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

When calling into an enterprise of any reasonable size, we all love to navigate our way through those pesky (and repetitive) enterprise auto-attendant services or phone trees that go through menu after menu to connect you directly to an appropriate destination service or person. NOT!

At last spring’s eComm 2008 we first learned about Fonolo, a “Deep Dialing” service that bypasses phone trees to connect you directly with the destination extension you really want to reach. I provided a detailed description of Fonolo, incorporating a video, on Web Worker Daily three weeks ago. While Fonolo has been in private beta for a few months, today it is launching a fully open public beta.

I asked Fonolo CEO Shai Berger, aside from the open public beta announcement, what have they learned from the private beta and what other experience have they gained during this period? His response:

• Fonolo has grown to provide Deep Dialing for over 300 companies from 150 six weeks ago.
• They are learning what is required to scale the service; it’s not the web portal  that presents an issue but rather the scalability of the service itself where they need to be supporting several hundred concurrent calls over the phone network in real time. “Every call involves a “deep dial” which is processor intensive and uses voice recognition to make sure they get to the right place within an enterprise’s menu.”
• From the beta test experience, “We’ve learned that ‘Deep Dialing’ has tapped into a vein of consumer frustration. We get lots of fan mail! We’ve also learned that the companies people want to call are concentrated on a few verticals, in particular wireless providers and ISPs. We’re going to disclose our “top 10″ enterprise category list at some point in the future.”
• What are the goals for the open public beta? “Watch how the service scales with usage and watch usage patterns. This is particularly important in helping to determine the structure of premium services.”

But there’s more to the Fonolo story than simply “Deep Dialing”. With the data collected during the beta periods and the services they are considering, they will also be able to provide a service to call centers to assist them with improving their productivity. This would include providing data on where users get lost in a menu, hang up in frustration or end up at an inappropriate destination. Martin Geddes foresees potential for Fonolo as having more benefit for call centers than for consumers; check out Fonolo’s role in a discussion led by Martin at the recent Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm conference in London, U.K.

… [but] who benefits more: the consumer, or the call centre? We think that it’s the latter, and the consumer is the price-sensitive side. The call centre wants the maximum rate of self-care, high customer satisfaction, and the web site offers the ability to do all kinds of enhanced multi-modal interactions that a 0-9*# keypad can’t do well… Therefore in our two-sided market world, we’d get telcos to distribute and promote this tool (on their fixed, mobile and on-device portals). They would then sell these enhanced capabilities to call centres.”

At the recent Mobilize 08 Shai announced the Fonolo application for iPhone, to become available early in 2009; Fonolo was awarded the Judges Prize at this event’s LaunchPad segment. And, given the target user base, I’m sure they’ll be looking into putting a BlackBerry application on their roadmap.

Symantec is one of the recent additions to their enterprise directory. I could have used Fonolo a month ago when I was having an issue with upgrading a Norton security product and had to make multiple calls to the same support line to resolve the issue.  A mouse click and getting a call-back would have been a lot simpler and less time consuming than pushing “9″ four times – interspersed with tedious voice directions – to get to the appropriate service personnel. .(The good news is that the issue did get resolved.)

Sign up for the Fonolo open beta here.

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