Alec Saunders SquawkBox

It’s been a busy day for me, as I got up early in Toronto to rehearse a speech I’ve been writing for the University of Toronto MET Executive Development Program. Composed mostly of Canadian wireless carriers, this was an audience that I had been hoping to address for some time, and a market which, if you’ve been a reader of this blog, you know I have strong opinions about. The speech went well, and I’ll have more to say about tomorrow.

Our Squawk Box discussion was serendipitously on the topic of deep packet inspection, as CIPPIC launched a case this morning against Bell Canada alleging a violation of privacy through the use of deep packet inspection. What followed was one of the most cogent arguments for privacy and net neutrality I’ve heard in a long time. Pay particular attention to the points made by Dave Brown and Frank Abrams. Frank Abrams, in particular, says “just meter the pipes and sell me the bandwidth I use, but don’t inspect my data.”

We also spent some time digging through the Google Friend Connect announcement, but because so few people had spent enough time with it we’ll have to save this for another day.

On the call: James Body, Jeanette Fisher, Jim Courtney, Dave Brown, Jonathan Jensen, Brad Jones, Julien Raynal, Adam Somer, Ian Hood, Ken Camp, Sheryl Breuker, Frank Abrams, Paul Newcombe and Barry Sullivan.

Enjoy

 

 Squawk Box May 13 [27:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This week is the big Blackberry conference WES2008 in Orlando, and RIM is cranking out the news just in front of the show. The debut of Blackberry Bold (the renamed 9000), plus their $150 million Blackberry fund were two topics we discussed on the Squawk Box this morning. The consensus? It’s all in the browser, baby… it’s all in the browser. Most people on the line felt that if RIM got the browser right, then Bold would allow the legions of Blackberry faithful to keep the faith. If not, then iPhone 2.0 is looking pretty compelling.

The Blackberry fund announcement actually raised more questions than it answered, not the least of which were questions about how the actual applications get to market. Several people called upon RIM to implement something like the Apple iStore in order to be able to step around the carrier controls and grow the market for applications faster. After the call, I visited Rick Segal’s blog to find out more about how Blackberry fund will work. It is, apparently, a classical venture fund focused on mobile applications.

We also had a short discussion of how Twitter broke the story of the earthquake in China last night.

On the phone: Brad Jones, Arshad Merali, Nick Desbarats, Andy Abramson, Dan York, Mark Hewitt, Jeanette Fisher, Adam Somer, Ian Hood, Bill Volk, James Body, and Jonathan Jensen.

 

 Squawk Box May 12 [35:16m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Today’s Squawk Box was on the topic of 911 standards.  Guest John Lange is the President of the Canadian Voice over IP Service Providers Association, and an active participant in the CRTC’s process for defining nomadic 911 services in Canada.  He explained the issues, solutions and politics surrounding nomadic 911 service.  An informative guest, we all went away having learned a ton about the in’s and out’s of providing 911 service to VoIP customers.

On the call:  Jim Courtney, James Body, Jonathan Jensen, Ian Hood, Bill Volk, Kyoko Kataoka, John Lange.

Enjoy!

 

 Squawk Box May 9 [47:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This morning we had the Ribbit team on the call. Ribbit continues to be one of the more interesting voice plays in the market, as they have figured out how to build out the application platform and revenue model that allows ordinary developers (web developers, not IMS geeks!) to be able to successfully incorporate voice into their web applications.

Ted and Greg walked us through the Ribbit for Salesforce application, as well as the overall Ribbit strategy, and we had some good and very intriguing questions from the likes of Dan York and Martyn Davies.

Enjoy the podcast! Tomorrow I won’t be on the call, because I’ll be on a flight, but Dan York will lead a discussion on 2 recent developments… the recent speculation that carriers may be trying to build a Skype competitor, and the new Wimax investments by McCaw and company.

 

 Squawk Box May 7 [35:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Ribbit for Salesforce debuted today. First demonstrated at the company’s launch last December, Ribbit for Salesforce has been in beta since, at 70 businesses. It’s now available to all US customers of salesforce.com, via the salesforce.com AppExchange. Prices start at $25/month with a 30 day free trial.

The product looks very good, including the ability to dictate, transcribe and automate various sales processes. For instance, with Ribbit for Salesforce, sales people could dictate meeting notes from the car, making productive use of transit time between meetings. For that reason alone, it deserves a look.

The vision story is a little loftier. Ribbit says they’re creating a new category of applications, called voice automation, with this release. The idea is that mobile voice services will become triggers for business processes, not just in CRM, but in many other kinds of applications .

As part of today’s announcement, Ribbit introduced a new technology — “voice automation” — a new category of services designed to increase productivity by automating and integrating voice into the workflow of mission-critical applications. Ribbit for Salesforce is the first of many innovative services expected in this new category.

I had a chance to speak with Ribbit CEO Ted Griggs, VP Marketing Don Thorson, and Salesforce for Ribbit product manager Greg Goldfarb. Enjoy this short interview, and join us Wednesday at 11 on the SquawkBox for a more in depth discussion of voice automation and Ribbit for Salesforce.

 

 Ribbit for Salesforce debuts [19:56m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download