI & AMI Applications with Ruby and Adhearsion

Adhearsion (http://adhearsion.com) is a Ruby-based framework, installable as a gem, that provides a comprehensive development environment for developing voice enabled applications using a jargon free DSL. Further, Adhearsion integrates with Rails in various ways, extending Rails seamlessly into the voice world.

We will provide an overview of why Adhearsion was created, how it works and then provide a tutorial on developing your first application.

If you are there at Astricon, please do say hello to Jason, who can also be found on Twitter as @jsgoecke.

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THE CLOUD MUST BE OPEN!

Can we say that any clearer? What is the point of running your applications “in the cloud” if you are locked-in to using a single cloud provider?

Here at OSCON yesterday, Tim O’Reilly stood onstage in his keynote and spoke about centralized services and databases and their “natural tendency toward monopoly“. He and others here continue to sound the alarm and warn that our increasing reliance on “the cloud” brings with it the danger of relying on cloud services that will simply lock us in to new proprietary systems and protocols.

We agree.

At Voxeo, we don’t think you should be forced to use a particular cloud telephony service simply because they are the only one who supports the protocol or language you want to use. When we launched Tropo.com back at eComm in March, this was one of our underlying concerns:

How do we prevent vendor lock-in for cloud telephony?

How do we make it so that our customers can develop their applications on Tropo.com, but yet have the freedom to take those applications and run them on some other provider’s service if they want to?

In looking at it, we saw the fairly obvious route that will no doubt seem radical to many:

We are making the Tropo.com source code available as open source. 

Yep… we’re opening the cloud. As our CEO Jonathan Taylor said (and yes, he actually did write this):

“Since 1999, Voxeo’s core mission has been to make telephony easy, effective and free of lock-in. We’ve been tearing down the walled gardens of telecom and replacing them with an open and accessible environment,” said Jonathan Taylor, CEO of Voxeo. “Nothing demonstrates this commitment better than Tropo’s completely open standards foundation and open-source availability. Unlike cloud vendors that use open-source but offer little back to the open-source community, we’re showing how cloud computing can be both completely open for end customers and concretely beneficial to open-source developers.” 

As both the news release and the post on our Tropo blog indicate, today marks the start of the process. We’ve made available two of the components that make up Tropo.com:

• Tropo SIP Servlet, which implements the Tropo core Java API for telephony applications and a mechanism to host a wide variety of programming languages on top of that API. The Tropo SIP Servlet is built on the Java SIP Servlet standard, JSR-289. SIP Servlet platforms are available from many vendors including Voxeo, Oracle, Avaya, and Redhat. The Tropo SIP Servlet uses another standard, the IETF’s MRCP standard to control audio interaction during calls. By open-sourcing this technology, we hope to support a wider variety of MRCP servers, and ultimately support any media platform that implements the Java Media Server Control API, JSR-309. 
• Tropo “Shims” for Groovy, JavaScript, Python, PHP and Ruby programming languages. Tropo Shims adapt the Tropo core API for use in a specific programming language. Open-sourcing these components enables Tropo to quickly support other programming languages. By releasing this code and working with the open-source telephony community, we hope to add support for additional programming languages such as Clojure, JavaFX, and Scala.

Over the coming weeks, Jason Goecke and Jay Phillips of our newly-announced Voxeo Labs team will release additional Tropo components that will allow you to run your own Tropo applications in private clouds, elastic computing services, or on your own servers in conjunction with Voxeo’s free Prophecy platform. Over the coming months, Voxeo Labs will work to support the widest variety of SIP Servlet and media server platforms, ultimately giving you a simple yet powerful telephony API that will work across the widest variety of platforms and vendors. Jason and Jay will be posting more information to the Voxeo Labs blog in the days and weeks ahead.

It’s all about having an open and interoperable cloud.

We’re excited about the possibilities – we hope you are, too. Will you join us now in bringing about open and interoperable cloud telephony?

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I was pleased to recently receive word that one of the proposals we had submitted to O’Reilly’s 2009 Open Source Convention (OSCON) was accepted. To my surprise, it was not one of the proposals we had submitted about the new simplicity of bringing voice into applications, such as through using open source programs and languages like python, PHP, etc. with voice via Tropo.com.

Instead it was a completely different proposal I’d put in called “Building a Corporate Blog Portal Using WordPress MU“. In the presentation, I plan to share some of what we’ve learned through building blogs.voxeo.com on top of the open source WordPress MU. I’ve documented many of our challenges and learnings in our Behind The Blog weblog and I’ll continue to do so as we continue to evolve the platform. Overall it’s been a positive experience because we have had the control to be able to truly shape the blog portal in the way that we want it to be. It has, of course, involved a good bit of work.

Anyway, if any of you will be out at OSCON 2009, July 20-24 in San Jose, CA, here’s what you can expect to hear me talk about:

Do you want to create a blog portal for your company or organization that includes multiple blogs and/or podcasts? Do you want to do so in a way that gives you the maximum amount of control over how the portal looks? And doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to implement?

While many people may be familiar with the open source WordPress blogging software, this presentation will focus on WordPress Multi-User (WordPress MU or WPMU), the open source multi-blogging software platform used for such high-traffic sites as WordPress.com. Presenter Dan York will draw on his own experience implementing WPMU for a corporate blogging platform and discuss topics such as:

• Checklist for getting started with WordPress MU
• Things to think about up front before starting
• Policy decisions around blog creation: who can create them, etc.
• Developing a common, branded look-and-feel
• Security issues associated with using WPMU
• Plugins that add value
• Integrating with other social media sites and services
• Educating users and helping authors get going

Attendees will leave with an understanding of how to return and get started with exploring a WordPress MU installation, along with tips to make it work smoothly and pitfalls to avoid. Come with your questions and prepare to return and start blogging!

Me being who I am, you can be sure that I’ll make whatever content I can (such as slides, etc.) available through this site.

You can also be sure that I’ll also see about having a BOF or other perhaps informal session out there about developing voice apps on Tropo.com. If you’ve never been to an OSCON, due check out OSCON 2009… I’ve been to several and they’ve been great shows.

And stay tuned for more info in the months ahead…

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Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpressmu, wpmu, danyork, voxeo, oscon, oscon2009, oreilly, blogging, blogportals, socialmedia

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As Jason Goecke notes over on his blog in a post, “Adhearsion Website and Sandbox Migration Complete“, we are now providing hosting to the Adhearsion project’s “Sandbox” service as part of our general interest in helping open source projects we find interesting.

Adhearsion is a framework that Ruby developers can use to easily write voice apps that work with Asterisk. The Adhearsion team now has a hosted offering that helps developers get started. As Jason explains:

We have also moved the Sandbox to a new hosted server. Our friends at Voxeo have provided a great server for us and are now sponsoring the Adhearsion Sandbox. It is great to have a visionary leader in the telephony cloud space involved with the Adhearsion community.

Jason and his partner Jay Phillips have both been working with us on our Tropo voice application platform, in particular on the Ruby side of things, and we’re glad to help them out with their project. Jason says it perhaps the best toward the end of his post:

Our goal is to lower all the barriers to make it easy for developers to realize the possibilities of voice in modern web development.

We share that goal – and it’s been part of our corporate DNA since our founding in 1999. We’re always glad to work with those who agree – and look forward to providing even more options in the future.

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