Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Ottawa DemoCamp 3 was a few weeks ago. Mark Stephenson shot videos of all the demos. If you’re interested in an extended Talk-Now demo, and audience Q&A… here it is!

Two very encouraging developments at ETel were programs and technologies announced by Orange and BT.  Orange’s Ndiata Kalonji talked about a social networking platfrom which Orange is working on, which exposes some of the elements of the IMS framework via web services. BT  had a talk on day 2, which was mostly a BT pitch, but included an intriguing slide at the end talking about a new developer program as well.

A cautionary note: I haven’t examined either of these programs in detail (hard to do so based on slideware), so the following may be completely meritless, but I will say it anyway.

So why am I worried?

As software developers we need consistent platforms.  Nirvana is having one platform to target, test against, and ship with. It’s nearly impossible to build compelling cross platform experiences in a heterogeneous world, which is why, with very few exceptions most companies in the personal computing world target Windows, the Mac, or Linux. 

There’s a very uncomfortable specter raising its head in the communications world.  There are simply too many platforms.   Orange has a developer program.  So do BT, and Cingular.  With over 300 mobile carriers worldwide, will each carrier have a developer platform?  A separate program?

On the handset side, there are also three or four dominant platforms — RIM, Symbian, Microsoft, and the older BREW platform.  J2ME, MIDP2… and what about the new Linux based platforms?  Worse yet, there aren’t consistent builds of the platform on each handset.  At iotum we were recently bitten by a dependency on an API that a particular carrier hadn’t loaded on the device being shipped.  Only some devices…

The balkanization of platforms and networks is eerily reminiscent of the world of online services in the early 1990’s.  At that time AOL, and Compuserve were the dominant players, with proprietary platforms targeting developers.  The newcomer on the block, MSN, had a terribly sophisticated tool called Blackbird under development for years.  Ultimately, all these platforms were swept aside by the internet, and the online services forced open their walled gardens by new players like Yahoo!

Who is the Yahoo of telephony?  Will the promise of new telephony applications be strangled by carrier balkanization of the platform?  Or can they agree on a unified and open platform for developers to target?

Two of the events I loved the best at ETel were the GigaOm LaunchPad, and the Mashup Contest.  In both events, entrepreneurs have had the opportunity to get up on stage, and show off the newest and best technology that they’ve been working on.

19 companies entered the Mashup Contest, and three finalists were chosen to present to ETel attendees.  The finalists were:

• FishLign: a social network combining voice and traditional social networking tools.
• RoboCal: an automated system for accessing your calendar by voice, which allowed you to make and review appointments easily.
• After Hours Doctors Office: an automated system for assessing patient requests after hours, and routing them to an appropriate specialist.

All three were great demonstrations of the possibilities of mashups.  The After Hours Doctors Office, however, was the winner of te $1500 first prize.  It was particular neat in the way that it combined voice, and the Amazon Mechanical Turk, in order to get patients to a doctor really neatly.  More importantly, however, creator Tom Howe, was the most effective presenter of what he had done, and why, neatly showing the mashup as well as framing it with the customer problem, and the benefits to the carrier.  Very impressive.

Om Malik’s Launchpad was the other big event.  Seven companies were able to launch new products on stage.  Each had about 7 minutes to present their products, and there was a popular vote at the end.  It kicked off with the dynamic duo of Om and Surj, who introduced the contest, and then invited each contestant on stage to show off their wares.

Warning to those reading with an RSS reader: a series of embedded videos follow. You may want to visit the original posting, if you can’t see these in your reader.

The companies were:

Grand Central.  Founders Craig and Vincent introduced their newest version of the product.  It was a slick and effective demo, and, as Paul Kapustka noted, a tough act to follow.

Jive Software.  While the technology was neat, Dave should have had a demo.  All powerpoint = no wow moments.  It was if he was a standard ETel presentation that had somehow snuck into the wrong event.

CellCrypt.  Rodolfo Rosini gave a nice presentation on his company’s voice encryption product, but no demo.

Peerant.  Marcus Dantus and Serge Kruppa built a call center application, on the spot, using their Ruby on Rails development platform.  Rockin’ stuff!

MySay. CEO Sean O’Sullivan showed off his company’s voice based social networking site.  Brad Templeton shouted out from the crowd “It’s MySpace for phones!”, which Sean (as Irish as you can be) denied with a twinkle in his eye.

Flat Planet Phone Company. Want to be in the VoIP business?  For $199 per year, Flat Planet Phone Company will provide all the back end services from termination to billing to reseller management.  All you have to do is brand it and sell it. CEO Moshe Maeir ran a very fast demo of all the things the Flat Planet Phone Company is capable of doing.  As demos go, it was a quick rundown of all the operator and reseller control features of the system.  This was my personal favorite of the night — not as slick a demo as Grand Central, but a very compelling business concept.    I heard a lot of similar comments afterward from others. (disclaimer: Flat Planet is an iotum partner)

Mig33.  Mig33 showed a powerpoint presentation of their combined VoIP and IM client for mobile phones, and took the opportunity to announce that they had just closed a round with RedPoint, and were moving from Australia to the valley.  I cornered a gushing RedPoint Partner Scott Raney afterward who said “Just look at the numbers!”.    Apparently they’re having a lot of success in Asia.

And then we voted.  Unsurprisingly, Grand Central was the crowd favorite. 

It was a great first launchpad event. A bunch of new companies had a fabulous chance to get on stage and show off their best.  What could be better than that?  I have just one small complaint – next year there oughta be a no powerpoint rule. Powerpoint is for companies that don’t have anything to show.  Flash animations too…  Save the powerpoint for the main session, and focus on the products here.

Apologies for the background noise on the videos. I am learning more all the time about how to get the best results. I’ll need a separate microphone in the future. The creaky sounds are my cheap tripod.

Etel is done.  What a week!

Mid-way through Day 1, the ETel organizers arranged for three short speeches on identity.  These were great, and very important, talks. 

Identity Woman Kaliya Hamlin talked about open identity platforms — OpenID, Inames, et al — and how they are coming together.  With AOL providing an OpenID for every subscriber, and Microsoft too, plus the competing technologies and standards unifying, it looks as if we might finally have some momentum around these platforms.   

Kaliya also quoted some great statistics.  At this point, more than 1200 sites, have enabled OpenID.  OpenID users are more active as well, spending more time on the sites they frequent. 

She closed with the simple observation that names, and hence identity, are assets that carriers own, and they are the foundation for commerce, etc.  There's a business in model in providing identity and commerce services to third parties. 

The dry as bone and very funny Lee Dryburgh followed with a talk that opened with the ironic observation that "emerging telephony is the end of telephony as a concept"… or as they might say in the US… "this ain't your mothers phone!"

Lee's talk was about a concept he calls "autobuddies", or enabling conversations with relevant strangers.  He proposes a new element to buddy lists, which are the people you don't know, but would like to know.  The key problems to solve are how to advertise attributes, and identity / reputation / interaction and trust models. 

In a social context, of course, this is a very interesting problem. I am not sure that we understand enough about whether the world at large (even today's very open netizens amongst the young) would be really willing to explicitly do things like set the "want to meet opposite sex for short nasty relationship" bit on your phone before entering a bar, for instance.  It's a bit like the now discredited meta tags for attaching web page keywords.  It seems to me that something more algorithmic, and less easily spoofed, will be a requirement.   

Lee pointed to something called the Higgins Trust Framework, donated by IBM to the Eclipse Foundation which I plan to take a closer look at.  

The last speaker was John Todd, talking about the ISN concept.  You can find out more at Freenum.org. The idea is a simple one — one can create the equivalent of a username / domain relationship by expressing extension / organization using numeric keypad depressable numbers.  An ITAD subscriber number looks like 61483*771, which means extensions 61483 in organization 771.  They've already done the work to set up an organization, and a number space managed by the IANA, and the movement is gaining moment.  Go join!

Identity was clearly one of the larger topics of conversation at the show.  The most interesting thing for me is the emergence of portable identity systems, which I pointed out in December 2005 as one of the key foundational elements in the Voice 2.0 Manifesto.  The me-centric communications world it envisions is impossible without these systems.