Voxeo Talks

Where is development of communications applications going? What have the trends in development been? What are future trends? What will the platforms be that people use? At the Emerging Communications Conf (eComm) in June 2011, Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor gave a great presentation about how Voxeo got started, where app development has come from and where it is going. Enjoy!

Each morning here at eComm in San Francisco (June 27-29) at 7:45am US Pacific, I (Dan York) will be joining Andy Abramson for a one-hour live broadcast on the VoIP Users Conference (VUC) audio and video bridge.

You can join the call and listen in via the contact info found on the VUC site. If all you want to do is call (and not use video), you can use any of these ways to connect:

• SIP: 200901@login.zipdx.com
• Skype: vuc.me
• Regular old PSTN phone: +15672522286

We[1] are doing this all three days of eComm and are planning to somewhat randomly pull in speakers and others that we see in the eComm breakfast area. Today we’ve already lined up:

• Alec Saunders of the new Voice 3.0 Manifesto fame
• Todd Carothers of CounterPath
• Erik Lagerway of HookFlash and other VoIP ventures

Not entirely sure what we’ll cover, but you can be sure that Alec and I will probably get into my response about what’s wrong with his Voice 3.0 piece

We’ll also have the usual VUC IRC backchannel active at #vuc on Freenode. More info on how to connect, including a web IRC interface, can again be found on the VUC site.

As I mentioned, we’ll be broadcasting live every morning at 7:45am Pacific. Stay tuned for more info…. and if you are at eComm and want to participate… find us!

[1] Where “we” equals some combination of us… I’m actually now flying home on Wednesday so I will not be part of the Wednesday morning broadcast.

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Want to understand the future of communications? Want to learn what the trends are and where the telecom industry is going? Want to meet the thought leaders and others driving the industry forward?

If so, join Voxeo and the many other companies and individuals gathering at eComm, the “Emerging Communications Conference and Awards” next week in San Francisco.

The fantastic list of speakers includes a number of Voxeons:

Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor

Onward The Disruption – Trends in Communications Application Development

Voxeo Co-Founder and GWOB Founder Johnny Diggz

Communicating Beyond The Horizon

Voxeo Labs Chief Architect Jose de Castro

Driving Communications Directly Into The Web Browser: The RTCWEB Initiative

Voxeo Director of Conversations Dan York

How IPv6 Will Kill Telecom – And What We Need To Do About It

Jonathan Taylor will also participate in a “Voice 3.0” panel on Tuesday. Voxeo Labs’ Jason Goecke and Chris Matthieu will also be attending the event as well.

I (Dan York) will also be joining with Andy Abramson (of VoIP Watch fame) and Michael Graves to stream out 1-hour live broadcasts of interviews with speakers for the VoIP Users Conference (VUC) starting at 7:45 am each day.

All in all it promises to be an outstanding event and we’re looking forward to meeting folks and helping advance the evolution of our industry! See you there!

Interested in speaking at one of the premiere conferences related to emerging communications? Organizer Lee Dryburgh has just opened up the Call For Speakers for the Emerging Communications Conference and Awards – America 2011, being held in San Francisco March 22-24. We’ve long been a fan of the eComm events (and past sponsor) and always have looked forward to the amazing speakers and announcements at the show.

If you are interested in being considered as a speaker, Lee has posted info in his blog post. As to our involvement this year, you can watch our events page for eComm 2011 over the next few months. Stay tuned!

With eComm America 2010 underway out in San Francisco, it is great to see that once again the incredibly talented photographer Duncan Davidson is hard at work capturing the event. This image of Voxeon Jose de Castro is from Duncan… and you can see the other images as he is uploading them to:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ecommconf

With today being the second day of the show, you can expect to see more images appearing there throughout the day and continuing tomorrow for the third and final day.

In looking through the stream so far, I see these images of folks connected to Voxeo in some way:

• Voxeon Jose de Castro, Chief Architect in Voxeo Labs:
  • http://www.flickr.com/photos/ecommconf/4536860012/ (the one in this post)
  • http://www.flickr.com/photos/ecommconf/4536859418/

• Developer Mark Headd from our partner Tele-Works, who has also provided a number of posts to our Voxeo Developers Corner blog and writes at his VoiceInGov site:
  • http://www.flickr.com/photos/ecommconf/4536622032/
  • http://www.flickr.com/photos/ecommconf/4535988063/

• Zhao Lu of Orange Labs, who spoke at eComm about a “STATUS” application he built on top of Tropo:
  • http://www.flickr.com/photos/ecommconf/4536225581/
  • http://www.flickr.com/photos/ecommconf/4536859988/

There may be others that I missed, but those were the ones I saw so far.

If you are out at eComm, do say hello… as our event page mentions, we have a booth and a team of people out there at the event.

We’re also tweeting from the event, primarily through our @tropo Twitter account… so follow us there and stay up with what we’re doing at the show.

And keep watching that Flickr stream to see all the great photos…

It’s time once again for what is probably my favorite conference out there… eComm, the Emerging Communications Conference. For a few days in San Francisco, all the early adopters and “alpha geeks” of the communication world will gather together to share new ideas, learn from each other, network among each other, create partnerships and generally do what they can to move the state of communications forward.

If you are interested in where the bleeding edge of communication is… it really is the place to be.

If you haven’t gone before, I’d strongly encourage you to check it out. This year there is even a third day focused on the rapidly exploding world of “augmented reality”… some very cool speakers and amazing talks. (Admittedly, I’m biased since I am on the program committee.)

In fact, if you go to the eComm site, click “Register” and then enter the discount code “voxeo” during the process you can get 10% off the ticket price.

Voxeo is a Platinum Sponsor and we’ll have a presence there at eComm, including a booth and a presentation by Jose de Castro. We’ll have some cool announcements, too, which of course I can’t say anything about yet…

For all of you who will be there, we’ll look forward to seeing you!

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:

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):

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 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!