Web 2 Voice

Over on the IfByPhone blog, I posted a note on a mashup one of our guys did with Yelp.  With about 30 minutes of effort, and 20 lines of code, we opened up the entirety of the Yelp review database to anyone with a phone.

What the mashup does is ask you for the phone number of the business you’re looking for information on, and you get the total number of reviews for that business and the average review.  We’re working on phase 2 as we speak.

This is a little mashup that took almost no time, and yet has a good amount of utility (and we have ideas on on more features that will add more value to this service).  I published the mashup mainly to prove a point.  This simple and inexpensive mashup really provides great value to Yelp.  We’re opening up their database so that now it can be used be people with no access to a computer.

The value of a service like Yelp is not so much in the data.  It’s in the use of the data.  It’s great that they have a huge number of reviews on their site.  But it’s not until someone actually sees that data that it becomes useful.  By adding voice access to your database\applicaiton\network you can dramatically increase the usage of that data, and by definition the value of the service you are providing.

I encourage you to check out my post on IfByPhone’s blog.  But if you want to try out the mashup, just call 866.596.8333 and type in the number of the business you want reviewed (use 312.266.1616 for the place with the best ribs in Chicago).

I’m going to be sitting in a booth at Web 2.0 Expo, NY Wednesday and Thursday for IfByPhone.  If you are going to be around, stop by.  IfByPhone is announcing yet another application to go along with our ever expanding suite, so look for a press release soon.

I probably won’t be attending many of the talks, but the one I am hoping to see is Fred Wilson’s Keynote.  Today, Fred announced in his blog that his VC firm has invested in Zemanta.  You can check out related links provided by Zemanta below.  I think it’s a nice fit with their portfolio, and I like the service they provide.  Zemanta scans a post as you type, and suggests related articles and pictures to include in your post.  Pretty cool.

Related articles by Zemanta

• NYC Web Tech Events - Week of September 15 - Huge Week of Events!
• Can’t Go to Web 2.0 Expo? Network with Technology Influencers on Tuesday Night, 9/16
• Web 2.0 Expo Meeting Scheduling: Twitpitch Me!

My favorite VC blogger, Fred Wilson has a post today “The Lazy and Smarter Web.”

He talks about how great social media is because you can ask almost any question, and get great answers.  I commented that it’s great for Fred, because he has thousands of followers in his social net.  For regular people, not so much.  And thanks to Disqus, you can see the back and forth it generated here.

Anyway, his reply is that sooner or later, people will start following places (and presumably things and concepts).  So the limitaiton in followers (at least for Twitter) will go away.  This particular solution is limited to Twitter (I’d love to see something like dynamic rooms in FriendFeed).  But it’s a step in the right direction.

That’s yet another reason why Twitter is a big part of the future.  It’s really the best way to track the Internet Zeitgeist.  It’s a fast moving, reactionary, real time conversation.  We’re not quite there yet, but it’s getting closer.

Another reason Twitter is great is that someone now added voice to it.  Go check out Phweet.  It’s very cool - developed by Stuart Henshall and David Beckemeyer .

Saw the news first on Luca’s blog (OFFICIAL: BT acquires Ribbit for 105 Million).  The press release can be found here. I discussed this previously here, mainly agreeing with take.  But in reading the press release, it sounds as if BT paid $105 million for easier access to developers.

Some snippets:

JP Rangaswami, managing director of service design at BT, said: ‘Silicon Valley is emerging as a hotbed of telecommunications innovation. With Ribbit, not only do we extend our presence in the Valley, but we also gain a groundbreaking platform, a growing community of developers and a world-class team that share a common vision. Buying Ribbit lets us accelerate that vision.’

Since its launch, Ribbit has attracted thousands of developers, launched an innovative solution for the enterprise software market, and has begun testing a consumer application scheduled for general release later this year. The acquisition of the Ribbit platform will complement BT’s existing capability in the software platform space with its award-winning Software Development Kit (SDK) initiative. BT’s SDKs enable developers to integrate new applications with BT’s services using a single line of code.

I’m in the Voice 2.0 industry.  This is great news for me, my employer, and the industry as a whole.  BT would seem to ‘get it’ so to speak.  When I translate this deal, I think that BT understand the value of CEBP (Communications Enabled Business Processing), and apparently Ribbit’s relationship with developers (presumably mainly Flex developers).

So at this point, it’s not important whether they’re going to build a ‘Grand Central’ competitor or Skype competitor.  It seems like BT just wants to stay a step ahead of the game.  Just think if there was a company that had actual off the shelf applications, an API that didn’t force you to use any particular language and a low price point.  I wonder what that would be worth?  Just asking.

EDIT: You should go check out Thomas’ take here.

IfByPhone (my employer if you’re new here) released it’s Voice Broadcast application into the iTunes store.  It’s pretty simple actually.

You choose some contacts, record a message (IfByPhone will call either your iPhone or any other phone you’d like).  Then the message gets sent out when you want it delivered.
I spend a lot of time driving in the car - without the ability to safely send emails or SMS messages.  And I tend to forget to do things.  Like pick up the milk.  I’ve tried using Jott with Sandy.  The idea being that I could call Jott, have them interface with Sandy (a reminder service).  But it doesn’t really work.  Generally, the transcription of my voice isn’t relaiable enough to pick up both the task and the time.   But that’s a convoluted solution for a reminder call.  So I plan on using this app for that just as soon as I get an iPhone.

You can read my post at IfByPhone on the application here.

Today was a slightly confusing. Phone Boy wrote a post on GigaOM about Voice APIs, asking “is there money in Voice APIs?” His premise:

But is simply providing an API to your telephony infrastructure enough to prompt the world to beat a path to your door? Don’t count on it.

Before I get to his post, a personal nit to pick. Every Voice 2.0 post outside of this blog (and possibly post on the subject.

Today, the news hit that Voice 2.0 platform player Ribbit is being bought out for $55 million by British Telecom.  Great work by the Ribbit team. Full disclosure: My employer is IfByPhone, which - roughly speaking - plays in the same space as Ribbit.

It’s not particularly clear why BT is making this move, particularly for such a premium.  TechCruch thinks it’s about building a competitor to GrandCentral.  GrandCentral was bought by Google, and has been languishing on the sidelines since. hogwash, and I agree with him.  An excerpt:

It doesn’t pass Occam’s razor: there’s a simpler reason why BT would buy Ribbit. If BT recognizes that their Enterprise customers will deploy communications enabled business process applications, and Ribbit has some 3,000 developers already, and it looks like Adobe Flash has more traction than (ick) SOAP… you get the picture.

I definitely agree that BT buying Ribbit to build a GrandCentral competitor makes little sense.  The consumer end of things, which really is where GrandCentral is right now, is going to be higher cost of entry, higher risk (because the market of paying customers simply doesn’t exist yet).  The real reason, and Thomas hits it on the head here, is that businesses are coming on board with the idea that they can add voice to their existing business processes.  And one of the limitations of Ribbit (the idea that you have to use Adobe Flex) goes away.  BT can just build a team of developers that will build these processes for their customers.

This is similar to what many bigger Telco companies (like a former employer of mine, West Corporation) is doing.  So it shouldn’t shock anyone that  a Telco is interested in a company that will make it easier for them to integrate further with their existing companies.  They’ve been losing out on a great deal of business in this area, and buying Ribbit is a pretty neat and clean solution to get in the game quickly.

Also Read: VoipSupply on the Ribbit deal.

epiphany (as defined by Dicitonary.com): a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.

I was writing this post on IfByPhone’s blog today (JumpForward and IfByPhone in partnership), and immediately after that I found Garrett Smtih’s (Who is Voice 2.0 enabling?) and iLocus (Emerging merging with the ordinary). The three posts all deal with Voice 2.0 and the services that companies are providing.

A sample from Garrett:

“For a few years now, we have all been touting the promise of Voice 2.0, the death of the PSTN and the revolution that is upon us, yet to date, this new wave has not come crashing down on the traditional voice world with the might that one might think. It isn’t for a lack of trying, but mainly from a lack of a focused vision.”

and from iLocus:

“But the value of your network is proportional to the number of people that are inside that network, not outside that network. Look at the most successful IM clients.”

I think it’s a little sad that the Voice 2.0 sector hasn’t had more success in monetizing their services.  But Garrett is right.  The focus isn’t there.  Providing low cost phone calls is the WalMart approach to this problem.  We need to add real value - true innovation.  Right now, companies are fighting a battle between creating this market and monetizing it.   That’s why you see the WalMart approach.  Revenue needs to be there.

But what we really need to be focused on is adding voice to the places where it needs to be and really isn’t.  Where does voice have an advantage that Email, IM, wall postings don’t?  There are some conversations that need to happen by voice.  Voice 2.0 companies can bring that to a wide audience.

So the question is: Where is that audience?  It’s in social media.  The audience is on Facebook, on Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, even Plaxo.  Allowing people to have conversations that interest both parties is monetizable.  Be it a company wanting to know if you’ll be there to accept a package and using Twitter to ask for a real time response (assuming the fail whale goes away permanently), or be it a college coach wanting to connect to potential recruits that meet specific criteria via JumpForward.  Those are conversations that people will pay to have.

The real challenge is in finding people that want to talk to each other, and providing them the ability to do that.

One of the upcoming issues in the forthcoming Obama\McCain presidential race will be Net Neutrality. The big ISPs want to find all different kinds of ways to profit (read restrict use) of the Internet

John McCain said “When you control the pipe you should be able to get profit from your investment.’” Hey, I’m all for getting profits when you lay down an investment and are taking risks. This argument reminds me of a day in one of my History classes at NIU. The subject was Teddy Roosevelt, Elihu Root, and the busting of Trusts (or monopolies).

My memory (keep in mind that this is a long time in the past) is that there was some dissension on exactly what should and should not be regulated. At the time, the Steel, Oil and RailRoad industries were all largely controlled by monopolies of one kind or another. This led to all kinds of bad things for the consumers and competitors.

But are all monopolies bad? No, of course not. ComEd for the most part is a monopoly. Why is that ok, but Oil needed to be busted up? It has to do with the cost of competition. Take the railroads as an example.

Let’s say Khyle Railways is the first to lay a line down between Chicago and St. Louis. I now have a defacto monpoloy on all the traffic that needs to travel between those cities. I can charge whatever I want, give away free trips on the line to my buddies, and partners in other industries if I want to. But, surely someone will step up and become a competitor right? As it turns out, probably not.

The cost of laying the railroad down is pretty hefty. Plus, the profit the new competitor would derive would be limited (unless the demand is so high that both lines are near capacity). So really, the economics of the situation are against competition. So the economic theory presented that day in class was that if the proportion of upfront capital investment was so out of whack with the possible return, then regulation or a monopoly makes sense.

It’s the same thing with the ISPs. It’s expensive (at least today, who knows with WiMax and other technologies) to get a pipe to the mass of the residential markets. The providers are making decent profits, but really, they want to (ab)use their power by charging more, or by limiting bandwidth for applications they don’t like (or that potnentially compete with some of their higher margin offerings).

Te me at least, this doesn’t make any sense. As consumers, we are largely without choice. Sure, you could get a satellite connection, or maybe you have both DSL or cable available. But really, it all comes down to a few players controlling the entire ISP market. So my stance is that until the capital investment in residential ISP services comes down, regulation is needed.

On a final note, this is another example where big companies are fighting to keep their old advantages and are slow to capture the new economics of the situation.  The CEO of the company I work for, IfByPhone had an excellent post that captures this issue in the Voice 2.0 area.  The Telcos are currently still trying to cut costs, and as of yet have not fully embraced the Voice 2.0 concepts that are on the horizon.  The basic message is that as the cost of calls goes down, it becomes more and more important to do something interesting and engaging on top providing the actual transport of the call.

At least ISPs have more control over their fate.  Their services are a little more sticky than the telephony market.  But both are going to have to find way to use their advantages as the transport to open up more and new services for their end customers.

There are two very good posts today from people at the forefront of Voice 2.0.  Alec Saunders (Jajah change is in the wind) talks intelligently on how carriers are finally taking notice that they need to embrace the next wave - which is Voice 2.0.  In order to fight declining revenue and smaller margins, they need to find ways to increase traffic.  here.

I highly recommend that you read both pieces.  The heart of the argument really makes sense to me.  The bottom line is that one way or another the cost of calling is going towards zero.  The future of the market is not in simply driving more calls.  It’s in the intelligence that can be provided.  Or, another way to say it is that it’s the apps, baby.  The long tail is the part of the graph that shows the volume that can be generated by the Voice 2.0 applications.

All this sounds great.  There are a number of Telephony Application Providers (TAPs) that are trying to capitalize in this space, my employer IfByPhone being one of them.  There is momentum - even in the last few months, I have personally seen that things that seemed foreign to non-voice 2.0 people have become more accepted (like click-to-call for example).  However, I can’t see big carriers jumping in with both feet.  That’s just not something they do.  Their modus operandi is to avoid risk, so they want to see the success first.  For them, success=$.  And as of today, the market is not yet fully developed.

Big companies like airlines, prescription providers, travel companies, and the financial industry have been doing voice 2.0 ish things for years.  United Airlines has integrated voice into several of their line of business applications (even though they haven’t really promoted it as much as they should).

Sure, while there is still an opportunity for big companies to take advantage of CEBP (Communications Enabled Business Procresses), the real sweet spot is going to be in the mobile & SMB markets.  Once rich and interesting applications really engage those markets, that’s when the carriers are going to take notice.