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Voxeo’s CEO interviewed on SquawkBox…
Continue Reading: Voxeo’s CEO interviewed on SquawkBox…Given that I’ve written here a good bit about Voxeo since joining the company 11 months ago, I thought I’d point to an excellent interview that Voxeo’s CEO, Jonathan Taylor, did with host Alec Saunders on Alec’s Squawk Box podcast. You can listen to it by either using the audio player on the show web page or alternatively you can download the MP3 file directly and listen to it in iTunes, Windows Media Player or whatever MP3 player you wish.It was an enjoyable call (I was listening) that went for about 45 minutes. Jonathan spoke about how and why he started the company, about the new release of Prophecy 9, the acquisition of Micromethod, our recent financial results and much more. I think you all will find it a great introduction to what Voxeo is all about.
11 months later, I’m still extremely glad I made the choice to join the company…
Technorati Tags: squawkbox, voxeo, voice, voice applications, voip
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Skype’s 5 years of disruption… (Happy Birthday, Skype!)
Continue Reading: Skype’s 5 years of disruption… (Happy Birthday, Skype!)Five years ago today, the first public beta of Skype launched, and in a blog post today new Skype CEO Josh Silverman celebrates with “Five Years of Wow“. It’s a bit of the “Ra-Ra” celebratory kind of post I would expect from a CEO but ends nicely with this:So, as we celebrate the first five years of Skype, let’s raise a toast to the human desire to connect.
Indeed!
Skype has done a great amount to help people easily connect to each other. It’s also caused a heck of a lot of disruption within the telecommunications industry. I use Skype daily (Skype ID: danyork) and it has indeed become a significant part of both my business workflow and personal life.
A PERSONAL REMINDER
I had a personal reminder of that the other day when I wound up in a video chat with one of my closest friends who was my best man at my wedding 12 years ago. Although we have spoken in the intervening years, we had not actually seen each other in probably most of 10 years due to living far apart. He and his wife emailed a group of folks that they now had a Skype…
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Bell Canada: “Users will NEVER need more than 10Mbps to the home”
Continue Reading: Bell Canada: “Users will NEVER need more than 10Mbps to the home”This piece in Canada’s Globe and Mail truly defies belief. Bell Canada is trying to offer some type of justification for why they are slowing down on rolling out fiber to the home. Well, I should say… they are trying to offer some justification other than the fact that they are now $30 billion in debt due to the recent buyout to take the company private. Anyway, along the way, they provide this gem:Mr. Crull said rivals cannot guarantee those high speeds and their service deteriorates depending on traffic volume. Furthermore, he said, the majority of customers have no use for speeds above 10 Mbps.
Wow.Obviously Bell Canada executives missed the memo about people getting more and more of their video across the Internet… and wanting to stream HD video, etc. And maybe they missed the memo about Asian countries that are now delivering 100 Mbps into homes.
And then there’s this little detail of how we are evolving more and more of our services “into the cloud”… and for that we need big, fat, dumb pipes.
I guess the good news is that if you are in Canada and are a Rogers shareholder, odds are pretty good that…
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Want to learn more about Voxeo? Join Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor appearing on Squawk Box conf call tomorrow
Continue Reading: Want to learn more about Voxeo? Join Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor appearing on Squawk Box conf call tomorrowAre you are available tomorrow, Tuesday, August 26th, at 11am US Eastern time? If so, you are invited to join in to Alec Saunders’ daily “Squawk Box” conference call / podcast where Alec will be interviewing Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor about all the recent news about Voxeo, including:- Voxeo announced record growth and global expansion
- Voxeo announced a new product release with new SIP APIs, Mac OS X and Linux support
- Voxeo acquired Micromethod Technologies
- Voxeo named 2008 Market Leader by Speech Technology Magazine
The call will take place using Alec’s company Iotum’s “Calliflower” conferencing/collaboration application. To join in to the call, you simply need to go to either of the following links to “join” the call and receive a PIN and call-in number for the call:
- Calliflower Facebook application – If you are a Facebook user, simply go to:
http://apps.new.facebook.com/calliflower/conf/show/37402
You will be prompted to add the Calliflower Facebook application and then will receive the call-in information.
- Calliflower.com site – If you are not a Facebook user or just don’t want to add another Facebook application, you can go to the Calliflower.com site at this URL:
http://apps.calliflower.com/conf/show/37402
You will be prompted to create a free Calliflower.com user account if you have…
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An extraordinary week for Voxeo…
Continue Reading: An extraordinary week for Voxeo…Last week was a truly extraordinary week for my employer, Voxeo. Here’s a bit of what went on:Voxeo announced record growth and global expansion – In these economic times, it’s incredible to be part of a company putting out information like this.
Voxeo announced a new product release with new SIP APIs, Mac OS X and Linux support – To our knowledge, this is first commercial telephony voice application platform to be available on Mac OS X (as well as Linux and Windows). While our customers might not deploy production servers on Mac OS X, this means that their developers using Macs can now even more easily run our application server. Additionally, we’ve developed some new graphical management interfaces that are pretty incredible (and useful, too).
Voxeo acquired Micromethod Technologies – With this acquisition of a company based in Beijing and San Jose, we’ve added a strong SIP Servlet (JSR 116/289) platform into our portfolio and we’ve already started integrating that into our core platform. Developers will now have even more ways to build VoIP applications on top of our platform.
Voxeo named 2008 Market Leader by Speech Technology Magazine – We received an award at SpeechTEK last week…
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Tune in to the Mitel / Sun Webinar tomorrow (Aug 21) at 1pm EDT
Continue Reading: Tune in to the Mitel / Sun Webinar tomorrow (Aug 21) at 1pm EDTIf you are free tomorrow, Thursday, August 21st, at 1pm US Eastern time, I’d encourage you to listen in to a joint Mitel / Sun Microsystems webinar. Details are available on the Mitel web page.Why am I encouraging readers to tune into this webinar? Especially when I no longer work for Mitel and have really nothing to do with them any more? Two words:
Terry Matthews.
During the time that I worked for Mitel from June 2001 up until last October (2007), the telecom industry went through some pretty bleak periods. Some very bleak periods. Mitel was not immune and there were certainly some tough times there. There were multiple times when friends seriously questioned why I continued to work there amidst some of the challenges and headaches. And while I admittedly had a few of those moments myself, I kept on working hard at Mitel because of the tremendous people I worked with there… and ultimately because of the vision and enthusiasm of Terry Matthews.
If you aren’t familiar with Sir Terrence Matthews, his Wikipedia biography and Wesley Clover (his investment firm) biography give a taste of the man. Terry is at this point a billionaire serial entrepreneur…
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Has Asterisk NOT “crossed the chasm” for developers? (Key links to read for open source)
Continue Reading: Has Asterisk NOT “crossed the chasm” for developers? (Key links to read for open source)Jay Phillips is frustrated. He passionately wants to see open source telephony enjoy success all around the world. Yet right now, when people think “open source telephony”, they almost always think of Asterisk… and Jay sees too many challenges for developers embracing Asterisk. Jay, the creator of the Adhearsion telephony framework for Ruby, has spoken about this at recent conferences and pulled together his thoughts in a lengthy post earlier this week entitled “What We’re Not Admitting about Asterisk“.Jay argues that Asterisk has not crossed the proverbial chasm for developers and outlines some of the issues he sees.
What is perhaps most interesting about Jay’s post is the equally lengthy response by Asterisk creator Mark Spencer. Mark responds to Jay’s various points and in doing so provides some good insight into his views on Asterisk’s connections to developers, APIs, etc., as well as the differences between the markets that Digium, the company, goes after versus the “market” of Asterisk, the raw telephony platform.
Both Jay’s article and Mark’s response are definitely worth reading. I’m friends now with both of them and they both bring immense passion and energy to the world of open source telephony. Ultimately they…
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Is anyone really surprised the iPhone has a “kill switch”?
Continue Reading: Is anyone really surprised the iPhone has a “kill switch”?Are people really surprised that Apple has a the ability to remotely kill applications?Based on news reports about Steve Jobs statement that Apple does have a way to remotely remove/disable software on users’ iPhones, there were a good number of blog posts diving into the issue. Several posts seemed to view this as a way for Apple to remotely disable your entire phone… but let’s look at what was actually said:
But the real controversy started when Jonathan Zdziarski, author of the books iPhone Open Application Development and iPhone Forensics Manual, discovered a URL buried in Apple’s firmware. That URL links to a file dubbed “unauthorizedApps” where malicious or simply bad apps might go once they disappear from the App Store.
So essentially they are providing the application equivalent of a “Certificate Revocation List” (CRL) used in SSL (a point I was glad to see made by one commenter on a post). If somehow an application gets through Apple’s vetting process and is found to do “bad actions”, Apple has a way to tell iPhone’s they should disable that application.This very much makes sense to me… Apple needs to protect the trust users have in their AppStore. If something…
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Speaking at SpeechTEK next week in New York on voice application security…
Continue Reading: Speaking at SpeechTEK next week in New York on voice application security…On Sunday I’ll be boarding a train bound for New York City where I’ll be attending SpeechTEK for Monday through Wednesday. As I mentioned previously, on Tuesday, August 19th, I’ll be giving a presentation on “Securing CCXML and VoiceXML Applications“:How secure are your speech applications? As the usage of both VoiceXML and CCXML continues to explode, and VoIP usage continues to grow dramatically, especially within enterprise environments, it is increasingly important that you ensure that applications and services are not open to attack. Learn about the potential vulnerabilities in a system using VoiceXML or CCXML, what you can do to secure these systems, and how you can develop a strong architecture.
It will be fun to expand my VoIP security commentary beyond my usual scope of networks and more into voice applications. I’m planning to record it (and have permission to do so) and potentially put it out as a Blue Box podcast.
At SpeechTEK there will also be a good number of us from Voxeo there. We’ll have a booth (#804) and we’ve got some exciting announcements coming up… 😉
If you are down at SpeechTEK, please do drop a note and let me know.
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…