Category: Mashups
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Want to talk about voice mashups? – Today, 9:30am Eastern US – Conf Call with Alec Saunders – Talking about Voice Mashups
Continue Reading: Want to talk about voice mashups? – Today, 9:30am Eastern US – Conf Call with Alec Saunders – Talking about Voice MashupsIf you are interested in “voice mashups”, as I am, and are available today from 9:30 – 10:00am Eastern US time, you might be interested in joining a conference call hosted by Alec Saunders and several others. More information can be found over at Alec Saunders blog:
Talking about Voice Mashups: “Thursday morning a few of us will be doing a round table discussion on Voice Mashups using the iotum FREE Conference Call service. Andy Abramson, Tom Howe, Jim Courtney and myself will convene for 30 minutes to have a con-cast (Conference Call + PodCast). If you’re interested in the topic, please join us and contribute. “
I’m going to be traveling today, but if cell service works, I’ll be joining in. Should be an interesting conversation.
Technorati Tags: apis, applications, voip, mashups, iotum, alec saunders
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It’s the (app) platform, stupid!
Continue Reading: It’s the (app) platform, stupid!“Phone systems” are dead. PBXs are dead. IP-PBXs are dead.
Well, okay, not really… people will still be buying “PBXs” for quite some time. Just as there are certain communities out there who still buy horse-drawn wagons. But the reality is this:
“Phone systems”, PBXs and IP-PBXs without easy application programming interfaces (APIs) are a dead branch on the evolutionary tree.
The future of communication belongs to mashups. To quick and easy ways to interconnect disparate systems. To integration of communication systems with business processes and other applications. In a world where voice is no longer always the primary mode of communication, we have to stop thinking about “phone systems” and take a larger look at how “communication” in general fits into our infrastructure. More than just how we use the system, we have to look at how we can get data in and out of the communication system. To borrow from the 1992 Clinton campaign:
It’s the platform, stupid!
As you look at communication choices, the question is really about who has the “best” APIs… whose system is easiest to integrate with…. who lets you get data out of their system easily – and also lets… -
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Digium buys SwitchVox and gets presence, Web 2.0 interface, mashups to Google Maps, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM…
Continue Reading: 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…
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Skype Mashup Contest: And the European winner is……
Continue Reading: Skype Mashup Contest: And the European winner is……The first result of the Skype Mashup contest was announced yesterday at the Skype developer event in Prague, and the winner is….
Yes… a fax application! As Jim Courtney writes over on Skype Journal (he was also one of the judges):
The PamConsult team created PamFax to solve the problem of providing a very simple process (especially relative to the somewhat cumbersome WinFax) of using the Internet to easily fax an MS Office document anywhere worldwide. The primary Skype feature here has nothing to do with voice; they used the Skype Extras publishing platform not only to install the application but also as a transaction processor for collecting revenues for the service using Skype credits. Skype Chat is used to send notifications re a fax’s delivery. In addition they developed a web-based portal to manage and archive your use of the service. The application can be launched from the Skype Extras menu or from within MS Excel or MS Word. A link to Google Maps will also show roughly where the fax is being sent (to within an Area Code).
The interesting aspect to me is how it uses Skype’s micro-payment infrastructure. No need for credit cards or…
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Skype Journal: "The Dawn of the Mashup World"
Continue Reading: Skype Journal: "The Dawn of the Mashup World"For a couple of months now, a post has been swirling around in my brain that I was tentatively titling “The Dawn of the Mashup Culture” in which I wanted to talk about “mashups” and why they are so incredibly important. Unfortunately I just haven’t had the time to put all those thoughts into the written word.
Well, in the meantime, Jim Courtney went off and wrote something very close to what I was intending to do: “The Dawn of the Mashup World – Part 1: Challenges, Why and Expectations” followed by “Part 1a: What is a Mashup?“
Read them. (And the follow-on posts that Jim indicates he’s writing.)
Mashups are fundamentally changing the way we can use and control services. It’s the remix culture.
You need to understand it… because if you don’t, your products and services will be left behind.
Open APIs win. Mashups win.
Technorati tags: mashups, apis, skype, skype journal, jim courtney -
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Mashable offers "Skype Toolbox: 50+ Enhancements for Skype"
Continue Reading: Mashable offers "Skype Toolbox: 50+ Enhancements for Skype"Mashable.com often comes out with various lists, and today they offered “Skype Toolbox: 50+ Enhancements for Skype” which offers a nice list of the various add-ons that have been developed for Skype. Some good ones in here that I know of… a number that I’d not yet heard about. The Skype ecosystem continues to grow…
(Hat tip to Julian Bond for pointing out the list today.)
Technorati tags: skype, mashups, skype api -
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Telephony – It’s the API’s, stupid!
Continue Reading: Telephony – It’s the API’s, stupid!After already publishing my last post about mashups, I came across Jim Courtney’s Skype Journal post about the Skype mashup competition, which in turn led me to Thomas Howe’s excellent “API of the week” post (got all that?) which had these wonderfully-written words (so much so that I feel compelled to excerpt them here, something I seldom do to this extent):
If you were to ask me, I would say the twenty year old software engineer has a distinct advantage over the older telephone guys (such as me) in the realm of innovation. Since the barriers to entry to deploying a service provider have fallen through the floor, the larger challenge is not in complex engineering, but is instead in innovation. The younger engineers are free of the legacy of the PSTN, and many things would occur to an experienced engineer won’t to them, and it’s not a bad thing.
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What does this have to do with telephony? Nothing. What does this have to do with next generation applications? Everything. Applications that use the Internet as the platform use APIs from a large number of sources, and by and large, these APIs are not telephony. However, nearly every…
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ProgrammableWeb.com launches "telephony mashup" category
Continue Reading: ProgrammableWeb.com launches "telephony mashup" categoryIt’s very cool to see that one of the leading web sites about “mashups”, ProgrammableWeb.com, has announced the launch of a new section focused on “Mobile/Telephony” mashups. They actually call it a “Market”, and there are two others launched today: Mapping and Shopping.
The obvious focus for this blog, though, is the “Mobile/Telephony” market. The announcement notes that there are currently over 25 different APIs under “Telephony” or “Messaging” and in the actual lists of mashups, 104 are tagged “mobile” and 113 tagged “messaging”. The announcement also notes that Thomas Howe will be assisting with the content of this new section. (Congrats to Thomas!)
The list of telephony APIs (only 11, the other 14+ must be “messaging) is available and several names are probably quite familiar. Thomas Howe also wrote a piece to explain the different types of APIs and provide a bit of background: “Telephony & Mobile APIs and Mashups, the Big Picture“.
I did find it a bit puzzling that the list of telephony APIs didn’t include Skype, given that Skype has a whole developer website set up to support its APIs. Likewise no mention of Asterisk even though the entire thing is really one big set of APIs. …