Category Archives: Future Communications

“Dumb” Pipes?

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Posted by Tom Katis on October 14, 2009 – 3:00 pm
Filed under Future Communications, Internet Protocol

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.

RebelVox in the New York Times

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on September 14, 2009 – 5:15 pm
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.

Orange Innovation Media Tour in Silicon Valley

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on July 20, 2009 – 2:42 pm
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.

FYI:
Orange Labs Profile: RebelVox

eComm in Amsterdam 2009- You need to be there!

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on July 9, 2009 – 3:59 pm
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

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on July 2, 2009 – 8:06 am
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.

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on June 12, 2009 – 10:12 am
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.

eComm Europe : Amsterdam Fall 2009

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on June 3, 2009 – 11:01 am
Filed under Future Communications

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.

Mention in Speech Technology 2009

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on May 18, 2009 – 10:52 am
Filed under Future Communications, It's About Time

We were pleased to see an article by Moshe Yudkowsky in Speech Technology Magazine about the RebelVox solution. It’s fun to hear the product described as “riveting”.

In March, I went to the Emerging Communications Conference (eComm) in San Francisco. There, a San Francisco-based voice communications platform vendor named RebelVox gave a riveting demonstration of a telephony interface that eliminates almost all of the overhead of making a telephone call. The company separates the act of sending your voice from making a connection, both of which are no longer bound in a rigid, linear time sequence. As a user, I select the name of the person I want to call from a list in what appears to be a standard instant messaging client. The application brings up a history of all of my calls and text and voice messages in typical IM format. I then touch the talk button and start to speak: My voice message transfers immediately to the person I’m calling.

New User Experience for Voice

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Posted by Dan S. on April 27, 2009 – 10:21 am
Filed under Future Communications

Visuals from the presentation our Vice President of Technology Matt Ranney gave at eComm 2009 have been posted online (see the slides below to follow along with the video):

and

Matt Ranney's Presentation at eComm 2009
View more presentations from eCommConf.

Thanks to Lee S Dryburgh at eComm.

What in the world is a “phone”?

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on April 22, 2009 – 10:54 am
Filed under Future Communications, Telephony

First there is the telephone, which is something that sits on a table or desk. Then there is the mobile phone (cell phone), which is something you can carry around with you. They both allow you to make “calls”. So what is the “phone” part? It is a device that has connectivity to the PSTN (public switched telephone network) and, when it makes a connection to another device, enables you to talk to that device live. (Now the device might be another phone, or it might be the voice mail system, or an answering machine.) There are some other twiddly-bits to a phone, but that is the basic idea. VoIP systems can bypass the PSTN sometimes when they run on the internet only, but otherwise work pretty much like phones. (VoIP does create streams of packets, but does it in such a way as to create a virtual circuit and connect you live to your destination (in order to be just like a phone.))

We have historically delivered this functionality with specialized devices that are dedicated to this task. Even modern smart phones, which do a lot of other things like take pictures and run web applications, have a special part of the device that is still just a phone with  historic phone behaviors (create a circuit to another device and allow a live call to take place.) We’ve added on more stuff, but left the phone function just as it has always been.

Of course, we know that what we really want is to talk to someone and have our speech delivered to that someone. Sometimes we’d like it to be live so we can talk together; and sometimes we don’t care about live. And now we have a device called a computer which, low and behold, can capture voice and deliver to others. It also has great advantages in that you can actually write applications which enable us to process the voice in other ways—not just live delivery which is all the phones do.

So why do we need phones? We don’t; or, more correctly, we won’t. We won’t need a specialized device. Basically, phones are an historic artifact from the days when we didn’t have computers. And they won’t go away immediately because they have an enormous infrastructure (think companies and network and hardware) that has yet to be re-purposed—that infrastructure can only manage a phone just the way it is currently conceived.

But it is all changing. The evolution is coming from both directions. Mobile phones are getting to be computers. And computers are getting to be so small and mobile that they are indistinguishable from phones. And networks are becoming more and more general purpose pipes to move our data and our voices.

So, without an enormous bout of innovation, what we think of as a phone is going to be obsolete. Not tomorrow, and not next year, but eventually. Eventually we will use computers of all sizes (like telephones and mobile phones today) and of varying degrees of mobility. They will come from what we think of now as phone manufacturers, but will also come from traditional and newly modeled computer manufacturers.

The really good news is that we’ll finally get some more sophisticated applications that will serve us better by saving wasted time, doing things when and how we want, and connecting us seamlessly to anyone in the world.

But it will no longer be a phone.

PS. You may think of your iPhone or your Blackberry as a general purpose device. But really they both embody two devices. One is the regular old phone system; and one is a multi-purpose computer. And so far, the power of the computer has not been unleashed for the “phone call” usage. Now you have a device that is a phone and a computer, but eventually you’ll be able to lose the “phone”.