Alec Saunders SquawkBox

A little iotum history was made today.  Read about it on SimplyRelevant.

An opening came up on the VON roster a couple of weeks ago.  Jeff needed an industry insight speaker to talk this morning, and when he asked if I’d be willing to do it, I was very happy to agree.  It’s not every day a startup like iotum gets an invitation like this.

My talk was titled The Future is Here.  I tried to stay away from a product pitch, or a dry pitch about a carriers networking business, and instead focus on what a Voice 2.0 future would look like.  I think it was well received, although it’s always difficult to know.  Certainly I had an enthusiastic reception from Jon Arnold, Jeff and others afterward.

Thanks for the opportunity, Jeff.

I am sitting in Jon Arnold’s panel for Skype Developers.  I’m here to hear from the horse’s mouth as it were.  iotum has wanted to work with Skype for some time, but not yet been able to get a successful relationship going.  I’d like to hear more.

Jon’s got Goren Gershon of WebDialogs, Andrew Hansen of Virtual Communications, Ben Lilienthal from Vapps, and Bill Tam from EQO communications.

Each of the speakers is giving a brief overview of what they do.  Andrew, of course, is on his third application at this point, which is Skylook.  He’s let us know that it’s just been Skype certified.  Congrats!  Goren has shown Unyte, a web collaboration tool built around Skype.  He makes the funny comment that "Skype has an API.  It might not be the best API, but it’s an API, and none of the others have one".  Ben is showing his voice conferencing solution.  He’s talking about his experiences working with Skype, and emphasizes that it was an iterative experience. Good to know.  Bill is talking about how EQO set out to extend Skype to the mobile phone, to extend the social networking experience of Skype to that phone.   It’s amazing that EQO was able to deliver their application in just 40 days, which Bill attributes to the quality of the Skype API.  He says that he couldn’t have done the same with MSN, or AOL.

Interestingly, Jon points out that none of the panelists have businesses built solely around Skype.  Jon asks where Skype fits into their business plans.  Goren answers basically that their original concept was to build brand awareness with Skype.  What they’ve done now, though, is to keep the free version, and have now introduced a pay version. 

Bill comments that in the last 18 months, Skype has begun to focus on business model.  He recommends that you find a way to impact Skype’s core business.  Drive minutes across their gateways.

Andrew also noted that shortly MSN, AOL et al will also have APIs, and at that point there is an easy port.  And, of course, I wonder about GoogleTalk.  It has an API - just not the customer base.  Andrew says that the API of GoogleTalk is so low level that it’s just plain hard to build applications.

Ben asks a very basic question:  how do you prevent rapid commoditization of everything.  Voice is free.  When does when web conferencing go that way? 

I ask who’s using the APIs from competitors.  Nobody has yet, but Goren provides some interesting insights.  He likes the AIM API.  Thinks it’s a much more modern API than the Skype API.  He has also seen the Yahoo! API, and believes it’s probably richer.

There’s a fascinating discussion going on around about what might happen if, say, Google were to step in and start to throw money around, buying developers loyalty.  The panelists dismiss the idea, but this is, of course, a classic #2 player tactic.   The discussion shifts back and forth, pretty regularly, to the topic of how to build products that Skype won’t just integrate into their platform in the future.  There seems to be some pretty deep scars here, and a reasonable degree of paranoia.

My takeaway: Skype seems to be playing the platform game pretty well.  It’s still a very small company, and it’s still a relatively immature platform.  But they’ve managed to tap into a latent need in the developer community well.

Asterisk is a huge phenomenon.  I had no idea how big, actually, until about six weeks ago, when Stephan Monette, the owner of Unlimitel and an iotum business partner, told me that we should think about targeting Asterisk users with iotum.  As of January, Mark Spencer estimated that there were 250,000 Asterisk installations worldwide, growing at about 20,000 per month.  The VoIP-Info Wiki lists hundreds of Asterisk system builders and Asterisk consultants.  And IBM, Linksys, and Intel have all made commitments to the Asterisk platform.

Well, today, iotum is also making a commitment to the Asterisk platform.  Over the last couple of months we’ve built an Asterisk integration kit, consisting of source code, and API documentation, for an Asterisk module to allow the PBX to communicate directly with the iotum server.  Ted Wallingford broke the story last night on his blog. 

The integration kit is going out in non-commercial beta at this point, which means it’s free to use for now.  Sometime over the next few months we’ll roll out pricing information, and the details of a revenue sharing program as well.   We intend for Asterisk resellers to be able to earn money by incorporating iotum features into their installations.  Application developers building products that incorporate iotum features will be able to earn some money too.  Stay tuned for more details.

The beta has all of the features of iotum, and the iotum Pronto Conference Calling application that we demo’d in Phoenix at DEMO 2006, save one.  At this point the team hasn’t completed the code necessary for an Asterisk server to call out to conference call participants and bring them into the call.  Look for that in an upcoming beta.

The beta is also interesting from another perspective.  To my knowledge, this is the first time anyone has done a mashup of Asterisk, Microsoft Outlook, and MSN Messenger.  It’s a little Web 2.0′ness applied to telephony — the kind of mashup I call Voice 2.0.  With iotum, you’ll be able to use MSN Messenger presence information to tell Asterisk where to send your calls, and Outlook contact and calendar information to have Asterisk automatically decide whether you want to take the call right now or not.  It’s pretty nifty!

To get the kit, head over to www.iotum.com.  A link will be live shortly to allow you to download it.

Enjoy!