Richard Sprague WebLog : Telephony

eComm Notes part 4

sprague — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 02:55:15 GMT

Continuing my Virtual eComm attendance, here are some notes on other presentations;

Dean Bubley (Disruptive Analysis): Starts out with a great quote “Don’t assume” because consensus viewpoints are often flawed. (I would say consensus is usually flawed). Interesting examples of 3rd-party paid data and widgets combining benefits for multiple types of citizens looking for information, supplied via APIs delivered by MNOs.
Brough Turner (Founder, AshtonBrooke): 100Mbps broadband ranges from $127 (Amsterdam) to $11 in Stockholm but isn’t even available in important places like New York! His claim is that structural bypass is the solution, not network neutrality.
David Beckemeyer (TelEvolution) proposes a mobile phone sensor-net, a large peer-to-peer stream to send tons of interesting information beyond simply location. Wonder if he’s heard of the MIT SenseAble City ?
Graham Brierton (CTO, VoiceSage): CEBP (Comms Enabled Business Process) and how it makes a business use voice more efficiently.
Todd Landry (NEC Sphere) connecting the dots between people who “run the business” and those who “make phonecalls” with smart software.
Amir Zmora (Radvision): technical discussion of H.264 and video encoding issues for IP Video Communcations.
Jan Linden (VP Engineering at Global IP Solutions) VOIP and Video on iPhone, which he likes for the easy API, but doesn’t like for the lack of VOIP over 3G, lack of background app support, and requirement that app monitor the audio. Note that you can’t do 2-way video on iPhone yet because the app can’t access the camera.
Darrin Mylet (Founder, Spectru-station) hates that fact that 85% of all spectrum in the U.S. is going unused and proposes an interesting way to open access fairly to apps that need them.
Mark Rottegering (T-Mobile). Most people like the mobile industry is maturing, but really it’s merging with other industries. Lots of nice data, including a discussion of consumer willingness to pay per bit. Very interesting strategic discussion.
Shai Berger (Fonolo) is one I remember from last year’s eComm, so it was nice to get an update. They now have 500 companies mapped, with fascinating information about the call trees of various orgs. (Worst is US Department of Veterans Affairs).

…and much more. I’m learning a lot just browsing through the presentations. Organizer Lee Dryburgh says he wants to post the audio to IT Conversations again and I can’t wait to add them to my podcast list.

eComm Notes part 3

sprague — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 04:57:40 GMT

Continuing my Virtual eComm attendance, I’m browsing through several more presentations. Ordinarily I’d write my thoughts quickly in Twitter and be done with it, but sometimes it’s nice to have the longer flow and easier format of a blog post. Plus I can look back later and find it again.

First stop is Alec Saunder’s presentation, titled “Voice 2.0 Applications in a Mobile World”. Basic idea continues on his Manifesto theme that voice is a baseline and that apps are key. Slide 4 (the “future” of 2005) looks interesting: about the long tail of opportunities in online communities, but the title makes me wonder if he thinks there is now a new future? Unfortunately the following slide is a video (not available in the Slideshare deck), so I couldn’t tell if he meant more. But while I was there, I signed up for the Premium version of his new application, Calliflower. (30 days free – normally $50).

Then I looked at Mobivox’ Peter Diedrich: discussion and demo of CRM over Voice.

Trevor Baca (Jaduka): How to Do Things with Voice is a tough presentation to see without the presenter. It’s mostly photos of objects and situations that have something to do with communication.

Mark Spencer from Digium has a presentation on the Skype+Asterisk beta and the new chan_skype use cases: lets Skype calls integrate with existing Asterisk call queue. Claimed he’s going to start a public beta soon.

Peter Ecclesine from Cisco on White Space. He predicts the rise of database gateways that associate your device location and your contact info. Look at http://showmywhitespace.com to see how much of the new free white space spectrum is available in your area.

…more notes later as I have time.

eComm Notes (Telio)

sprague — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 20:26:14 GMT

My boss, XDH kept mentioning Scandinavia in his Twitter feed from Ecomm, so one of my first stops in my Virtual eComm attendance was the presentation by Alan Duric, CTO at the Norwegian telecom company, Telio ASA.

Telemetry and real time communications will start to merge, thanks to technology like RFID.
He likes mobile storage: points out that churn is much lower when customers get online data storage from their carrier.

I’ll be cranking through the presentations throughout the next few days, writing up my summaries… Looks like a really good show!

Hate the phone company?

sprague — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 09:07:31 GMT

You’re not alone. Telecommunications companies kept their #1 spot in Washington State last year for total number of complaints filed with the Attorney General’s office. They’ve been number one for the past decade.

Industry	2008	2007	2006	2005	2004
Telecommunications	1	1	1	1	1
Retail Sales	2	3	2	2	2
Collections	3	2	3	3	5
Auto Sales	4	5	4	4	4
Electronic Shopping	5	4	5	9	3
Contractors	6	6	6	5	6
Books/Magazines & Directories	7	8	8	8	11
Cable Networks & Program Distribution	8	10	n/a	n/a	n/a
Health Care	9	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a
Commercial Banking	10	n/a	n/a	n/a	n/a

[via TechFlash]

Prepping for ITExpo

sprague — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 04:14:59 GMT

One more week and I’ll be off to Miami for ITExpo East. I don’t usually look forward to trade shows, but I really enjoyed the last one and we have so many cool things planned that I can’t wait to get there.

The organizer, Rich Tehrani, wrote a nice summary of what we’ll be doing there publicly, but it’s actually the behind-the-scenes parts that have me interested.

There are plenty of good reasons to visit South Florida in February, but if you need another one, this is it. Let me know, and I’ll get you a free pass.

Podcasting from the other side

sprague — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 05:37:36 GMT

I had a fun conversation this afternoon with Rich Tehrani of TMCNet. (You can listen to the recording here). I like Rich's podcasts, and I try to listen to as many as I can. My favorites were the ones earlier this year with Chris Lyman (talking about his thoughts on working with the open source community) and another one with Jan Scheeren (great insights on what it's like to be in this industry for a long time).

I'm been a daily podcast listener for years, so it's a real treat to appear on the shows that I've been listening to for myself. A few weeks ago I was on one of Allen Miller's podcasts too, who is another name on my list of regular must-hear downloads.

Rich did the whole setup and publishing so seamlessly that I had to ask him afterwards what podcasting equipment or software he uses. Interestingly, he uses the competition! Well, sort of. Microsoft doesn't have any podcasting features per se in our telephony software, so I don't blame Rich; in fact, I'll probably use it myself if I ever start doing podcasting at home. But it got me thinking about the ways I wish podcasting could be made more mainstream and easy for everyone to participate in, both as listeners and as speakers.

I have more to say about this, but I'm on my way out the door and I'm busy queuing my next set of podcasts for the drive home.

What I got wrong about the iPhone

sprague — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 19:04:03 GMT

Looks like this morning my inbox is flooded with people reminding me of my post made long ago, before the iPhone was announced, where I predicted that it wouldn't sell as many as Apple was claiming.

Most of the reaction is just simple gloating: "ha ha, you idiot" kind of stuff. But I'm curious what people really think. What did I get wrong? Was it the technology--the phone itself is just far, far better than anything else? Was it the marketing? Was it something else?

Note: I'm not a Microsoft spokesman, and I'm not affiliated with the Windows Mobile team. I'm just another guy who wants to to understand an interesting problem about technology and the future. So please, let me know your thoughts.

[update: my hastily written post from this morning didn’t link to the original, so I added that. Also, don’t forget to check out other people who weren’t as excited about the iPhone.]

Go directly to voicemail with Slydial

sprague — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 16:46:18 GMT

I've been testing out the new free service from Slydial that lets you leave a voicemail without ringing the other guy's phone. I called 1-267-SLYDIAL (267-759-3425), entered the phone number I wanted to dial, and sure enough I was soon talking to directly to the voicemail box.

The service is free, although you do have to listen to a very short advertisement (for McDonalds dollar menu, when I called), but there are a few catches:

It only works for U.S. mobile numbers.
Doesn't work for non-mobile numbers (like, say, Microsoft's corporate number)

I also noticed that it worked from my AT&T mobile number, as well as from the landline I use at home, but for some reason it didn't work from my VOIP account. I'm contacting my VOIP provider to see if they know why.

[update: it was a fluke. I tried again and it works fine with my VOIP account]

I want Hi-fi phone calls

sprague — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:07:45 GMT

Once you've spoken with your young son or daughter on a wide-band telephony connection, you'll never want to go back to your old POTS (Plain Old Telephony Service) phone line again. Children have such high pitched voices that the upper frequencies get chopped off and it's hard/impossible to distinguish your boy from your girl.

I've wondered for many years why the phone companies don't offer wide-band, 16khz audio for phonecalls. I can sort of understand how upgrading the entire network infrastructure is expensive and maybe would promote incompatibilities among carriers who adopt different wideband technologies, but why not high-quality between callers on a single network? If AT&T is so proud of its push-to-talk service, why not go the next step and make all ATT-ATT calls high-quailty?

Turns out the answers to that obvious question aren't easy, but I'm glad that TMCNet writer Rick Bye has at least summarized the challenges. He concludes with good news:

So, wideband telephony, an exciting feature that has been ‘coming soon’ for a long time, but may now actually be on its way, offering clear benefits to end users that should result in more and more people switching to VoIP services.