Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Principia has a very interesting opinion piece on convergence from Ring2 co-founder Steve Flavell.  His contention is that a market driven approach to convergence, rather than Microsoft’s grand design, can help solve customer problems today.

True.  Incremental changes can improve the experience of many products and services.  In this case, Ring2 has built a clever conference call control panel for RIM’s Blackberry.  Recognizing that web based conference call control panels provided valuable functionality, but that 75% of conference calls are made away from a PC, they’ve provided that functionality on handhelds.

Cool!  And a good business, too!

There are far more than just incremental changes that can take place, however.  iotum’s Pronto Conference Calling (announced last February) simplifies the process of arranging and participating in conference calls, most notablity the pre-call phase and the process of quickly bring users together for the call.  As Telepocalypse writer Martin Geddes has noted on many occasions, potentially the richest source of value add in a Voice 2.0 world is the pre and post conversation phases of the call.  And what of the addition of New Presence features to allow for ad-hoc, presence driven conference calls?

We’re just scratching the surface of what is possible.

Congratulations to the Digium team, who officially released AsteriskNow today, their competitive distribution to the very popular Trixbox.  At the Saunders household, we haven’t yet installed the latest release, but it’s on the list of upgrades I need to do.  Over the holidays, instead of upgrading the PBX, I did household upgrades on electrical fixtures, light bulbs, and so on. 

That’s my excuse, anyway, and I’m sticking with it.  Stay tuned.

The’re back.  First posting in nearly a month from Skype Journal just went up!  With a new and spartan layout, they’ve moved to a new hosting service as well.