1 conversation: 7 minutes to 1 minute. What did we lose?

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By Mary Panttaja on April 15, 2009 – 4:54 pm
Published in It's About Time

We have a video on our site that illustrates how RebelVox can work in the consumer or enterprise space. You get to feel how the messaging, live conversations, and the transition between those states actually works.

We estimate that the conversation shown, which includes leaving messages as well as a live conversation, would take about 7 minutes of the participant’s time to complete if they were using standard telelphony and voice mail. The participants, Sam and Jill, only speak for about 1 minute, which is about how long it takes to complete with RebelVox.

What’s missing?

  • Time waiting for a circuit to be created.
  • Time waiting for phones to ring.
  • Time waiting for someone to answer, or worst yet, not answer.
  • Time listening to voice mail prompts, only some of which come from your conversational partner. Most of them come unbidden from the carrier.
  • Time dialing into your voice mail to pick up messages—-and all of the above lost time.
  • Repeat ad infinitum.

Issues that contribute to the problem:

  • Most calls are not completed to their targets; a high percentage end up in voicemail. This is time-expensive for both the sender and receiver.
  • How long are most messages you leave? Many of them are very short. How does the overhead (waiting, ringing, prompts) measure up against the actual thing you need to say?
  • How many times a day does the average worker have to leave or pick up a message? Multiply that times how many people have voice mail?

This is not an insignificant piece of the gross national time bank—this is our precious time lost for no good purpose at all. The older generations seem so used to losing this time that they don’t even notice it. Younger generations, who have grown up with chat clients, not so much. They increasingly don’t use voicemail if they can help it. Unfortunately, they also give up on live voice, because, with this archaic model, it is so time consuming and far from the instant gratification they expect. Voice itself is actually quick and efficient, but the circuit switched technology overhead slows us down.

We think time savings is a good thing—and our goal is to generate a lot of it, for everyone.

RebelVox on TechCrunch

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By Mary Panttaja on March 30, 2009 – 7:23 am
Published in 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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By Mary Panttaja on March 27, 2009 – 6:06 am
Published in 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.

eComm Wrapup

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By Mary Panttaja on March 6, 2009 – 4:31 pm
Published in Future Communications

The eComm conference ended yesterday and it was a whirlwind of information transfer. As per conference founder, Lee Dryburgh, it was “five days of presentations in three.” It was a very wide ranging discussion and very successful. He is to be commended for creating and leading such a quality event.

A key to the vibrancy of this conference is the carefully crafted mix of topics: innovative technology (our focus), innovative business models, new product introductions, scientific research, social research, government policy, spectrum management, and always in the mix—the future of communications.

A few interesting presentations and facts:

  • We discussed spectrum allocation a lot. I was interested to learn that much of the allocated spectrum is going unused. The FCC doesn’t have any power to make sure that the spectrum as allocated and sold is actually used. And it turns out that even if an allocation is being used, it is being utilized at a very low percentage of its capacity. Everywhere.
  • The founder of Smule, Ge Wang, spoke. Smule delivers the iPhone applications “Ocarina” and “Sonic Lighter” (among others). He gave a fascinating talk covering all of his work in music at Princeton and Harvard (he is currently an assistant professor of music at Stanford.) While all the electronic music stuff was very cool, I was struck by the depth of the operational models that the Smule applications entail. There is the application itself (play music, or light the lighter); but much more: upload when and where the ocarina is being played, share the live music with anyone or everyone else, view a global map of everywhere someone is playing an ocarina right now, score music for the ocarina and publish it in a social network. It enables other kinds of creative sparks to fly: one Sonic Lighter user traced out “Hi” on the global map  by walking certain blocks in his Los Angeles neighborhood. (See additional Sonic Lighter note below.)
  • Weird resurfacing theme: wireless microphones. Turns out that wireless microphones are unlicensed but use licensed spectrum. It came up as a topic, or joke, in 5 or 6 different talks. We were using them extensively in the room all day.
  • The breadth of voice applications was impressive. Communication enabled business processes (CEBP) was a broad theme, much more so than user focused communication tools. Even Skype’s announcement was of a new codec, SILK, and not their upcoming release. One vendor joke that they were actually “planning to make money,” which seems to be a really good reason to focus on solid business cases.
  • There were a lot of vendor announcements (SILK from Skype; Voxeo with a new IVR platform release, etc.), but RebelVox was the one vendor who was totally new to the scene. No one knew who we were coming in, so our presentation was a bit of a surprise.

Most of the presentations can be found here. Videos of the event will probably come soon.

Note: In playing with my Smule Sonic Lighter, I discovered that I couldn’t blow it out. “Emphesyma,” someone suggested. But no, it would not work. Finally I accidentally discovered that there was a user preference setting: “Wind Input”. And mine was set to “off”. This software application has an input affordance which is wind.

RebelVox at eComm

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By Mary Panttaja on March 6, 2009 – 4:30 pm
Published in Future Communications

Matt Ranney, our VP Technology, did our first public presentation of our technology last Thursday in San Francisco at eComm. We were pretty pleased with the results. You can see the accompanying twitter feed.

There are also a couple of blog posts, the first notices of our coming out event:

Dean Bubley of Disruptive Wireless reports on the whole event and includes us:

Rebelvox, which has an interesting “timeshifting” voice technology, which essentially acts as a hybrid between push-to-talk and voice messaging and telephony. This is essentially another form of “non-telephony” VoIPo3G.

“Hybrid” is an interesting way to describe it.  One of our challenges is always describing what we do, for we do not “unify” something that has been separate, but rather totally replace the modalities of live voice, messaged voice, and text with something entirely different. They only look like the expected medium. Though we can make our applications behave just like the medium they replace, they are so much more dynamic, flexible, and useful after we have done our “hybrid” magic.

Alan Quayle also writes a report on the conference and mentions RebelVox.

RebelVox, new user experience for voice: Like Bubble Motion, with cute fast-play function to speed through listening to a voice message (based on a military technology), and ability to break into a live call.

It’s interesting to find us called “cute”, but good that people picked up on the tactical core of our work. Again, we come up on the difficulty of explaining something totally radical that looks a bit like things people expect. The play-faster, catch-up-to-live, and seamlessly transition into a live call really is a radical maneuver that cannot be accomplished without the RebelVox magic (patent pending, of course.)

And from Jan Linden, VP of Engineering of Global IP Solutions (which, by the way, is on our block in San Francisco) and who gave a very interesting talk on the challenges of deploying VoIP on the iPhone.

In terms of new applications/services I really liked Matt Ranney’s presentation on  RebelVox‘ technology that in a great way combines live and  asynchronous voice communications. This can be viewed as an integration of Voice SMS/IM, text IM, and live voice calls. This is definitely a type of service I would be prepared to pay for.

All in all, a good start to our public persona which will continue to evolve as we grow the company.

Taking Stuff Apart…

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By Mary Panttaja on March 2, 2009 – 8:09 am
Published in Telephony, Transforming Radios

I was reading part of Moshe Yudkowsky’s book “The Pebble and the Avalanche” in which he discusses the revolutionary potential of “taking things apart” or disaggregation. He talks a lot about the breakup of the AT&T monolith; and about how internet telephony disassociates the network transport from the actual voice application. This last break up is something we really focus on in our work.

Whenever you are creating something new out of something that exists—there is the issue of how it can be manipulated. How can it be taken apart? Where are the seams? Some of them are amazingly, intransigently invisible—30 years ago who would have thought that you could have a telephone call without a telephone company?

Constantly driving deep into a system over time, allows you to find “disassembly” edges that are not obvious. In communications, the industry has come to recognize a few key elements which were seemingly whole but are clearly not. We are aided by a primary creative force in our communication age, which is shifting communications from  old analog structures into computationally manageable components. This helps us envision elements that come apart:

  • The transport for voice and how the voice is experienced by the user are surprisingly not the same thing. Whether telephone, VoIP or radio, the user experience of the voice application need no longer be dictated by the reality of radio waves or sound transport. Most of our applications don’t actually do much if anything with this fact, but we could.
  • The liveness assumptions of the act speaking in person to another need not always be reflected in a digitally mediated conversation. And we do a little of that with voice, but with a system, voicemail, that still assumes the speaker much be in a live connection with the system.
  • Speakers (initiators) and listeners (receivers) need not pay attention at the same time. We use this fact in text (such as email) but not very effectively with voice.
  • The device and the message type need not be tied together: I do live voice with this device; I only can get or leave voice messages with a phone.  We can pick up our email from anywhere because it lives in the cloud; what if voice were the same. Why can’t I get (or make) my communications anywhere on any device, whether they are live or messaged, but still be able to also get them everywhere?
  • Why are message media (text, live voice, messaged voice, video) tied to different applications? In a purely digital world, it’s all data. Why not precisely the same mechanisms?  And how would that simplify the user experience?
  • In the tactical world, the pervasive tie to “liveness” originated by the nature of radio frequency technology has created protocols dependent on “live or nothing”; what if that was a choice that you didn’t have to make? What if you can have live and, if live is not possible, something much better than nothing?

The second (and third and fourth) step in creating new things by disassembling old things is figuring what to put back together and how. At this week’s eComm Conference, this will be a major source of discussion. As the telecommunications markets, platforms, and applications dissagregate, what shall we all make of it?

Tactical Communications, Part 1

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By Mary Panttaja on February 23, 2009 – 10:23 am
Published in 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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By Mary Panttaja on February 9, 2009 – 10:29 am
Published in 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.

Communications…the Revolution is Upon Us: eComm in March

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By Mary Panttaja on February 2, 2009 – 1:21 pm
Published in Future Communications, Telephony

As a traditionally software-oriented professional, it has been enlightening to realize over the past two years that telecom is now in my bailiwick. Every evolution of our software platforms and network infrastructure has been moving towards a world in which “everything” turns out to be software; but the field of telecommunications has been slower than most to feel the shift. (For interesting commentary on this, see Andreas Constantinou’s post on NaaS.)

Why? Many reasons, but most of it has to do with inertia. Any industry that has an enormous investment in infrastructure and massive existing markets will be slow to move. One finds oneself so embedded with the philosophy of simply finding a slightly better way to monetize market investments, that bold new thinking is too far outside the box to contemplate. In addition, all of our cultural assumptions concerning voice communications are pretty unyielding.

In this regard, software folks have a bit of an advantage. We are used our world being toppled into pieces with new paradigms on a regular basis. So, not only are software folks ready for the annual upset apple cart, we assume that we can “do anything with software”; and so we find some freedom to look at problems in radically different ways.

eComm 2009 in March will provide a wonderful forum where established telecom players and wildly varied “other players” will take a stab at envisioning the future of communications. They call it the “post-telecom” era bringing “cataclysmic change”, and, for sure, it is upon us. While it will take many years for the transitions we envision to play out, the game has changed. As we understand that what one does with communications (the application)  is separate from the ability to connect (the network), the power of the “application” will erode the historical control enforced by  network constraints (physical, social, and corporate).

This year’s eComm Conference has an amazing array of contributors to that future world, which is why we are excited to be a sponsor. We hope to share what we are doing, but also explore with the community there many new visions of the future.

How Skype is like TiVo…

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By Jim Panttaja on January 27, 2009 – 4:54 pm
Published in 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.