Category: Programming
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Speaking about Voxeo Prophecy 9 in webinar tomorrow (Apr 21, 2009)…
Continue Reading: Speaking about Voxeo Prophecy 9 in webinar tomorrow (Apr 21, 2009)…If you are free tomorrow at 11am US Eastern / 8am US Pacific / 5pm CET, and want a glimpse into what we all are doing over at Voxeo, we are offering a free webinar about what is new in the upcoming Prophecy 9 and VoiceObjects 9 product releases. I am speaking in the first part about Prophecy 9 and then will be followed by Stefan Besling from our VoiceObjects team to talk about what is new in VO9.As I put together the slide deck, I realized that the engineering team has filled this release with some great features:
- our voice application platform now works across all three major operating systems: Windows, Linux and MacOS X
- the new management console has some graphical features to aid in managing large premise installations that simply have to be seen to be believed (think… three dimensional walls…)
- the new “virtual platforms” feature makes adding new capacity as drop-dead simple as installing a new server and adding it in
- the new log analyzer tool lets you dive deep into logs to find what’s going on – and to generate pretty pictures out of the activity as well
I’m definitely looking forward to talking…
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FYI – I’ll be out at OSCON next week in Portland talking about voice mashups…
Continue Reading: FYI – I’ll be out at OSCON next week in Portland talking about voice mashups…If any of you reading this will be out at O’Reilly’s OSCON Open Source Convention next week (July 21-25) in Portland, Oregon, I (Dan York) will be there giving a talk on Wednesday on “Mashing Up Voice and the Web Through Open Source and XML“. Here’s the abstract:With over 4.5 billion mobile and fixed phones out there as of November 2007, the phone represents the most ubiquitous user interface out there. As “mashups” on the Web let us quickly and easily access information from multiple data sources, how do we extend those mashups to the world of the phone? How do we bring the old world of voice and telephony into the new world of the Web, social networks, and social media? And how do we do that using open source tools and open standards? In this session, Dan York will introduce participants to the world of “voice mashups” and how applications can be quickly built on top of open source and open standards. Topics covered will include:
- The technology and architecture behind voice mashups
- The open standards in voice of VoiceXML, Call Control XML (CCXML), the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), and new standards emerging from the Internet…
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Voice mashups – Notes on Alec’s conference call today
Continue Reading: Voice mashups – Notes on Alec’s conference call todayUPDATE, Jan 11: The recording of this conference call is now available.
As I mentioned in an earlier post today, Alec Saunders convened a 30-minute conference call today on voice mashups. The call was recorded and will be available as a podcast from his site. (I’ll add the link here once I’m online.)
I was traveling down through the state of Vermont today and so while I had no Internet access I did call in and joined the call from my Blackberry. (My wife was driving the car at the time.) I wrote down the following notes on my laptop during the call.
Alec introduced the call, mentioned that it would be recorded and distributed as a podcast. He then muted all the callers except for himself, Thomas Howe, Jim Courtney and Andy Abramson. For callers with Facebook open, they could press a button to “raise their hand” at which point Alec could unmute them. I was calling in on my cell phone while traveling with no Internet access, so for me it was to press “*2” to raise my hand.
Alec tossed out the first question which was “what is a voice mashup?” Thomas laid out one definition which…
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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 about the platform – Google finally answers the “Gphone” speculation… with an Android!
Continue Reading: It’s about the platform – Google finally answers the “Gphone” speculation… with an Android!“It’s about an open platform, stupid!” While I didn’t include Google when I first wrote my post about how voice is really all about application platforms, I did note in the comments that I had intended to do so… and today’s announcement really shows that they should be in anyone’s list of telephony application platforms. As announced on the Google blog with “Where’s my Gphone?“, Google today announced the Open Handset Alliance and the associated set of forthcoming software called Android. The front page of the Open Handset Alliance provides a rather compelling (to me) statement:
What would it take to build a better mobile phone?
A commitment to openness, a shared vision for the future, and concrete plans to make the vision a reality.
Welcome to the Open Handset Alliance™, a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies who have come together to accelerate innovation in mobile and offer consumers a richer, less expensive, and better mobile experience. Together we have developed Android™, the first complete, open, and free mobile platform.
We are committed to commercially deploy handsets and services using the Android Platform in the second half of 2008. An early… -
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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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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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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. …