Voxeo Talks

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

As we noted in our press release on Tuesday, we were delighted to be one of the recipients of Internet Telephony magazine’s “2007 Product of the Year” awards for our Prophecy product. As we state in the release:

Voxeo Prophecy 8 is the easy-to-install and openly downloadable platform for speech, VoIP and IVR applications. Before Prophecy, most telephony application platforms were complex “cast iron” systems that pre-dated the open era of the web. In stark contrast, Prophecy is built entirely on modern standards including VoiceXML, CCXML and SIP. Prophecy is as easy to install as a piece of consumer software, avoiding expensive on-site vendor installation. Prophecy is free for anyone to try, and is available at http://www.voxeo.com/prophecy.

We thank TMC.Net and look forward to seeing Rich Tehrani and many of the others in the TMC crew down at the Internet Telephony Expo in Miami later his month.

And please do check out Prophecy. You have basically all the incredible power of our hosted Evolution service - only in a version on your own premise!

Technorati Tags:
applications, prophecy, awards, rich tehrani, voxeo

We’ve been called many things over the years but being labeled a tool of the Israeli defense industry is certainly a new one on us! There is a thread making the rounds of various blog sites over the past few days that asserts that we are somehow owned by the Israeli defense industry and are somehow involved, potentially nefariously, in the Iowa caucuses. Most of this seems to stem from an article by writer Christopher Bollyn titled “ELRON - VOXEO: The Israeli Defense Firm That Tallies the Iowa Caucus” and crossposted on several other sites.

After we first saw these articles - and stopped laughing, we admittedly thought the assertions were so far out there that they wouldn’t be taken seriously. However, we have had a handful of email inquiries and have seen the text continue to be cross-posted to other blogs, so let’s just set the record straight for anyone searching on the topic…

First, Voxeo is a privately held, employee-owned company, and is not affiliated with, owned or controlled by any outside companies or interests. No Israeli defense firms, Russian mafia, aliens from Area 51 or anyone else like that.

Second, Voxeo specifically doesn’t program and run applications. The customers do that themselves and have complete control. Voxeo’s platform, if you will, is a slave to whatever the customer programs it to do. Any application programmer who understands the distributed XML model would know that Voxeo doesn’t “tally” a vote count for anyone. Neither our people nor our platform “tally” votes. A customer has to collect the data and interpret it themselves. Because Voxeo is one of the world’s leading VoiceXML hosting companies and is the only company with a 100% uptime guarantee, our application platform is the choice of a lot of organizations, political or otherwise. We’ve had over 55,000 applications built by our customers that do pretty much anything you can imagine being done with a phone. If you would like to check it out, visit our developer site at evolution.voxeo.com. You can set up your own account for free and see how easy it is to create applications (and how they remain under your control).

Finally, as to specific questions about who our customers are and what they do with our platform - like most businesses, we don’t disclose such information publicly. It’s up to our customers to disclose anything they do with us. Voxeo has experienced phenomenal growth over the last 5 years thanks to the opportunities brought to us by our customers. If we started talking about them and what they do without their permission we’d lose business quickly.

Feel free to leave us comments, though. As a company we’re very open and we’re glad to talk about anything other than the confidential interests and information of our customers.

Technorati Tags:
voxeo, elron

I am pleased to note on this final day of 2007 that we’ve recently added a new blog to the site. With “Behind The Blog“, our goal is to tell the story of what we had to do make this blog site work using WordPress MU - and to continue to write about what we do as we improve and enhance it in the time ahead. We’ll write about the plugins we add, the modifications we make and the challenges we deal with - and answer any questions raised by readers. More details - and information about why we are publishing this blog - can be found in the introductory post to the blog. If you are interested in creating a blog portal like blogs.voxeo.com, or are just interested in the technical details behind a site like this, feel free to join us as we explore the world of running a corporate blog portal using WordPress MU.

If you use a feed reader, you can subscribe to the direct feed for the blog or simply get new posts as part of the “all Voxeo blogs” feed. (Behind The Blog posts also appear in our new Twitter feed.)

Come along and join in our little adventure… we know there are bound to be challenges ahead!

Technorati Tags:
voxeo, wordpress mu, wpmu

We’re hiring! Check out the positions we have listed on Careerbuilder:

• Telecom Provisioning Administrator
• Technical Recruiter
• Customer Engineering and Support

As our job descriptions say:

Challenging work at an open-culture, profitable, pre-IPO, cutting-edge technology company in downtown Orlando.

• Are you the go-to person for your company’s most challenging issues?
• Do you love to “teach a man to fish” and take time to teach others how to use technology and solve its problems?
• Do you get frustrated by bureaucracy that keeps you from getting work done and making customers happy?
• If so we should talk. We’re building a world class company and need more people like you.

Company Background

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.

Come join us!

P.S. You need to apply online through CareerBuilder.com so please do not leave any information here as comments.

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.”

Two minor updates to our overall blog site that I thought I’d mention. First, you will notice that we’ve changed the main portal page at blogs.voxeo.com to show the latest posts across all blogs. Before today, we displayed the latest post in each blog. So for each of our blogs, you saw the latest post. While this is one way to display our latest posts, it doesn’t really show the fact that we may be posting more frequently in some blogs than others. For instance, with RJ and I both out in Vancouver at IETF 70, we have been posting quite often in Speaking of Standards. However, the previous way of displaying posts only showed the last post. Today Rick had some cycles to work on the PHP and MySQL code and successfully changed the portal page to show the last five posts across all blogs. We think this gives a better reflection of the content we are creating on the overall site.

What do you think? Do you like this format better? Is five the right number of posts to display? Should we have more? (10?)

Second, while we previously posted about making a site-wide RSS feed available on the main blogs.voxeo.com page, the site-wide feed was only for posts. You will now notice that we also have a RSS feed available for all comments across all blogs. If you would like to see comments left to any of our blogs, you can now subscribe to that feed. We will be adding easy subscription to comments feeds to all of the individual blogs as well.

Comments and feedback about these items - or anything else about the site - are definitely welcome. Thank you for visiting.

Part of what we’ll do in this blog is also occasionally provide an update on new features we are adding to this blogs.voxeo.com website.  For instance, today we added:

• Site-wide search - If you go to the blogs.voxeo.com “portal” page, you’ll see that the search box in the first sidebar now says “Search All Blogs”.   This will search through the contents of pages in all of our weblogs.  (Should we put this as a feature of the sidebar in all our blogs?  Or just the main portal?)
• Site-wide RSS feed -  Also on the main portal page, we now have an “All Voxeo Blogs” RSS feed. Please do subscribe to that feed if you want to keep up with any and all posting we post here on the site.

Beyond that, we continue to make minor style improvements.  Astute observers will also note that the icon in your browser address bar is now a Voxeo logo. (We moved a new favicon into place.)  More improvements are on the way in the days and weeks ahead.  Please feel free to leave us our suggestions (or just tell us how much you like Rick’s theme that gives us this nice design!)

Here at Voxeo we have a great amount of passion about what we do and in one recent email exchange we were talking about ways to show that passion to others. Someone suggested we put up a Flickr account… and so we did: www.flickr.com/photos/voxeo! We’ve now got 3 Canon cameras around the office and through the magic of the Eye-Fi card we’ve got those automagically uploading to our Flickr account. Check out our photos and get a glimpse into our office in Orlando, Florida.

Technorati Tags: flickr, photos, voxeo

Welcome to “Voxeo Talks”, the corporate weblog of Voxeo Corporation.  In this weblog, we plan to tell you some stories about Voxeo… who we are, what we do, we why are so passionate about the company and our products and much, much more!  If you would like to stay up on what we are doing, please do subscribe to our site’s feed - and please do pass along your comments.  We’d love to hear from you.