In the spring, CEO Tom Katis, gave an interesting talk on military communications highlighting the challenges that can be addressed by a new application approach.
And check out our discussion of it in the previous post.
Author Archives: Mary Panttaja
Everything You Think You Know About High Performance Military Communications is Wrong
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Filed under Enriched Conversations, Future Communications, Weak Spots in Tactical Communication Scenarios
Tactical Applications: A Sea Change
Filed under Future Communications, Public Safety, Transforming Radios
While the US government has long pushed for increased use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology, an even more dramatic direction is being taken to foment change in the development and acquisition of new technologies to support our armed forces in their defense and public safety roles.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) released a pair of solicitations this week (one for information and another for proposals) that are an attempt to leverage the radical innovation pace of modern technology AND the very powerful standard communication infrastructures that we use everyday. They are moving to use standard platforms (like the iPhone and Android) and standard cellular networks to deploy networked applications in the support of operations across the world.
This changes the game in so many ways. While previously only incumbents with deep pockets could play—and often with legacy technology to protect (sometimes invented in previous decades). Purpose-built military technology is expensive (for lots of good and not so good reasons) and once in the field it is hard to consider replacing it. But in the area of communications, applications, and network technology the commercial world has left our military technology in the dust. It’s cheaper. It’s faster to evolve. And it’s robust because millions of us use it everyday.
At RebelVox we see this as one of the key shifts that will bring the strength of dynamic IP-based networks, traditional software development, and rapid innovation cycles to tactical users; bringing the applications and capabilities that we use in our everyday lives into the field effectively.
To read more on this topic, see this article from The Register.
Tom Katis, RebelVox CEO, Speaks at eComm Europe
Filed under Uncategorized
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
Productivity in the Enterprise-We Can Have More!
Filed under Enriched Conversations
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.
RebelVox in the New York Times
Filed under Enriched Conversations, Future Communications
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.
RebelVox CEO Tom Katis in the News
Filed under Enriched Conversations, Human Efficiency, Weak Spots in Tactical Communication Scenarios
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.
Orange Innovation Media Tour in Silicon Valley
Filed under Future Communications
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.
eComm in Amsterdam 2009- You need to be there!
Filed under Future Communications
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)
RebelVox as Email
Filed under Future Communications, Human Efficiency
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.
- You just hit send and you know it will be reliably delivered.
- It works on the open internet with any network access you have at the moment—use is not isolated to a special network.
- You can manage your email on any device—your computer, someone else’s computer, a phone, etc—it’s not tied to a particular device.
- You can work with it offline—on a plane, for example—and know it will be delivered as soon as possible.
- You don’t have to wait for anything to write and email; no waiting for network, signaling (ringing), or someone’s attention.
- You don’t have to interrupt someone to send them an email; and incoming emails don’t demand your attention (like a ringing phone) so you can pay attention precisely when you want. (This is because you know that you will not miss anything—it is reliable.)
- You can communicate with a group of people just as easily as an individual knowing that each of them will get the conversation with the whole group just exactly when they want to.
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.
RebelVox as the “Ultimate Solution”—we didn’t say it.
Filed under Future Communications
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.
