Disruptive Telephony

How do YOU see social networking changing enterprise communication?

How do you see "social networking" and "social media" changing communication within companies, enterprises, etc.? How do you think blogs, wikis, etc. will change enterprise communication? What about Facebook and other similar sites?

What would you say on this topic to an audience at VoiceCon Orlando this week?

That's the task ahead of Irwin Lazar and I as we talk with Eric Krapf and Fred Knight in a keynote "conversation" from 10:30-11:00am on Wednesday. The panel, called "Social Networking Meets Enterprise Communication"has this for a description:

It's no secret that world of enterprise communications is undergoing a transformation; IP Telephony and Unified Communications are changing the nature of the game. Now new forms of interaction, which began in the consumer/personal communications market -- blogs, wikis and online services like Facebook are migrating into the enterprise. Where do these social networking systems and mindset fit into the enterprise communications landscape? Join us for a discussion about what's real today and what's likely to happen in the future.

Obviously, this is a topic about which I am rather opinionated and have been writing about in my various blogs for years (including this blog, as well as on Disruptive Conversations and in my reports into For Immediate Release), so I'm very much looking forward to the session with Irwin on Wednesday.

We've already got a long list of points we can cover... and obviously won't be able to cover them all in only 30 minutes (and we've got a hard stop at 11am as what's next is a presentation with Al Gore and Cisco CEO John Chambers!). But I thought to myself - how can I do a keynote panel on the impact of social networking in enterprise communication if I don't somehow include social networking into the prep for that panel?

So here's my question for you all -

What do you see as the top one or two ways that social networking / social media will change the ways in which people communicate within enterprises?

Both internally among employees and also externally between the company and its customers and partners?

To perhaps get the conversation going, here are a few of the topics that Irwin and I already have in our list:

• interest in the opportunities to improve collaboration among employees, especially virtual/distributed
• interest in the opportunities to improve collaboration with customers and partners/vendors
• concerns over enterprise usage of public sites/services, i.e. what security is there for corporate data out on these sites?
• challenges with rolling out these services internally (from a deployment point-of-view as well as business case, who owns it, integration of different systems, etc.)
• expectations of new generation of incoming workers

What do you think? How do you see social apps/services changing enterprise communication? (Or do you take the contrarian view that it won't?) Your feedback is definitely welcome... (thanks in advance)

Technorati Tags: voicecon, voicecon orlando, facebook, socialnetworking, socialmedia, irwin lazar, enterprise, irwinlazar, danyork, dan york

Attempt to join a VoiceCon/Mitel presentation on UC foiled by Real Player on Mac

So today my participation in a VoiceCon webinar was foiled by "fun" with RealPlayer and my MacBook Pro. The VoiceCon team was running a webinar called 'Demystifying Unified Communications' and I was curious to check it out as it was sponsored by my prior employer, Mitel, and the speaker was Mitel's Doug Micheaelides who I know well. I was just curious more than anything else to see if Mitel's marketing had changed in the six months since I left. I'm also one to often listen to analyst presentations - it's part of what I do.

It was not to be. Now, admittedly, this is largely my fault for not checking whether the webinar system would work with my Mac in advance. But attending the webinar was low priority to me and something I would just try to "fit in" if I could do so. Since it looked like I could, I jumped over to the page, registered and clicked the link to launch the presentation...

Oops.

Turns out that the web presentation system the VoiceCon folks are using needs Real's player and as shown in the image to the right, my browser wasn't very happy with that.

Naturally, I did try to install the plugin. Clicking on the images shown there to "download the plugin" took me to Real's page about Real Player 10 for the Mac OS X, but here was the first problem:

Where's any mention of the "plugin"?

Plugin? What plugin? All that is mentioned here is the "Real Player 10 for Mac OS X" and far more annoying is the fact that I have to "Get it now with SuperPass". This of course takes me to a screen where I have to register to sign up to get my "free 14-day trial"!!!

NOTE TO REAL:

I DON'T WANT YOUR 'SUPERPASS'!!!

I don't want to do a 14-day trial. I don't want to do a 1-day trial. All I want to do is download a browser plugin to view a #$%@@#? webinar!

Clicking around the site I eventually did find a page that let me download the unencumbered RealPlayer 10 for Mac. So I did that. This was where I hit the second problem. On the page, it says simply:

4. Drag the RealPlayer icon into your Applications folder.
5. Double-click RealPlayer to begin using it.

But I didn't want to "use" the RealPlayer. I just wanted to use the plugin for my browser. So I didn't double-click it, knowing that many Mac applications do whatever installation they need when you simply drag them to the Applications folder. After I copied it to the Applications folder, I restarted one of my browsers and... nothing. I tried the installation again with the same result.

At this point I gave up on attending the VoiceCon webinar and went off to do other work.

Sometime later I tried just double-clicking the RealPlayer icon and... ta da... there was the installation screen! So here's a note to Real - your page should really read:

5. Double-click RealPlayer to complete the installation.

All in all a brief bit of frustration. I guess the good news is that I now do have it installed for future VoiceCon webinars, but it shouldn't be this hard! The part about the "SuperPass" was particularly annoying to me. (Could you tell?) I realize that Real wants to capture names in return for giving away the player for free and wants to get people to buy more services from them. But I would argue that should be something that users can more easily opt-in to. Real has, perhaps, found that this "in-your-face" method yields better results. But it really turns off some % of people - of which I am obviously one.

Technorati Tags: real, realplayer, voicecon, mitel

Joining ooVoo for video... are you an ooVoo user?

I gave in today and installed ooVoo on my Mac. I'd resisted because I'm a wee bit swamped right now, but with friends talking about "My ooVoo Day" starting on Monday I finally succumbed and installed it. I admit to being a skeptic... but I'm also open to being surprised. My skepticism is mainly because I already have a zillion ways for people to contact me and I already run several IM/voice/video clients... so it's really NOT clear to me that I need another one. Still, the interface looks interesting and they've incorporated many of the features you would see in Skype and other clients... presence, status messages, etc. Many of the features are intriguing, such as the ability to do video conferencing with up to six people.

So as the admitted chaser of bright shiny objects that I am, and since they do have a Mac version - and my Mac has a webcam, I've installed it. Of course, given that sites like this don't yet support what DataPortability.org is aiming to do, I have no contacts, so it's rather useless to me right now. Yes, I can use the "Find Friends" feature to import contacts from email programs... but... maybe it's just that I'm a "security guy", but I'm still leery of letting programs I don't really know have access to my email directory.

So if you are a reader of this blog and an ooVoo user (or install it now), feel free to add me as a contact. I'm using the incredibly creative username of "danyork".

Then we can see what this ooVoo thing is all about. :-)

P.S. Kudos to CRAYON for their blogger outreach program and their "My ooVoo Day" initiative... well done!

Technorati Tags: oovoo, video, collaboration

A simple answer to why I've done more videoconferencing in the past 3 weeks than I have in the past 3 *years*...

In the past three weeks I have done more videoconferencing than I have in the past three years...including my year or so as the product manager for Mitel's video collaboration products.

Why?

There's a simple answer, really. And it speaks to the heart of why I think it has taken so long for videoconferencing to take off... I mean, we've have been talking about videophones for what? 40 years or so?

The answer is... duh!... I have a camera always available!

It is always there, sitting at the top of my MacBook Pro screen, just waiting to be used. Whenever I am in a Skype call, or using Sightspeed or iChat... or any other communication program that supports video... moving into video is as simple as pressing a button in the GUI and... ta da... we're in a video conversation.

Contrast that to the situation a few years back where moving into video involved making sure your camera was connected first. In fact, some of the various programs required a restart after you connected a camera, which meant that you couldn't just escalate into video while you were in the midst of a call. Back when I was the product manager for Mitel's collaboration software, it was often a challenge to find people to test the software with because it required people to have a camera connected... and in the days of laptops and people moving around that required them to carry their camera with them. Once I started working remotely in 2005, there were many times when I wanted to have a video call to see the person or room on the other end. I'd often ask "Can we go to video?" and the answer was almost inevitably "Darn! I left my camera back in the office."

Today the story would be different. We're moving rapidly to an era of ubiquitous cameras embedded in laptops. I don't know if Apple started the trend, but with the MacBook's they certainly propelled the trend along the way. I've seen most other vendors follow suit. A quick tour of the laptop aisle in Best Buy recently showed that most all vendors at this point are including embedded webcams in many if not most of their laptops.

So maybe, just maybe, with ubiquitous cameras we'll finally reach the point where video can truly be just another modality of communication that we can easily move to and from during a call. It's certainly been a great addition to my communication over the past few weeks... and I see myself continuing to use more and more.

How about you? Do you have an embedded webcam? If you do, do you find yourself using video more now that you can do so very easily?

P.S. The captured screenshot at the top of the article is a call yesterday with Dameon Welch-Abernathy, a.k.a. Phone Boy.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, videoconferencing, unifiedcommunications, video

A heck of week to choose to go dark! (Microsoft, MySpace/Skype, iPhone... )

Boy, did I choose the wrong week to go dark! Way too many amazing things going on out there this week... here is a quick view of some of the disruptions with relevant links:

• Microsoft formally announces release of Office Communication Server - tons of coverage out there but I recommend the analysis by the UC Strategies team.
• Skype will be providing voice to MySpace IM - again tons of coverage - Skype Journal has more info and a screenshot. See also the Skype blog.
• Per Business Week this morning, Skype will be rolling out its own mobile phone, starting in Europe.
• MySpace
• Apple, meanwhile, announces an upcoming developer kit for the iPhone via a note from Steve Jobs (some reactions here and here).
• And finally MySpace says it will open up to application developers in a similar manner to Facebook.

All in all a rather busy week! (And it's not over yet...)

Technorati Tags: apple, applications, facebook, iphone, myspace, microsoft, ocs, unifiedcommunications, skype, voip

Digium buys SwitchVox and gets presence, Web 2.0 interface, mashups to Google Maps, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM...

Imagine you are a customer service rep (CSR) at a small/medium company and a phone call comes in from a customer. As your phone rings, up on your screen pops all the information about that customer, pulled from your CRM database in Salesforce.com or SugarCRM, plus other information from other databases and finally a nice Google Map showing you where that customer is located and potentially other information like the locations of your nearest offices. During the call, the CSR needs to bring in a subject matter expert so the CSR consults their web panel and looks at the presence information displayed for each of the other people in the business. The CSR can then contact someone showing as available and potentially bring them into the call.

Now imagine that all that is running on top of open source telephony... specifically Asterisk.

You can now stop imagining, because Digium just bought the company that does precisely that. There will undoubtedly be much attention today (at the very least in the VoIP blogosphere) about Digium's announcement here at AstriCon today that they have acquired SwitchVox. I am going to bet that much of the reporting today will focus on angles like these:

• Digium now has very competitive offerings (SwitchVox SOHO and SwitchVox SMB) for going after the small / medium business market.
• Digium bought themselves a very sophisticated/simple/easy GUI/management interface that moves them forward dramatically in making Asterisk easy to use, deploy and manage.
• Digium just got 1400 paying customers with over 65,000 endpoints.
• Digium bought themselves parity (or more) in their ongoing competitive feud with the folks at Fonality/Trixbox.

All of that is true. The SwitchVox products offer a very seriously competitive list of features (you have to go through and expand the subsections to see all the features). The GUI is very well done and simple. The price is quite compelling for the servers and also the support. I mean, for $1200 ($995 server plus $199 support) an SMB gets an IP-PBX with a very broad range of features and an unlimited number of users! Yes, the business still has to pay for IP phones, but they can buy any of a wide range of phones at varying price points to suit their needs. Considering that almost all the mainstream IP-PBX vendors charge on a per-user basis for licenses, the unlimited user model is certainly disruptive in its own right. (Digium has also been doing this with their Asterisk Business Edition.) And yes, Digium now has an answer to the growing competitive threat of Trixbox and it's management interfaces, support, hybrid model, etc.

All that is true - but it's not the really interesting story.

To me, what is far more compelling is that Digium just bought themselves a whole group of people who "get" the world of "unified communications", business process integration, Web 2.0 mashups, etc.

Digium has had no story at all around "presence" within its core offerings. Now it does. While Asterisk has always been a platform play where you have the ability to integrate Asterisk with other apps, doing so has not exactly been for the faint-of-heart. Hire yourself some programmers and you can do pretty much anything with Asterisk... but that's not something that many businesses want to get into. SwitchVox now gives Digium a way to do easy integration with databases and web sites. The integrations to Salesforce.com and SugarCRM are slick. The Google Maps popup is a seriously cool mashup! (And where is that on the roadmap of the mainstream vendors?)

Throw in a "click to call" add-in for Firefox to let you dial any number you see on any web page, plus a plug-in for Outlook, and you've got a very compelling offering. For a very nice price. My only knock (other than the fact that I can't find a picture of their Google Maps mashup anywhere on their website) is that it doesn't seem like their presence capability is yet integrated with existing instant messaging services. Given Asterisk's XMPP (Jabber) capabilities, this seems an obvious path that could get them connected to Jabber and GoogleTalk presence information. If they don't have that yet, I hope they add it soon, as we really do NOT need yet another place to change/update our presence info.

Regardless, this integration capability is, to me, the real story. Phones are being commoditized. I have to believe call servers/IP-PBXs are on their way to being commoditized. (Folks like Microsoft are going to help in pushing those prices down.) The money will ultimately go away from those areas.

The future of "unified communications" is about platforms. About mashups. About web services. About exposing APIs. About making it easy to combine different sources of data into interfaces that make people more productive. Microsoft gets that. Some of the traditional IP-PBX vendors get that. Digium has always known that, but this acquisition gives them a far better ability to make it happen.

Congrats to the folks at both Digium and SwitchVox for making this happen... I very much look forward to seeing where it evolves! (And in the meantime, I'm going to have to go down to the AstriCon exhibit hall and get some video of the Google Maps mashup to show how very cool it is...)

Read more:

• coverage in the blogosphere
• Digium FAQ about the acquisition
• Digium blog post by Bill Miller (more posts will apparently follow today on their blog)

Technorati Tags: asterisk, astricon, digium, mashups, opensource, presence, switchvox, telephony, voip

MySpace is NOT giving away free cell phones but instead launching a free ad-supported phone VERSION (of the site)....

In what looks like a classic case of someone leaving a critical word out of a headline, the Associated Press this morning came out with this report that MySpace is apparently launching an advertising supported free cell-phone. As indicated in the news release:

The company already offers premium, subscription-based versions of MySpace through AT&T Inc. and Helio wireless services. Those versions include special features integrated into specific handsets, such as uploading cell phone photos directly to a user's profile page.

The new version set to launch Monday will work on all U.S. carriers and will allow users to send and receive messages and friend requests, comment on pictures, post bulletins, update blogs, and find and search for friends.

At first I went along with the headline but the more I read it the more it made no sense whatsoever. There was no mention of phones... rate plans... or anything else. Gradually it dawned on me that while the AP headline was this:

Myspace to launch ad-supported cell phone

what they really meant was this:

Myspace to launch ad-supported cell phone version

Oops!

And here I was getting all excited that News Corp. was doing something truly stunning and had figured out a way to use advertising to drive the costs of all calls to $0 and give away all the phones and minutes for free! Given the huge community of MySpace users out there, they would probably have immediate pickup and would truly disrupt the industry.

Ah, well... the truth appears to be that they are just making it easier to use MySpace on web-enabled cell-phones without paying for the subscription version. Commendable... but not even remotely as exciting.

Let's see how far people run with the "MySpace to give away free cell phones" theme today!

Technorati Tags: freecellphones, myspace, headlines, socialnetworking, wireless

Iotum improves their Facebook conference call app...

What a difference a day makes. When I wrote about Iotum's "Free Conference Call" app for Facebook yesterday, I mentioned that there were a few things still in development.  Today, as shown in the image on the right (click on it for larger image), they've already addressed two of the issues: 1) the Agenda can now be completed (and in fact is the second step now while you are setting up the call); and 2) they've corrected the display issues with the participants.  With a few participants, the pictures loaded in very quickly, and with a larger number of participants the pictures were removed and only the names were shown.  Kudos to the Iotum team for iterating so quickly.

FYI, as shown in the image, I did participate in the "historic" public conference call hosted today by Moshe Maeir at 3:30 Eastern US time today.  It was a good demonstration as at one point we had easily 10+ people involved.  Very nice to see who joined simply by looking at the list of participants and seeing who was in green.  (Hmmm... note to Alec, you might want to rethink the use of green and red as there is some percentage of people out there who are color-blind and can't differentiate between the two.)  Unfortunately, about mid-way through the call, actually when I was in the middle of answering a security question that Moshe asked... the conference bridge failed. (or something failed - in any event, the call was terminated)  The others apparently all dialed back in, but I unfortunately had to prep for a 4pm conf call and couldn't make the time to rejoin.  Despite the glitch, though, it was a nice experiment in using it with a group of people in a public setting.

In related news, Alec Saunders has a nice roundup of the coverage of the launch of their Facebook application.  Worth checking out to see the opinions of others.

Technorati tags: iotum, facebook, facebook platform, conference calls, conference calling, conferencing, alec saunders

Facebook gets free conference calls with Facebook app from Iotum

Conference calls - inside of Facebook?  And for free? 

Yes... courtesy of the folks up at Ottawa-based startup Iotum. As I've written before, there are tons of applications being developed for Facebook, but there haven't been a whole lot of voice applications and there have been even fewer (in fact, almost none) voice-over-IP (VoIP) applications.  Of the existing voice apps (nicely listed by Pat Phelan), most of them are really what I'll call "consumer" apps... primarily focused on cheaper phone calls or making it easier to call people.  Or "calling" other Facebook users - or leaving them voicemail.  But there haven't really yet been any interesting apps I've seen that could provide business features.

Until now.  The team at Iotum just released their "Free Conference Call" Facebook application and now allowed anyone to install it. Until now, it's been in a very limited test phase, but after Alec issued his request for volunteers last Friday, I naturally had to give it a try (and he asked us not to write about it until today).

So here's the process.  After you've installed the app, you have to go through a brief authentication process to put your mobile phone number on file with the app.  Basically, the app sends your mobile number a text message with a verification code.  You then enter the verification code and your number is put on file with the app.

Creating a conf call is then a simple process.  Click a link and then fill in the relevant time/date fields (which can be basically right away) and then choose whether this is a private conf call or should be listed in the public directory (click on image for larger view):

Since the app is still in test mode, there weren't really any public calls to see and I just tried it out with private calls.  The next step is to invite recipients, a process that is made very easy by having a search box in the upper right side that lets you easily search through your Facebook friends (click for larger image):

Note that there is the capability to "Invite Friends who are not on Facebook", although this functionality is still in development.  The basic idea is that that person could receive an email with dial-in instructions.  In the end, you have a conf call page listing the various participants (in this case only one) and you have the ability to send invitations out:

 

When you send the invitation out, it goes out in typical Facebook fashion to the user's Facebook account where the user is then given the choice to RSVP or Ignore the invitation:

In the end, you press "Finish and View" and wind up with a page like this:

It has the typical type of info you would expect for a conference call.  A place to add an agenda (although this was still being developed), list of attendees, etc. Once the call is underway, the portion at the bottom fills in to show the pictures of the participants who are on the call, with the participants in green when the call is underway and red when they are disconnected from the conference bridge:

I'll note that the images took a very long time to load on my PC (in fact, they never loaded in one of my browsers) but this is clearly a bug they are very aware of and working on fixing.  For Alec, the images loaded quickly (and he said it had nothing to do with him being on Iotum's network because all traffic is proxied through Facebook).

Alec indicates that the plan is to highlight the people currently talking, etc.  He also says that over time they expect to add more functionality like a "Wall" capability where you could write notes during a call.  In my brief testing I was able to create both an immediate conf call (by simply scheduling the call for the time it was right then) and also a scheduled call.

Regarding the scheduled call, back on my "Conference Call" application page inside of Facebook, I have a nice view of upcoming conference calls, a tab for past conferece calls and a tab for public conference calls (none currently listed):

The link to create a new conf call is up in the upper left.  Once the time came for the call, I got a red bar across the top that said "ACTIVE CALL" indicating that one of my conf calls was in session.

The call itself was rather straightforward.  I simply dialed into the conf call bridge (a number in Minnesota) and, because my Caller ID matched that of the number on file for my mobile, I was put directly into the appropriate conference call.  Had I called in from another line, I would have needed to provide my mobile number as the "PIN" to get me into the conf call (which may also be the case with some mobile providers that don't send appropriate Caller ID).  I'm not entirely sure how comfortable I am with relying on Caller ID to get you into the conference calls (since, wearing my security hat, I know how easily it can be spoofed), but when it works (as it did for me) it does get you in there easily. Alec said they will soon be sending out a text message prior to the call with the dial-in number, which would make it easier for mobile users to simply dial the number in the text message, and also serves as a useful reminder.

All-in-all, it seemed like a nice very basic conferencing system.  Not yet as full-featured as any of the regular conf call systems out there available for businesses (Full disclosure: My employer makes such a system.), but it's probably "good enough" for many people and more importantly, it's integrated with Facebook.  Yet to be seen is how well it really scales... and what, if any, security exposures are out there, but those type of things will appear over time. It's a new app and, again, it's integrated with Facebook. There's also the detail that it only has a North American phone number, but again, this is just its initial launch.

I had two questions for Alec: 1) Why a conferencing app from Iotum? What does this have to do with their "Relevance Engine"? and 2) What is the business case?  How is he providing the free conference calls?

On the Iotum connection, Alec freely admits that launching the conferencing app now is mostly about time-to-market and getting out there first with a conferencing app.  Having said that, Alec is very clear that iotum's plan is to add in their presence features over time and also integrate this app with their Talk-Now app for Blackberries.  Adding a "social networking" component to their products was always on their roadmap, but the launch of the Facebook platform allowed them to accelerate those plans.  For right now, Alec definitely sees how red-hot the interest in Facebook is and is quite obviously seizing the opportunity to ride that wave. (And the beautiful thing about being CEO of a startup is that he can easily adjust and do this.)

On the money side of things, Alec indicates he's funding the free conf calls in part through sharing termination revenue with the LEC hosting the conference bridge and also through ad-supported SMS messages.

So in the end, Facebook now gets a conference calling application.  Give it a try.    I would expect that it will actually be the first of many such apps, but Iotum is now first out there with a working app.  From my perspective, it's good to see an useful business app out there for Facebook, in whatever form.  Kudos to Alec and team - and I look forward to seeing what it evolves into.

(Meanwhile, I'm still waiting to see a true VoIP app for Facebook (that does more than just calls between FB users) .... )

Technorati tags: conference calls, facebook, facebook platform, alec saunders, iotum, telecommunications, telephony

IBM announces acquisition of WebDialogs, makers of Unyte!

Wow!  From the stage here at VoiceCon, Michael Rhodin, General Manager of Lotus Software at IBM just announced that they are acquiring WebDialogs, the makers of Unyte!

IBM just issued a news release announcing this acquisition.

For those of us following the Skype space, Unyte has been known for a long-time as one of the leading business/collaboration extras available for Skype. 

Congrats to the WebDialogics folks and it will be VERY interesting to see where this goes!

Technorati tags: ibm, webdialogs, unyte, collaboration, web conferencing, skype, voicecon