Category: Applications
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Congrats, I think, to Alec Saunders as RIM’s New VP of Developer Relations
Continue Reading: Congrats, I think, to Alec Saunders as RIM’s New VP of Developer RelationsCongratulations (I think) to my friend Alec Saunders for taking a new role as “VP of Developer Relations and Ecosystem Development” for Research In Motion (RIM), makers of the Blackberry line of mobile devices.Or perhaps condolences are in order… somehow he has to make developing for the Blackberry sexy again to all the app developers who focus these days on the world of iOS/iPhone/iPad and the Android platform.
Alec certainly has his work cut out for him. As he writes in his post today announcing the news:
Over the last few days I’ve been in San Francisco at the Mobilize conference, and speaking with developers. It’s clear from those conversations that the primary problem we face is lack of support from application developers. My team’s job is to correct that – to win the hearts and minds of mobile developers again.
“Lack of support” probably doesn’t go far enough as a statement. Any of a zillion charts will show you Blackberry’s rapidly declining marketshare (particularly in the US). iPhones are dramatically outselling Blackberries and Apple is poised to launch iPhone 5 / iOS 5 / iCloud next week, pretty much assuring even more of a boost to…
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Video: Using an iPad to Create Tropo Applications
Continue Reading: Video: Using an iPad to Create Tropo ApplicationsStuck somewhere without a computer but with an iPad? My former colleague Chris Matthieu just posted this amusing video today of how he used only his iPad to create and deploy an application using the Tropo cloud communication service. I don’t know what amused me more – that he wrote the app using his iPad… or that he filmed himself using his iPhone! Quite a deft bit of handling to make it all work:You can, of course, register for a free Tropo.com account and start creating your own voice/SMS/IM/Twitter apps using languages like PHP, Python, JavaScript, Groovy and Ruby…
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Mitel Rolls Out UC Apps for iPhone and iPad
Continue Reading: Mitel Rolls Out UC Apps for iPhone and iPadGood to see that Mitel is joining the iOS application space with Unified Communications apps for the iPhone and iPad. These apps will work with Mitel’s “Freedom” architecture to allow people to use their own iPhone or iPad device with the Mitel corporate phone system.Per Mitel’s news release, the app allows users to:
- Search the corporate directory and click-to-dial from corporate contact list to place calls through the corporate network.
- View missed, dialed, and received calls.
- Access visual voicemail from your office extension and manage messages by preference rather than sequence.
- Automatically update presence status and call routing preferences based on your location, or time of day.
Given enterprise users’ desire to use their own devices, it is not surprising to see these type of apps coming out from a vendor like Mitel. It will be interesting to see how this helps Mitel in the marketplace.
Kudos to the Mitel team for creating the apps.
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Video: What’s New in Voxeo Prophecy 11 and VoiceObjects 11?
Continue Reading: Video: What’s New in Voxeo Prophecy 11 and VoiceObjects 11?Want to know the newest ways to build communications apps using Voxeo products? Want to know about IPv6, wideband audio, fax support and large-scale management of servers?In a recent Voxeo Developer Jam Session, I explained what is new in Voxeo’s Prophecy 11 and VoiceObjects 11 and how you can use them to build even larger-scale communications apps than before.
The session is available for download, as are the slides. It is also available for viewing on YouTube. If you don’t know anything about Voxeo, this is also a great way to learn more about its core products.
Oh, and when you’re down watching, you can download Prophecy 11 or VoiceObjects 11 for free for Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. 🙂
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
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Video: How to Communicate at Burning Man using OpenBTS and Tropo
Continue Reading: Video: How to Communicate at Burning Man using OpenBTS and TropoHeading to Burning Man this coming week? Would you like to use your mobile phone to connect up with others on the playa in Black Rock City?If so, check out this video from Chris Pirillo about the work being done by a team of folks to supply local cell phone coverage… the vans with satellite and cell hookups are already enroute… it uses software from OpenBTS and Tropo.com to let burners leave each other voice messages, exchange SMS messages and more. Here’s the video:
And here are some blog posts that provide more information:
- The Long and Winding Road to Burning Man
- Tropo + OpenBTS + Burning man = Awesome
- Voice Board and Group SMS for Burning Man
- Papa Legba FAQ (about the deployment at Burning Man and what you need to do to participate)
I’m not personally going to be at Burning Man, but this does sound very cool!
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
- The Long and Winding Road to Burning Man
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What Should You Consider When Choosing A Cloud Communications Platform? Join this June 22 session
Continue Reading: What Should You Consider When Choosing A Cloud Communications Platform? Join this June 22 sessionWhat factors should you consider when considering moving your communications applications to the “cloud”? What are the advantages of hosting in the cloud? The disadvantages? How can the cloud help you scale your applications? How can the cloud connect you to other communication channels beyond voice?Tomorrow, Wednesday, June 22, 2011, at 1:00pm US Eastern, I’ll be speaking in an online webinar on this topic called:
“Taking Customer Service to the Cloud“
The session will begin with industry analyst Daniel Hong from Ovum discussing what he found in his new 2011 research report, “Decision Matrix: Selecting a Provider of Cloud-based Speech Self-Service Solutions in North America.” I will then follow discussing what you need to consider when choosing a hosted provider (such as that of my employer, Voxeo). Next Debbie Diersch from Chrysalis will discuss factors to consider when choosing an application developer… and then we’ll throw it open to questions.
Daniel’s got some great data and Debbie and I are both aiming to provide some solid educational material (i.e. it’s not just sales pitches), so if the topic is of interest, the hour will be a good use of your time.
You can…
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Tropo.com Lowers SMS Rate to 1 Cent Per Message – Now Super-Cheap To Build SMS Apps
Continue Reading: Tropo.com Lowers SMS Rate to 1 Cent Per Message – Now Super-Cheap To Build SMS AppsWant to build text messaging (SMS) applications for a very cheap price? My colleagues over in Voxeo Labs recently reduced the price of sending or receiving SMS messages to only 1 cent per message. (As a bonus, they also came up with the cute graphic I’m using on the right.)As Adam Kalsey writes in the Tropo blog post, “Announcing New lower SMS pricing” sending an SMS is a trivial matter in Tropo. His language of choice is PHP, so he shows:
<?php call('+14155551212', array('network' => 'SMS')); say('d00d, Penny SMS? '); ?>But you could obviously do something very similar in Python, Ruby, Groovy or JavaScript in Tropo Scripting… or with any language using the Tropo WebAPI.
Personally, I like seeing what I can do to merge SMS with Twitter… back in December I wrote about how to use Tropo to trigger alerts via SMS based on text in Twitter, which is a variation of an app I do actually use for Twitter monitoring. My colleague Justin Dupree also wrote a cool post about using Node.js to build a Twitter IM/SMS service.
Anyway… all of these SMS apps are now able to be deployed in production for only 1…
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Want To Learn Best Practices in Multi-Channel App Creation? (Voice, SMS, IM, Twitter, etc.)
Continue Reading: Want To Learn Best Practices in Multi-Channel App Creation? (Voice, SMS, IM, Twitter, etc.)Want to know industry best practices in creating apps that work across voice, text messaging/SMS, IM and social channels like Twitter? Would you like to know some of the latest research on what channels customers are using to communicate with companies?Next Tuesday, April 19, at 11am US Eastern time, I will be joining an industry analyst in a webinar called “Best Practices in Multi-Channel Customer Interaction“. We’ll be covering topics such as:
- what communication channels customers are choosing for interacting with businesses
- best practices you can implement for each channel
- where customer interaction is heading, with particular focus on social and mobile channels
- how you can create applications that interact with customers across multiple channels
- best practices in cross-channel analytics and integration into business intelligence systems
I think you’ll find it quite educational if you’re wondering how to expand your customer interaction beyond simply voice or web. The session will have some solid quantitative data and will take a look at what’s ahead in terms of customer interaction.
Registration is free and simple and is open to anyone. We’ll also be recording the session and it will be available for listening after the fact if you can’t attend…
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Stuck With Old Nortel PeriPro Apps? Check Out This Migration Tool…
Continue Reading: Stuck With Old Nortel PeriPro Apps? Check Out This Migration Tool…Did you spend a significant amount of time, money and energy building voice applications with the “Peri Producer” (a.k.a. “PeriPro”) tool formerly owned by Nortel and now by Avaya? Would you like to move away from proprietary lock-in to a standards-based platform with a clear future? Would you like to move your PeriPro app beyond simply voice and add in communication channels like SMS/text messaging, IM, mobile web and even Twitter?If so, do check out what my colleagues within Voxeo have come out with as the “VoiceObjects Migration Manager“:
http://developers.voiceobjects.com/support-training/voiceobjects-migration-manager/
It’s a tool that helps you move those PeriPro apps over onto Voxeo VoiceObjects where they can then work with either Voxeo’s IVR platform or the IVR platforms of about 30 other vendors. My colleague Tobias Goebel put together this screencast that talks about what the migration tool can do:
There was also an hour-long webinar earlier in March where Tobias and Dan Evans discussed the tool at great length and answered many questions from attendees. You can view the webinar and/or download the slides at the jam session page at:
http://blogs.voxeo.com/jamsessions/2011/03/07/jam-session-march-10-2011-peripro-migration-too/
While PeriPro apps were the first type of app to be converted by the VoiceObjects Migration…
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Update on Phono, a jQuery plugin to simply add voice/chat to your web app: More tutorials, videos, available…
Continue Reading: Update on Phono, a jQuery plugin to simply add voice/chat to your web app: More tutorials, videos, available…Have you played yet with Phono, the new way to add a phone or chat client to your web app, directly from within your web browser? Two weeks ago, when Phono was announced at the jQuery conference in Boston, I wrote about how Phono lets you “rewire the real-time web”. In the time since, the Voxeo Labs team and I have been busy cranking out tutorials, videos and blog posts showing how people can build cool apps with Phono. A page is now up summarizing many of the new resources at:
http://blogs.voxeo.com/news/phono/
If you have no idea what Phono is all about, that page also provides a great way to learn more. There are sample applications like “Facebook Telephone” and “Twelephone” for Twitter. There’s a “Kitchen Sink” example that you can use to get started right away… the Phono Blog, too, is filled with ideas and new ways to add voice or IM to your website or web application, including a WordPress plugin that lets you add a “Call” button to your WordPress blog
It’s all cool stuff, to me… and interesting because it makes it even easier to connect people to your company or organization from your website. My…