RJ Auburn - One Step Beyond

Voxeo has recently started a number of blogs over at blogs.voxeo.com to cover a number of topics of interest to the telephony space. The first blog Speaking of Standards covers Voxeo’s work in the IETF, W3C and other standards organizations. Voxeo Labs will be used to share a number of our experiences and thoughts on working with the different platforms and carriers we work in our network. Lastly Voxeo Talks shares general thoughts and comments from various Voxeons about the IVR and VoIP industry along with a view into what it’s like working at Voxeo.

We are just starting out so there be a few bumps as we finalize getting everything together but you should definitely take a look and add it to your list of feeds to follow.

Well so far this trip is starting off on the fun side with a bunch of flight delays from United. On the bright side they rebooked me on US Air automatically so it looks like I may actually make it to Vancouver before midnight. The real kicker however is going to be the 50 degree drop in temperature that is coming my way when I land:

On the serous side I am looking forward to a busy week of standards meetings and catching up with industry colleagues. Between sip, sipping, mediactl and all the other groups that I will be attending it will be a busy few days especially once you mix in a few customer meetings that I have scheduled with folks who are in the area.

Sometimes it’s shocking how expensive networking equipment can be. The current case in point is Cisco DWDM GBIC’s. These little puppies take in raw fiber and convert them into ethernet for high end switches and we have to use them to take in data feeds from some of our providers. The little guys weight about 2.5oz yet list for around $6,000! I need to remind our network team to treat these guys with kid gloves.

This posting on crappy enterprise software outlines so much of why I hate the status-quo and why when we started work on Prophecy that our goal was to make it as easy to use as shrink wrap software. It’s not that you would ever go into bestbuy and pick up an IVR platform but for the love of god it should not ship on 8 CD’s and require an expert to show up on your doorstep for a week to get it up and running.

Now while I think we have done a pretty good job in making Prophecy the easiest IVR platform on the market we think there is a lot more that can be done in the space. One of the mantra’s around our office is “how could we make this easer?”. It’s the question we try to ask ourself time and time again as we try to reach closer to our goal of killing off the quacking cow.

This week I am happy to welcome Dan York to the Voxeo team. Dan will be working for me in the Office of the CTO and will be focusing on emerging communication technology trends and helping out with representing Voxeo in the standards organizations like the IETF. Dan is an expert in the VoIP security space and has been an active VoIP blogger for several years now. Previously he worked in the Office of the CTO for Mitel.

Dan has a nice post about starting at Voxeo over on his Disruptive Telephony blog. If he’s not already in your newsfeed I would definitely take a moment and add him to your list.

Being a Mac user currently I need to put up with VMWare or Parallels in order to run Prophecy our premise IVR platform (At least until Prophecy 9 is released). For the most part everything works perfectly except for our SIP phone when running under VMWare Fusion. Sadly this one problem was really really nasty because it would cause the entire VM to crash leaving your VM config and disk file locked and required manual work to recover from. Our engineers had been unable to pinpoint what the problem was other then it was being triggered by some of the sound card tricks we have to do to make g711 ulaw play correctly on windows without occasional blips (thats another story for another day). We have sent bug reports off to VMware but never heard anything back about what the problem might be. For long longest time now I just put up with using SJPhone on the Mac side and avoiding the SIPPhone inside windows.

Anyway, today I decided to try the VMWare Fusion 1.1 beta build and I was thrilled to find out that it looks like this bug is fixed. I managed to place about 30 calls without having any problems when before it was would lock up about 1 in 4 times. Anyway, this release is highly worth downloading if you have struggled with this problem on a Mac.

The latest news today seems to be that Avaya is offering a “free” IP-PBX. In this case it’s not really free as much as they are offering 0% financing lease on their entry level PBX systems. Cute, even if it is somewhat misleading.

Anyway it’s interesting to see how some of the larger players are working to adapt to the new market where they can no longer sell phone systems that cost 5-6 figures out of the box for a basic starter system.

We certainly understand the value of making new technology easy to access to the small business. Thats why with Prophecy our premise IVR platform we have always offered free (really!) 2 port licenses that never expire and an easy up front pricing model for people who are looking to get started. Heck you can download set it up and buy it online in less then 10 minutes without ever having to talk to a person! Of course if you really want to talk to us we are always there 24×7 incase anything ever goes wrong.

I must say that Orlando surprises me at times. While it’s nothing like the Silicon Valley if you look past the mouse ears it does have a pretty decent geek community.

Anyway, the latest thing is that it looks like we are going to have a pretty nice Bar Camp on the 23rd of this month. There are currently over 200 attendees registered to attend so it looks like it should be a fun event. If you are in the area you should definitely check it out. I am going to sign up to do a session on creating phone applications but I know I am looking forward to seeing what else people in the area are working on. Ruby, mashups and blogging seem to be the hot topics so far.

Anyway, I hope to see any of you Orlando geeks there!

Our 3rd child Iris Ruth Auburn was born yesterday at 10:24AM. She was a healthy 8lbs 13oz and 20.5 inches long. Everyone is back home today and doing well.

I have posted pictures her to our flickr page.

Voxeo has been growing with leaps and bounds the last few years and we are currently looking to hire a bunch of smart people to help build out our team. We are profitable employe owned company located in the heart of sunny downtown Orlando that has survived the highs and the lows of the last several years.

We have a list of the “open” positions listed on the jobs section of our web site. However, even if you don’t see a direct match but want to work for an exciting, growing company drop us a line at jobs@voxeo.com and we will see if we can find something that fits.

Today I gave a presentation at etel about my ideas around Voice 2.0 and the simplification that is should go along with. While the slides really need me talking to go along with them I have uploaded them for your enjoyment.

As promised here is a link to the slides from my session today at etel on CCXML and VoiceXML applications.

Things that suck:

1: Having your hard drive crash.
2: Not having time to fix it for 4 months.

Things that don’t suck:

Having working backups.
Wordpress 2.0

Meet Emily, the Nice Evil Robot

When good VUI’s go wrong.

Eric Hernaez over at The Third Screen just came across rocketsource. If you have not seen his blog you should take a look. It covers some good stuff on the Telco 2.0 vision.

David Kang recently write a great tutorial on using SAP and Prophecy over on the SAP developer network. Anyone who is looking at getting started with VoiceXML on the SAP platform may want to take a look as it gives a good overview to getting up and running.

As promised here is a zipped up copy of the full day CCXML 1.0 tutorial that I ran with Mark Scott and Rachel Muller last week at speechtek. Please enjoy and if you have any questions please feel free to drop me a line.

Ahh, SpeechTek day one. The fun of early keynotes, booth setup, meetings and all around fun ;-) Guess I had better get moving and pick up my badge so I can make the keynote… See you guys around the floor.

CellTell.tv recently created a nice Telephony 2.0 application that shows exactly what I have been talking about with regards to where we need to be going in the telephony world.

Celltell.tv is a phone interface to the popular backpack web service from 37 signals. In case you have not heard of backback it is a very nice web based personal organization program. It manages todo lists, calendars, notes and just about anything else using a very simple web interface and has some great hooks into e-mail and a open developer API for extending it.

What CellTell has done is added way to create voice notes for your pages simply by placing a phone call to a VoiceXML application. When you call in and leave a message the recording is automatically uploaded to the backpack service allowing you to listen to the content when you are back at the computer. They support accessing it via toll free numbers, local numbers both in the US and the UK and skype.

This is just another of the ten’s of thousands of applications that have been created on Voxeo’s Evolution developer program. Anyone want to guess as to if we would have seen this service if people had to write low level C code modules instead of simple XML to make this work? Think of what the world would be like if you had to write an apache module for every web application! mod_rjauburncom anyone? ;-)