What’s Next In IP Communications? Here’s An Idea To Look At

Last week two stories seem to generate a lot of interest all across the blogs and in the news. The first was the rumor of a “Skype Killer” being planned by the leading telcos around the world. The second was the blockbuster move by the new WiMax consortium of players including Intel, ClearWire, Sprint plus the cable companies, along with online leader Google, to take over what Sprint and Clearwire were both not really doing yet, that to create a national WiMax footprint here in the USA which will deliver, in theory, both Mobile and Fixed broadband solutions.

These two topics are really pretty central to IP communications as we look ahead. Skype isn’t a panacea, but it’s the largets VoIP deployment in the world, and remains wildly popular. And it’s still growing. WiMax is arguably a successor to WiFi, or a fit somewhere in between WiFi and carrier wireless broadband. It could be the next carrier wireless broadband for data if it really succeeds.

Here’s a point Andy makes that the two technologies may be interwoven -

You see, the genie is out of the bottle and there’s no putting the Skype Genie back in, so another more robust and accepted flavor of IP communications that does the same thing and more, but without the already known concerns that Skype raises, could overtake them in time,
especially if its primary purpose was to supplant the existing analog base of installed users as the telcos move them to IP on their own or see them migrate to cable or WiMax.

I’m not sure I fully agree with the details, but I’m absolutely on the same page as Andy with regard to the problems.

The telcos don’t like Skype. Fair enough. They don’t like competition of any kind. They’ve struggled with it since divestiture of the old Bell System in 1984 and have a a long history of killing competition. But they’ve done too little for too long, and it’s far too late. What was once the leading technology industry (think 1956 and Bell Labs invention of the transistor), has fallen into a malaise of maintaining status quo and a sense of the right to be the incumbent forever.

Skype is in play. It may not be openly, actively courting, but Skype is clearly in play. And eBay has demonstrated their inability to leverage their huge investment in Skype toward any substantial success. Yet Skype continues to grow and improve. There’s been some speculation that some consortium of telcos might actually make a move to buy Skype. I think it’s highly unlikely. One of the biggest negatives Skype has shown is its disinterest in open standards for VoIP. for the telcos to embrace Skype, they’d have one of two paths to follow - (a) radically alter Skype to use open standard VoIP in fitting with their infrastructure, or (b) radically re-architect their own networks to use or add Skype’s protocols.

Either presents major problems, and would take on a lifetime of reinventing telephony all over again. They telcos believe they already know telephony, because they know it as it was. Frankly, they don’t have the innovative wherewithall to pull off either of those options successfully. What they might be able to do is mediocritize Skype by building a series of gateways to the PSTN. This could work from a technical standpoint. It also makes sense from a regulatory perspective to manage Skype in a fully separate environment.

Given the innovation shown by the telcos for the last fifty years (please note the tongue-in-cheek…there has been no substantive innovation by the telcos for fifty years), this last option seems a slippery slope, fraught with business, technology, and customer satisfaction problems.

So pick your analogy. Andy said the genie is out of the bottle. Others have said the horse is out of the barn, the water’s over the dam. For the telcos, their response to the Skype threat is simply too little, too late. Skype came on their horizon at a time every telco executive had been forced to read The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. Every one of them knew full well that disruptive technologies come with a set of known characteristics. Disruptive technologies generally:

• Arrive substantially “downmarket”
• Less complex and expensive (off-the-shelf)
• May sometimes be more costly
• Lower performance than mainstream technology
• Offer lower margins than mainstream technology
• Are introduced into insignificant markets
• May have to make their own markets
• Are perceived as unnecessary by mainstream customers
• Do not fit mainstream value model
• Are difficult to deal with by established players
• Carry significant first-mover advantage

They knew this and ignored Skype until it was too late. Years too late. Skype ate the telcos lunch, and in many ways now has the mindshare that the traditional telcos can never win back. They rested on their laurels as a sustaining technology.

Just as radically as the 3.5″ disk drive disrupted the old traditional disk makers out of business, Skype has forever changed the face of voice communications.

• Of leading 14” drive makers, none survive the 8” drive
• Of leading 8” drive makers, 1 survives the 5.25” drive
• Of leading 5.25” drive makers, only 35% introduce a 3.5” product!

It’s nice that the telcos finally woke up to smell the coffee, but the pot’s almost empty and there’s a hole in your cup. Too little too late. Like many of us have been saying for years to the telcos - the bell tolls for thee.

Andy goes on to bring in the WiMax angle as a related topic -

WiMax. Last week’s announcement of the mega players all joining hands was a very good deal for Clearwire and Sprint.
Clearwire’s investors cashed out. Sprint got someone else to carry the
ball in the USA market, plus this now provides another option to offer
IP based communications versus the already existing 3G solutions.

As a result I chose to think how the very much-ballyhooed WiMax play
could be differentiated versus being looked at as only a substitute for
the mobile phone. As I like to say “too much me too, me also, not me
different” is nothing really new. I mean, what good is going the 4G
route if all it does is give a less expensive experience to make phone
calls on the go, and not work everywhere for many years to come. That’s
what the cable guys already did with VoIP, where the only difference
from what we’ve always had from the phone company is the wire the phone
service travels over and the bill.

WiMax as a substitute for the mobile phone is a boneheaded idea for the reasons Andy states.He’s pretty open with his “too much me to, me also, not me different” description of ideas he sees as off the mark. I tend to be less charitable and call a boneheaded idea just that. A carrier-based approach to WiMax will take years to deploy. I compare carrier WiMax with ISDN in the United States. Never has a technology cost so much, to do so little, and arrive on the scene so late. By the time ISDN for consumers was generally available, it was overpriced, under-featured and obsolete. So now the telcos are going to make WiMax the next ISDN.

Sprint is among one of the least innovative companies I’ve watched for the past ten years. They’re slow to market with solutions that under-deliver, if they work at all. So know they’re going to partner with Clearwire. I’m just not as impressed as a number of my colleagues.

The success of WiFi has not been driven, extended or enlarged by the pitiful efforts we’ve seen that put WiFi in Starbucks and McDonalds. WiFi succeeded because it was unlicensed spectrum that you and I could deploy quickly, easily and cheaply in our homes, offices and businesses. Just like the disruptive technologies Christensen so aptly described, WiFi came in at the low end of a different market. It created its own market. I don’t believe WiMax has that same kind of potential. It’s too direct a competition potentially to existing wireless technologies. I believe we’ll see WiMax widely deployed, but it’s not a wireless technology I believe will sustain momentum long enough to become a major incumbent technology…at leastw not with the carriers driving it. They’ll drive it to mediocrity in their effort to stave off their own painful death while they tell themselves they’re innovating.

The next generation of wireless isn’t here yet. I don’t think we’ve really seen it yet. While the US runs a 2.5G network at best, much of the world is moving toward real 3G wireless. 4G is another animal and what we’re seeing today is a lot of experimentation in the space as players try to find the technology mesh that will gain the critical mass of user acceptance.

I don’t think this mesh will come from any company we see today as a telco. The telcos are innovating us into the dark ages of FCC largess protecting their business. The telcos exist in an environment of cronyism, back room handshakes and political contributions. That’s an approach that may stave off death a while longer, but it won’t create an environment where innovation thrives. They’ve still got their heads in the sand. While they’ve been beat over the head with a clue-by-four repeatedly for years, the telcos, to a very large degree, still haven’t a clue. They don’t have a ten year roadmap that’s got any grit to it.
Technorati Tags: telcos, WiMax, Skype, 4G, next generation networks, unified communications

Sheryl Breuker has more than 15 years of experience working with communications and information technologies. As an independent consultant and analyst, Sheryl is an experienced thought leader who studies emerging communications technologies and how they integrate with existing operations in both enterprise business and society at large. Sheryl has crafted strategies globally for both public and private sector organizations, providing written analysis of complex technology and business integration strategies. Sheryl consults with a number of vertical market segments ranging from high-tech innovators to winemakers and restaurateurs. She has successfully guided a number of these organizations in integration of new technologies into their legacy voice and data networking environment in support of an emergent competitive corporate culture. Sheryl’s series of Incidental Interviews have been widely acclaimed as she probes how technology leaders see their vision of the future. Sheryl consults, writes and speaks about the rapid evolution of unified communications in areas of mobility, video collaboration, and convergence with existing business applications. Sheryl is deeply entrenched in the evolution of social media and how evolving conversational tools reshape business operations and work flows. She lives in Olympia, WA. Sheryl is a principal with Stardust Global Ventures (http://www.stardustglobalventures.com) working on technology, social media, and the impact on business and society. Her Gabby Geek Weblog, home of Incidental Interviews, is online at http://www.thegabbygeek.com.

Please bear in mind that I was out in mobile mode, with only my Blackberry, so all I’d actually seen initially was the flurry of chatter on Twitter about Twitterfone and the expected flurry of test posts as people try it out. Sheryl and I got invitations to join the beta, but weren’t back at the office until last night to actually get that done. For those of you who follow me at all, you know I’m an avid Twitter user, and have been since it was Twttr, long before it caught the wave of popularity. Sheryl and I use Twitter as part of our work at Stardust Global Ventures, and it’s an integral part of our daily life.

When I started using Twitter, it was SMS only, so it required a mobile phone to use. Now it seems to have come full circle, as Twitterfone enables people to use their mobile phone rather than the browser/. Huh? Yep/ The difference is that you can now phone in a message and have it post rather than key in an SMS text message. It also posts a short URL that links to your recorded audio.

Like a great many people, I use Twitter almost entirely via mobile on my Blackberry, and I like the raw simplicity of the SMS interface. I find many add-on tools make Twitter more complex and are something of a nuisance. The web interface enhancements seem to wipe out the simple elegance of Twitter with undue complexity. But adding voice to the mix is a very different enhancement and opens new vistas in human-to-network resource interaction.

I’m not sure the concept bedazzles me initially, but it’s interesting. I’ve played with SpinVOX and Utterz in the past. Both can do a similar type of thing - variations on a theme. Both of those implementations work pretty poorly in my experience. Speech recognition software however is improving at a rapid rate and if Twitterfone can do speech to text conversion cleanly, there could be some real value. Given the global audience on Twitter, the language and pronunciation variations could prove challenging.

That challenge was on my mind while I out in mobile mode, only on my Blackberry. That’s when I got this message via Twitter on my mobile -

To be fair, it’s the only one of those I saw, but very few of the people I follow on Twitter are using Twitterfone so far. I know it’s in invite-only beta mode, so I expect some glitches.

This morning I tried it out myself for the first time. Here’s what Twitterfone posted. If you click the graphic, you can hear what I said.

Twitterfone did a reasonable, but not quite perfect job of speech-to-text conversion.

Given that both Twitter and Twitterfone are free services, and Twitter has proven time and again that it’s not entirely reliable, they make an interesting match for social networking tools. Now it’s pretty easy to make a phone call and post to Twitter. You can actually speak a three minute message and the beginning will post to Twitter (140 character limit). People who want to hear the whole message can click through on the web to do so. On my Blackberry, I can click through and read the transcribed text, but not play the audio.

Being able to post to Twitter via a phone call somewhat troubles me as much as it intrigues me. The stream of Twitter messages is filled with useless drivel as it is. I’m as guilty as the next of posting useless information that’s only noise to the world at large. Now we all have an easier way to post as we drive or are otherwise occupied. That’s a mixed blessing.

I know two of the founding investors, both friends I think highly of. I’m really curious what their long range plans are. Is this for publicity or do they envision a monetization scheme that enables monetization. So far Twitter doesn’t have any monetization mechanism, so now we have another free service enhancing a free service. I’m not sure where the survivability might be. It seems potentially rather tenuous. But Pat and Florian are very bright guys with a great handle on the business, so I’m interested in what their vision is.

Pat and Florian, how about a podcast briefing on here?

Twitterfone inaugurates voice-to-Twitter service

• Allows anyone to send updates to Twitter by calling a number
• Voice is automatically transcribed to text

Twitterfone www.twitterfone.com - an Internationally backed voice to text message service launched today in the US, UK and Ireland.

Twitterfone voice-enables Twitter, a text message rebroadcast service and the hottest social networking service at the moment. With Twitterfone, people can dictate text messages via their mobile to be sent out to everyone on their Twitter social network.

Twitterfone investor and Cubic Telecom President Pat Phelan stated “Right now the million active users of Twitter use cell phones or computers to send and receive short bursts of texts to each other. Millions of messages each day are sent like this but while Twitter is one of the truly mobile social networks out there, there are times when users on the move cannot stop what they are doing to key in a message.

Twitterfone improves upon Twitter by allowing us to make a voice call which is turned into text and sent out to our network of friends. This only costs the price of a local call, no matter how many it is sent to. With hands-free kits common in cars it now means we can text each other without taking our eyes off the road and our hands off the wheel.”

How Twitter works:
Once people sign up to Twitter, they can subscribe to receive updates of users and receive them via the web or a text message. Web gurus Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble have over 20,000 subscribers each and even the Los Angeles Fire Department and the English Government are now sending out text updates to people via their Twitter account.

An alliance of international high-tech and telecom companies provide the technology platform behind Twitterfone. Geneva-based VOX telecom provides calls routing, Redwood City, California-based Zong powers mobile enrollment and transactions, MAXroam powers the telephony intelligence system and Dublin firm Dial2Do supplies the core speech recognition which is at the heart of Twitterfone. Dial2Do CEO Ivan MacDonald stated

“We’ve been involved in the space where the phone system meets the web for a long time now, and naturally we’ve been fascinated by the rise of Twitter. Increasingly, we’ll see “web 2.0″ services that people use primarily from their phones. Projections are that mobiles will become the dominant way of accessing the Internet, and a lot of this will be done via voice interfaces. We are very pleased to see Dial2Do add even more value to an already extraordinary service.”

Phelan added “We built this because we are all avid users of Twitter and have made some excellent business connections and friendships from it. We decided to see what we could contribute to the service and with our telecoms backgrounds the Twitterfone idea fitted perfectly”.

Twitterfone is in invite beta at the moment meaning that only those that have been sent invites can join up. There will be regular releases of invites and Twitterfone says they have planned for a million sign-ups over the next year.

Twitterfone inc is a privately owned corporation

Twitterfone investors are Pat Phelan, David Marcus, Florian Seroussi, Sean O Sullivan and Ivan MacDonald.

Technorati Tags: Twitterfone, Pat Phelan, Twitter, speech-to-text, voice recognition

I’ve been watching Zobni closely ever since my friend Jeff Bonforte took the reins as their CEO in February. I’ve been waiting for a peek at how Xobni will turn Outlook from a pain into a really productive and useful tool.

Today I finally got the email telling me I’ve got an invitation to join their invite-only beta testing. I immediately went to the download install and set up, and I have to szy they’ve done a dazzling job and Outlook suddenly seems…well…useful.

I’ll keep testing and playing, but so far, given my use of MS Outlook dating back over ten years, this is the best add-on I’ve seen. LookOut as a search add-on is the only other one that I found exciting, and since Microsoft bought them, that tool died. Crushed out of existence by aquisition, a phenomenon not unheard of in the industry.

Keep your eyes out for Xobni. I know I’ll keep testing and be using it. Consider me impressed.

You can find the TMCnet page here.

Free Webinar Register Now!

Communications Enabled Business Services Tuesday, April 29, 2008, 2:00pm EST 11:00am PST Companies are more productive and more successful when their employees and customers are better connected to the processes that drive business. Communication Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) combines communication technologies with business processes and applications to more effectively communicate between customers, suppliers, and employees. And, integrating new tools shouldn’t be a difficult or risky proposition. It should be easy to implement and compatible with the latest technologies. By connecting people, information, and the workflow process, a business can streamline operations, provide better customer service, and make a positive impact on its bottom line. After the presentation, the Webinar will be open for a live Q&A. Be sure to have your questions ready! Register Now! PRESENTERS: Trevor Baca Vice President of Software Engineering Jaduka Trevor Baca is Vice President of Software Engineering at Jaduka and oversees software engineering, real-time systems engineering, telephony services development, information architecture, usability, and user-experience engineering teams. He has ten years’ experience in telephony and software development and has held senior leadership roles in software development, systems engineering, strategy, product development, and human-computer interaction. Baca also holds a similar title at NetworkIP, the parent company of Jaduka, and a leading platform provider of prepaid telephony since 1998. At NetworkIP, he led research and development of the second-generation Kodiak services platform. He was instrumental in bringing both metrics-based and user-centered development to the product life cycles of the different parts of the Jaduka technology portfolio. Baca also researched and directed the development of the NetworkIP iQT® realtime QoS analysis and correction system, registered as U.S. Patent #6,914,967. Baca received a Bachelor of Arts in the honors program from the University of Texas. Ken Camp Independent Consultant Ken Camp has more than 25 years of experience in information technology. Ken spent 17 years with AT&T and Lucent Technologies successfully designing and implementing voice and data networks. He later worked in the security marketplace and played a key role in early IPSec VPN deployments. As an independent consultant, Ken’s primary focal areas include network performance improvement, security practices and the design and deployment of integrated voice and data solutions. He may be contacted at: ken_camp@realtimepublishers.net Erik Linask Associate Editor Technology Marketing Corporation In addition to his work with TMC’s IP Communications publications, Erik is a contributor to TMCnet. Prior to joining the TMC team, he was Managing Editor at Global Custodian, a global securities services publication, where he also managed the magazine’s survey research. Erik began his professional career at management consulting firm Leadership Research Institute.

It begs a question, though. Has anyone ever seen a Fonera connection in the wild? I haven’t, and expect I’ll just toss this thing in the dumpster when we move later this week. I know I could reflash it and make it useful, but it’s hardly even worth the bother.

Earlier today I saw someone mention how available FON hotspots are, but I’ve never seen one in any part of the country I’ve visited. Ever. The only one I have ever noted was my own.

So what’s the point>

Because Sheryl and I have friends all over the world we hope may be able to join us, we’ve decided to share our wedding date and let everyone who might share this very special day with us have lots of time for travel plans. We haven’t set the precise location yet, but there’s plenty of time for that. Definitely in Washington.

Thank you to all our friends for the support and encouragement as our love has grown and you’ve shared in our life together. We know that you’ll be seeing more of us, but we hope many of you will be able to come share our wedding in person.

Technorati Tags: Ken Camp, Sheryl Breuker, wedding

This evening we sat down to talk about what social media is. It seems to mean many different things to different people. We took some time to think about what it means to us and try to give broader definition than we see in most conversations.

In this episode, we also unveiled our new look for the show and new them music. We want to thank our friend Dan Lynch for the great music.

Click To Play

If you haven’t already done so, please also take a minute to go vote in our poll here.

Technorati Tags: GeekSpeakTV, Sheryl Breuker, Ken Camp, Stardust Global Ventures

Beneath all the hype about Web 2.0, a real revolution is taking place. And, regardless of your job function or industry, it can potentially change the way you manage technical projects and conduct business. Are you ready?

Join us for a fascinating 60-minute video Webcast that reveals how wikis, blogs, social networking, and other Web 2.0 applications are creating a “mass collaboration” paradigm. Learn how you can apply this model to solve technical challenges and promote innovation. Discover how other organizations are already using it to transform their business operations.

Interviews with Industry Experts
Learn about the technologies available to you now that you can put into action. Get valuable insights and practical game plans from the thought leaders in Web 2.0 applications, including:

• Don Tapscott, coauthor of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
• Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester Research’s Senior Analyst for Social Computing
• Robert Scoble, new Managing Director of FastCompany.TV and author of How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk to Customers

WebEx Connect Demonstration plus Live Q&A with Web 2.0 Experts

You will also see an exclusive demonstration of the new WebEx Connect solution, a powerful new collaboration workspace. And, David Knight, Jeremiah Owyang, and Robert Scoble will be on hand to answer your Web 2.0 questions during the broadcast.

Here’s a YouTube trailer for the show:

The URL for the show is:
https://event.on24.com/interface/registration/autoreg/index.html?eventid=104693&sessionid=1&key=A4F0A0445A3013006F9A2B102EFFA804&partnerref=4063

You can find the TMCnet page here.

Free Webinar Register Now!

Communications Enabled Business Services Tuesday, April 29, 2008, 2:00pm EST 11:00am PST Companies are more productive and more successful when their employees and customers are better connected to the processes that drive business. Communication Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) combines communication technologies with business processes and applications to more effectively communicate between customers, suppliers, and employees. And, integrating new tools shouldn’t be a difficult or risky proposition. It should be easy to implement and compatible with the latest technologies. By connecting people, information, and the workflow process, a business can streamline operations, provide better customer service, and make a positive impact on its bottom line. After the presentation, the Webinar will be open for a live Q&A. Be sure to have your questions ready! Register Now! PRESENTERS: Trevor Baca Vice President of Software Engineering Jaduka Trevor Baca is Vice President of Software Engineering at Jaduka and oversees software engineering, real-time systems engineering, telephony services development, information architecture, usability, and user-experience engineering teams. He has ten years’ experience in telephony and software development and has held senior leadership roles in software development, systems engineering, strategy, product development, and human-computer interaction. Baca also holds a similar title at NetworkIP, the parent company of Jaduka, and a leading platform provider of prepaid telephony since 1998. At NetworkIP, he led research and development of the second-generation Kodiak services platform. He was instrumental in bringing both metrics-based and user-centered development to the product life cycles of the different parts of the Jaduka technology portfolio. Baca also researched and directed the development of the NetworkIP iQT® realtime QoS analysis and correction system, registered as U.S. Patent #6,914,967. Baca received a Bachelor of Arts in the honors program from the University of Texas. Ken Camp Independent Consultant Ken Camp has more than 25 years of experience in information technology. Ken spent 17 years with AT&T and Lucent Technologies successfully designing and implementing voice and data networks. He later worked in the security marketplace and played a key role in early IPSec VPN deployments. As an independent consultant, Ken’s primary focal areas include network performance improvement, security practices and the design and deployment of integrated voice and data solutions. He may be contacted at: ken_camp@realtimepublishers.net Erik Linask Associate Editor Technology Marketing Corporation In addition to his work with TMC’s IP Communications publications, Erik is a contributor to TMCnet. Prior to joining the TMC team, he was Managing Editor at Global Custodian, a global securities services publication, where he also managed the magazine’s survey research. Erik began his professional career at management consulting firm Leadership Research Institute.