Alec Saunders SquawkBox

I’ve been wondering where the heck all the traffic has been coming from today… well, David Pogue’s tech column in the NY Times cites the research I did on the Futurephone story. To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything sneaky or underhanded about what Futurephone is doing. It’s an old old telecom game. How do you think all those naughty chat rooms with numbers terminating on Carribean islands fund their businesses?  Same method.  Rather, my objection is to calling the service “free”.  Just because you’re already paying for a bucket of minutes, and Futurephone doesn’t require an additional fee doesn’t mean that it’s “free”.

Thanks for the traffic, David!

Angel.com is a new breed of hosted VoIP service provider. They don’t provide hosted business telephony service, but rather they provide a hosted IVR capability.  With Angel.com, any business, large or small, can deploy sophisticated voice applications, ranging from simple auto attendents, to credit card processing, database systems, call centers, outbound IVR and more.

Following the Voice 2.0 conference on Monday,  Angel.com VP Sam Aparicio dropped by the iotum offices to discuss his solution with us.  What impressed me the most about his business was this:

1. They’ve built a sophisticated, but easy to use, front end for creating IVR applications.  Form based, it allows anyone, from novice to expert, to create an application.  Once complete, it generates VoiceXML which can then be run, or customized further by a VoiceXML jockey.  It provides the right balance between the complete flexibility of VoiceXML, and the usability required to get people running quickly.
2. They’ve clearly thought through the implications of Voice 2.0 architectures also.  For instance, applications are extensible through web services interfaces for mash-ups with other network services.  Moreover, Angel.com itself exposes a web services interface, so that remote applications (like iotum, for instance) can manipulate the call path directly, allowing for the creation of many kinds of solutions using Angel.com to originate and terminate calls.
3. The business model is designed to target even the smallest businesses. Built on the Nuance platform, Angel gives tiny businesses access to very sophisticated capabilities.  For a low (sub $100) monthly fee, even a 5 person travel agency can have a high end call management solution, with advanced speech services.  Angel provides the DIDs, and application platform.  You just tell it where to terminate the calls.

Angel.com is a poster-child Voice 2.0 company.  A hosted solution, with XML based web services interfaces, and a programmability model designed to attract the long tail of voice solutions, they are also a terrific success story. With 1600 customers today, and over 10,000 applications running on their platform, they’re living proof of the viability of Voice 2.0 businesses.

Thanks for dropping by, Sam. 

How do you respond when your business model is “gatekeeper”, and the gates suddenly disappear? 

Jim, a PR professional and friend of mine asked me that question last week.  What he said was “How do I deal with agency clients who want to shift their PR dollars to blogging”. Indeed! The role of the PR agency has always been to be the eyes and ears of the company in the press, and to shape and deliver messages to the press and analyst community for the client.  In today’s environment, however, anyone can deliver that message.  I’m doing it right now!

That creates a real challenge for the PR industry.

Blogging buddy Ken Camp posted yesterday about his experience with MoPR, T@lkster’s agency, and how much they impressed him.  Within hours of his ho-hum reaction to T@lkster, Melissa was on the telephone to set up a meeting with CEO James Wanless. While Ken is still undecided on T@lkster, he’s certainly much more open to hearing their story than he was yesterday. 

In contrast, Sears Canada is a bricks and mortar business which has chosen to ignore the blogosphere.  In May of last year, at the Saunders household we had a washer breakdown, and a very unsatisfactory experience with Sears.  I wrote about it at the time, and since then that page has continued to attract a steady stream of disatisfied Sears customers, all vowing to never do business with Sears Canada again.  If Sears had responded to my complaint, I would have written about that as well. They could have turned my complaint into a win for everyone, but they didn’t.

So what’s the lesson for my friend Jim?

1. MoPR are bloggers themselves.  They get it.
2. MoPR encourages their clients to run a blog, and uses the Talkster blog on WordPress as a central way to distribute information to those who want to know about Talkster.  No need to wait for releases and pitches.  Just subscribe to the RSS feed.
3. MoPR engages bloggers actively in order to solicit their feedback, and counter negative opinion in the blogosphere. 

MoPR is redefining their role as a facilitator of dialogs, and enlarging the audience they work with.  That’s not traditional PR, it’s something new.  They’re not the only company doing this, either.  Andy Abramson’s Comunicano is another great example of the new PR.  Andy himself is the current “King of VoIP bloggers“, his blog VoIPWatch is a recognized authority in the communications industry, and his pioneering blogger relations program for Nokia, now over a year old, really set the tone for how companies could interact with the blogosphere.  That’s why iotum is a client!

And that Jim, is what you should be doing.  Be the eyes and ears for your clients in the blogosphere, and help them shape and deliver their messages to this new audience, using a medium that this audience understands — the blog.

UPDATE:  A couple of my PR friends have called wanting to know if they were “Jim”.  Sorry guys… he’s a composite of a bunch of conversations I’ve had.  No hard feelings.  None of you are really the J-Dude…

There is an important post on O’Reilly’s ETel this morning by TalkPlus CTO John Todd.  It concerns the Truth in Caller ID Act currently before the United States Congress.  Specifically, the act seeks to amend the US Communications Act of 1934 to prohibit the provision of “deceptive” caller ID information.  It’s remarkably unclear on what “deceptive” caller ID information is, and what constitutes “correct” caller ID information.  For instance, in the case of a call back service like Jajah, what caller ID information should be displayed?  Or, how about Skype, where there is no ANI available?  What about a one-number service, where it’s highly desirable to place the call-back number in caller ID?   These appear to be allowed through an exemption that permits call centers to perform this substitution, but what about individuals?  There’s a high degree of irony, by the way, that Congress would permit this latitude to telemarketers, after passing the very popular Do-Not-Call legislation.

One cannot argue with the sentiments of Rep. Joe Barton, who introduced the bill.  However, much more thought is required before implementing laws designed to combat VoIP phishing schemes.

John’s piece has a fairly lengthy proposal for a system to provide the assurances that Joe Barton is looking for.  He concludes:

My company is looking to provide basic funding for the construction of a nonprofit and to participate in the database, but we will only act if others are willing to minimally invest in the experiment. Please forward this message to technical or executive staff of firms that you feel have an interest in keeping their “Phone 2.0″ businesses unregulated in this regard.

Count iotum in John.