Disruptive Telephony

Six months with Voxeo...

I find it rather astounding to me that it was six months ago today that I announced that I had joined Voxeo. Where did the time go?

It's been a really amazing six months that has so greatly expanded my knowledge into new areas I hadn't played with before. This picture from our "VoIP Platform Overview" page perhaps best shows what I find so interesting about Voxeo's platform:

On the one hand, it's an XML-driven SIP application server... yet it's also a media server... and then there's all the speech stuff - Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-To-Speech, etc.... VoiceXML, CCXML, CallXML... and then it's a conferencing server... all based on SIP and using things like ENUM and so much more.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects for me is that on one level we are customer-focused working with individual developers to help them learn to build voice applications. But then on the back-end we have this massively-scalable, redundant hosting infrastructure and we are among the largest consumers of SIP trunks in North America. (And constantly in need of more - a colleague of mine is tasked nearly full-time with working with carriers to find more SIP trunk capacity!)

So it's fun for me to go to an IETF standards meeting because on the one hand I'm interested in SIP as it relates to end users and end user applications, yet on the other hand I'm interested in all the SIP peering standards and other efforts which make it easier for us to connect into the "cloud" of SIP service providers out there. So I get to look at the small end and the massively large end. For a guy interested in SIP, it's pretty wild.

It's also very cool to be part of an organization that has been working with many aspects of what we are now calling "cloud computing" since long before that label came into fashion. Voxeo is all about moving your voice applications into the cloud. Being able to access them from wherever. Whenever. So as there is all this newfound interest in moving computing into "the cloud"... that's where we already are. The challenge now becomes one of learning how to have our "cloud" interact with all the many other "clouds" out there. (And yes, we do have a premise product, too, for customers that for various reasons do not want to push their apps into the cloud - but the hosted version came first by many years.)

Beyond all the technology, it's also been great to get back into a "startup" mindset. Even though Voxeo has been around since 1999, it still retains so much of the passion and drive of a startup. (As well as some of the fun aspects- in Orlando they even have a barista and coffee bar!) There are a great many opportunities to participate in growing the company. The management is incredibly open with employees, too, which is wonderful to be involved with... and there's just some really great people inside the company! (And hey, we're hiring!)

So what are some of the other things I've learned in the past six months?

• Call Control XML (CCXML) is one of the most under-appreciated standards out there (and something I'll be writing about more). It basically lets you put an XML layer on top of SIP and, well, since all those web application tools speak XML it opens up all kinds of opportunities.
  
  
• WordPress Mu can be used to build a corporate blog portal (blogs.voxeo.com) - that's been both fun and a great learning experience.
  
  
• It absolutely scares me that I now know my way around downtown Orlando and to and from the Orlando airport.
  
  
• There is more to "Orlando" than simply "The Empire of the Mouse" and downtown Orlando is a rather cool place to be.
  
  
• JetBlue's direct flights from Burlington, VT, to Orlando are a truly wonderful addition that I will miss when we move to N.H. (although I understand Southwest has direct flights from Manchester).
  
  
• It is very cool (although sometimes admittedly strange) to have a manager who blogs and twitters and generally "gets" the value of social media.
  
  
• It's nice to be in a company in the telecommunications/VoIP space that is... (gasp)... profitable!
  
  
• I freely admit that ever since getting our corporate laptop, the Apple MacBook Pro, I have become a Mac fanboy!
  
  
• It's wonderful to be in a company with a strong developer focus that gives away free versions of its software for developers to use. I just really happen to like the model... mostly because you get to be surprised by the very cool and sometimes offbeat things that people will do, simply because you give them the tools. Creativity is an amazing thing to nourish.

All in all, I'm not entirely sure how six months flew by... but it's been a great block of time and I'm looking forward to the next six months and many more beyond that. (And no, I'm not just writing that because my boss may read my blog!)

P.S. Did I mention that we're hiring?

Technorati Tags: voxeo, danyork, dan york

Equals' "Party Line" app uses Voxeo's platform to bring voice to Facebook

Have you ever wanted to quickly get into a conference call with a group of people? What if you could just call a number and initiate a conference call that automatically dialled out to bring in the other participants? Would you see yourself using this for a group (or groups) of your friends? Could you see this being useful for a group of coworkers? Over on Voxeo's blog today, I wrote about a new Facebook application called "Party Line" that does exactly this.

As I outline in the blog post, Party Line, available (to Facebook users) at www.equals.com/partyline lets you create an unlimited number of "party lines", each of which can have up to five participants. To initiate a group call, you either dial in to 1-877-4-BUZZ-ME or you initiate the call from within the Facebook page. The application calls all the other participants and brings you all into a group conference call. You can talk for as long as you want. No bridge numbers to remember. No passcodes. Very simple to use.

For Equals, the company who developed this Facebook application, this is their first product and platform. They've indicated that in the end they want this app to also work with OpenSocial and be able to connect into the other social networking services out there supporting OpenSocial. I'll be very interested to see how well it is adopted.

From a Voxeo point-of-view, as I mention later in the blog post, this is the first Facebook app (that we know of) that uses our SIP/XML application platform, so it is admittedly exciting for us to see. We know we have a great platform for developing these kind of voice applications, but to see someone else recognize that and actually go off and develop such an application is rather cool to see.

On a technical level, it's great to see an example of what you can do with Call Control XML (CCXML). Before joining Voxeo six months ago, I knew absolutely nothing about CCXML but as I learned about what it could do, I was truly amazed. Essentially, it is an XML layer that lets you drive and control SIP-based applications. There's an amazing number of tasks you can do with CCXML and it's something I'll be writing more about here and over on Voxeo's blogs in the future. (If you'd like to learn a bit more now, you can look at the CCXML documentation, check out some CCXML tutorial videos or look at the recent post about sending telephony presence to Twitter.)

Anyway, for the moment I would encourage you to check out my Voxeo blog post with more details about Party Line, install the Party Line app and try it out! Please do let us know what you think.

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

Creating voice applications that interconnect with Skype and SIP

Given that I write on Voxeo's blog site, I tend not to write much here about things we are doing at Voxeo.

But I thought I'd mention here one specific post I put up recently called "Skype-ifying your voice applications" which talks about the intriguing ways in which you can use our hosted platform to make voice applications accessible through a number of different mechanisms.

As shown in the diagram to the left, an application that you write and is hosted on our platform can be called into over the PSTN, over a direct SIP connection or via Skype or FWD. Likewise calls can go out to PSTN numbers or to SIP endpoints.

This flexibility is one of the many things that intrigues me about the platform (of which I knew nothing about prior to joining the company in October).

Anyway, more information is in the full blog post. I just thought I'd mention it here. (By the way, if you'd like to try it out yourself, developer accounts are free.)

Technorati Tags: voxeo, skype, sip

I'll be down at VoiceCon Orlando in March 2008...

FYI, I will be down at VoiceCon Orlando on March 17-20, 2008. I'm moderating two panel sessions (see the schedule). First, up, bright and early at 8am on Tuesday, March 18th, I'll be moderating a panel on "Top VoIP Security Threats". This should be a fun one as it has VOIPSA Chair Dave Endler, Mark Collier of SecureLogix and Sachin Joglekar of Sipera Systems. I know all three of the guys, particularly Dave and Mark who have both worked on VOIPSA matters, and this session should be a good bit of fun. I'm planning on making it a rather interactive session. :-)

At the other end of the show, on Thursday, March 20th, at 11:45am, I'll be moderating a panel "Open Source for Enterprise Voice: How Much, How Soon?". This would should be interesting because it has Bill Miller from Digium (makers of Asterisk), who I know well, and M Raza from 3Com... and then Tony Pereira from Nortel! 3Com's presence on the panel isn't particularly surprising given their relationship with Digium, but it will be interesting to see Nortel's view on the matter.

All in all it should be quite an interesting show. Lots of good sessions and, I'm sure, interesting people to meet. If you're going to be down there, please do drop an email as I'm always interesting in meeting readers of the blog.

Technorati Tags: voicecon, voxeo, voipsa, securelogix, sipera, 3com, digium, asterisk, voip security, open source

Heading to Orlando for Voxeo customer meetings...

In a few minutes I'll be boarding a plane heading down to Orlando for several days of presentations to a number of our (Voxeo) customers. For a change, I'm not presenting, but rather capturing presentations! I'm bringing down all my recording gear and will be capturing both audio and video for posting on Voxeo's blog site. It should be a lot of fun... as well as work. The temperature will, of course, be rather different! They are predicting a major storm here over the next few days, so it will be rather messy. Thankfully today I'm on a direct flight via Jet Blue from Burlington down to Orlando. No layovers... VERY nice!

Technorati Tags: voxeo

Heading off to Florida tomorrow morning for Internet Telephony Expo and a Voxeo visit

I haven't really written any blog posts on any of my blogs today (until this one) largely because I've been straight out trying to get everything tied up before flying out tomorrow morning down to Orlando, Florida. Once in Orlando, I'll be driving down to Miami Beach tomorrow afternoon/evening to speak at Internet Telephony Expo on Thursday, go to a SIP Forum meeting on Friday and then drive back up to Orlando to spend some time at the Voxeo office. I'll be in Orlando over the weekend and then there through next Wednesday, January 30th.

I am very much looking forward to trying out Jet Blue's new direct, nonstop service between Burlington, Vermont, and Orlando tomorrow. Flight leaves at 8:20 in the morning and arrives in Orlando at 11:50am. I am looking forward to NOT having to make a stop in JFK or any of the other hub airports.

Introducing "Speaking of Standards", a new Voxeo blog about industry standards, IETF, W3C, SIP Forum, etc.

A large part of why I have NOT been writing here all that much in the past few weeks is that I've been busy in my new role with Voxeo working on a corporate blog portal. I've been covering a bit of that odyssey over on my Disruptive Conversations blog as well as in my weekly reports into the For Immediate Release podcast. It's been a great amount of work but also a lot of fun - I've been very lucky to have a colleague who does amazing things with CSS and graphics, and so the sites look a whole lot better than they would if I were left to my own devices.

I'm very pleased to say, now, that we've reached the point where I'm willing to link to our work and talk a bit about what we are doing. The main blog portal is the predictable "blogs.voxeo.com" but the weblog that we're really starting to use and could be of interest to readers of this blog is our "Speaking of Standards" blog found at:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/speakingofstandards/

I've obviously been very occasionally writing here about standards and some of that may continue, but I expect most of my writing on the subject will now occur over on this new Voxeo weblog - and I'll naturally be writing more on the subject. We'll be writing about the IETF and SIP standards, but also the W3C and standards such as VoiceXML and CCXML that I've never covered at all here. We'll be linking to events and tutorials we find and generally providing whatever information we can about standards affecting our industry, as well as Voxeo's views and implementations of those standards.

Why would Voxeo sponsor a weblog about standards? Primarily because the company and our products are all about open standards - which was one of the things that attracted me to the company after they first approached me. I've since learned that they've been leading the IVR industry in adopting open standards. As the products page says in the "Fast Facts" sidebar:

• 100% Standards based IVR
• Supports W3C VoiceXML 2.0
• Supports W3C CCXML 1.0
• Supports W3C SRGS 1.0
• Supports W3C SSML 1.0
• Supports CallXML 3.0
• First platform with XML call control
• First platform with XML conferencing
• First shipping CCXML implementation
• First SIP/VOIP IVR platform

Not bad, eh? Add to that the fact that our CTO (my manager), RJ Auburn, chairs the W3C's Working Group on CCXML and we've hired other folks involved with standards efforts... all of that is why we added a weblog on standards.

So if you would like to see our view on industry standards, find tutorials about various standards or learn about standards-related events we may be attending, I would invite you to come on over and check out "Speaking with Standards" - or subscribe to the RSS feed. While I (and others) will still be working on improving the site, it's mostly done and I'm delighted to be able to return to writing more. Let us know what you think!

Technorati Tags: ccxml, ietf, sip, standards, voicexml, voip, voxeo, w3c

I'll be out in Vancouver Dec 2-7 for the 70th meeting of the IETF.

Just confirmed travel plans today - I will be heading out to the 70th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, from December 2-7. If any readers will be out there (either for the IETF or in Vancouver in general), please do drop a note and let me know. This will be my first meeting in my new role with Voxeo and I'm very much looking forward to renewing old acquaintances and also getting more directly involved with the work of the IETF.

Technorati Tags: ietf, sip, standards, voxeo

My interview on PulverTV today...

Today at Fall VON in Boston, Jeff Pulver hosted a special version of his Pulver TV show where he interviewed a number of people from the conference including me. First up was Jason Calcanis of Mahalo fame. Next was James Tagg, Founder and CEO of TruPhone. I followed and then the show wrapped up with Bob Frankston who is perhaps most widely known as one of the inventors of VisiCalc.

My part of the show starts at 14:30 and goes until 23:24. (When I nicely leave the stage without taking off the lapel mic! Oops! Sorry about that... ) We talked about my presentation at VON (on Thursday), application platforms like Facebook, my new role with Voxeo, social media in general and much more. It was a good bit of fun to do and I have to thank Jeff for giving me the opportunity to participate.

Technorati Tags: applications, danyork, facebook, fallvon, socialmedia, socialnetworking, voip, voip security, voipsa, von, voxeo

It's nice to have a boss who blogs...

It's nice to have a boss who blogs, because then he writes things like this! :-)

Technorati Tags: danyork, voxeo

My new employer is..........

So here's the story... after my layoff from Mitel and the corresponding job hunt, I became very convinced that I should go down the consultant/analyst route. I had purchased equipment, started setting up the legal side of things and was in serious discussions with several others about allying (and aligning) myself with their own efforts. All looked good and I was excited to get going.

Then I got this email from a CEO of a company I'd never really heard of who said he'd found my blog posts and that it so happened that they were looking for someone doing essentially the roles that I outlined in one of my posts. As they were growing strongly they were looking to expand their "Office of the CTO" and add to their capabilities. I looked at their website and initially wasn't too sure about what I saw. But as I dug in a bit more I was pretty blown away by what I started to see... and got back in touch.

It turns out that there's this company based in Orlando, Florida, whose VoIP application platform is used by one of the world's largest telecom vendors, two of the worlds largest software vendors, and the five largest cable TV networks. They have a community of over 26,000 registered developers with something around 55,000 applications created on their platform. They are some of the technology behind innovative startups like Jangl (more here) and Jott. The company was named by Gartner as one of the "Cool Vendors in Enterprise Communication, 2007". The technology can be hosted in the company's secure, redundant data centers or located on a customer's premise (or OEM'd). They focus on providing extremely high levels of customer service and by default give a 100% uptime Service Level Agreement (i.e. they pay you if there's any downtime). They are focused entirely on open standards and support a very wide range of APIs, including Web 2.0 APIs like JSON and e4x as well as SOAP, REST, etc. They support all sorts of security standards, including some like PCI which are newer. They are all about being an application platform.

And... they've been around since 1999, been profitable for several years and are growing based on profit (versus VC infusions). And they give away a ton of information and functionality through their developer site, including inbound and outbound telephone connections. (Yes, the absorb the cost of allocating phone numbers and outbound dialing in order to encourage developers to use their platform... and 26,000+ developers have taken out accounts.)

And probably most all of us have never heard of them!

It didn't take long for me to reconsider my decision to go down the consultant route. I built a couple of sample applications on their platform and saw how trivial it was to do. I traveled to Orlando and came away incredibly impressed by the company, the technology and perhaps most of all the people.

So yesterday I was delighted to start working for the CTO of Voxeo Corporation! My technical title is the nicely vague "Director of Emerging Communication Technology" and my role will include: analyzing emerging technology and communicating that information internally, participating in IETF standards work, assisting with VoIP security analysis/communication... and customer/product evangelism through speaking at conferences/customers and developing appropriate blogs and podcasts (and other social media) for both internal and external audiences. Basically somewhat similar to my previous role only this time with an explicit focus on social media, which is exciting because I get the chance to put into action many of the ideas I've talked about here, over on Disruptive Conversations and also in my reports into FIR. And, in a company of <100 people, it's just a wee bit easier to get things done (example, I'm in Day 2 and a server is already being allocated to host blogs, etc.). So yes, I'm winding up getting paid to spend part of my time blogging and podcasting!

Basically I get to help tell Voxeo's story. Particularly, part of what I will be doing is talking about everything else Voxeo can do beyond what you might initially think. If you go to voxeo.com it is all about creating IVR applications using VoiceXML which is interesting to one segment of the population out there... but if you look at the page about their VoIP platforms and services you get a glimpse of the much larger picture. Voxeo has an incredibly powerful SIP-based application platform that can be deployed in either a hosted, on-premise or hybrid model. They chose to focus on the IVR application side because it was an avenue where they could earn revenue. Now they are looking to promote the other aspects of what you can do with their platform beyond IVR apps. There's voicemail... conferencing... call recording... a zillion other things all accessible through open, standards-based APIs. I get to help tell that story.

In the end, Voxeo's aim is to be the platform for people who want to develop next-generation communication applications. Easily. Securely. Reliably.

Not a bad place to be. (And we're hiring!) Don't take my word for it though... join the Evolution community site and create your own hosted application, complete with inbound phone numbers, Skype connections and SIP URIs. There are a ton of tutorials and other information there. Or download the free Prophecy server software, which essentially gives you the same capabilities as the hosted environment. (In fact, you can develop apps on Prophecy and then move them to Evolution for deployment.)

Or wait for me and others to start telling the story in more detail. Your choice.

So that's the story of what's next for me... obviously I'm rather excited and looking forward to it! Thanks again to all the many, many people who were so helpful and supportive over the past few weeks.

And now, I can return to the regular blogging I've been doing here...

Technorati Tags: danyork, voxeo