Orange Innovation Media Tour in Silicon Valley

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By Mary Panttaja on July 20, 2009 – 2:42 pm
Published in 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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By Mary Panttaja on July 9, 2009 – 3:59 pm
Published in 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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By Mary Panttaja on July 2, 2009 – 8:06 am
Published in 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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By Mary Panttaja on June 12, 2009 – 10:12 am
Published in 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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By Mary Panttaja on June 3, 2009 – 11:01 am
Published in 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.

What is “rendezvous?”

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By Mary Panttaja on May 21, 2009 – 11:07 am
Published in 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.

Mention in Speech Technology 2009

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By Mary Panttaja on May 18, 2009 – 10:52 am
Published in 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.

Army Uses the iPod Touch

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By Mary Panttaja on May 5, 2009 – 1:12 pm
Published in 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.

New User Experience for Voice

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By Dan S. on April 27, 2009 – 10:21 am
Published in 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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By Mary Panttaja on April 22, 2009 – 10:54 am
Published in 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”.