Alec checks out the original iPad while attending eComm 2010

About 20 years ago I was managing the Canadian operation of Quarterdeck, publisher of the very popular QEMM-386 memory manager for DOS. During that period Microsoft decided they needed to upgrade DOS to include some memory management features in DOS 5 and later DOS 6. Somehow the genius developer team at Quarterdeck always managed to stay a couple of versions ahead of the DOS feature set. But the experience also led me to meet Microsoft’s Canadian Product Manager for DOS, Alec Saunders. We jousted about our products but I also came to appreciate Alec as a respected player at Microsoft.

When I went to Los Angeles a year or two later to work with Quarterdeck on a corporate restructuring I needed to have meetings at Microsoft Redmond (don’t ask about the business reason – cause I forgot). I learned that Alec had moved to Redmond. One call to him ensured that I had the meetings I needed; we continued to cross paths as he moved on to become the first product manager for Internet Explorer (yes, Quarterdeck had a great browser – with tabs – but did not understand the Internet culture of beta testing), and we would always meet up at Comdex, amongst other shows.

Alec returned to Canada in 2000 where he worked with a successful Real Time Operating System company, called QNX – a company about which I had learned in the mid-80’s during my frequent trips to Ottawa. A year later he took up a business development position with a telecom equipment vendor. About four years later we met up again as he was considering the launch of a start-up that eventually became known as iotum with a conferencing product called CalliFlower. You will find many posts here about the evolution of CalliFlower. For about a year Alec hosted his daily SquawkBox conference call when a crowd of up to 20 to 30 enthusiasts would talk about IP-communications industry issues, meet several of the players as featured guests and contribute to the development of Calliflower’s feature set. During this time Alec gained experience developing applications for Facebook and the iPhone.

What I really came to appreciate is not only how well Alec understood the technology behind today’s IP-based communications and wireless technology but also about how well he understood the business and personal communications issues related to building a strong developer program for a platform. The combination of his Microsoft, QNX, Versatel and iotum start-up experience made him a frequent reference point for not only obtaining background on issues but also, often, my posts.

A few months ago I learned that Alec had commenced some consulting with RIM covering business development activities involving developer relations. I also was certainly having my own questions about how RIM was proceeding not only with their BlackBerry partners but also with the Playbook. It was pretty obvious that RIM was struggling on that front, especially when it came to developer relations. Alec could bring a lot to the table for RIM.

Towards the end of July I made a Skype call to Alec only to learn that he was on his first day on the job as Vice-President, Developer Relations for RIM. His initial focus is on the PlayBook, working with the QNX team in his home city of Ottawa (but probably now a frequent commuter to RIM Headquarters in Waterloo). Andy’s post yesterday made this public; the only previous external clues that something had changed were his occasional inquiries on Twitter and Facebook about how to use a MacBook Pro; it can now be disclosed why these queries were arising.

If RIM continues to hire experienced professionals of Alec’s caliber, it only improves RIM’s chances for success built around the QNX platform. Having been aware of QNX for over 25 years I learned that they have the most robust, crash-free operating system available – you can fly an airplane with it. It has several features that support true multitasking on multi-core processor platforms. QNX has a most compelling customer base as exemplified here. The challenge here is to leverage QNX’s key features and RIM’s historical enterprise pedigree to bring about a Playbook that takes off in directions that the iPad cannot touch. Suffice it to say there is a path to follow and it does not rely on being a direct competitor to the iPad. Is this a hint?.

Gizmodo defines Alec’s challenge here:

BlackBerry App World is like the sad broken-down amusement park your dad takes you to because when he was a kid it was the only place that had a log flume. You got behind with devs. You got beat. Get them back. Microsoft’s doing it—slowly, surely—with Windows Phone, and you can too. It’s going to take money, sure, but considering how many wasted investments you’ve been willing to make recently you might as well splurge on something useful.

You’ve got time before QNX makes its phone debut. Use that time to line up as many major devs as you can. Don’t just make BlackBerry a QWERTY storefront for Android apps. We have that already. It’s called Droid.

Bottom line: A strong developer relations program is only one critical component to RIM’s success. While Alec brings a lot to the table, RIM’s biggest challenge is to quickly build a disruptive platform that can become a market leader in its own niche.

Ever wonder how those “free” conferencing services work? Why did Magic Jack offer such a low price compared to legacy landline service providers? And why did this only work in the U.S.? Yet, how can Skype and other IP-based communications service providers continue to offer “free”?

Seem like the U.S. had developed subsidy programs, of which the Universal Service Fund (“USF”) was the main culprit. Idealistic politicians wanted to ensure universal access to a variety of constituencies including “High Cost” rural markets such that small service providers could offer conventional phone services at rates comparable to urban rates. So they came up with this Universal Service Fund whereby the “large” carriers would collect an additional fee (or tax) which was then paid out to the hundreds of smaller service providers in “rural” states such as Iowa and Minnesota.

But then some smart people in Iowa caught onto something. The 150+ small carriers in Iowa formed a co-operative that applied for and obtained $80MM of USF monies to set up one of the most powerful fibre networks in the U.S. Of course this meant Iowa had significant extra capacity for terminating calls.

But there was another catch.

The North American numbering system means that a minimum of 10,000 numbers had to be tied up with each “exchange” or central office (the first three digits of the local telephone number). But some of these rural service providers, each of which was assigned an “exchange”, may have had a very low number of actual customers (as low as 150) and certainly many fewer than 10,000. So they ended up with a huge surplus of unused numbers that could, however, be used to collect revenue through access charges and they had the call load capacity due to the fibre installation.

Basically if a caller made long distance calls into these “excess” numbers, the local “rural” service provider could collect, from the larger carriers, termination fees (access charges) which they, in turn, supposedly would collect from the call participants. However, the larger carriers had invoked fixed price, unlimited minutes North American calling plans; this limited their additional customer revenue while driving up their costs. Not a great business scenario.

Once the “local” providers received their funds, they would pay a portion to the conferencing service providers. Effectively it was these access charges that would generate revenues for the “Free” conferencing services. There was one major problem; suddenly larger carriers such as AT&T were getting bills for several million dollars per month; they objected and took their case to the FCC.

And the gravy train has run off the tracks … largely at the behest of the FCC according, in one case, to the Telecom Law Monitor. Two stories corroborate this:

Calliflower, a conferencing service which I have covered often, has eliminated their free calling option. According to a recent post:

There’s an old saying that you have to break an egg to make an omelette.  Today I have some sad news as well,  which is that that we are eliminating our free conference calling offering on March 25th. Eliminating the free offering has been a tough decision, and one that we’ve given a lot of thought. We’re doing it because it is simply impossible for us to continue to offer that service reliably in the face of continued opposition at the FCC in Washington DC from larger, incumbent carriers.

You’re probably asking “what do these carriers have to do with anything?” A lot, it turns out. We were able to offer Calliflower at no charge by sharing a portion of the long distance fee you paid to your carrier in order to access the conference service. Those carriers don’t want to pay anymore. In fact, we haven’t been paid by them in two years. Unfortunately, we can’t operate the service any longer without any ability to recover our costs. That’s the reason we made this very difficult decision.

And this past Monday it came out that Magic Jack is in a position to lose its “Magic” because their parent was providing services not listed in their tariffs filed with the FCC. To quote Andy:

Basically  YMAX, the CLEC, was planning to make money on access charge compensation. AT&T said, we’re not paying the rates you want to charge. Well it seems the FCC agreed. That means that MagicJack’s model of cheap no longer means, almost free or at breakeven to them, and brings to light the fact that they may now see the possibility of losing money on every call without their sister company making a profit on the access charges which subsidized what they have been doing.

Read the posts for more details. But the bottom line is that, if you want to host a conference call, you’ll pay. However, even at the rates charged today – and most are at fixed monthly rates — conference calls are orders of magnitude less expensive than ten to fifteen years ago when the telcos would charge $0.50 to >$1.00 per participant per minute.

Nobody in his right mind is going to start a service today that relies on these “subsidies”. The dilemma for Magic Jack and their parent is that they have effectively offered one year contracts to their customers and must deliver on them or otherwise compensate their customer base. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

And how can Skype continue to offer free Skype-to-Skype calling? Because at the most basic level Skype calls are peer-to-peer between or amongst participating PC’s (or other Skype-enabled devices) with no intermediary beyond a directory service to establish the initial connection – and no termination charges. The “carrier” is essentially your Internet connections which see voice “packets”, prioritized but on a peer level with the data packets that deliver web pages or your email. But then they add in – at no cost to the user – chat and multi-party voice calling along with other services such as one-to-one video calling and file transfer. And it’s all encrypted. The user’s real costs are your local PC or other terminating device hardware cost and having a broadband or faster Internet connection. Other than for directory servers and, as a result of a recent Skype outage, super node servers, Skype has very little capital costs associated with these services.

Bottom line: even at today’s rates hosted and managed conferencing services are a bargain compared to a decade ago or earlier. But, without the cost drivers, it appears that Skype can continue to offer all its services with the only costs being for connections to the PSTN and multi-party video calling.

So where does Skype gets its revenues? Check out the most read Voice On The Web blog post (even after two years): Skype Business Model Revealed at eBay Analyst Event.

Related articles

• FCC Finds MagicJack Can’t Collect Access Charges From AT&T (blogs.forbes.com)
• Update: MagicJack Responds To FCC Ruling In AT&T Case (blogs.forbes.com)
• MagicJack trips on tariff ruling (calliflower.com)
• NetTALK positions against MagicJack and Skype (skypejournal.com)

Since its launch about two years ago, I have blogged several times about iotum’s CalliFlower Conference Calling service. More significantly I have used it for several conference calls of up to 25 people, including a couple that ran for over two hours. While permitting up to several hundred participants into a conference call, Calliflower’s primary unique feature is the “portal” created for each call along with the long term archiving of a call and its associated “portal”. Other features include:

• access via the PSTN in over 100 cities in 30 countries (using phone numbers supplied by Voxbone)
• ability to display (and share) documents supporting the conference call’s agenda
• a common chat window, often used to share URL’s, provide information complementary to the primary discussion or even ensure all participants have correct spellings of key words used in the discussion
• a complete service that supports the entire conference call process from initial invitations to the final archiving of the call
• an iPhone client for setting up and accessing a CalliFlower session
• sessions can be either private requiring invitations or public; the archived content of public sessions is searchable

Today iotum has announced the addition of Skype as a way to access Calliflower conference calls; from the press release:

Previously, participants could only dial into Calliflower conferences through PSTN access numbers, potentially incurring local charges.  In regions or countries where no such access numbers are available, customers would incur long-distance and even international charges, or use up Skype-out minutes calling access numbers overseas.  Now callers can access Calliflower through a Skype ID – CalliflowerSkype – or via a web button in the Calliflower UI, overcoming this disadvantage.

“We’ve had many requests from potential Calliflower customers who had no local access numbers, especially from  parts of Africa, India, China and the Middle East,” said Alec Saunders, iotum CEO. “Now, as long as they have Skype, that doesn’t matter anymore.”

In addition, users gain from the better audio quality they will enjoy through direct Skype access¹, as well as from all the visual information, documents and presentations that are shared through Calliflower’s interactive dashboard. These tools go a long way toward improving understanding on international conference calls.

Available on PC, Mac and iPhone, Calliflower makes organizing and participating in multi-party calls simple and engaging.  It allows participants to see the status of other callers and raise hands to request the floor, while also providing interactive chat, document sharing, intuitive conference controls, call recording, invitations and reminders, integration with calendars, and more.

On your initial access to a CalliFlower call you will need to add CalliFlowerSkype as a Skype Contact. But then recall that Skype allows you the option of using your Skype Online number or a designated mobile phone number as your caller ID for SkypeOut calls. When accessing a CalliFlower conference call on Skype, CalliFlower will look at your callerID in place of entering a PIN number to provide authentication for your access. iotum is looking at adding the ability to use your SkypeID as a participant identifier.

As with access in over 30 countries via the PSTN, Skype Access in CalliFlower is included in the monthly Premium service with a monthly charge of $50 for the first two moderators or organizers within a company and $25 per additional organizer.

Bottom line: Skype Access opens up lower cost access for participation in a CalliFlower conference call in every country where Skype is available. Incorporation of Skype access also fits into Skype’s “Skype Everywhere” goal. In this case calls can be accessed not only via Skype on a PC but also from any Skype offering on a mobile platform. This is enhanced for iPhone users where they will also find an iPhone client for setting up and managing a CalliFlower conference call.

¹I asked iotum CEO Alec Saunders to clarify the statement re improved auido quality; his response:

1. Better quality hardware. Skype users tend to be using better quality equipment than POTS callers.  In particular most PC headsets have a better microphone than the cheap microphones in telephone handsets.
2. 2. Fewer transcoding losses. Internally, Calliflower is VoIP.  When a user calls Calliflower from the PSTN, those calls transit a media gateway where the media is transcoded and presented as G.711.  Prior to the direct connection we’ve initiated, media coming from Skype would be transcoded at least twice – from Skype to the PSTN, and then PSTN to G.711.  The result was a noticeable degradation in quality.  Now Skype presents the media to us directly as G.711.

Other posts:

Check out Tom Keating’s post over at his VoIP and Gadgets blog on TMCNet where he interviews iotum CEO Alec Saunders about how CalliFlower implemented its Skype access via Skype for SIP, involving Skype for SIP’s addition of IP address authentication.

Full disclosure: the author has followed the evolution of CalliFlower over its three year development process, and was a frequent participant in iotum’s SquawkBox calls where not only did we discuss technology news of the day but also contributed ideas and suggestions for improvements and enhancements to the CalliFlower service. You can access the archive of the SquawkBox call discussing the FREETALK Everyman headset at the time of its launch here.

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• Skype – not just for computers! (en.onsoftware.com)
• Is WiFi Becoming the Unregulated Stealth Carrier of the Future? (voiceontheweb.biz)
• HiDef Conferencing Relaunches as a Service of Citrix Online’s Audio Services Group (voiceontheweb.biz)

Citrix Audio Services Group (formerly VAPPS, Inc.) has repackaged its “stand alone” HiDef Conferencing offerings to provide clearer, more predictable charges while relaunching its website to be more consistent with the Citrix Online brand. ASG is also about to become the preferred supplier of voice services for Citrix Online collaboration services such as GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar.

While Skype has always featured the ability to support multi-party voice calls, now with up to 25 participants provided one has a recent generation PC, it has never been a managed conferencing service, complete with moderator support and web-based call participant portals other than the Skype client itself. Hosting a Skype multi-party call also relies on the host’s PC resources (processor speed, audio hardware, Internet upload speed amongst others). However, two players have emerged to offer hosted and managed conferencing services over the past few years: VAPPS with its HiDef Conferencing service and iotum’s CalliFlower service.

Having developed over the past few years a unique conferencing server that could handle HD Voice where supported at any user’s endpoint, last fall VAPPS was acquired by Citrix, a veteran of remote computer services, and is emerging now as the Audio Services Group of its Citrix Online business unit. The two primary services for ASG are:

• HiDef Conferencing – moderator managed audio conferencing with flat rate packages for up to 150 participants
• HiDef Corporate – an enterprise grade, moderator managed audio conferencing service supporting meetings with up to 1000 participants

HiDef Conferencing can complement any collaboration service that incorporates desktop sharing. However, it is also becoming the preferred voice service that complements Citrix Online’s GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar online meeting services.

HiDef Conferencing is offered via four bundling plans that support 10, 25, 50 and 150 call participants. As in the past, HiDef Conferencing features include:

• Unlimited “local” or “Tolled” access via numbers in 14 countries
• Free unlimited access via Skype
• Toll –free calling minutes (500, 1000, 2000 and 3750 monthly minutes respectively)
  • Minutes shown are for all callers, both organizers and participants.
• High Definition Voice where end points support HD Voice; for instance Skype call participants will more clearly hear other Skype call participants due to Skype’s support of high bandwidth (8 KHz) audio
• Call recording
• Hand raising
• A Moderator call management portal, shown above, encompasses caller invitations, call recording activation, participant muting, call locking/unlocking (to allow or not allow additional participants) and caller disconnect.

Summarizing the relaunch:

• HiDef Conferencing’s value-add comes with it caller management services (including moderator panels), HD Voice support and packages that bundle a mélange of fixed cost call access options.
• By year end, HiDef Conferencing will be the sole recommended supplier of voice services for Citrix Online’s GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar meeting services that incorporate desktop sharing and some chat features. Bringing the higher voice quality of HD Voice to these meetings could actually shorten the meetings.
• HiDef Conferencing has brought its website into line with Citrix Online branding.

Bottom Line: Joining Citrix has brought to HiDef Conferencing the infrastructure and market reach it could never have hoped to have achieved so rapidly on its own. As a hosted service with HD Voice support, it sets a standard for enterprise grade voice conference calling. And with free calling for Skype participants, it will be interesting to see if this feature helps drive Skype adoption as one other high profile service within the Skype for Business ecosystem.

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• Ben Lilienthal on HiDef Audio, Skype, and conferencing (skypejournal.com)
• Skype’s Stefan Öberg @ Interop: Stealthing Skype Into Business, But Cover the Entire Skype Ecosystem (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Yuuguu Offers Skype Users Cross Network Instant Messaging, Screen Sharing And Real Time Collaboration (sociableblog.com)
• Skype for Asterisk Release Marries Skype Calling into Popular Asterisk PBX Platform (voiceontheweb.biz)

Over the past eighteen months I have often reported on iotum’s Calliflower voice conferencing service as it has evolved and matured. For the first time in a few months I had occasion to use it once again yesterday evening. Connecting  11 participants in the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto triangle, New York and Virginia, I can report on an excellent quality, two hour and ten minute call with no interruptions where everyone was clearly understood. (Even the dogs co-operated by not barking in the background although someone’s cell phone did ring at one point.) And it’s archived for access by all members of the group, including those who could not participate in the call.

However, not only has the overall consistency of call quality improved but calls hosted by a Premium Service subscriber ($50/month for two organizers, unlimited calling and participants) can now be accessed “locally” from over 100 cities in 30 countries:

Calliflower flat-rate conferencing services are now available in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

If there was one improvement that could be made it would be to make it more obvious on the invitation emails that a participant should RSVP whether they will/may/will not attend. As demonstrated with recent enhancements to Tungle, the meeting scheduling service, invitation emails must clearly explain all the steps to be taken to respond to the invitation appropriately. In my case yesterday, I was sending invitation emails to “newbies” unfamiliar with the service; some did not know how to respond. As a result I had to send separate emails to non-responding participants to ensure they knew how to access the service.  The issue has been reported to iotum personnel who now have this issue as a “ToDo” item on their action list.

And how much of a value is this service? Ten years ago, using Bell Canada conferencing service, the 11-party call I mentioned in the introduction would have cost $787.00 with additional minutes at a cost of $0.55 per minute per participant just for the voice service. How business models change! But with Calliflower you can also see who is on the call, manage participation through muting and hand raising, share documents, augment the conversation through a chat window and record/archive the call.

Bottom line: with a rewording of their email invitations, Calliflower certainly delivers on its offering of unlimited calling from over 100 cities worldwide along with tools that enhance the conversation. During last night’s call, Calliflower went into the background and was transparent to the discussion; we accomplished our meeting agenda and objectives uninterrupted by the technology.

Overlooked: Calliflower conference calls can also be scheduled, accessed and moderated via their iPhone application.

Click here for more details about the Calliflower service

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• Calliflower expands: Flat Rate International Conference Calls now available from 30 Countries. (saunderslog.com)

I first met iotum CEO Alec Saunders as a competitor in the Canadian PC software market back in 1994. I was Canadian Country Manager for Quarterdeck whose QEMM-386 memory manager had been the tops-selling utility for DOS-based PC’s; Alec was Microsoft’s Canada’s Product Manager for DOS where they were introducing some memory management techniques into DOS 5 and DOS 6. (All to deal with the violation of the Bill Gates’-attributed memory maximum statement “640K is more memory than anyone will ever need.”)

But Quarterdeck’s development team kept coming up with ingenious ways to move drivers and other small utility programs outside the “640K” limit. QEMM-386 allowed users to, say, connect to networks while running multiple programs in this memory constrained environment using Quarterdeck’s DESQview. With the introduction of DOS 5 in 1991 and DOS 6 in 1993, QEMM-386 sales actually increased as awareness of memory management as a resource issue increased. Of course the introduction of Window 95 in August 1995 killed the need for a memory management utility altogether. But the point here is that Alec and I participated in a competitive environment that was actually mutually beneficial to us both; thus defining “co-opetition”.

We both moved on – Alec to Microsoft headquarters to become the original Internet Explorer Product Manager, myself to Los Angeles to work with a restructuring team at Quarterdeck. We would meet at conventions (usually Comdex) and occasionally exchange emails and phone calls for whatever business reasons. Alec returned to Ottawa in 2001 to take up product management and marketing positions with a couple of startups.

In April, 2004 I received a phone call from Howard Thaw, another acquaintance from my days involved with distribution of PC hardware and software in Canada, asking me to have a coffee with him during one of my trips to Ottawa on another project. He presented me with documents supporting his and Alec’s proposal to start up a new venture involving “applications that take advantage of the opportunities opened up by the emerging IP-based communications space”. The philosophy behind this goal is summed up in Alec’s Voice 2.0 Manifesto, pointing out that the value-add going forward in the communications space will be the applications.

After several iterations and developing some unique software, as well as winning a DEMO God award in 2006 iotum launched in the fall 2o07, initially as a Facebook application, Free Conference Call, a multi-party conference calling service which evolved over time into supporting the complete conference call process; the outcome then relaunched as CalliFlower in June, 2008. Through all this time I have also been privy to many of the financing trials and tribulations Alec and Howard have encountered as a startup.

Fast forward to the fall of 2008. iotum had decided there was an business opportunity in making an iPhone application for participants in CalliFlower conference calls.

Update, April 22, 2009: The posts previously linked here related to an issue that has subsequently been resolved satisfactorily with the developer who was the subject of the posts; the posts have been removed. However, I leave the remaining content in this post as it does make a point about how any outsourced service or outside contractor needs to be viewed as a team member even though they don’t have full “employee” status.

However, Alec sums up the situation very succinctly in the third post:

The lesson to be learned here is pretty simple.  When you bring a contractor into your organization you’re adding that person, albeit temporarily, to your team.  You expect to be able to work with them, through good and bad. To do that demands a certain generosity of spirit from all members of the team.

All across America, businesses are waking up to the reality that in this economic environment, team work is the key to getting through this crisis.  Whether it’s GM and their unions, the banks and their mortgagees, or the tech start-ups in Silicon Valley, businesses are learning that accommodation, flexibility, and sacrifice, not egos, are the formula for success.

When [a contract developer] failed on his first deliverable as part of our team, we simply worked through it with him.  But when we asked him to return the favour, he refused.   That’s why, in my opinion, he [was] not [at the time] much of a team player.

And that’s the reason I couldn’t [at the time] recommend [developer name] to my friend.

We had a similar experience at Quarterdeck when developing a Voice Over IP application called WebTalk in 1995. We needed additional resources beyond our internal development team, including a developer company to develop the codecs. Part way through the project, they tried an “extortionist” play. They quickly learned that, if you take on a development contract, it’s not about just delivering code; it’s also about demonstrating that you have the business smarts to realize that, even when you’re not an employee, you – as a contracted developer – better be prepared to play as a member of the team contracting your development expertise. And, as a team member, you work through the problems, including the financial issues, with from the perspective of being a team member.

There are many opportunities arising for developers in today’s communications markets, not only in the smartphone app store space (Apple, BlackBerry,etc.) but also with other platforms such as Skype and WordPress. If you’re a contract developer with this expertise, ensure you are comfortable, not only with the thrill of technical development but also the ride of working with startups who may be otherwise resource challenged, including financially – especially in today’s economic environment. You never know when your co-operation may result in having been a participant in that breakthrough “brass ring” opportunity.

In my thirteen years of running a consulting business, my clients have occasionally been challenged financially. Yet, in all circumstances, they brought their issues to me, we worked out a payment or compensation plan and I eventually was paid. (Some careers died in the process where a management change was involved.) But without that flexibility, I would never have received in one case, about two years later, funds that I needed to help my oldest son complete his medical degree at Stanford.

In today’s environment, rife with both opportunities yet significant economic challenges and barriers, it’s about building relationships for the long term, not burning bridges for short term gain.

Over the past three days there has been a continuous stream of presentations that provide insight into a wide range of issues, opportunities and perspectives in the IP-based communications space going forward. While there will be more posts covering individual presentations, it’s worth taking time to mention a few highlights:

• Most innovative, outside-the-box, presentation: Ge Wang of SMULE (Sonic Mule) and his presentation including recordings of the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO). Become your own iPhone musician by breathing gently into the iPhone’s mic using their Ocarina iPhone application (warning: small fee $0.99).
• Most outstanding announcements: three offerings that open up new user experience opportunities in a Voice 2.0 world (Yes, I already blogged about these but they still stand out as winners for both the service providers and end users.)
  • Voxeo: Tropo.com opens up the Voxeo platform,  previously limited to the small population of voice developers, to hundreds of thousands of web developers.
  • Skype: making the superwideband SILK codec available royalty-free to any relevant hardware or software vendor that wants to bring new user experiences to voice calling.
  • Jaduka: the appointment of Thomas Howe as CEO will accelerate the adoption of voice into existing business processes, eliminating the error-prone mundane while opening up new standards for applications such as healthcare procedures, customer satisfaction and service deployment.
• Other presentations of note:
  • Martin Geddes, Head of Strategy, BT: there is value in addressing issues of efficiency and effectiveness inherent to business processes. Martin proposes that the key business model is to satisfy the needs of parties who want to interact with customers; for instance, improve the productivity of call center employees
  • Shai Berger, Fonolo, whose deep dialing service has now mapped out the IVR trees of over 500 companies and presents new opportunities for customer service operations.
  • Mobivox, expanding their voice-activated mobile services platform with their CRM for Voice business tools.
  • iNum, announcing support for IM and presence, initially with Google Talk
  • Alan Duric continues to see ongoing profitability and success at Norwegian service provider Telio. Why? a continuous stream of innovation and new value-added services.
• Some themes and issues across multiple presentations:
  • Spectrum 2.0: several presentations and a panel covering issues related to (the lack of) spectrum management and “white space”. In major markets over 90% of available spectrum remains unutilized.
  • Regulatory issues: the challenge of creating and executing a user-oriented regulatory framework under “the first technology administration”. Network neutrality: is it more a “buzz phrase” than a real issue? Seeding the policy makers with players who understand regulatory issues from both an innovation and business opportunity orientation as opposed to supporting monopolies or duopolies. Aligning regulation with the application potential of emerging communications technology.
  • API’s: several presentations from vendors who provide free API’s that support third party developers in writing applications that are then hosted by the vendor: IfByPhone, Voxeo, Jaduka, Ribbit, Adhearsion (whose Jay Phillips, right, provided a tutorial incorporating programming to Skype for Asterisk),

One note: there were a lot of innovators and forward thinking people amongst both the speakers and the audience. Most interesting was that there were at least six attendees from carriers who were asking the questions about how carriers can adapt to this emerging communications world: SaskTel (2), T-Mobile US, Rogers, NTT. eComm’s biggest challenge for next year will be to attract a larger audience of carrier personnel. In personal conversations I learned a lot about their issues that may work its way into future commentary.

Overall, eComm 2009 once again provided a primer in a wide range of aspects of the emerging communications space. With Thomas Howe leading Jaduka’s CEBP charge into larger enterprises, Voxeo addressing a huge community of web developers, Skype offering new levels of call quality to the entire communications hardware and software community, Fonolo solving that PITA known as punching your way through company IVR systems and Calliflower offering new user experiences in conference calls, the next few months will prove most interesting. Most challenging to observe will be how these technologies and services assist business and personal issues in times of a most challenging overall economy.

Timothy Hay, Wall Street Journal wrote up Jon Arnold’s panel on “New Ways to Monetize Voice” : VoIP Start-Ups Scramble To Find Niche (subscription may be required)

Alec Saunders: eComm – strong stuff

Over the past eighteen months CalliFlower has evolved into a complete audio conference call service. While they still offer a basic free service, in January they launched a premium service that provides document sharing, local calling numbers in North America, Europe and Australia as well as a feature that allows administrators to set up, but not necessarily participate in, a conference call. The most important feature is “no per minute charges”; you get “unlimited calling with an unlimited number of participants”.

Last week, over at Web Worker Daily, I wrote a post “Search Transforms CalliFlower Sessions from Events to Social Media Elements” where CalliFlower had announced that they had made all public CalliFlower sessions searchable such that they become part of an ongoing social networking conversation. My conclusion:

If you are into social networking by engaging your customers through blogs, Twitter and/or Facebook, check out CalliFlower as one additional element for carrying on your ongoing public customer conversations.

Yesterday the CalliFlower team woke up to learn that their CalliFlower for iPhone had been added to the Apple App Store overnight. (Yes, apparently “it just happens”; Apple uploads new or upgraded applications with no notice.) The iPhone application provides access to all of CalliFlower’s features with the exception of document sharing (which requires Adobe Flash – an issue for all smartphones). Set up a call, see your upcoming calls, see who’s on the call, participate in the chat wall and, of course, call in from your iPhone – they’re all there providing a unique mobile smartphone conference call experience. iotum CEO Alec Saunders provides more details in his post “CalliFlower on iPhone releases“  where he states:

And Calliflower on iPhone – well, let me just say that you’re going to love it.  We’ve remained faithful to the Calliflower experience on the web, while taking full advantage of the iPhone experience giving you the hands down BEST mobile conferencing experience ever.  Here’s a few examples of what I mean.

Check out my Web Worker Daily post and Alec’s full description of CalliFlower for iPhone. Also note that CATA makes Calliflower available to 28,500 members. If you have not signed up for the service, give it a try. Or install on your iPhone via iTunes here.

Full disclosure: the author is a user of the service for a non-blogging related project with great success. I call in to CalliFlower calls via SkypeOut.

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With both VoiceCon and Under The Radar events in the Bay Area last week, there were lots of announcements in the Voice 2.0 communications space; I wrote up some GigaOm and Web Worker Daily Posts to cover a few of them:

On Tuesday Voxbone announced the launch of their iNum Service. Basically it provides a means to have a universal worldwide “local” number that can be accessed through the recently accredited (by the ITU) +883 country code. Last Tuesday I hosted a SquawkBox conference call with Voxbone CEO Rod Ullens; a post on GigaOm with more details talks about Geography Is Dead – Thank VoIP. Two other excellent “Voxeo Talks” posts from Dan York on this topic (Voxeo is a Voxbone iNum Service Provider Partner):

• How to get an iNum – a “global phone number”
• iNum and “global phone numbers: a video interview with Voxbone CEO Rod Ullens.

A heads up on using iNum; access from Skype to a +883 number is considered a SkypeOut call requiring SkypeOut credits.It’s not a “country” covered under Skype’s Universal Calling Plans; check out the various alternative means to access iNum numbers here.

The following day iotum announced the official launch of their Calliflower conference call service incorporating premium options for businesses that see its benefits for more interactive voice conferencing through the Calliflower call portal. Document sharing and a much wider range of access points, including iNum access were amongst the new features. And they announced an iPhone application for accessing Calliflower calls. More details can be found in my Web Worker Daily Post: Calliflower: A Complete Conference Calling Service.

Finally, in doing some checking out of a new service, I encountered an Automated Attendant that wanted me to enter a person’s last name in order to locate that person in the host business’s extension directory. But that presents a bit of a problem when you have a BlackBerry QWERTY keyboard and you want to generate the tones where 2–> “A, B or C”, etc. But the RIM people think of everything; there is a relatively simple solution. Find out the answer over at Web Worker Daily in “Entering ‘Last Name’ From a BlackBerry”.

Tags: Voxbone, iNum, iotum, Calliflower, Research in Motion, BlackBerry, Dan York, Voxeo

According to Tech Crunch and GigaOm posts late last night Logitech is about to spend $30 million to acquire SightSpeed, the video messaging and video conferencing service that recently was selected ot provide the infrastructure for Dell’s Video Chat. Congratulations to Peter Csathy and his team.

Seems like the video calling and video conferencing market is about to heat up. There will be another post later this morning involving an announcement that can bring video conferencing to a much broader user audience than Skype’s (though it’s not exactly insignificant) and SightSpeed’s.

Questions that arise from this acquisition:

• How is Logitech able to continue to partner with services such as Skype when they are now entering the desktop video services market? Logitech’s co-operation was vital to Skype’s ability to provide High Quality Video.
• Or is it a produce marketing acquisition? Is Logitech acquiring SightSpeed simply to have additional collateral software to provide with their webcam offerings? Will we start to see Logitech’s Carl-Zeiss optics in embedded webcams on Dell PC’s?

The economy may be in recession; it’s driving less travel and more audio and video conferencing. They’re seeing a rise in customers and use of audio conferencing at both HiDef Conferencing and Calliflower. It will be an interesting winter for expanding user experiences involving desktop video.

Tags: Logitech, SightSpeed, Skype, Peter Csathy, Tech Crunc, GigaOm, HiDef Conferencing, Calliflower

When Skypecast was shut down at the end of August, I suggested three alternatives that can be considered as cost effective replacements for those serious about multi-party discussions.

iotum CalliFlower serves as the host for the daily SquawkBox conference call discussing communications news of the day as well as featured guest interviews. (Full disclosure: I usually participate.) But it also is building a user base who hosts a wide range of audio conference calls for business meetings, interviews with prominent personalities, training and enhanced social networking amongst other audio conferencing requirements. CalliFlower’s key feature, aside from the “Free” aspect, is its rich web interactive interface that supports the call through a “chat wall”, seeing who’s on the call and hand raising.

However, sometimes users get stumped in setting it up. Monitoring “CalliFlower” on Twitter via either Tweetdeck or TweetBeeps, iotum CEO Alec Saunders encountered one of those frustrated users, Steve Pohlit – a blogging for business consultant, and made contact with him. In Alec’s subsequent post, A little twitter karma, he comments:

The lesson here is pretty simple. In today’s world of social media, news travels near instantaneously. And in the world of twitter, an idea can propagate and mutate at unbelievable rates. Steve wasn’t asking for help, but by offering it I turned what was a bad experience for him into a very positive experience. He rewarded that effort with something special.

And what was that “something special”? Steve has produced three instructional videos on how to use CalliFlower.

SkypeOut subscribers can readily call into CalliFlower calls; in fact, if you have setup your mobile number as your Skype callerID and registered that same number with CalliFlower, you bypass the need to enter a PIN number. This became very useful last week when my broadband Internet service was down. From my Blackberry I called into SquawkBox via iSkoot, which cannot currently pass through DTMF tones. But since my SkypeOut callerID is my mobile number CalliFlower immediately admitted me into the call. In this case, since I had to hold the Blackberry to my ear (and had no broadband Internet connection), I accessed the call’s web page for the call via my iPhone. Is this convergence or divergence?

Over the past few months I have been a frequent participant on Alec Saunders’ daily SquawkBox conference call where several of those involved in following today’s communications and web developments will discuss topics of the day. Subjects for yesterday’s call were the impact of the Internet on this years U.S. President campaign and Skype’s fifth anniversary today. Participants included Dan York of Voxeo, James Body of Truphone, William Volk of MyNumo (one of the more successful iPhone Apps developers) and Jonathan Jensen amongst others. The Saunderslog post is here.

The Skype discussion commences about half-way through the call. The one universal agreement was that Skype has succeeded because of the user experience. You can build all the communications technology you want but unless people can get all the way through the setup and readily make a call, people will not use it routinely. And the discussion highlights the importance of getting the Skype 4.0 user interface right but starting with some experimentation that challenges all of us to think through how to set up and manage a multi-modal conversation experience.. Some comments from the SquawkBox discussion:

• James Body: participating in a discussion at a smoke-filled bar in London with Nicklas just after Skype launched: “this proprietary thing will never work because it does not use SIP”. James then goes on to point out that if Skype had not had the success it has achieved, Truphone may never have been funded to the level they have obtained.
• Alec Saunders: basically it was the first VoIP-based service that “just worked”.
• I then discussed my memories of watching the Quarterdeck team develop WebTalk back in 1995 – and how our CEO of the day drove the engineers to make it work on 50MHz (not 50 GHz – a slip of the tongue) Pentium PC’s and over 14.4 kbps modems. But the overall infrastructure was just not there to let it become viable as a consumer in the 1996 time frame.Yes, having widely deployed broadband was one major contributor to the timing element that helped achieve Skype’s immediate success. (I did have WebTalk running over a 56kbps modem on a 100MHz Pentium but it was challenging to carry on a conversation. Yet a few small businesses did adopt it.)
• William Volk talked about the importance of usability. “Just because it – VoIP – works is not enough. Users are fickle. You will lose a significant number of users at each step where the process of installing and completing a call may fail. The user experience is everything.”
• Dan York the security expert amongst us, got into a discussion of how Skype worked when offerings such as NetMeeting and CU CMe just did not get significant traction. Firewall traversal across NAT – a major failing of SIP, the first true high quality wideband codec, and Skype’s inherent security are all features that impressed Dan.

But listen to the recording via the link/player on the Saunderslog post to get the full story, especially helpful for Skype employees involved in the Skype 4.0 beta.

And Happy Fifth Anniversary to Skype from all of us on the call! There are many challenges ahead as Skype liquifies communications – we look forward to the next generation of Skype under its new executive team. And thanks to the iotum team and SquawkBox producer Alec Saunders for making such a conversation feasible.

While there has been lots of dismay about the discontinuation of Skypecasts (Skype’s blog posts: here and here), it had appeared for the past several months that the service just did not have the robustness to provide the reliability and quality of service that users would expect. Being a free service, it was obviously placing resource demands with zero revenue potential on Skype developer and support personnel that hopefully can be diverted to bringing feature equality to Skype’s basic service, whether on Windows, Mac or Linux.

There are alternatives; in fact, this decision provides a unique opportunity for two third party conference calling services:

1. Skype Multi-Party Calling:

For up to 25 participants on a call, Skype has recently expanded its multi-party calling capacity. The caveat here is that the host must use a multi-core Windows PC and a reliable broadband internet connection (preferably cable). Participants can be on any version of Skype or be accessed via SkypeOut. In this case the host must set up the call and call out to all the participants. More details here. A unique feature of Skype’s multi-party calling is its ability to show which participant is actually speaking at any given time. But keep in mind Skype really offers multi-party calling, not a full conferencing service.

2. iotum CalliFlower

iotum’s CalliFlower has the benefit of no charge other than whatever it costs to make the connection to one of their access points. I often participate in their daily SquawkBox call via my SkypeOut account; the recent availability of SkypeOut CallerID, displaying my mobile phone number when I make a SkypeOut call, has allowed me to participate in these calls within my SkypeOut subscription without even using the provided password for each call. In fact, there are four options for accessing these calls:

As an example of building communities, iotum has worked with Alan Hunkin to provide a weekly interview session, CalliFlower Communiques, with notable personalities such as William Shatner. Immediate future guests include Ken Blanchard, author of “Being a One Minute Entrepreneur” and actor Alan Alda discussions his recent memoir “Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself.” Recordings of previous sessions are available at the page linked above.

3. HiDef Conferencing

Vapps’ HiDef Conferencing (formerly HiSpeedConferencing) provides high definition (HD) voice quality calls for participants accessing via Skype. Their business grade service involves fixed rate monthly hosting subscriptions involving unlimited Skype access, dial-in to specific numbers in several countries and toll-free numbers. Obviously this involves some ongoing expense to the host but their infrastructure supports providing the best possible voice quality, depending on access mode. The host uses their web controls to set up calls, manage call participants as well as record and archive calls.

Looking at the options it appears the best conference experience comes when:

• hosts are able to setup and fully manage the calls, including an open access invitation;
• users can participate through a web-based experience not only via voice but also via chat.

The good news is that Skype provides either free or low cost unlimited access to any of these services. What will be most interesting is to see if iotum and/or Vapps rise to the opportunity here and and is able to provide encouragement to the many communities that were supported by Skypecasts.

Tags: Skype, Skypecast, iotum, CalliFlower, Hi Def Conferencing, CalliFlower Communique, Vapps, multi-party calling, Alan Hunkin

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Over the past two weeks there have been several announcements and activities related to the personal conversation space:

• Skype announced its Skype 4.0 beta program trialing a “full desktop” interface.
• SightSpeed announced an improved SightSpeed client with many engineering improvements to enhance video and audio quality
• SightSpeed for Business announced a 9-party video conferencing capability
• iotum launched its rebranded CalliFlower voice conferencing platform
• Dell announced their new Studio line of prosumer laptops incorporating Dell Video Chat powered by SightSpeed.

And the combination of these announcements, along with my own experience in using these services, hit home once again that it’s all about the user experience. This market needs to remain competitive through innovation but at the same time it’s also measured against performance, process and marketing. Skype and iotum have set some standards to be met, including:

• High Quality Video that has turned my lethargy about video calling into an enthusiastic user whenever feasible. Its 640 x 480 @ 30 frames per second over widely available (cable and DSL) broadband connections, along with top quality webcam optics, sets the standard I am looking for.
• Echo cancellation: while I continue to use a headset for privacy and courtesy reasons, most of my Skype calls are to contacts who are using the basic microphone and speakers provided as the basic configuration of a PC.
• Wideband or HD audio: provides an clarity of sound that constantly amazes. Unfortunately, our legacy phone system makes compromises that we have to live with but when it comes to VoIP-based services I want that HD voice.
• Complementary services: iotum’s interactive participant interface richly enhances the voice conference call experience.
• Upgrades: when I do an upgrade I just want the new version to work. No hangups, no PC freezes. Whereas upgrades could be the cause of much angst ten to fifteen years ago, upgrades offered to the public today – especially if enforced – need to “just work”. And these days I find most offerings meet that standard.
• Auxiliary services such as conversation archiving and file transfer.
• Beta programs are just that: programs to try out new concepts and get user feedback. Pre-Internet I ran software beta programs out of the public eye; today many services and offerings tend to leave their offering in a state of “constant beta” in the public eye such that users don’t realize that beta means provide feedback and check out the various phases as the offering evolves. But please don’t equate beta with the “officially released” product.

And my “like-to-have” list includes:

• Multi-party video conferencing
• Improved conversation management; switch readily between multiple conversations and see a record of all activities with a contact.
• Improved marketing at all the service providers: give us the straight goods, what is the benefit to the user? Forget the technology accomplishments, yes we appreciate – it’s about the user uptake and experience.

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CalliFlower: iotum rebrands its Free Conference Call service with a focus on a rich user experience not only for conference call moderators but also for participants.

Value-add in the Web 2.0 world comes primarily through the user interface. There’s a plethora of great technology innovation happening out there. But it’s becoming acknowledged that ease of installation, implementation and operation has been one reason for many services’ success to date, including Skype’s. Yet with only 30-35 million “Real users” out of 300 million registered accounts, Skype has embarked on a new beta program designed to improve on the user experience and ongoing adoption rate for both new users and power users. In the end it’s viral user adoption that builds a business.

Last fall iotum launched its Free Conference Call for Facebook service; over the intervening months, participants on iotum’s daily Squawk Box conference call, using their Free Conference Call service, have seen the evolution of a user interface that has set a standard for enriched conferencing services. While the host or moderator tools have established call recording, participant management and a comprehensive invitation process as basic requirements for any complete multi-party virtual meeting, it is the interactive participant interface that has made Free Conference Call popular with not only the regular attendees of Squawk Box but have also found Free Conference Call being used for other series of regular Special Interest Conference Call events.

But Free Conference Call initially required you to be a member of Facebook; later a separate web-based user interface, independent of Facebook, was introduced to allow participation and hosting outside Facebook. On the participant interface itself we started to see pictures of all the attendees if fewer than 20 participants are in a call; otherwise there is a text indicator. Hand raising, muting and a chat wall all made the calls a richer, more vibrant yet still manageably spontaneous experience. And the calls are stored in perpetuity for later recall. Oh, and, other than being an Unlimited Skype user, I have never paid a cent to attend these Squawk Box calls. (Seven years ago I was paying $200 for a five party, one hour conference call.) Conference calls are as much about organizing, moderating and archiving as they are about the actual call connection.

And, with over 200,000 registered users, iotum learned:

• the need to focus on the participant experience as much as on the moderator experience
• participants valued the rich user experience
• every participant is a potential organizer or moderator
• its most active users were small business entrepreneurs

Building on this feedback and introducing additional features, iotum took on a mission to reinvent business conversations. Today iotum launches the beta of its rebranded conference call service, Calliflower, with two user interfaces – one for the moderator and one for the participants – that deliver an even richer user experience. A interactive dashboard for call moderators, calendar integration, a selection of call-in options and an interactive chat wall all contribute to establishing a new benchmark for a complete conference call experience.

Calliflower is targeted for small businesses who wish to conduct a more interactive and complete conference call experience for both the moderator and the participants. Their longer term goal is to have “open access” via any social network or any device. Yesterday I saw a demonstration of the service running through the iPhone browser but they are still working on the adaptation to the iPhone format. Certainly Nokia and Blackberry smartphones are also in their sights, provided they have appropriate advanced browser support.

But most importantly, iotum has demonstrated that an engaging, interactive, yet simple user interface is key to mass adoption of Voice 2.0 services. It’s also a business fundamental being encountered by other service providers, such as Skype and the revamped SightSpeed for Business about which I’ll be posting in the next few days.

Try out a demonstration of CalliFlower here; or sign up and organize your own CalliFlower conference call here. If you have a Facebook account, you can use your Facebook login information. You can access CalliFlower conference calls via SkypeOut; if you have a Skype Unlimited plan that includes either North America or France, that connection comes at no additional charge..

This morning Squawk Box turned the tables. Adam Somer acted as a guest host and interviewed Alec Saunders and Howard Thaw of iotum about the new CalliFlower service and their experiences leading up to its launch. Alec is putting up a recording of the call here (awaiting posting); listen in for more information.

Tags: iotum, Free Conference Call, Calliflower, SkypeOut, Squawk Box, Facebook

Taking back control of your real time communications in the AlwaysOn world.

(While this post was published originally  inFebruary 2007, it still has even more relevance in a very active Social Networking world; see the Update note at the end of the post).

When reporting on my visit last summer to an Alexander Graham Bell museum near his summer home, I discovered an interesting facet to his lifestyle:

In all his homes he had a separate office/laboratory room where he could be a night owl geek writing, experimenting and thinking. But he never had a telephone installed in any of his offices/labs.

Dr. Bell did not want his experimentation activities interrupted during his time in his home offices. Local folklore (I live less than an hour from RIM’s headquarters) has it that when Jim Balsillie, CEO of Blackberry manufacturer Research In Motion, enters his home, his family has asked him to leave his Blackberry at the door. And for years we have been searching for solutions to the dinner-time interruptions of those persistent telemarketers. In the Skype world we have those who seem to think a simple “Hi” in a chat window is sufficient introduction to start a conversation with a total stranger from the other side of the world. The potential for interruptions has become prolific with the introduction of each new technology and/or service, especially those that are “AlwaysOn”. In turn these AlwaysOn services expose us, as users, to being “Always Available”.

Yet we build our lives around communication with friends, lifestyle service providers and business colleagues who need to communicate at an appropriate time and in an appropriate manner. In today’s AlwaysOn world, made possible through both broadband Internet connectivity and mobile phones, there has arisen a crying need to manage our interruptions based on our interpersonal relationships and the real time context of our current activities. We want to ensure our communications efforts and time are spent more effectively with friends and family and spent more productively with the lifestyle service providers, business colleagues and clientele with whom we need to converse to carry on both our personal life and business activities. But such a demand requires a more intelligent algorithm for providing presence and availability information.

Over the past few weeks I have had the opportunity to evaluate many real time communications modes on new platforms such as the Blackberry 8700, Nokia N80i (selected since it runs on both WiFi and all four GSM bands) and a couple of models of the newly released “PC-Free” Skype phones. As a result I have had the opportunity to experience many modes of interruption of my activities and many modes of generating interruptions of my Contacts’ activities. They all have an element of providing basic presence information prior to making a phone call and, in some cases, also provide an ability to Chat through an IM client. And through these devices we also have new modes of real time communication: SMS messaging, email, and, with the arrival of embedded GPS, location-based services. More AlwaysOn services that simply increase the potential to be “Always Available”.

• While at CES, I used Blackberry Messenger to communicate directly (PIN to PIN) with key business contacts as I toured the exhibition floor and as we approached the time for key meetings. This “direct” channel was instantaneous and improved our “conference” productivity in a very crowded and noisy environment where voice communications was not only relatively expensive but also almost physically impossible due to background noise. Through its “Open Conversation” mode, one has an element of presence (Available/Not Available//Online/Offline) of user-designated remote contacts.
• Truphone on the N80i allows me to make calls from any WiFi hotspot (provided I have or can readily obtain authentication) but has no ability to tell me if my remote contact is readily available for a real time conversation.
• Fring (also on the Nokia N80i) provides both traditional presence and chat capability with my Skype, Gmail and/or MSN Messenger contacts but its “fringing ringing” with every chat session entry becomes overbearing and very annoying, especially once when I was in five concurrent chat sessions.
• “PC-Free” Skype phones provide Skype’s basic presence but no chat capability. So one cannot invoke the standard VoIM protocol of texting a Contact to enquire if s/he is available to take a Skype call.
• My Blackberry email messages are restricted, via a web-based service from my Service Provider, such that only those email addresses I have designated will find their emails forwarded from my legacy email to my Blackberry.
• Over the past several weeks I have been participating in the technology preview of iotum’s Talk-Now for Blackberry.This testing has provided plenty of opportunity to think about (i) when I want to be interrupted for a real time conversation and (ii) when I want simply to to be able to access presence or availability information in the context of not only my Contacts’ current “status” but also his/her current work activity and even previous communications activity.

Concurrent with managing interruptions I also need the intelligence to manage multiple phone connections (and, potentially, multiple IM connections). For instance,

• “PC-Free” Skype phones potentially put the user in the position of effectively having two phones, especially if one wants to continue to use Skype for business via a legacy PC Skype interface but the “PC-Free” phone is to be used in conjunction with, say, a home phone line. This creates the need to sign up for an additional Skype account for the “PC Free” phone. (More in a separate post.)
• My Fring installation is on a separate device which is the only one that supports both WiFi and GSM connectivity.

Bottom line is that I want to manage my availability for real time communications taking into account:

• Whom I want to be interrupted by in real time? whether the communications mode is chat, voice, SMS, video calls, etc.
• How do I triage my incoming calls to determine if I need to answer immediately or should wait until time permits a callback.
• What is the context of the interruption? Am I in a meeting? Is the caller someone whom I will be meeting later in the day and may want to discuss arrangements for that meeting?
• What is the relationship between me and the Contact? Is s/he a customer, a work colleague, a friend or a family member?
• What hours am I available for business activities? for personal activities?
• What is the context of the Contact’s current situation? Is s/he occupied by a meeting or willing to accept business calls at this time? What are her/his personal/business hours?
• How do we avoid voice mail tag? A recent study of calls placed at CAP Gemini showed that 82% of all calls end up in voice mail and it takes 3.15 attempts to make a voice connection.
• How do I ensure that I don’t miss either business or personal opportunities through ad hoc calls?
• How do I want to be notified of an interruption: a loud ringing phone? a silent vibrating phone?, a ring tone in my Bluetooth headset?
• What is important enough in context to trigger a notification (and therefore an interruption)?
• On what device (or service) do I want to be interrupted at any given point in time and physical location?
• How can my real time communications activity make my day more productive?

What are the implications for the developers and providers of new services?

• While the ability to open the same Skype account on several platforms can be convenient, it raises issues of currency of presence information on any device, including which platform should be considered the “primary” platform for, say, chat messages? How does one keep all the open clients in sync, especially with respect to presence information?
• How can I share my real time availability information with my critical business colleagues to ensure ad hoc access while reducing voice mail’s “running interference” and/or inappropriate interruptions?
• How does a service provide maximum end user flexibility with respect to issues such notification method, desired device at the time, hour of the day, designating Contacts’ relationships, etc.
• How can a service maintain an element of personal privacy in this era where identity theft and aberrant personal exposure can change your life forever?
• How does a service prejudice my interruption management towards those whom the user really wants to communicate with, yet not miss personal and business opportunities that arise from new introductions?

At this point in time there is no single answer. But through technology preview platforms such as Talk-Now, Fring, Truphone and new types of products, such as the “PC-Free” embedded Skype phones, we are getting a chance to experience in practice when, where and how we want to be interrupted. Hopefully these experiences will build the etiquette and protocols for implementing what Alec Saunders at iotum has labeled “New Presence” – delivering intelligent availability in a real time context to facilitate ad hoc interpersonal communications.

Bottom line: I want to be able to participate in the conversations essential to my lifestyle and my business operations – when, where and how I choose. And the service(s) of choice will only rise above the noise (and become a revenue generator) when I can take back control of my life – through a focus on restoring my privacy and my prejudices to my communications activity.

Update April 12, 2011: While iotum’s Talk Now service has gone away and iotum now offers their CallifFlower Conferencing service, the concepts of this Interruption Manifesto actually apply more deeply given all the approaches available in a Social Networking world.