In October, one the most compelling conferences in communications, eComm, was held in Amsterdam. Our CEO, Tom Katis, gave a talk about telephony in which he made a very interesting analogy with broadcast television and TiVo-like systems.
Check out his presentation:
http://blog.ecomm.ec/2009/12/telephony-if-desired-today.html
We at RebelVox are grateful for the privilege of participating in the UrbanShield event hosted by the Alameda County Sheriff’s office last month, helping select first responder organizations increase their preparedness to serve their communities against a wide variety of threats.
We worked with communications officers responsible for coordinating a large number of people, activities, and information transfer needs. They used RebelVox software primarily for reporting scores and status of the exercise teams during the 48 hour event. As you would expect, there was initial hesitation facing a new tool. Quickly, however, our users grasped that mixing text and voice, live and recorded, with immediate on-screen recall and replay had advantages over typical Live-only tactical communications. They saw first hand, a unified system that can enhance radios, and replace notes, faxes, calls, and runners. They could picture incorporating this technology into their day-to-day communications fabric. It is always a great learning experience to put technology in the hands of real world users; here, gaining feedback from people working in a variety of public safety agencies.
Through our small UrbanShield pilot deployment, we have learned even more about the needs of such tactical users, and while we were glad to observe the positive reactions, quick usage adoption, and actual activity involving our new communication technology, we have also generated new ideas for how RebelVox can contribute solutions to this area. We look forward to even more interaction in this arena.
RebelVox for Dispatchers
Operations reviewing UrbanShield via RebelVox
RebelVox belongs to the ngConnect Program (sponsored by Alcatel Lucent) which fosters innovation by bringing together leading companies to create rich solutions for future networks like LTE.
We recently contributed a post for the program blog that discusses ways to create more productive communication platforms for enterprises that go well beyond unified communications. Good reading if enterprise productivity is important to you.
This weekend, throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, the Urban Shield event takes place. A major training event for teams from emergency response and public safety jurisdictions, it draws many from Alameda County and several of the other surrounding Northern California counties, some from across the United States, and a couple from out of the country. Billed as “a real-life multidisciplinary training exercise”, each team works through a series of emergency scenarios of various sorts that have been designed and crafted by local jurisdictions and sponsors. They are challenged by the scenarios one by one, non-stop over a 48 hour period.
This is an important opportunity for our public emergency response teams to experience events in the field that come as close as possible to real crisis situations. They face challenges both physical and intellectual to execute on their training in preparation for dangerous incidents and public safety threats. Since they are scored on their success in each scenario, there is a winner at the end of the long weekend–a team that proves itself most capable of meeting each of the exercise obstacles.
The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office hosts Urban Shield, now in it’s 3rd year, supported by Homeland Security Grant funds. The program is being adopted by other jurisdictions across the United States and in other countries.
RebelVox is proud to be a sponsor and technology provider for the 2009 event.
If you want to learn more about the Urban Shield event, click to their website.
The use of the phrase “dumb pipes” is doing terrible damage to the progress of the Internet.
A dumb pipe, in the world of telecommunications, is one where the network operator’s revenue only comes from the network transport itself. Clearly the cable companies and wireless telephone carriers don’t want to get out of the business of offering their own content and applications (yes, the telephone is an application that is separate from the connectivity).
In reality, the loudest proponents of dumb pipes in the net neutrality debate are really just asking for open pipes. They still want their HBO. They still want to be able to call people over the telephone network. They just don’t want the networks to stand in the way of innovation by blocking content and applications that compete with their own.
But that doesn’t make the pipes dumb. What they really want is good pipes; fast, reliable and fair. By calling these good pipes “dumb pipes” we set back the cause. Who wants to be dumb? Every network operator I’ve ever met with has a visceral reaction to the term.
Recently I attended an event sponsored by Alcatel Lucent where I witnessed a conversation between carriers, technology providers, and an assembled group of outspoken members of the millennial generation. In pre-recorded interviews as well as live discussions time and again the millennials showed their bias towards free content and applications. Most weren’t bothered by whether the free content was legal or not.
Interestingly, the one thing all of them paid good money for was their “pipe.” The value of a good, fast and reliable pipe was paramount. That was what made the whole online experience better, both for their cell phones as well as their computers. While most of the conversations in the room centered around the shocking disregard for the value of content and the desire of the people in the room to keep from becoming just a dumb pipe, there was no recognition of the fact that those same network operators were providing the one service that was most desired by the participants and the only one all of them were willing to pay for.
I’m not going to tell you that I know how the business models will evolve for the music industry, the newspaper industry, the movie industry, or any other content business. But, it is clear that the business of providing Internet connectivity will continue to grow profitably.
The core product of the networks at one point might have been telephone service or TV, but increasingly it is Internet connectivity. All of humanity is working to create content and applications for the Internet. I know of no firm, telco or otherwise, with more talent and capability than all of humanity combined. If a network operator chooses to cripple their pipes to prop up their content and application business they are fighting a losing battle. That is my definition of a really dumb pipe.
Those networks that offer the best service will own something incredibly valuable. They will own the customer relationship, including a billing relationship. They will have plenty of opportunities to offer additional content, applications and services.
There is only one possible strategy for the network operators in the long run. First, they have to offer the best pipe they can. It needs to compete on speed, reliability, coverage, cost and openness with other connectivity options. Second, they need to build their content and application businesses as stand alone businesses. They can offer bundled services and leverage their customer relationships, but they can’t cripple the one business young people demand most without damaging the long term success of their businesses.
At RebelVox we are out everyday telling people about our new communication platform. While that’s one of our key tasks, it is particularly rewarding to inspire others to want to help us tell our story.
Last week, Saad Fazil of Venture Beat, wrote a post detailing how RebelVox enriches the ways people can interact. He points out that some of the value created comes from treating voice communication as data—and that’s exactly right. While there are some other “secret-sauce” components to making a RebelVox application work, working over IP networks and treating voice as data are two very critical components.
The post got picked up for the online version of the New York Times, which we find very exciting. Take a look and see what’s coming in voice communications.
We were lucky to host this summer’s Orange Press Tour of Silicon Valley—even though we’re actually in San Francisco. While they were here our CEO, Tom Katis, was interviewed by Leila Makki of TelecomTV.
Here is a link to the interview which touches upon some of the tactical origins of our concepts. Note that it really is our Tom Katis.
Since our public introduction at eComm Conference in San Francisco in March, we have expanded the range of people that we are introducing to our technology and now actually showing them RebelVox in action.
On July 8th, we hosted the Orange Press Tour on Innovation in Silicon Valley at our San Francisco headquarters. A dozen members of the European press attended and saw a demonstration of the RebelVox communication technology. It was great to get the reactions of folks who are not in the communications or telecom space.
Several articles were spawned from the meeting and TelecomTV.com filmed a conversation with our CEO and a demonstration of RebelVox in action.
We have a lot of developing news here at RebelVox, so it is challenging to figure out what to talk about first. But we’ll go with an event that is near and dear to us, since it hosted our “coming out” party in the spring in San Francisco.
We are proud to announce that we are a Gold Sponsor of the eComm conference in Amsterdam this fall.
We are continually inspired by folks who spend their time pushing the envelope to increase the freedom and control that we can and will gain over our communication tools. Software is relatively new to the telephony paradigm, and it is changing the world. No where is this illustrated so dramatically as at the meeting of the minds sponsored by eComm Conference & Awards–which is led by the ever awake and aware Lee Dryburgh.
We are honored to be taking part again this fall and excited to see all the new technology that is coming into being. Hope to see you there.
PS. For those of you not familiar:
The Emerging Communications Conference & Awards (eComm) is the world’s leading-edge communications event. It’s designed to showcase and accelerate both technology and business model innovation; and to explore the latest opportunities. Attend and be at part of ‘What’s Next in Telecom, Mobile & Internet Communications™’ (See http://eComm.ec for details)
The good news these days is that we have lot of ways to communicate with each other. Unfortunately for most of us all our communications end up in different buckets depending the the technology in use (email here, voice mail there, IMs and twitters in assorted piles)—the technology controls and constrains how you get to use it. (Assembling them is one of the major patches that unified communication technology tries to put on top of them all.)
Each type (IM, live voice, voice mail, PTT, email) has different and valuable properties. But in addition to the problem of separate data silos, those useful properties also seem to get isolated to one type, mostly because of the particular technology used.
At RebelVox, we think one platform/application/protocol is enough—IF it is technically capable of all of the best properties of all of the common communication protocols. We think it should work exactly the way a user wants at any given moment, so it should embody all of the best features.
This week, let’s talk about RebelVox and the best attributes of email: what if voice could be managed exactly like email?
What is so great about email? Lots.
What if your voice communications (live, messages, and voice chat) all worked just like that? You could pay attention if you want, or not, knowing you would get everything in any case. Voice like this can be seamlessly integrated into email systems; or run as a highly useful standalone application. Either way, it brings the best attributes of voice and email communications together in one system.
PS. Later we’ll talk about instant messaging and push-to-talk benefits that also exist in the same system.
