Voxeo Talks

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.

One of the questions I frequently get asked is:

“So what kind of applications do people create with your platform?“

The challenge in providing a simple answer is that over 34,000 developers have created over 73,000 applications on our hosted platform since 1999 and there have been over 30,000 downloads of our premise platform since 2006 – and each premise platform could support any number of different types of applications. So the answer really is:

Pretty much anything that you can do with the phone – someone has done it on our platform.

But that doesn’t usually go down really well… people are looking for more concrete answers. That answer is, though, the truth. We’ve seen people build everything from your basic IVR system / auto-attendant to Facebook conferencing applications to PBXs to bad weather school notification systems. We’ve seen anonymous dating services… and we’ve seen companies create large interviewing systems to screen potential job candidates through a voice application. Then there was the company that used our platform to create a very cool game where you called in via a phone and interacted with their website. And then there are a very large number of companies running their customer service toll-free numbers on our platform…

It’s an incredible range that is hard to simply categorize. Here’s a selection of the type of applications we’ve seen people build:

There are naturally many more than those listed. The fun part about providing free developer accounts on our hosted system or letting people download our software for free (without even requiring any questions to be answered) is that we have absolutely no idea what people will do with it. So it’s always inspiring (and sometimes entertaining) to find some blog post out there where someone is doing some kind of wacky mashup we would have never even remotely thought of.

In fact, I’ll be profiling one of those very cool mashups in the next little bit… (and if you have an app built on our platform that you’d like to have me write about, please do contact me as I’m glad to consider it).

Does this help explain a bit better “what kind of apps do people create?” Would you like to see more case studies? What would you find helpful?

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS or following on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: voxeo, voice, voip, applications