Voxeo Talks

We’re very pleased to note that we’ll be part of three presentations coming up at the Communications Developer Conference (formerly “VoIP Developer Conference”) co-located with ITEXPO West 2008, September 16-18, 2008.

As shown in the Communications Developer Track 1 schedule, RJ Auburn will be up first on Tuesday, September 16, from 9:00-9:45am as part of a panel on “The State of SIP Application Development“. Here’s the abstract:

As SIP continues to be implemented in enterprise and consumer environments, applications are being developed that further leverage the IP capabilities of the clients. Two of these capabilities are location and presence — where I am, and what my availability status is. This presentation will address the various protocols and standards involved in presence and location, and how these apply in a SIP environment. It explains how SIP both enables complex applications that integrate unified communications with presence and location, but also some of the challenges that it presents.

Next, on Thursday morning, September 18th, Jose de Castro and I are back to back. The day actually starts off at 8:15am with what should be a fun talk on “Voice/Data Mashups” that includes Thomas Howe. After that, Jose’s on at 9:15-10:00am with “AJAX’s Impact on Telecom“:

AJAX has completely changed how developers approach the Web. A lesser-known and surprising phenomenon is AJAX’s impact on telecom and open telephony standards. This session will give the audience a brief history of speech technologies and how XML fits into the speech technology ecosystem. Jose will demonstrate how developers can apply their existing AJAX skills to build dynamic telephone applications, and why this development paradigm is ideal for telecom applications.

I (Dan York) am then following from 10:15-11:00am with “Developing Voice Applications in the Cloud“:

Today the industry is buzzing about cloud computing and pushing applications out into the network cloud. Google has brought out their AppEngine platform while Amazon offers their EC2 and S3 services and Microsoft and others prepare their own offerings. In this session, attendees will learn about what is involved with developing voice applications on cloud computing platforms. What options are out there? What do you need to look for in a platform? How can you get started? The session will include demonstrations and prepare the attendees to return home and get started.

We’ll also have a booth there and have now also become a Platinum Sponsor of the event as well. We’re a huge fan of developer-centered conferences (hence our strong past support of ETel and then eComm) and we’re looking forward to seeing how this one goes co-located with the large ITEXPO show. If the Communications Developer Conference is not yet on your agenda for the fall, we’d definitely encourage you to check it out!

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conferences, voxeo, dan york, rj auburn, jose decastro, sip, voip, ajax, telecom, cloudcomputing, telephony, communicationsdeveloperconference

Have you ever wanted to quickly launch a call to a group of friends or colleagues? Say you want to get together for dinner (or a party) and rather than keep going around on IM or email you just want to talk to them all quickly? Or perhaps you are working with a project team scattered all over and as the deadline approaches you want to rapidly get all the team members together on a conference call?

As we are announcing today, a new Facebook application called “Party Line” does exactly that. Built by the folks at Equals, this application lets you create an unlimited number of “party lines”, each of which can have up to five members in it. You can either initiate the call from directly inside of Facebook or you can call 1-877-4-BUZZ-ME (1 877 428 9963) and simply select the number of the party line that you want to launch. The application then calls out to all members of the Party Line and… ta da… you are there in the conference call. Talk as long as you want… it’s free. No conference bridge numbers. No passcodes. Simple. Easy.

Want to try it out? All you need to do is (assuming you already have a Facebook account) go to:

www.equals.com/partyline

That address will automagically redirect you to the Facebook application page where you can simply add the application to your Facebook profile.

Once you have done that, you should be brought to the application page where you have one more step to do before you can get started. Click on the Advanced tab and you will see a place to get enter the phone number you want to use to make/receive calls (typically your mobile phone). Enter your number and press Verify. In a rather cool form of verification, the application will then call you and give you a code to enter into the verification box that pops up.

Now you can go back to the Party Line tab and just start creating party lines and adding in your Facebook friends. If they don’t have the application installed yet, they’ll be prompted to do so when you invite them.

Initiating a “Party Line” call can be easily done in either of two ways:

1. Call 1 877 4 BUZZ ME (1 877 428 9963). For one of the party lines you have created, you simply enter the number after a prompt and the call connects. For a party line created by someone else of which you are a member, you press “#” first and then the number of the party line. In both cases you can listen to the list of available party lines so you don’t have to remember the numbers.

2. Use the Facebook application interface. If you are logged into Facebook, you can just hit the big “equals” button to “Buzz Now! and start the call, as show here:
   

That’s it. After a brief sponsor message you are placed into the conference call with the other members of the party line and can talk for as long - or as little - as you want to.

Would you like to see it in action? Here’s a quick video tour:

We are rather thrilled to see this use of our platform by the folks at Equals. As far as we know, this is the first time a customer has built a Facebook app that uses our application platform, so we’re delighted to see it become available.

More than that, it’s a wonderful example of how someone can build a Facebook app based on the open standards of CCXML, VoiceXML and SIP. In particular, Call Control XML (CCXML) is being used to control all the call processing - and the conferencing. When someone calls in, CCXML is driving the overall call flow… initiating the calls to the other users and then bringing them into a shared conference. In turn, SIP is being used for all the connectivity out to the PSTN through our various service providers and VoiceXML is used for the the spoken dialogs you hear in the application. All around a pretty cool use of open standards in the midst of a Facebook application.

We’re also excited because while this application launched initially on Facebook, the Equals folks have built it in such a way that they will be able to move it to OpenSocial and from there allow it to be used on all the many other social networks that will support OpenSocial apps on their systems. They also have a range of other ideas to expand this application that we are looking forward to seeing as they roll those out.

Congrats to the team at Equals on this launch and we look forward to seeing what they do next. If you are on Facebook, please do check out the Party Line app and let us know what you think. (There is also documentation available if you would like more information about the application.) And if you want to learn more about how you could develop on our platform using open standards like I mentioned above, please check out our free developer accounts and software and learn how you can get started today.

Technorati Tags:
applications, facebook, facebook applications, facebook platform, voxeo, equals, social networking, voip, voice, voice applications, voice mashups, sip, prophecy, ccxml, xml, voicexml, ivr, opensocial, party line, conferencing, collaboration

Today over on his Tech News Comments blog, Markus Göbel writes about how he uses an application on our Evolution site as a bridge from Skype to the phone network. People who call him on his Skype ID ring him on his desk phone or cell phone. It’s a great little demonstration of our transfer capabilities.

Markus also wonders what I think about this solution, especially given that I had written about Skype’s lack of interoperability on my Disruptive Telephony blog earlier this year. Well, first off, I’m delighted that Markus is experimenting with our platform and we do appreciate his kind words and writing about his experience. We’re glad to see he liked our Designer tool. We’ve put a lot of work into making that an easy and simple way to create voice applications without requiring you to learn all the intricacies of VoiceXML.

Second, he’s right that I’ve known about the “Skype-to-phone” capabilities of our platform and in fact I’ve used it for some of my own applications that I’ve developed on our platform. I just haven’t written about it on any of my blogs for two reasons:

1. The inbound Skype connection is there to allow our developers to build interesting applications for Skype; and
2. The connection is only one-way and doesn’t provide the full interoperability that I was writing about.

Let me hit each of these points separately. First, one of the coolest things to me about developing voice apps on our Evolution hosted platform is how incredibly easy it is have an app that can be reached from a range of different sources. As shown in the diagram to the right, any application you create can be reached through the following methods:

• Direct dial across the PSTN to a direct phone number (and applications can be assigned more than one number - for instance if you wanted numbers in different area codes)

• Dialing across the PSTN to an 800-number with a PIN code.
• Dialing across the PSTN to a non-800-number with a PIN code (which I didn’t show in the diagram)
• Inbound connections from SIP endpoints
• Inbound connections from Skype users
• Inbound connections from FWD (formerly FreeWorldDiallup)

Any of you reading this can try it out - just follow our Quick Start Guide. Skype is one of the ways that you can connect to whatever kind of application you create. As an example, here are the contact numbers for a small application of mine (a call-in comment line for my Blue Box podcast):

Pretty cool stuff, eh? Of the many things you can do with your application, you can of course make outbound transfers to the following services:

• Regular PSTN phone numbers (note that free Evolution developer accounts are restricted to making calls within the USA)

• SIP endpoints (including FWD users)

Note that outbound dialing is not enabled by default but if you email our support team we will issue you a “token” that you can use for outbound calling from your app.

What Markus did was create a very simple app that did an outbound transfer over SIP to a service which then rang his various phones. (As he is in Germany, the free Evolution accounts could presumably not call his number directly. Paid Evolution accounts, can, of course, call anywhere and pay the corresponding rates.) Calls can come in via Skype (or other means) and go out via SIP.

So if this is a “Skype-to-SIP” gateway, why aren’t we trumpeting it to the world? Simple… that’s not the purpose of the Skype connection. The inbound connection from Skype is to allow the 30,000+ developers on Evolution to build interesting apps that can work with Skype. Sure, you can obviously create a simple Skype to SIP “transfer” application like Markus did, but that’s not why Skype created the connection with us and if all we used it for was Skype-to-SIP transfers probably at some point Skype might clamp down on the usage. So while it certainly can be done, we ask people to understand the real reason we have the connection and to please not abuse that.

The second reason I personally haven’t written about this capability is because it’s not a full Skype interoperability solution. If you look on the right side of the diagram above, what’s missing? We can accept inbound connections from Skype (which is admittedly very cool for our apps), but we can’t do outbound connections to Skype users. If you look back at my article about Skype interop what I want is the ability to make SIP connections from within the Skype client itself. In contrast to Markus, who is now delighted that he can turn off his Skype client yet still receive calls to his ID, I want to use the Skype client and be able to call SIP endpoints.

In any event, I’m delighted that Markus is trying out our platform. He concludes his piece with:

Let’s see which other solutions I can develop with Voxeo. Their visual tool makes the design of VoiceXML fairly easy.

I, too, look forward to seeing what other solutions he’ll develop!

Technorati Tags:
skype, sip, voxeo, applications, xml, voicexml, fwd

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new weblog: “Voxeo Developer’s Corner“. In this weblog we will be giving you tips, tricks and tutorials to help you develop applications on our platforms. As you are probably aware, there is a huge amount of information available in the documentation and forums found on our Evolution developer site. What our goal is with this blog site is to point people to some of the nuggets of gold buried within the pages of Evolution. Members of our staff will highlight some of the great tips they have found and other information they think might help you build even better voice applications on our platform.

The blog is off to a great start already with Matt Henry’s initial post, “Certified Tech Tip: Using SISR-formatted grammars with Prophecy 8“, where he demonstrates what SISR-formatted grammars are all about. The post attracted some comments and Matt is already planning a follow-up post. Expect to see more along these lines from Matt and his team in the weeks ahead.

I also kicked off a series on voice mashups and Twitter today with a post “Voice Mashups with Twitter, part 1: Who will win the 2008 SuperBowl? (A mashup in CallXML.) where I show how you can create a voice application that sends its output out to the Twitter micro-blogging service. Over the next few weeks I’ll be adding more articles in that series.

If you are interested in developing voice applications, we do encourage you to check out the “Voxeo Developer’s Corner“. There’s also an RSS feed if you would like to subscribe and stay up-to-date with our posts.

Technorati Tags:
applications, voxeo, developers, callxml, xml, voicexml, mashups, ccxml, apis

If any of you will be in Miami next week for Internet Telephony Expo, I will be speaking at Ingate’s SIP Trunking Seminar Series held in conjunction with IT Expo. It probably comes as no surprise, if you know my background, that I’ll be speaking in the session from 8:30-9:45am on Thursday, January 24th, titled “Seminar/myth 1: VoIP is not secure“.

These SIP Trunking Seminars have always been very well attended and have had a great amount of information included. They are free, but if you’d like to be sure to have a spot you can pre-register.

If any of you are attending either IT Expo or the SIP Trunking Seminar Series, please do drop a note as I’m always interested in meeting readers.

Technorati Tags:
sip, sip trunking, ingate, itexpo, conferences

We are currently looking for a kick ass telecom routing guru to lead up the management of our carriers and external routing systems such as SMS/800. If you or someone you know is someone who understands what SMS/800 is and knows the difference between a CAD and a CPR (or would like to learn) please take a look at the job listing below and drop us a line as we would love to hear from you.

Summary

Work for an open-culture, profitable, pre-IPO, cutting-edge technology company in downtown Orlando.Are you great at organizing things and pushing tasks and vendors to complete projects?Do you like building good relationships with vendors to make orders flow smoothly?Do you have experience with or enjoy accounting or telecommunications?Are you up for doing anything possible to make customers happy?Do you like solving problems and coming up with innovative ways to get things done?If so, we should talk. We’re building a world-class company and need more people like you.

About Voxeo

Voxeo’s mission is to make it easy for anyone to create and deploy voice applications that can run on any home, mobile, office, or VoIP phone. Leading analyst firm Gartner says Voxeo is part of a select group of companies that “will have a business impact on the future of IT”. Voxeo is a profitable, pre-IPO, international, employee-owned, Internet software company. Our technology is at the cutting edge of Voice over IP (VoIP) and web 2.0 applications, standards, and mashups.We want to revolutionize the telephone industry and are doing so every day. We run the world’s largest voice application developer community (over 30,000 members to date) and have hundreds of enterprise customers in fields including telecom, consumer services, healthcare, retail, government, and more.At Voxeo we focus on building a team of incredible people and making our customers extremely happy. We work hard, but we believe in balance. We have numerous perks and benefits, including the best health insurance in Florida, incentive stock options, free snacks and drinks, an employee football team, catered lunch on Fridays, and poker and movie nights.Voxeo employees work in our 100% cubicle-free open-environment office on the 20th floor of The Plaza – downtown Orlando’s newest office building. Our culture is just as open as our office. Voxeo employees are encouraged to ask for help from and offer help to anyone at any time. Our culture comes from our roots in Silicon Valley, where many of us helped start and build companies including Netscape, Yahoo, TellMe, and OpenWave.Voxeo is built on a spirit of entrepreneurship. Many of our employees have previously founded other successful tech companies, and you will work directly with Voxeo’s co-founders on a daily basis.

Responsibilities

• Create, manage, and track call routing plans through various carriers
• Create, manage, and track toll free call routing plans
• Place and track local and toll-free number orders through various carriers
• Place and track Local Number Portability orders through various carriers
• Think of and suggest ways to improve our number ordering process
• Do everything possible to make our customers happy with the number orders and setup
• Escalate and push issues with order delivery as necessary with the appropriate carrier
• Build relationships with appropriate carrier personnel to enhance productivity
• Help organize and maintain internal systems to track number inventory, orders, and status
• Help others on the Network Operations team as required

Requirements

• Excellent oral, written, email, and IM communication skills
• Great process of elimination and other problem solving skills
• Ability to work in a fast-paced office environment where multi-tasking is a must
• Ability to work full time (40+ hours/week)
• Experience with number ordering, Local Number Portability, or toll-free SMS / Resporg systems is highly desired

Benefits

• 100% company-paid health, vision, dental, and short-term disability insurance
• 100% cubicle-free, casual, open office environment with great views of Central Florida
• Incentive Stock Options and bonus plan
• Three minute walk to popular restaurants, bars, and a brand-new 12 screen movie theatre
• Challenging work and significant career growth at Orlando’s fastest growing tech company
• The opportunity to revolutionize how people use and create applications for any phone
• Free education and certification in highly desired technologies such as VoIP and VoiceXML
• Work directly with top experts in SIP VoIP technology and W3C web standards
• Free parking at our downtown Orlando office

Interested

Then please, contact us by emailing us at jobs@voxeo.comPlease include the position you’re applying for in the subject line of your email so we can find your application quickly. Thank you!You can learn more about Voxeo by checking out:

• Our corporate site
• Our developer site
• Our Flickr page

From our Employees

We asked all our employees what they thought we should mention in our job postings. Here’s some of what they had to say:“This company would be a hot commodity in Silicon Valley, but having an opportunity to work for a company like this in Orlando is rare and a huge thing for folks who don’t want to have to move out of state.”“I applied for a job here, but definitely got more than I bargained for, I found a place I can call home”“The item that really hooked me in my job interview is the health benefits. That’s a huge difference in Voxeo compared to other firms.”“One of the great points about working at Voxeo is the opportunity to work and learn directly with the company’s top engineers and executives”“Corporate culture is one of the perks that has kept us from being a “turn and burn” company … a large factor in our hiring process is a good culture fit, we would be remiss if we didn’t stress the fact that we are looking for cool people to work with”“I think you should say that Voxeo provides all of the tools that allow you to perform the challenging work, including telephone, laptop and the software you need to excel at any position”“To a lot of people in IT right now, the “MacBook Pro” has become the “hot” laptop to have and most people will never dream of getting one because they are stuck in a space where all they will ever see are Dell laptops of various vintages”“The great thing here is the opportunity to learn. The chance to increase your skill set exponentially in a cutting edge field and to feel truly needed and satisfied at the end of the day. Hard to quantify that sort of job experience but it is invaluable.”“I think a key point that we are trying to capture is that everyone at Voxeo works hard but we love what are working on. I think if there is some way to put down that the entire company loves what they are doing and you don’t have dead wood around is a nice thing. ““Speaking as a relative Voxeonoob, the office was a definite selling point in coming here. The view and top-floor-prestige aside, you can’t understate the importance of clean bathrooms”“We definitely have a fun and fabulous group of people.”“Everyone that works here has such a great personality and makes you feel right at home. The employees at Voxeo are accountable and extremely intellectual individuals, but they also know how to enjoy the day and laugh at the lighter side of things.”“I think the ‘can do’ culture should be in there, every employee is empowered to help the customer and to create a better solution”“The fact that the company (and some of the people) are Silicon Valley transplants has a certain sex appeal. We should consider mentioning that”“For me, the best part about working at Voxeo is our team family, and the culture of voxeo. We are intensely technical, and we work very hard, and we don’t take it all too seriously.”“I think Voxeo is a rarity for the Florida market. Opportunities to work with a successful, high-tech, industry-leading company are few and far between in this area”“One of the most attractive benefits for many people is our 100% company paid health insurance. That benefit alone can be the deal breaker for a potential employee. I would put that at the top of the benefits list”“I’d add that the office is located in the top floor of the Plaza, and perhaps market it up with “featuring spectacular views of I-4″ –replacing “I-4″ with whatever is truly spectacular”“One of the best things about being a Voxeon is that you have access to the highest level of management in an open and laid back setting. Often times people care more about who they work worth and enjoying coming to work each day then pay, benefits, etc.”“I like the ‘Teach a man to fish’ reference. I would find a way to emphasize that management is just as involved in the technology as the employees are.”“I think the all-hands and quarterly financial meetings are something that not all companies offer, and are seen as a benefit to many as they expose the insides of the company, show that Voxeo is very open about the state of the company, and allow the employees to participate in discussions that affect the company on the whole. ““The fact that you (the CEO) are asking us (the employees) for input on this job posting should somehow be conveyed in there as well. And it’s not just the job posting, you send out things like this all of the time, showing how much you value all of our input.”