Call-the-Cloud

I just returned from a trip to California that included attending and presenting at the Emerging Communications Conference. I’ve hyped up this conference a few times on this blog, and I can say without hesitation that the show delivered on every level. Hats off to organizers!

One my favorite parts of the conference was the very active "back-channel" (powered by Twitter) that sizzled with comments, questions, jokes and tangential topics throughout each session. And it makes for a good read now, as well. After my presentation, I immediately checked the comments there and was pleased to find them very positive. What a great way to get immediate feedback to a speaker. (I will post my slides here shortly.)

Unfortunately, I only got to see a small sample of the presentations because of other meetings I had while in California. Hopefully, the videos will be available shortly. Some notes from sessions I did attend:

Phweet

Stuart Henshall showed off Phweet and positioned it as an alternate way to connect with someone via voice spontaneously. I like to think of a contact list as ranked by "strength", i.e. how well do you know each other / how often have you spoken. For contacts who are strong connections, you typically just pick up the phone and dial. For medium connections, you might IM first: "Want to talk?". Its with the far end of that range: new or very weak connections, where you find room for innovation. The "call me" badges from Jaxtr, GrandCentral, etc were one attempt at this. (Anyone have data on whether that approach has seen real traction? I’ve never clicked one.) Phweet is an attempt to leverage Twitter to answer this challenge. As Stuart said: "The value is before the call." Consider: Both Phweet and Fonolo are alternate ways to start a call, and don’t involve dialing a phone number.

Phonetag launched Grid.com

The guys from Phonetag launched a "developer environment" for voice apps called Grid.com. James Siminoff: "What’s stopping us all from innovating is the contracting process with vendors… too much friction in the supply chain." They are offering "wholesale pricing" on SMS, VoIP, Whitepage look-ups, billing and (their personal specialty) voice transcription. They are partnering with Voxeo (for the IVR hosting I presume). Voice transcription is still one of the pricier building blocks in the Voice 2.0 toolset. It’s the main reasons services like PhoneTag, GotVoice, SpinVox and Jott can’t be offered for free (at scale) or ad-supported. I wrote about Jott’s transition away from "freemium" here.

Voxeo launched Tropo.com

Jonathan Taylor, CEO of Voxeo, showcased their own "developer environment", but this one more focused on hosted IVR. Tropo lets you build voice apps in Javascript, PHP, Ruby, Python or Groovy. (I hadn’t even heard of that last one,  but my programming days are long behind me. Fonolo is mainly PHP, by the way.) Pricing is dead simple: 3 cents/minute, with no up front commitment.  At lunch, Jonathan assured me that they are not competitive with Grid.com at all, but rather complimentary.

Ditech launched TokTok

Todd Simpson from Ditech networks showed off a service that gives callers a wide range of voice-activated features. According to the demo video, you can conference in a friend to the current call by saying ("Toktok, conference in Jim"). Toktok will pull appropriate phone numbers from your online address book to do that. You can also create and modify events in your Google Calendar through verbal commands.  Very interesting on a number of levels. I think I’ll write a follow-up post.  

Mobivox launched "CRM over Voice" product

Fellow Canadian start-up Mobivox unveiled a new stage of their platform strategy. Mobivox started off several years ago as a consumer-focused calling service (i.e. discount long distance) and has since successfully transitioned into a platform-for-carriers company. Alec Saunders described this latest addition by saying "it’s about the idea that carriers should host users address books, and watch to see what they do with those address books.  Over time, as behavior is tracked, a CRM over Voice application would automatically start to initiate up-sell behaviours with the customer."

CEO Peter Deitrich wrote in the company blog how this is all about reducing customer churn: "Every time end users – whether our own or those of our partners – access our platform, they ‘talk’ with a personalized and provider-branded voice assistant. In essence, a natural dialogue with the customer… [and] an opportunity to deliver tailored, non-intrusive messages – for example, thanking users for or making payments, highlighting new features or offers, even doing short and simple customer satisfaction surveys… "

Skype makes their "SILK" voice codec royalty free

Jonathan Christensen made an announcement that was received very enthusiastically by the crowd. In fact, many of the questions were of the flavor: "Really? What’s the catch?" because it sounded to good to be true. Skype has put very generous licensing terms around their new "superwideband" voice codec, which is the default codec in the new Skype client. Some coverage here.

Calliflower update

Calliflower founder Alec Saunders gave an update on their very slick and forward-thinking conferencing application. He also looked back at his very prescient 2005 post "Voice 2.0 Manifesto" and compared it to where we are today.

Some other coverage

As I mentioned, I saw only a fraction of the sessions. Here are posts from other attendees that will fill in some the blanks:

Alan Quayle: Emerging Communications Conference 2009.

Dean Bubley: Thoughts from eComm.

Andy Abramson: eComm Was A Hit.

Jim Courtney: eComm 2009: An Outstanding Primer in Emerging Communications

Jon Arnold led a panel discussion that was then covered in the Wall Street Journal. Jon’s thoughts are here.

[Update: Martin Geddes, Head of Strategy for BT Design, and a well-known industry analyst, gave a presentation by video which is now available here. He discusses Fonolo starting at the 8:00 mark.]