Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Gary Kim writes that some people view the introduction of voice as an attribute of every application as the death of traditional voice services.  Perhaps the correct articulation is "the death of the business models associated with traditional voice services".  After all, no matter how much integration of voice with other applications occurs, people still "like to talk" as Niklas Zennstrom so simply put it.  The challenge for the voice service provider is in delivering value that can be monetized for more than a few tenths of a cent per minute. The service provider must become a pipe for delivering huge volumes of communications, and/or an applications provider that leverages that volume.

That's the essence of the Voice 2.0 argument. 

iotum's mashup with Facebook combines a traditional voice service — Conference Calling — with a hot social networking platform.  It's a leaping off point for business models built around premium services, advertising, and traditional voice minutes.

Although much less visible in the last few months, Asterisk and the Asterisk community continues to chug along, demonstrating the tremendous value that open source telephony solutions bring.  For instance, just this past week at IT Expo, Neophonetics announced a unified messaging platform based on Asterisk Business Edition, including:

• Multi-tenant voicemail for one telephone or one telephone extension
• Voicemail to email
• Voicemail to paging 
• Call forwarding
• SMS messaging 
• Message waiting indicator 
• Distinctive rings for multi-tenant telephones
• Automated system and voicemail configuration 
• Voicemail groups
• Web-based end user portal

Fabulous. Even more interesting was the fact that Neophonetics chose to market a product based on Asterisk that would be an add-on to existing PBX systems rather than a replacement, adopting a business strategy much more friendly to the incumbent PBX players.

OS architecture geeks and hackers will find this latest move by industry veteran QNX Software Systems remarkable.  Yesterday they published the source code to the company's crown jewels, the Neutrino Microkernel.  More than simply publishing the source code, however, they are opening up the development process as well, allowing the QNX community to participate in the process. Not open source, their hybrid development process is an intriguing take on source code licensing which offers three different licenses depending on each development need — a partner license, a commercial license, and a non-commercial license.  As a user of the source code, you have the option to either contribute your code back to the community, or keep it proprietary as well. 

For more information, OS News has published an interview with CEO Dan Dodge, and there's a fairly active thread on Slashdot as well.  Some critics have complained that the model is a much more akin to Microsoft's community development process than "open source".  However, Microsoft has not yet published the source code the Windows kernel.  For companies that rely on the QNX platform to run their mission critical systems, this is a very big deal.

In addition to publishing the kernel source, QNX also made their award winning development suite, QNX Momentics, available for download.  Free. 

It's a good day to be a real time OS developer.