More from eComm2008 - commodities, bad telephony and getting directions.
Source: www.voip-news.com
Influence and persuasion might be better words for the eComm2008 conference than the popular word in use here, disruption. For example, Thomas Howe of the Thomas Howe Company (one of our top 20 VoIP Influencers) spoke on the topic of commodities and using both paprika and corn as examples explained how voice has become a commodity. People want and expect all voice experiences to be the same. He asked the attendees to ‘make it our mission to accept voice as a commodity,’ and urged people to do new things with voice. “We should be cooks, not farmers.”
RJ Auburn of Voxeo talked about how telephony sucks and how it is complex, arcane and proprietary and instead should be simple, ubiquitous and open. And then talked about the Voxeo model and VoiceXML and CCXML. You can find out more at http://evolution.voxeo.net/.
Irv Shapiro of ifbyphone.com gave one of the best received speeches in introducing their new mashup services including an application that you call up , speak a phone number at or near your current location and a second number at or near where you want to go and in return receive voice driving directions. He talked about how the best practices for voice mashups include a technology agnostic API, dialog support (voice forms, dtmf, text to speech, speech rec), call management (outbound, inbound, scheduling) and support services. And finally he announced that they are giving away a million free minutes of calls a month to developers in North America – you can find out more at www.phonemashup.com.
