Jeff Pulver weighs in this morning with his take on Voice 2.0: Jeff says It’s Purple! Purple Minutes is a term coined by Jeff in 2000 to describe minutes of voice traffic associated with enhanced telephony applications. In other words — application driven, premium value minutes. Absolutely!
Voice 2.0 is Purple+. It adds these two elements to the idea of Purple Minutes:
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XML Web Services for application to application interop. Open services, and open applications on the network are the ideas that enable the Web/Voice mashups that the manifesto talks about.
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A business model which presumes that customers will pay for applications rather than metered access. This implies models that include per month access fees, purchased products, ad-supported products, and many other models.
The big driver for Voice 2.0 is the phenomenon that Jeff pointed in the Purple Minutes talk five years ago. Minutes are dying. There simply isn’t any need or justification for meters. For example, yesterday I flipped open the Windows task manager while using Project Gizmo to talk with my business partner Howard. Total CPU load for the application was about 10%. Total load on my network was just .08% of capacity. Network capacity is no longer a scarce resource, and there’s no need to meter it. The value is being created in the applications which live at the edge of the network, where people are simply not going to pay for metered access.
Kudos to Jeff for his leadership, and vision.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
