I’ve been offline all weekend. It was the first really nice weekend we’ve had since winter. Living in this part of the world, when the good weather arrives, you take advantage of it!
Anyway, having been offline, I missed the growing Voice 2.0 buzz. VC Ed Sims writes about "…beyond Vonage" suggesting that applications will dominate the future of communications. In fact, in SiliconValley.com Ed is widely quote as well, talking about his recent trip to Israel, with similar themes.
Last night, Jim Courtney, who has been an iotum beta tester for some months, wrote his first look review of the new collaboration between iotum and PhoneGnome, which we’re officially announcing this week. FYI, if you are a PhoneGnome customer, you can start using iotum today. It’s just another option available to PhoneGnome customers. Jim titled his piece Voice 2.0 Builds Momentum. He concludes with some good commentary, including the observation that Voice 2.0 services, such as iotum, are fundamentally agnostic to the network.
Bruce Stewart, on the O’Reilly ETel weblog wrote a brilliant review of the iotum and PhoneGnome integration which he published Friday. Bruce has been a tester, and is also a fan of both companies. The first comment on Bruce’s piece is from Mark Petrovic, who also does some consulting for PhoneGnome. Mark writes:
What I’d like to add, and which I think lots of Java, Python, and Ruby folks will want to hear, is that the protocol binding between the PhoneGnome and Iotum platforms is (drum roll)… XML-RPC.
Not SIP, but plain old, accessible XML-RPC. It’s a simple query-response protocol that makes this nifty service a reality. One message to alert Iotum of the inbound call details, and one messsage to PhoneGnome with instructions on how to dispose of the call.
XML-RPC. Think about that. This en-franchises an entirely new set of voice-related developers. This is Voice 2.0, indeed (great phrase). Voice for the rest of us.
As I wrote in the Voice 2.0 Manifesto last year, the use of published XML protocols is one of the foundations of this new approach to telephony. Platform strategies are most effective when large audiences of developers can be engaged. XML let’s us do that. Following Mark’s comment on Bruce’s blog, Mark wrote on his own blog about how the iotum and PhoneGnome integration actually works. In Welcome to the Voice 2.0 Big House he gives example protocol interactions, and commentary. He finishes up with:
if you know any language for which there exists an XML-RPC implementation — and they are many — you are a member of the modern Voice over IP developer community.
For the first hundred years of voice telephony, you were not invited. You didn’t have the money. You didn’t own a Network.
Welcome. You are now invited — we have running code to prove it.
Powerful stuff.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make 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.
