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:

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 at eComm Europe in Amsterdam yesterday, Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn did his characteristic stirring of the pot with a talk called The Rise of Real-Time Text and the Demise of Voice. The Twittersphere seemed to be quite amused by the CTO of a “voice” company saying this – an oft-twittered phrase was:

Voxeo is talking about text, not voice! Kids don’t talk on the phone, they text or IM. So the future is text.

To people reading this blog or any of our other blogs, these statements shouldn’t come as any real surprise. Today the way companies interact with customers definitely includes voice – and for ten years now we’ve helped over 100,000 developers, over 45,000 companies and over half the Fortune 100 deliver exceptional customer service over voice.

But any look at communications trends today – including our own usage as individuals – will show that we’re increasingly moving to a world in which voice is only one of the many channels that customers use to interact with you – and it may not be the preferred channel. It’s not just the fact that “Kids don’t talk on the phone” – it’s also that we as consumers/individuals don’t want to wait on the phone while a call center agent takes forever to look something up on a slow computer system. We want to multi-task… we want to get other things done. But yet sometimes we also want to just get a person on the phone.

From a Voxeo perspective, we call this “Unified Self-Service™” – the idea of developing one application and allowing customers to interact with that application through whatever communication channel they choose: voice, SMS, IM, Twitter, mobile web … whatever.

We’re not just talking about this, of course… we’ve made it real today… with our Prophecy 10 platform, with our IMified platform, with our VoiceObjects product… you can sign up for a free account in our Evolution developer portal and write a VoiceXML app that interacts with users via voice (from the PSTN, SIP or Skype), via SMS or via IM. Today. Now. It’s that simple. Or go over to Tropo.com and write your multi-channel app in JavaScript, Ruby, python, PHP or Groovy. One application – many channels.

You’ll obviously see us writing and speaking more about this topic in the weeks and months ahead. But rather than listen to us – dive in and try it out!

And in the meantime, check out RJ’s slides – they are done in RJ’s typical excellent style (and yes, he presented the 94 slides in under 15 minutes):

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 he did back at eComm in San Francisco in March, photographer James Duncan Davidson (“Duncan”) has been at it again this week in Amsterdam at eComm Europe with this outstanding set of photos from eComm:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/x180/sets/72157622680355908/show/

Here is the Flickr set as a slide show:

Voxeo’s RJ Auburn and Jay Phillips can be seen here:

RJ: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5
Jay: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5

Scattered throughout that photo set, of course, are so many other friends of Voxeo… it’s great to see!

By the way, how does Duncan get such great shots? Obviously a lot of it has to do with his skills as a photographer, but it is also about quantity. In a Google Wave where this topic was discussed, Duncan indicated that on the first day of eComm Europe he shot around 1500 images and posted 109 – for a post rate of around 7%.

Kudos to Duncan, too, for letting presenters use them for their own blogs, promotions, etc. Great of him to do so.

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

If you are in Europe and interested in emerging communications technologies, I really hope you are planning to attend eComm Europe next week in Amsterdam. The eComm schedule is truly an amazing collection of some of the greatest thinkers about “what comes next?” in terms of communications. It really looks to be an outstanding event.

(NOTE: You still can register and if you enter the promotional code “Voxeo” you will get 20% off the price of your ticket.)

Two of those speakers will be from Voxeo. As noted on our event page:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/events/ecomm-europe/

on Thursday, October 29, 2009, from 11 – 11:15, Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn will be speaking about “The Rise of Real-Time Text and the Demise of Voice“:

Voice applications are dying. The era of the voice-only IVR is over. Take one look at the younger generation now entering the work force and consumer space – how many of them actually use their phones to place calls? Or take a look at the incredible success companies are having with “live web chat” to provide customer support? The cold, hard reality is that customers want more choice in how they interact with your company – and increasingly they want to choose non-voice communication means. They want to contact you via SMS, IM, Twitter, Facebook or the mobile web. They don’t want to work through a mountain of menus – they want to send you quick short requests and get back answers fast. How do you cope with this change in behavior? How can you develop applications that interact with customers in all these different channels? In this talk, Voxeo CTO RJ Auburn will outline the rise in real-time text communication and offer suggestions for how you can efficiently create applications that let you scale your support for multi-channel communication and deliver the information customers need in the channels they want. Come prepared to ask questions and learn how to move beyond voice.

Thirty minutes later, from 11:45 – 12:00 pm, Jay Phillips of Voxeo Labs (and Adhearsion fame) will speak on “Entrepreneurial Advantages with New Open-Source Technologies”

As an industry how do we build scalable voice applications with open-source tools? How do we infuse talented web developers into the “uncool” telephony world? Why hasn’t open-source completely dominated telephony like it has in other tech industries? These are some of the biggest questions facing the future of Emerging Communications and their answers are changing dramatically every year. Brewing at Voxeo Labs is an open-source approach to building arbitrarily sophisticated communications applications which promises to shake up the industry. In this session Jay Phillips, the new VP of R&D at Voxeo and creator of the open-source Adhearsion telephony framework, will discuss the exciting new ways developers and entrepreneurs will be able to easily build, productize, and scale telephony applications. As an open process, willing community members are also invited to help build this public asset and make their lasting marks in a profound way on the world.

Please do check out their talks and feel free to introduce yourself. As a Platinum Sponsor, Voxeo will also have a booth in the exhibit area – please do stop by to say hello to Sabine Winterkamp and other Voxeons who will be around.

Once the show is over we’ll be posting RJ and Jay’s presentations to our SlideShare account and will have links to them here. We’ll also have tweets going out from the show on either our @voxeo and/or our @voxeogermany Twitter accounts.

We look forward to meeting up with some of you there at eComm!

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 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…

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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…

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

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

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 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

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

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

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