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
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.
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.
Brough Turner, Chief Strategy Officer of Dialogic, wrote a great post about the evolution of voice, presence, and telephony. He brings up several points that are core to our approach.
Despite more than a decade of development, VoIP services today are little different than traditional telephony as practiced for a century. Yes, we’ve decorated the original service with voicemail, email notifications and phonebook auto-dialing, but the fundamental service remains the same. You place a call, you wait to be connected and then you find out if the other person is available and willing to talk.
But we were reallly pleased to be included in his closing paragraph, where he begins to imagine what voice could be.
The ultimate solution should seamlessly transition between asynchronous voice messaging, push-to-talk and one-on-one live conversation as desired. Recently Rebelvox demonstrated how this might work (although as I write this there is no product or service available). Like Palringo, an instant messaging interface lets you see if your correspondent is available. A push-to-talk button lets you send them an asynchronous voice message. You each can see a history of your messages, voice or text, in an IM format display. But here’s the breakthrough: If you see a message coming in live, and you choose to, a single click lets you listen in catchup mode (silences dropped) and, once you are caught up, seamlessly connects you in a traditional voice telephone call. Now that’s Telephony N.0!
This isn’t everything that we at RebelVox believe voice can be. We want it to be full-duplex live, totally reliable like email, instant like PTT or IM, multi-modal, trivially multi-party, and seamlessly live and messaged. Everybody gets precisely what they want all the time.
RebelVox had its coming out event at eComm2009 in San Francisco, California, our home base. We are happy to see that the eComm adventure continues this year with the announcement of an eComm Conference in Amsterdam in October.
We have attended both eComm conferences, 2008 in stealth mode and 2009 where we presented some of our ideas about voice communications. We believe in the mission of eComm, which is to explore those edges where traditional telecommunications meets the software and internet worlds; where the radical transformation of experience that is engendered by software is challenging our sense of what communications are all about.
We will be supporting this event and working to participate in the ongoing conversation driven by Lee Dryburgh’s inspired leadership. If you want to be in on the conversation and see what radical new innovations are coming down the pipe, Amsterdam is a good place to be in October.
One of the fascinating features of RebelVox is a “perfect rendezvous”. But when we try to explain that to folks, it seems a mysterious term of unrecognizable value. So we always struggle with how to effectively explain.
The classic rendezvous problem is illustrated with the separate systems that support live voice and voice mail. (That they are separate systems is the key to the problem.) It shows up particularly on mobile interactions, partly because on my mobile I can see who is calling me. So you call me, but I don’t get to it before it “rolls over” into the voice mail system. I can see it was you, so I dial you. But you are talking to my voice mail system, and, sure enough, I am rolled into your voice mail system. Because they are different systems, my trying to reach you while you are leaving a message is impossible. AND, I cannot listen while you are creating the message; that stream is no where that I can interact with it until you complete it and I “go and get it.” Live calls and voice mail are different applications that “land” in different places.
I often like to extend this rendezvous context beyond the complexities of live voice and voice mail to consider where my instant messaging, emails, conference calls, and video chats live. All in different applications (managed by different protocols). No wonder we are overwhelmed. Who wants to check all of those different pipes of information for the response to a simple IM I sent? This constrains users to a few applications and to modalities that can maximize the likelihood that my response won’t get lost. If you email, I email you back, even if I’d rather speak. If I leave you a voice mail….well, there is no good way to figure out how to rendezvous with voice mail.
How did this happen? Well, first we had live voice over circuits. Then we tacked on a voice mail system that diverts the connection to a voice mail server. Two systems. Then we found that texting was cool. Another system. Then, from another software and service model, comes email. Great for asynchronous messaging. But another system. Video chat? Another system. Some of these are associated on the desktop in common applications, but they are still separate media paths, and what we would call separate conversations, because, at the core, they can never rendezvous. (On the surface they can sometimes be “forced” into a common stack of messages, but because these various platforms do not share the conversational context, they can’t actually rendezvous.)
What if I could respond to any message received in any media you choose to use with any medium I choose, and they would always rendezvous in the same conversation, the one you and I (or you and I and any number of people) have ongoing? And what if live voice and messaged voice (time shifted voice mails, if you like) also rendezvous in the same single place?
RebelVox supports this very thing. (Of course, that’s why I’m writing the post…)
The RebelVox protocol is totally indifferent to the type of media being transported, that is, we can support any media. We support conversations in which the user always gets to choose, at any given moment, what medium to use—always with the same application and the same messaging context. Except for latency optimization, the protocol doesn’t process live full-duplex voice any differently than voice messages or video streams or text or transcriptions of other streams (”derived streams”). It’s all the same in RebelVox. So any given “conversation” or thread can contain any or all media types totally interwoven. Each participant gets to contribute however they want an any given moment—but it all ends up in the right conversation; so no missed messages. And it really transforms multi-party conversations where anyone can be live at any time they want; but some can choose not to be live, but they’ll never miss any of it. Everyone gets to choose their favorite way and time to interact but are guaranteed that nothing is lost.
The whole rendezvous solution is summed up in the unique RebelVox interaction we call “catch up to live”. CTL enables you to join a live ongoing conversation, message, call, or conference, play it slightly faster if you want, and seamlessly transition into the live call, having missed nothing. You are leaving me a message, I notice, and I “catch up to live”, and then we are on a live call, but I heard it all.
Think about how that transforms the dropped call (just keep talking), the missed rendezvous, or the multliple conference calls that you can’t quite ever get to. Ever consider how cool it would be to pause any live conversation and then slip back in seamlessly without having missing anything?
It’s all about the rendezvous.
