Category Archives: Human Efficiency

Posts discussing how we can revolutionize the efficiency of human communications.

RebelVox CEO, Tom Katis, Discusses Tactical Voice

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Posted by Tom Katis on May 24, 2010 – 12:15 pm
Filed under Future Communications, Human Efficiency, Public Safety, Weak Spots in Tactical Communication Scenarios

In April, the Emerging Communications Conference (eComm) returned to Silicon Valley .  We have consistently found eComm to contain the most innovative thinking in communication technology.

Photo by James Duncan Davidson

Photo by James Duncan Davidson

RebelVox CEO, Tom Katis, gave an unusual talk for eComm: Everything You Think You Know About High Performance Military Communication is Wrong

As Tom points out, the radio is the most powerful weapon of any military unit and also it’s most important safety device. Everything rides on a unit’s ability to communicate effectively.

Because most of the audience is focused on commercial communications, it was thought provoking to take a dive into the world of Military communication and it’s unique capabilities and challenges.

New computing power and networking technology are changing the way people communicate and interact.  As we try to anticipate the future of communication, it helps to look at the very real challenges the most sophisticated and well financed military in the world faces as it tries to improve it’s already substantial capabilities.

This is something that RebelVox focuses on, in addition to the potential commercial application of our technology.

This is the third time RebelVox has participated in this important event. We’ll post the link to the talk when it becomes available.

RebelVox CEO Tom Katis in the News

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on August 20, 2009 – 3:51 pm
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.

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.

What is “rendezvous?”

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on May 21, 2009 – 11:07 am
Filed under Enriched Conversations, Human Efficiency

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.

Army Uses the iPod Touch

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on May 5, 2009 – 1:12 pm
Filed under Human Efficiency

An interesting article showed up in Newsweek this month about iPods being used by soldiers in the field (in particular the iPod Touch). And they are not being used to just play music, though that probably happens too, but to run critical applications. As commercial products, those you and I use everyday, get more powerful, they approach capabilities originally embedded in much more expensive devices. And not only are the devices cheaper, they are essentially more powerful and quite a bit more flexible.

Using a commercial product for such a crucial military role is a break from the past. Compared with devices built to military specifications, iPods are cheap. Apple, after all, has already done the research and manufacturing without taxpayer money. The iPod Touch retails for under $230, whereas a device made specifically for the military can cost far more.

In fact, today at Amazon the low-end 8 megabyte iPod Touch is $218.85 with free two-day shipping.

The trend to cheaper, faster, and more powerful consumer products, has been fueling a revolutionary change for the military, enabling them to adopt commercial products and leverage them for their needs. Traditionally every item was purpose-built to meet special requirements—mostly because we did not have commercial products that came anywhere close. But now commercial products surpass many military specifications and with drastically lower costs.

There is also the fact that we are solving problems (as noted in the article: translations, research, data collection and sharing) with software instead of hardware. Software is always cheaper. But who would have thought that the computer of choice for running these software applications would be an iPod—originally conceived to play music and videos.

Once you have a computer in your hand, no matter it’s small size and cost, many, many things are possible.

RebelVox on TechCrunch

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on March 30, 2009 – 7:23 am
Filed under Future Communications, Human Efficiency

Friday RebelVox got noticed on TechCrunch—with just a brief note about what we do. In addition, the day was an internal anniversary of sorts; so a special day all around.

The TechCrunch post illustrates a few of the challenges we face in trying to communicate about our core functionality and how it affects communication applications. Every analogy we use falls short–email is close in one regard; but then our protocol provides live voice. Voice messaging comes close but then we support asynchronous (and synchronous, for that matter) text. Push-to-talk is interesting—but we support an infinite degree of time shifting.

So how are we like email?

  • You get to talk or listen whether you have good network or not, in the same way you can do email on an airplane.
  • At the moment you talk, the other participants don’t have to be paying attention; and you never interrupt them.
  • You can get all your voice on any and every device anywhere, because it lives in the cloud.
  • You can save whatever voice conversations you want, just like email.
  • You can listen, review, replay, respond any time you want.
  • When RebelVox is integrated into the email infrastructure, you can can use email addresses for voice instead of phone numbers.

How are we like push to talk?

  • You can talk instantly. (But with RebelVox it doesn’t have to blare out the other’s speakers until they want it.)
  • You save time because there is no setup network time (no ringing, no messages, no prompts). Choose! Talk! Done! A five second message takes five seconds.
  • You can have preset conversations with any number of people—think of them as channels that do not have to be live. But can be live with anyone, whenever they want.

How are we like voice mail?

  • Well, we never like to compare ourselves to voice mail, but….
  • You can leave messages and listen to time shifted messages; but they are stored in meaningful contexts and can be among multiple parties.
  • And, did I mention that with RebelVox they can be live? (As in screening calls, playing faster, catching up to live.)

How are we totally unique?

  • Live voice, voice messaging (time shifted voice), text, location, and video all rendezvous in the same conversations, protocol, and applications. Nothing has to be unified because it is all one.
  • Only a RebelVox application or protocol enables you to seamlessly transition between live voice and time shifted voice, either direction, at the whim of how people use the system moment to moment.
  • Voice messages can transition into live calls and users can screen calls, play them faster, and catch up to live on a call with one party or many (including conference calls).
  • No other voice system that support live calls also extends the range of a challenged network by gracefully dealing with bandwidth shortfalls and extending voice when no live voice can take place. (We freely admit that we cannot manufacture bits where no bits are to be had.)
  • Only RebelVox persists all voice and once we’ve persisted conversations and their media, live voice becomes data and applications can be built to use voice in many meaningful ways: embedded in applications, voice as a media of record, transcriptions, translations, after action reviews, and other kinds of search, filters, and restructuring.

Only Rebelvox incorporates all the functionality of email, live voice, voice messaging, and text messaging together in one application and gives perfect control to both the sender and receiver over how they want to interact with their communications.

Between a Rock and a Very Hard Place

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on March 27, 2009 – 6:06 am
Filed under Human Efficiency, Transforming Radios, Weak Spots in Tactical Communication Scenarios

Some of the prime motivating factors for our work at RebelVox are stories of people caught without effective communications at a critical moment.

One story is of a team under fire in Afghanistan whose communication specialist cannot get enough radio connectivity to call for help from his point of safety. (The actual Rock.) He has to move out into the open, key his mic, and speak his request, which, of course, puts him in harms way for an extended period of time. He makes the call but is fatally wounded. (This is real story from Afghanistan: news story from the NY Daily News; the official Medal of Honor Page.) In fact, our CEO spent most of 2002 and 2003 on a Special Forces team in the same area where this event took place.

Another is a fire fighter deep in a building skirting around a large air conditioner (or some such) when the call to “get out of the building” comes. She misses it. And no one knows that she misses it. And she never knows that she missed anything.

A firefighting team in California is moving around the back side of fast moving fire through rough and hilly terrain. The plan is to skirt east around the edge of the fire. As they drop into a ravine, the radio call to tell them that the fire has shifted east, and that they should go west, never comes through their speakers.

One key problem in these situations is that our current model for radio functionality (how the comms application works) is that it is live or nothing. If there is not enough bandwidth for the radios to process the media (for both the sender and the receiver) at the moment the words are spoken, then there is no communication.

If the communications could be live but were not required to be live (if the technology in the radios and the network supported this), then, if the connectivity existed but did not meet the very high quality required for live, the communications could come through more slowly (but get there). Then the creation of the message and the use of radio spectrum would not have to happen at the same time: the radio, not the person, might have to get out into the open. Senders could know whether receivers got the message.

We hope and plan to fix these problems with tactical radios (and telephones, for that matter).The results of our solution enables us to change a lot of other things about how radio and telephone communications work. But these stories continue to be a inspiration for us. Get us into the office each day.

PS. For an explanation of what we call the “tyranny of live”–check out this post.

Tactical Communications, Part 1

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on February 23, 2009 – 10:23 am
Filed under Human Efficiency, Telephony

One focus at RebelVox is tactical communications. And by that, we usually mean communications in support of tactical operations for public safety or defense. But we also work in the consumer space, and, in thinking through some of the scenarios, we have noticed that a tactical mode of communication can be required in any market. While we tend to think of consumer telephony as family conversations, “calling mom”, chatting with friends, the truth is that we need telecommunications for all kinds of daily tactical challenges.

One meaning of tactical is: “of or relating to small-scale actions serving a larger purpose.” And a tactical communication is some part of a larger task that one is trying to accomplish. And in every day life, we have such larger purposes: we need to coordinate a future social event with ten friends; we need to meet up in the city with 4 people all using various forms of mass transit; a flat tire requires us to reschedule all of this afternoon’s appointments.

A tactical voice communication has a few requirements:

  • It has to go through to the right person (or maybe many persons).
  • It may or may not need to be live, but it has to go as efficiently and quickly as possible.
  • There is likely some response, coordination, or other information exchange required.
  • It would be great if the recipient (or many recipients) could get back to me simply.
  • It would be great if we didn’t do the irritating “pass you in the dark” voice mail exchange–again, imagine with many recipients.
  • In the group situation, it would also be helpful it everyone saw everything automatically—like “reply all” for email.
  • If you missed part of a conversation, you can always retrieve it and catch up on what’s going on.
  • You never miss anything.

When was the last time you tried to plan a large party by making phone calls to everyone? No, you would use email, of course. But what if you wanted to do it while you are driving to LA? Sometimes voice is best.

So a good voice solution for these things would include:

  • Live conversation if I and and any of my targets desires,
  • Any live conversations are maintained for any non-live participants,
  • Instant voice messages otherwise—to one or any number of participants,
  • Responding is as simple as choosing and talking (or typing),
  • All live talk and messages threaded into a conversation that keeps our context,
  • Interleaved voice or text in the same conversation so everyone can use what’s most convenient at the moment,
  • Ability to replay, retrieve, play faster, and if folks are talking live, catch up with the conversation and move into live with them,
  • All seamlessly persistent in one system with one point of rendezvous.

Turns out that this kind of “tactical” solution is important in all markets. It makes it easier to see that a more sophisticated voice application could be really handy, and not just to the fireman and sheriff, but to all of us every day.

The Tyranny of Live

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Posted by Mary Panttaja on February 9, 2009 – 10:29 am
Filed under Human Efficiency, It's About Time

“The tyranny of live” is a phrase we use around here to explain some of the archaic constraints surrounding the behaviors of phone calls and tactical radio communications.  In the “olden” days, communications were carried by a wire and the wire had to be in place between the communicators. Then things evolved so that the communications traveled over the airwaves, but the devices created the waveforms directly from live sound and converted the captured waveforms directly into sound. These physical behaviors created the sense, which some still accept, that voice conversations are a live media. Well, we don’t actually believe that, but we accept systems that still enforce this tyranny.

We all know that if you want to actually speak to someone now that the phone system has to find them, alert them, and capture their attention—that is, subject them to the tyranny of live, because that’s what you want to do. But did you realize that when you are leaving them a voice message that the system has the same behavior? It requires a “live” connection between you and the callee’s voice mail system (which doesn’t actually care that you are there at that moment)–with all the overhead that implies.

Of course, with today’s technology we don’t have to go straight from waveforms to sound or vice versa; we can digitize the data and do whatever we can imagine with it. We can save it; we can send it later; we can broadcast it, email it, transcribe it. (Most of us don’t do all these things with voice because it’s too much hassle to have 5 applications to replace our phones—even with all its limitations.)

The worse effect of accepting the tyranny of live is the fact that in tactical communications, the only messages you get are those that you can receive live, as in, real time now. Most of the radios send messages as they are spoken and transform the incoming messages directly into sound as they arrive. If there is any glitch in your real time network, a little bandwidth shortage, a piece of waveform disrupting hardware (an air conditioner, say), a bit of a hill, you never, ever receive that message. It is lost to you. And if no one repeats it at the right moment (how efficient is that?) you will not hear that message to get out of the building.

Things have to change for us to succeed in revolting against the tyranny of live, but it turns out that the technology is at hand in these days of IP networks and capable devices. And in the future your communications can happen when you want, and how you want, and you will spend as little “time” as possible making them effective.

Having it always work just the way you want is living with no tyranny at all.

How Skype is like TiVo…

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Posted by Jim Panttaja on January 27, 2009 – 4:54 pm
Filed under Human Efficiency

OK – here is one interesting way that Skype is like TiVo.

For a long time, many of my friends had TiVo – and I didn’t. I couldn’t quite imagine why I would want yet another contraption that I had to program. And somehow it recorded stuff from my television. Why would I want that? Well – it turned out for me that the ability to time shift (but I didn’t know this was the term when I first did it), and to not watch commercials were the killer features. I now can’t imagine how I would watch TV any other way. We now watch the news most nights when we get home – and watch the 30 minute program in about 20 minutes – whenever we want.

So ‘I can’t imagine why I want it’ became – ‘I can’t live without it.’

Skype came on to me in the same way. At first I knew people who were using it. They  were often unhappy – but kept using it. I had an engineering staff in San Francisco, and a contract team in Ukraine. One day – my team discovered Skype – and would spend hours a day (in various combinations) on Skype. This replaced some (but not all) IM communications, and made email communications much more specific – with code samples or documentation. The key was cost (telephone calls to Ukraine were prohibitive) and convenience (it is much easier than dialing).

In both cases – these tools offered some specific advantages over alternatives. If you don’t need (or don’t recognize) the advantages, you aren’t going to adopt them. Once you do – you can’t live without them. But how do technologies get past the ‘unrecognizable advantage’ phase? And how can we users figure out which technologies are going to take a place in our pantheon of dire necessities?

The answer would be, of course, the ultimate key to marketing success.