Thursday, September 13, 2007

The death of voice services? Not so fast…

by alec on September 13, 2007

Gary Kim writes that some people view the introduction of voice as an attribute of every application as the death of traditional voice services.  Perhaps the correct articulation is "the death of the business models associated with traditional voice services".  After all, no matter how much integration of voice with other applications occurs, people still "like to talk" as Niklas Zennstrom so simply put it.  The challenge for the voice service provider is in delivering value that can be monetized for more than a few tenths of a cent per minute. The service provider must become a pipe for delivering huge volumes of communications, and/or an applications provider that leverages that volume.

That's the essence of the Voice 2.0 argument

iotum's mashup with Facebook combines a traditional voice service — Conference Calling — with a hot social networking platform.  It's a leaping off point for business models built around premium services, advertising, and traditional voice minutes.

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Neophonetics delivers UM platform, on Asterisk

by alec on September 13, 2007

Although much less visible in the last few months, Asterisk and the Asterisk community continues to chug along, demonstrating the tremendous value that open source telephony solutions bring.  For instance, just this past week at IT Expo, Neophonetics announced a unified messaging platform based on Asterisk Business Edition, including:

  • Multi-tenant voicemail for one telephone or one telephone extension
  • Voicemail to email
  • Voicemail to paging 
  • Call forwarding
  • SMS messaging 
  • Message waiting indicator 
  • Distinctive rings for multi-tenant telephones
  • Automated system and voicemail configuration 
  • Voicemail groups
  • Web-based end user portal

Fabulous. Even more interesting was the fact that Neophonetics chose to market a product based on Asterisk that would be an add-on to existing PBX systems rather than a replacement, adopting a business strategy much more friendly to the incumbent PBX players.

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QNX Neutrino micro-kernel source code published.

September 13, 2007

OS architecture geeks and hackers will find this latest move by industry veteran QNX Software Systems remarkable.  Yesterday they published the source code to the company's crown jewels, the Neutrino Microkernel.  More than simply publishing the source code, however, they are opening up the development process as well, allowing the QNX community to participate in the process. Not [...]

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