ManyMedia

Moderator Gary Kim will introduce speakers Frank Fawzi, Jeff Lattomus, and Peter Pattullo, for this session on Telecom 2.0.

Gary Kim (no PowerPoints!), encourages questions from the audience.

Peter Pattulo: clean build of his company, focus on hosted applications (unheard of 11 years ago), reinvented telecom company–now on 8th revision of software. All capabilities brought as close to problem as possible, developer APIs not really part of their profit model; more about removing friction.

Frank Fawzi: Amazed with everything 2.0, ecosystems, et al. From Pete’s description, he hears that we all want to make money, create a way to monetize your services and intellectual property. Telecom 2.0 is the next migration; starts to feel like early days of bringing solutions to market that customers are valuing and deploying. Marriage of Internet and traditional telecom: we attacked to make that happen. Carrier 7+ billion minutes, wholesaler with distinction: TDM or SIP, or API layer with widgets and applets that deal with diff biz environments (order fulfillment, upselling, collaboration and conferencing, emergency notification, insertion of voice and telecom functionality w/in web sequence. Is broker between “customer owner” carriers, and communities of software users, bridging gap between those silos.

Jeff Lattomus: We (in this room) are the dedicated ones. (Applause) Sales for western US and PacRim, bottom line is we’re all here to make money. Metaswitch is manufacturer of class 4 -5 app driven manufacturer. How to drive new revenue? Telecom 2.0 is all the new ways of serving customers with new apps (like Google) to make point and click easy access to new services? How to develop?

Open standards, developing gadgets for customers to try. We need to drive innovation.

Gary: Telecom 1.0 is telecom as we’ve known it over last decade: voice driven revenue service. Revenue models now changing, direction unknown. How are you making your money: carriers and supporters, apps, etc. If voice is application, can I drive revenue to me and build company around that? New people coming into market, wedge into existing value chain. Some conversation is from telecom people, others making telecom providers irrelevant. How does Telecom 2.0 work for you?

Frank: built our biz around partners (carriers and large users), continue to evolve new services and not commoditization. Challenge is to make voice so critical where end user is willing to pay for that value. As we expand reach, working with other carriers, this becomes a pressure to derive diff value props from their products, voice enabled.

Jeff: in marketplace it’s a buzzword, is a true application space, but is like IMS (gotta have it). Need to take a pragmatic approach: what do our customers actually need, evolution to get there. Build apps today for pragmatic revenue generating services. Kids will drive technology in next 15 years. Some things are true apps, making them a reality in industry has to be things you guys want to buy.

Frank: just signed long term agreement with Microsoft, leveraging cloud computing and carriers. Space starting to move down to apps with voice enablement. Expanding functionality. Hosted model, SAAS or communications as a service, trial apps for revenue, move on with minimal investment.

Peter: Going from 1.0 to 2.0 is about reducing friction. Not just download, is giving power to guys in enterprise to solve their problems. Adding voice to some business process, new tool sets to solve problems. Microsoft (excel): gave tools to build own spreadsheets. Telecom 2.0 is pushing ability to the edge, to connect.

Gary: is up to vendors to develop tools. How good is each of us to value and understand real business problems? More than just usage–need to be business process facilitators?

Peter: we may never know our customers well enough. There’s real pain out there. Example of delivery service going to sites where they couldn’t deliver. From our perspective, not that there is pain, it’s that we need tools for customers to use. [wait, first you need to understand problem before you can deliver appropriate tools. -jc]

Jeff: Open standards is one driver: develop some apps to get customers started (moving from legacy environment), and allow and support customer development. Work closely to understand customer base.

Gary: some think Telecom 2.0 is for enterprises, but some real pain is felt by smaller businesses. Communications tools: increase transparency to see processes. Should be able to automate certain processes that are not transparent now (e.g., healthcare appointments).

Peter: lot of niche apps that only work in limited ways, as opposed to generic apps that won’t fit as well. Opportunity cost vs expenses.

Frank: moving from time of “minute is a minute” to long tail, move up to set of apps that can be standardized and customized for specific needs. What we can do is provide well defined widgets and apps to build and customize application resources.

Jeff: key theme is automation to put processes in customers’ hands, so they can use for their customers, or what’s most useful to them. Make it mobile. Make it something worth paying for.

Peter: almost like we’re coming out of stone age: number of opportunities is endless.

Gary: most opportunities aren’t big, they’re lots of small that add up. Need to be better at communicating to end users to empower them. Take each of the functions, convince people to use them to solve problems, turn functionality into a widget that they can use to drive traffic.

Jeff: what is next gen product line? Creativity of software. Roomfuls of equipment, but power is in software. Softswitch = software.

Gary: assets are not being deployed to 100% capacity. Some amount of biz logic in work thru old time processes.

Question: iPhone not just communication device, is an info and commerce device. (?)

Frank: is about evolution, not revolution. things that we can do today is voice mashups, things without a huge amount of IT, from the cloud. New edge of the network is not a box, it’s apps and processes. Lot of apps, not a lot of use. Simplify to our level. Push out media, voice mashups, etc. Voice is no longer a commodity minute, now is a value prop.

Peter: we separated apps for control from network. Softswitches, don’t have to completely rewrite software due to new technology.

Question: are we over-complicating things? Everyone wants to communicate, how do we simplify?

Peter: we gotta simplify. Drop dead simple.

Q: so are we over-complicating?

Peter: making voice as app and making voice as central, yes in some ways we are.

Lunch and awards ceremonies!

Events, Network changes, mashups, Network, PTC09, switches, technology

O’Reilly recently convened the Web 2.0 Conference and Expo in San Francisco. I registered for the expo (a few pictures), attended a couple of sponsored sessions, and came away with two significant things: 1) I’m not missing much yet, and 2) a laser etching on my laptop (thanks Instructables!).

First off, the expo floor wasn’t all that crowded so it was easy to make my way around. Secondly, I wasn’t attending as an “enterprise” representative, which made my journey more strategic. Many of the booths on the expo floor were touting ways to “mash up” legacy systems to create new forms of data (e.g., reports previously unavailable) or to be the next “social” apps hosting platforms (e.g., hosting the corporate wiki). [Related post]

Here are my notes from crawling the expo floor. Note that I’m only commenting on a few of the companies that struck me. I missed a few, and avoided others. Such was my timeframe for this event.

• Springnote: online wiki-like notebook, uses OpenID.
• Rackspace: enterprise hosting provider. I was already familiar with them. Thanks for the pen.
• Blist: (pronounced BList, not B-list) I checked them out a while ago following their launch at DEMO. Intriguing database service, but s. l. o. w. I asked about this, and was assured that they’ve addressed their performance issues, and have added international characters and sharing capabilities. I need to check them out again.
• Camwii: Interesting screen-sharing app. Best described in their video. Good: lets me share the part of the screen that I want (via a “looking glass” frame), lets me see what my shared partners see (feedback loop), and can be “private labeled” for customized use (1:1 or 1:many). Questionable: is 100% flash, which means it works on most computers but is tied to Adobe proprietary format. Also uses your phone number as ID. Now that becomes a database with a good key value.
• Truvico: one of several companies that provided continuous data analysis (words, statistics, what’s happening on your site).
• Amusing side note: someone cut the lights on the expo floor for a few minutes (1:40pm). Something eerie about the whole space going dark. This happened on top of what many booths were reporting (and I was witnessing): s-l-o-w network access. Holy cow.
• Magnify360: a “behavioral targeting platform,” which was explained as real-time behavioral programming. This is about “targeting” and “personalizing” to “increase conversion rates.” I feel better already knowing that my every need is anticipated and provided for.
• Kapow: two things: buzz phrase kings (see photos above), and really, really expensive.
• ConfIdent: Weirdly, I didn’t learn what ConfIdent was about, and couldn’t really tell from their website either. What I did see was Vidoop: a system of gaining access to a site by using picture passwords. This was interesting. Passwords were determined by a set of images. The images are random-ish, but they fall into categories like food, travel, space, etc. I somehow would choose or have, let’s say, 3 categories so I would choose the 3 pics out of 9 shown that correspond to my categories. Vidoop is also an OpenID platform/service.
• Nokia: Nokia was one of the big sites on the floor. I went to the table/area designated as “Advertising” to find out what that meant. Nokia has partnerships with various vendors (no surprise) like Sprint. Nokia claims to be carrier and handset agnostic. They act as advertising middlemen, gathering all of the demographic data from Sprint that helps them target your desired audience. Let’s say you want to reach all of the moms, ages 24-35, living in a particular area and having a specific income. No problem, Nokia can serve that group. This was one conversation that made me want to wash my hands and face afterwards. No sign of a cluetrain at this station. Better not be on the tracks when Nokia comes through.
• Etelos: a platform for application deployment. They had several partners and clients represented in their booth.
• Spinscape: a hosted mind mapping tool (similar to The Brain?) that’s web driven, collaborative, extensible with Google Apps and Gadgets. This thing can “auto-discover” everything on your hard drive. In collaborative mode, you can have nodes and assign roles and responsibilities for various levels of collaboration.

That was a first pass at the expo floor. Next I ran to catch the OpenID sponsored session.

OpenID is promoted as a bridge to sharing. It’s being engineered for adoption at an ID layer. Question about open sourcing, noted that it works well with Novell and others. Why relevant, why only authenticating? OpenID has been around for three years, OpenAuth is brand new and needs to focus on what it can enable: integrating contacts. Concerns expressed about it being hard to grasp. Challenge: user experience not optimal.

I asked about how this is taking back control of our IDs when each silo has its data and can gather additional intelligence about us by partnering with other data silos. The answer was largely about the inability to get any hosted service site to delete info on request (once you register, it’s their data). Yeah, we know. Then how is it that openID will help me “manage” my identity?

The question remains. Back to the expo floor.

• Photobucket: claims they are the world’s largest repository of photos, video and more. (Somewhat similar to Flickr, which is limited to photos.) Photobucket has facility for doing minor photo editing. They do not have a search capability to find CC-licensed resources. Bummer. The best thing about Flickr is an unrelated site, compfight.
• Topix: a “top 20 news site.” (huh?) Shows news that’s local to you, as they determine where you are. You can also change locations of course. Extensive news forums, and users can edit stuff. They also offer commercial feeds.
• Yugma: collaborative desktop sharing with chat, conference calls. Java, subscription basis.
• Sprout: a web-based authoring platform for creating widgets: layers of stuff with links and functions. Can do limited mash-ups. Interesting: no sign-up necessary to create. This actually looked like it could be fun, but my old computer didn’t want to work at any reasonable speed with sprout’s programming.

At this point, the expo hall closed. We were all shuffled out. Many of us went to see O’Reilly’s keynote and the talks that followed. I have notes, but on re-read, they’re pretty boring.

Clay Shirkey was the reason I stayed. My notes fail in light of his post of that talk.

That was a great way to end Day One.

As for day two, nothing really struck me. The sponsored session on “Creating a Social Network, It’s Easy” seemed to be more about hiring the group than learning how. Afterwards I went to the women’s networking event. I wasn’t already part of the small leaning-together cliques and didn’t find a conversational way in. So much for networking.

Content, Events conference, IDmanagement, mashups, networking, relationships, self-determination, social web, web 2.0