Voxeo Talks

What is the future of voice, video, text and other real-time communications technologies? Where is the innovation happening? What does our communication future look like?

That was the topic of a video interview by Chris Pirillo between VoIP industry veteran Jeff Pulver and Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor. Conducted using a Google+ Hangout, Chris described on his own site what the interview was all about and then made the video available on YouTube:

It was an enjoyable interview to watch live … and great to hear what Jonathan, Jeff and Chris had to say on the topic.

This week our partner Interactivation released a very cool “InteractiveXML” toolkit that lets you create videos where viewers interact with the video via voice, text or other channels.

I can’t really explain it… you really have to see it to understand how incredibly cool this is!

First, check out this video where you can call a phone number and interact with the guy in the video (and yes, this is using Voxeo’s network to power the phone interaction):

It’s quite cleverly done. Also… after you’ve tried it out, reload the page and then ignore it for a while. It’s rather amusing what the character in the video does.

Then you can test your 80′s music knowledge with this video that doesn’t use voice but instead has you press buttons or enter text to answer questions:

And again, if you ignore the screen the character gets rather amusing.

Interactivation has released this new “InteractiveXML” language and service to let people create video applications like these. You can learn more about it at, predictably:

http://www.interactivexml.com/

It’s very cool to see and I’m looking forward to seeing what people may do with this new service. Congrats to the Interactivation team on their launch of InteractiveXML!

As several people have asked about what the video looked like that was running in the back of our SpeechTEK booth, we uploaded the video loop to YouTube.  Note that it is silent, so no, there isn’t a problem with your speakers.  Enjoy…

The video was produced by our friends over at R3M1X3D with direction on our end provided by our Kim Martin.

At ITEXPO back in January, Eric Linask at TMC interviewed me in what has seemed to become a regular every-six-months routine. In the interview, I discussed:

• the Cloud Communications Summit and pushing communications out into “the cloud”
• security issues related to cloud communications
• what’s next in communications, including multi-channel communications (a part of which we refer to as Unified Self-Service)

The big black vehicle behind me was being raffled off as part of the event promotion… hence why we were there. (Wouldn’t it perhaps have been more interesting if we did the interview inside the vehicle?) Anyway… here’s the video: (and will astute observers notice anything about me that is different from the other videos I’ve done?)

If you are wondering what is going on with all these “Voxeo Speaks” videos appearing in our Voxeo Talks blog, here’s the deal – last week at ITEXPO I (Dan York) recorded several of the sessions in Thomas Howe’s Cloud Communications Summit with the intent of making them available through our voxeo.blip.tv channel. I have to use blip.tv because the videos are longer than the 10 minutes allowed by YouTube. But then, of course, I realized that to publish them to that channel in the way that I am currently using the channel, I needed to number them… and perhaps it’s just me, but I wanted them to be in rough chronological order with the other conference videos I have recorded.

So… I am basically “flushing the queue”, as it were, and getting some of the video I’ve had around for a few months up online. I’m almost there, but if you have worked with video you know that it takes a while to render. Over the next few days I should be all caught up.

I hope you enjoy the presentations – and yes, the lighting was horrible on that WPMU presentation… (well, actually the brightness of the slides caused the camera to reduce the exposure level).

P.S. And no, I don’t know why precisely I didn’t spin up a separate “blog” on the site specifically to house these videos. I still could… but now these are here in the Voxeo Talks stream. My thinking really was that people can subscribe directly to the blip.tv channel – and that we won’t have a zillion of these videos over the course of a year. I may revisit that thinking, though.

Two weeks ago out at ITEXPO West 2009 in Los Angeles, Erin Harrison from TMCnet interviewed me (Dan York) about what Voxeo has been up to and where we are going. Amusingly, it didn’t really dawn on me why we were sitting in front of a green backdrop until I saw the end result and the fact that we now appear in front of a bunch of city buildings.

In any event, those of you interested can now watch the video here:

You can also view the video at this link, although if you go there, you have to watch an ad before viewing the video.

Want to learn more about what Voxeo is doing these days? Or about how our acquisitions of VoiceObjects and MicroMethod fit into our overall plans?

Back in early February, I (Dan York) was down at the Internet Telephony Expo (ITEXPO) East 2009 show in Miami and sat down with TMC’s Eric Linask to talk about what is new with Voxeo.

I recently noticed that TMC has added the ability to embed their videos, so while you can also view the video on TMC’s site, I thought I’d also share it here.

I should note that this video is now three months old, so some of the numbers I shared here are no longer correct (ex. we now have had over 35,000 developers build voice apps in our Evolution Developer Portal), but overall the information is still accurate. (Well, my title has since changed to “Director of Conversations”…)

If you are planning to be out at the ITEXPO West 2009 in September in Los Angeles, you’ll probably also find me there…

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If you have been watching our main Voxeo blog portal or are subscribed to our “All blogs” RSS feed or are following us on Twitter, you know by now that I launched a new video podcast a few weeks back called “Emerging Tech Talk” or “ETT” for short. Now that the show has been going for a bit and I have most of the kinks worked out of the production process, I thought I’d take a moment to formally introduce the show here and talk about what I’m doing with it.

First, though, I should of course mention that you can follow “Emerging Tech Talk” and receive notification of new shows by doing any of the following:

• subscribing via iTunes
• subscribing to our YouTube account (if you are a YouTube user)
• subscribing to our RSS feed
• following us on Twitter

THE PREMISE

So what is “Emerging Tech Talk” about and what am I doing with the show?

Primarily the show is a way for me to use video to tell stories about new / emerging communications technologies that I find interesting. I thought about subtitling it “Chasing bright, shiny objects related to communication technology..” and while I may not use that sub-title, that’s basically what it is. A part of my role within Voxeo’s Office of the CTO is to look at the changes happening around us with regard to both the ways in which we communicate and the tools/technologies we use to communicate. I speak about those changes at conferences and write about those changes both here and on my external blogs – with Emerging Tech Talk I can also now speak about those changes in a video format.

Basically I want to share with you through video some of the exciting changes I see going on out there.

Note that this show is not necessarily about Voxeo. Sure, by nature of what I am doing on a daily basis, probably many if not most of the shows will have some bearing on what we do here at Voxeo, and certainly I’ll use ETT as a vehicle to talk about new Voxeo announcements (as I did with the VoiceObjects news) but in general my plan is for the show to cover a wide range of topics related to “emerging communication technologies” – the kind of topics you would see covered at a conference like eComm next March.

In fact, I expect to use conferences like eComm, VoiceCon, ITEXPO, etc. as places where I’ll be doing video interviews to run in the show. As you’ve seen with ETT already, I’ll undoubtedly do some shows from IETF standards meetings. Essentially I’ll just have my camera (or laptop) along with me as I travel to various conferences and see what video is interesting to record at those events.

I also expect to include some “screencasts” of various tools and services I find interesting. I’ll probably talk about some iPhone apps… social networking tools… new VoIP products… basically, again, whatever I find interesting and exciting.

Given that a secondary reason for doing the ETT show is simply to experiment with the video podcasting medium, I expect you’ll see some experiments along the way with different video tools and services. (And some may work well and others may not.)

THE DETAILS

Each show will be less than 10 minutes in length. I’m also uploading these shows to YouTube and the folks there restrict the length to roughly 10 minutes. (I know this all too well. Having successfully uploaded a show that was 10:56 long (ETT #011 on P2PSIP) I got a little cocky and tried to upload one over 11 minutes. Rejected.)

I’m not aiming to do much in the way of post-production / editing. The goal is to record shows that are less than 10 minutes (so I don’t have to do much cutting), pop them into iMovie on my MacBook Pro, do some very basic editing, add text overlays, adjust titles… and publish.

I’ll primarily be recording directly into iMovie using my Mac’s embedded webcam, recording with my small little JVC MG-330 hard disk camcorder or using ScreenFlow on the Mac to record the screen and also the video. (Which is actually how I did the Skype video recording I did with Michael Codini in ETT #010.) I’m sure I’ll use other tools as I come across them. Because of the different tools, I’m sure video quality may vary somewhat between shows.

As far as frequency of shows, I expect it to be highly variable. My goal is to have a new show up at least twice a month… right now I’ve had a couple up each week. I expect that when I go to conferences/events I’ll have more shows going up. I also expect that when I’m buried under some deadline I may not produce a show for some time. The net of it is that I can’t guarantee to you that it will be a weekly show, but you’ll see shows as often as I can create them.

THE INVITATION

So with all that said, I extend to you two invitations. First, as I noted at the beginning of this post, there are several ways that you can subscribe to the show and join in the journey. Please do! Let’s see what we can do with this medium to tell the story of the changes happening around us with regard to communication.

Second, you are definitely invited to contact me with topics you think I should discuss on the show. If you have questions about subjects I cover on shows, areas you would love to have more details on, or just cool new services you’ve seen (or are involved with) that you think I should talk about, please feel to contact me and let me know. You can email me, contact me on Twitter or identi.ca, contact me through Facebook or LinkedIn, or IM or call me on Skype (danyork). I can’t necessarily promise that I’ll fit everything in, but if I find it interesting and it relates in some manner to communication technology, I very well may.

[NOTE to PR people: Before you pitch me, please read the blogs on this site as well as my Disruptive Telephony and Disruptive Conversations sites to see if your clients' new whiz-bang product/service is even remotely along the lines of the things that I write about. Thank you. (Can you tell I'm really sick of being pitched by people who don't even bother to take 30 seconds to look over my sites to see if it is even appropriate to pitch me?)]

Now, let the journey begin…

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Technorati Tags: emerging tech talk, emerging technology, emergingtechtalk, ett, technology, video, videopodcasting, voice, voip, voxeo

Want to leave a comment on our blog but don’t want to take the time to type it in? If you look at the bottom of this or any Voxeo blog post, you will now see below the comment area this image:

Just click on that image and start talking into your webcam!

As explained in more detail in our “Behind The Blog” post, we’ve installed a new WordPress plugin from a startup named Seesmic that lets us easily create videos to embed in our blog posts and also allows us to accept video comments.

You do NOT need to have a Seesmic account to leave us a video comment!

Just click on the link and start recording. Don’t worry, you have the option to re-record your video and also to cancel the video comment (by clicking the “back to text comment” link) if you don’t like how it came out. If you do have a Seesmic account, the video comment you leave here will be posted to your Seesmic account for others to see, but again, you do NOT need an account to leave a comment here.

So what are you waiting for? If you have a webcam handy, click the link below and tell us what you think of this service!

P.S. If you’d like a spiffy new MacBook Pro with an embedded webcam, consider applying for one of our job openings – the MBP is our corporate standard!

Technorati Tags: video, seesmic, wordpress, wpmu, wordpress mu, voxeo, wordpress plugins, plugins

When you hear mention of “Orlando, Florida”, what do you think of? Probably 99.9% of the time people think of certain giant theme parks located a bit south of the city. There is, however, a vibrant “downtown” Orlando in which our office is located. When I was down there last week (I normally work out of a home office in Vermont) I was testing out a new video camera and so I recorded some video showing the surrounding area. These were just test videos that I uploaded, but since they are now on YouTube, I thought I’d post them in case you are looking for a way to procrastinate and want to see what February looks like in Orlando:

By the way, this could be the view you see everyday if you came and worked for us – we are hiring! See our Jobs page for details.

I tweaked the camera’s settings a bit (including shifting from 16:9 to 4:3) and shot a night view from an adjacent tower:

I added a title slide, credits, etc. And yes, I probably could have edited out the part with me walking by the various columns. Remember… these were test videos, eh?

For the techies out there, the camera I am using is a JVC Everio GZ-MG330A. It’s a hard-drive camera that is small! Seems to work real well and imports nicely into my MacBook Pro. Editing, titles, etc. was done with Apple’s iMovie ’08 which also did the conversion and upload to YouTube.

Anyway, we’ll have more videos coming out soon… in the meantime enjoy the view of Orlando.

P.S. Maybe next time I’m down there I’ll do a walking tour to show you what downtown Orlando looks like at ground level… roaming Segways and all.

Technorati Tags: orlando, voxeo, video