Category: Voxeo
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The Publishing of RFC 8496 Concludes the 10-year Saga of P-Charge-Info
Continue Reading: The Publishing of RFC 8496 Concludes the 10-year Saga of P-Charge-InfoOctober 31, 2018, was a special day for me. Not because it was Halloween, but because after 10 years a small little document I co-authored about the “P-Charge-Info” header for SIP-based Voice-over-IP (VoIP) was published as informational RFC 8496. You can see it at either:
Ultimately, all this document does is register the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Header Field of “P-Charge-Info” within the “SIP Parameters” registry maintained by IANA at:
But the story of getting that registration to happen is a long one!
In the beginning…
The short version is this. Back in around 2007 or so, I was working for Voxeo and we were using the “P-Charge-Info” header in our large SIP-based application server to pass along billing information. Essentially, when someone made a call on our system, we wanted to pass a billing identifier that was often different from the source phone number (i.e. “CallerID”). This quote from RFC 8496 was pretty much Voxeo’s use case:
As another example, a hosted telephony provider or hosted voice
application provider may have a large SIP network with customers
distributed over a very large geographic area using local market PSTN
numbers but with… -
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Wow! Cisco To Acquire Tropo’s Communications Application Platform
Continue Reading: Wow! Cisco To Acquire Tropo’s Communications Application PlatformWOW! In companion blog posts today Cisco and Tropo announced Cisco’s intent to acquire the Tropo team and platform:- Cisco blog: Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Tropo
- Tropo blog: Tropo joins Cisco to Power next-gen collaboration APIs
As someone who was at Voxeo in 2009 and helped launch Tropo (and wrote many of the early blog posts about it[1], as well as some of the python samples), I’m thrilled for the team there now that this is happening.[2]
Congratulations to all involved!
Over the years since leaving Voxeo, I’ve written about Tropo from time to time and continued to watch its progress. I’ve continued to be very impressed by what they’ve done over the years. They’ve truly made it easy for people to create powerful applications using simple programming languages.
It looks like the Tropo website is struggling right now so here is a snippet of their announcement post:
Six years ago we launched Tropo with the idea to make it easy to power phone calls through a simple API. Since then, we’ve empowered thousands of developers to add voice and messaging to their applications.
From our very first sign-up in 2009, to powering thousands of mobile and…
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Ameche Lets Telcos Add Apps Into Regular Phone Calls To Add Value And Services
Continue Reading: Ameche Lets Telcos Add Apps Into Regular Phone Calls To Add Value And ServicesImagine you are driving fast along a major highway in traffic and you receive a call from a critical customer. She wants to know immediately when you can meet tomorrow with her team to go over the final proposal and sign the deal. There’s no way for you to pull over and look at your calendar on your phone or computer… and it’s really not safe in the high-speed traffic for you to be flipping through your calendar while you talk. What do you do?Do you tell her you’ll give her a call back when you get to a safe place? Or do you do the unsafe action of looking at your calendar on your phone?
What if there was a different way?
What if you could say something like “Let me check my calendar for tomorrow at 3pm” and then suddenly have a voice whisper back to you – on your call, but only heard by you – “your calendar is free at 3pm. You have meetings at 2 and 5.”
You could then reply to your customer after just this brief pause letting her know that you could meet with her.
Sound like science fiction?
Perhaps… but…
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Video: An Excellent Tour Of Voxeo’s Awesome New Office!
Continue Reading: Video: An Excellent Tour Of Voxeo’s Awesome New Office!My friends and former colleagues at Voxeo have produced a truly outstanding video giving a tour of the incredible space they have created in Orlando, Florida:
Kudos to the Voxeo marketing team for creating this video! And congrats to Jonathan Taylor and the rest of the team for realizing his vision of creating a truly unique working space and corporate culture in Orlando.
I’d note that Voxeo is quite often hiring and truly is a great company to work for. If you’re looking for a job in the communications space with an excellent team of people, you should definitely check them out!
(Full disclosure: I worked for Voxeo from 2007-2011 and remain a shareholder.)
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WebRTC + Phono SDK = Browser Phone Calls WITHOUT A Plugin
Continue Reading: WebRTC + Phono SDK = Browser Phone Calls WITHOUT A PluginCalling people using your browser – but without a Flash or Java plugin? That's been the mission of the WebRTC initiative for some time now with efforts underway in both the IETF and the W3C to standardize the work so that it can be broadly implemented.
I was very pleased to see the team at Voxeo Labs announce that the Phono SDK can now support WebRTC with the developer build of the Google Chrome browser. They outlined their work in a blog post and produced a video demonstrating the technology and also received a very nice writeup on TheNextWeb:
This is very cool as it has the potential once WebRTC is baked into more browsers to provide us with a very solid browser-based platform for building and deploying real-time communication apps. Kudos to the Voxeo Labs team for what they've done so far!
P.S. Some interesting comments about this topic over on Hacker News…
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Voxeo Imports Snow… Into Florida??? (Video)
Continue Reading: Voxeo Imports Snow… Into Florida??? (Video)Kudos to my former colleagues at Voxeo for a great Holiday Letter and a truly fun video showing the making of the holiday photo. A large part of why I enjoyed working at Voxeo so much was just the wackiness that leads to doing crazy things like having a snowball fight in Florida! Keep on doing crazy things, my friends… it’s awesome to see what you are doing!P.S. And I imagine that this little bit of snow may have been more snow than a few of those Floridians had ever seen! 🙂
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Video: Voxeo’s New 60,000 Sq. Ft. Co-Working Office Space Featured in Fox News Interview
Continue Reading: Video: Voxeo’s New 60,000 Sq. Ft. Co-Working Office Space Featured in Fox News InterviewWant to see what Voxeo’s cool new office space looks like? The 60,000 square feet that also includes “co-working” space for startups?
Kudos to my former colleagues at Voxeo and to CEO Jonathan Taylor in particular for this great video interview on Orlando’s Fox 35… check it out:
It’s both a very cool space for Voxeons and also a great idea to create a startup incubator right there in the heart of downtown Orlando.
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Voxeo Customer Summit 2011, “Unlocked and Loaded”, Launches Tonight!
Continue Reading: Voxeo Customer Summit 2011, “Unlocked and Loaded”, Launches Tonight!Tonight I’ll be thinking of all my friends and former colleagues at Voxeo as they launch the Voxeo Customer Summit 2011 at the JW Marriott Grande Lakes hotel in Orlando. With the great theme of “Unlocked and Loaded“, they have an incredibly packed agenda that will make it truly an outstanding event. Lots of great technical talks mixed in with business talks… some voice biometrics… product announcements… plus a great party and other activities!
Plus the ever geeky and wacky Chris Pirillo as show emcee and Joseph Jaffe providing the keynote talk… it should be a great time for all!
While I’m no longer a Voxeon, I’ll be thinking of the crew there and wishing them all the best. It’s a big event and will really help the people who attend to learn so much more about building communication applications using Voxeo’s platforms and services. Cool stuff!
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
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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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Ch-changes – Taking A New Job At The Internet Society To Join The Fight For The Open Internet
Continue Reading: Ch-changes – Taking A New Job At The Internet Society To Join The Fight For The Open InternetIn the end, my impending job change is perhaps best explained by two quotes: this prescient quote from the 1992 film Sneakers:
“There’s a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets. It’s about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think… it’s all about the information!”
and this quote from poet Mary Oliver:
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
For a longer explanation, read on… but perhaps not on a mobile phone… this one’s a bit on the lengthy side…
Bleeding “Voxeo Blue”
Just shy of four years ago, I wrote here about joining this incredibly remarkable company, Voxeo, that probably none of you had ever heard of.
I hope I changed that a wee bit. 🙂
Around a thousand blog posts later, a hundred videos, too many speaking engagements and webinars to count, many articles, a ton of analyst briefings and media interviews … and countless tweets, Facebook posts and other updates later… it has been truly an amazing journey.
Along the way I have come to truly love the company -…