Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Marketwatch is reporting that Google’s 8K, filed yesterday, reveals a pact with Florida-based VoIP Inc.  According to the documents:

Google agreed on Sept. 1 to test voice-over-Internet-protocol, or VOIP, services offered by VoIP’s VoiceOne Communications unit on Sept. 1. Then in October, Google moved into implementation phase, buying VoIP’s services and putting in place direct Internet links between the two companies at multiple locations.

CEO Steve Ivester also commented that the company is developing services for Google, which he declined to elaborate upon.

ZDNet’s Russell Shaw has done a bit more spadework, which you can read in this excellent posting on his blog.  And TMCNet’s Robert Liu reports that VoIP Inc. is building out to accomodate additional traffic from Google.   

"In October, a series of purchase orders were issued for the production of VoIP traffic to be interconnecting with other carriers. As a result, VoIP Inc. “anticipates that material sales of its service will commence during 2006.”

CNET reports that Google has said that the buildout is for Google’s Click to Call service. 

"We are working with VoIP, Inc. on a click-to-call advertising test which we began late last year," a Google spokeswoman said in an e-mail response to questions. "We have no further details to share at this time." 

Meanwhile, Light Reading’s Mark Sullivan has also done a thorough job of investigating this story. 

It all gives one pause.  Why is Google partnering with VoIP Inc on the one hand, and buying wads of dark fibre on the other?  Why do a deal for terminations, and then have a scrap with Ed Whitacre of SBC over differentiated bandwidth charges?

It all goes back to how Google, and the other portals, are approaching the voice market, in my opinion.  In the Voice 2.0 Manifesto, I argue that the world of the future will consist of access providers, identity / directory businesses, and applications.   Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have all made public statements that they do not wish to be in the access business.  They’re simply not interested in selling DIDs, or dealing with the regulatory oversight that selling DIDs implies.  All three of these players are playing for the brass ring of identity, and the applications which can support identity.

Certainly we’re seeing a lot of early evidence of that.  Example:  both Microsoft and Yahoo sell branded versions of their products through major incumbent carriers.  Here in Canada, MSN is called Sympatico/MSN (Sympatico is Bell Canada’s ISP), and the business is run by Sympatico.  In the UK, Yahoo is similarly partnered with BT. 

The future of the incumbents is to be tomorrow’s shopkeepers.  Just as Egghead and CompUSA were Microsoft’s channel a decade ago, BT and Bell Canada and Verizon will be the channel of tomorrow.  The incumbents core competencies are billing and running networks.  They will be the distribution and credit arms of the content providers, whether that content be web pages, or VoIP traffic.

And Google?  It’s partnering for access with VoIP Inc.  And it’s waging a war of words over distribution with SBC.  But for all of the posturing that the incumbents are doing, this argument is little more than a very public negotiation over the cost of shelving.  Google has the trump card — it’s called dark fiber.

Other coverage from the Blogosphere: Mark Evans, Al Bredenburg

Congratulations are in order for Anoop Gupta.  You see, Anoop just became the new VP of Microsoft’s newly created Unified Communications Group.  According to the press release, the Unified Communications Group will be created from the merger of the Exchange Group, and the Real Time Communications Group. 

I’ve seen Anoop, and members of his team, speak several times.  They’ve had a strong Unified Communications vision, and now, with assets like Exchange part of the organization, they will be able to really execute on that vision.  The logic of combining the company’s message store with the Real Time Communications group is irrefutable. 

The next really interesting step will be to see how they provide hosted versions of new offerings based on this technology merger.  Scalable, hosted versions of these popular apps would be the killer VoIP offering for small and medium enterprise.

The RSS Advisory Board was announced today. Congratulations Randy!

My first reaction, today, was that I must have been asleep at the wheel.  On January 5th, the Skype 2.0 Beta API was released.  It contains, at long last, the feature many of us have been asking for for months, and that is the ability to redirect a call.  It’s hidden away in the "ALTER CALL" API, but it’s quite clearly there as a feature of the END command. 

ALTER CALL

The ALTER CALL command controls call status.

Syntax

ALTER CALL xxx
  { ANSWER
  | HOLD
  | RESUME
  | HANGUP
  | END { HANGUP | REDIRECT_TO_VOICEMAIL | FORWARD_CALL }
  | DTMF <0|1|..|9|*|#>
  | JOIN_CONFERENCE <callID> }

Version Protocol 5

It seems I am not the only one who was in the dark on this either.  Just last week at ETel I was discussing Skype’s lack of call redirect capability with folks from TellMe, who (like me) were hoping Skype would implement it soon.  And nowhere, on any blog, not even the excellent Skype Journal, was I able to find mention of these APIs. 

Thank you Skype for doing this.  If I may whine just a little… I’d love to be notified when something of this significance ships. 

Hats off to Andy Abramson.  He’s spent a bunch of time over the last day or so conversing with Jeff Pulver and Doug Renert about Tello, and has posted a very clear explanation titled Tello Explained.  He’s got the history, understands the issues, and explains Tello in very neat and succinct terms.

Tello provides a hosted Instant Communications and Collaboration service, with complementary client applications, that allows users to instantly locate, contact, and connect with others across their business communities over the different systems, devices and applications they already use.

Any application running on the Tello service, including their own clients, can show at a glance the availability of contacts at any time anywhere in the world and initiate multi-modal communications with the click of a mouse or push of a button.

He also wades into how Tello and Iotum are different.  Tello is about locate, contact, connect — linking up disparate networks in a federation between enterprises to enable collaboration and communication.  Iotum is about attention management.  In a world where everyone is vying for my attention, how do I make sure that I am making the best use of my time?  Where Tello is focused on where and how a communication can take place, Iotum is focused on why and whether that conversation is relevant right now.  These are two different, but very complementary solutions.

Good job, Andy.  Well done!