Source: www.voip-news.com

Second place in the BroadSoft(R) Xtended Voice Mashup Contest went to Project ARCTIC.

Project ARCTIC is for enhancing accounts receivable. It uses low-cost methods to notify customers when their accounts are past due, raising the possibility that bills will be paid and paid on time. IT was created by WorldXchange Australia, a large telecommunications carrier in Australia.

“ARCTIC is a well-conceived integration, surprisingly with a focus on the back-end side of the equation,” said Rich Karpinksi, reporter at Telephony Magazine and blog content provider for Telephony 2.0, covering news, technologies and business strategies of telecom providers. “The low-touch and low-cost automated feature makes it a nice customer service application.”

For the win, the creators got $2,000 in cash and a trip to BroadSoft Connections (including a pass to the event).

Source: www.voip-news.com

The judges for the BroadSoft, Inc. Xtended Voice Mashup Contest have been announced. The contest runs through Sept. 2. The contest is intended to encourage the creation of telephony mashups that are new services for customers.

According to BroadSoft:

Xtended Voice Mashup Contest judges include:
– John Musser - Founder & Blogger, Programmable Web, a site that covers mashups, Web 2.0 APIs and the Web as a platform
– Dave Gilbert - CEO, SimpleSignal, hosted business VoIP provider
– Rich Karpinksi - Reporter, Telephony Magazine and blog content provider, Telephony 2.0, covering news, technologies and business strategies of telecom providers
– Mike Tessler - CEO, BroadSoft, Inc.
– Scott Hoffpauir - CTO, BroadSoft, Inc.

Winners will be announced in September at the Web 2.0 Expo New York 2008.

“The goal of our Xtended program is to arm the market with voice applications that support individual work and personal lifestyles,” said Leslie Ferry, vice president of marketing for BroadSoft. “We are excited to have such a distinguished panel of judges who support our goal of fostering innovative telephony mashups in the marketplace.”

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

Aspiring Thomas Howe wannabees can try their luck in an innovation based Mashup contest around Lypp and HighRise, the CRM solution from 37Signals that starts today.

Pal Erik Lagerway has the details.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

Thomas Howe Company COO Patrick Murphy posted a note about their recent participation in the Voice Peering Forum held this week in New York City. This was one of the events I was hoping to attend this year, and had been invited to, but business here in London with Truphone and Nokia prevented my being in two places at one time.

What’s obvious is that there is a growing desire for service in the telephony world that offer more than the services we have today. Client Thomas Howe Company is one of the companies out at the forefront of looking at business processes, web based services and Internet based solutions and tying them up into a simple, easy to use voice application.

While this stuff is very nascent in some peoples minds, the relevance can’t be missed between the story below that talks about the cable industry going 2.0, and Paul Kretkowski’s VoIP News story about Thomas Howe and the desire for more that Mr. Murphy has pointed out. Clearly the ‘net is making its impact felt. The blending of peering, registry and applications are the cable and wirleess networks best weapons against an already existing national telco framework that the iLecs operate. With Verizon, Qwest, Sprint and AT&T all moving in the same directions, the time to be IN the game has never been better.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

Comunicano client, The Thomas Howe Company and Sylantro are teaming up to challenge developers to create the best Voice 2.0 mashups and present them at Sylantro’s Global Summit in Las Vegas, Sept. 30 to Oct. 2. This latest contest will generate new technology solutions to real problems faced by enterprise and businesses today. Thomas is widely regarded as one of the masters of the mashup following his eTel contest win last February.

“Voice is moving beyond its traditional applications such as PBX into the realm of Voice 2.0 where it leverages the huge momentum in allied areas such as the Web and mobility to become a key enabler in communication transactions. Thomas Howe is among the handful of thought leaders whose leadership, creativity, and evangelism have given Voice 2.0 a firm footing today ," Marco Limena, president and CEO of Sylantro Systems told me. "We are very excited to be partnering with him and his team in defining the future of voice applications.”

Source: goebel.net

The VoIP company Sipgate, one of the biggest in Germany with also significant business in the UK, offers a special service for developers. "Sipgate API" is a new interface to integrate almost every Sipgate function - VoIP, SMS and large administration tools - in own applications. The Sipgate API enables to use central Sipgate functions within your own software or web projects, so that VoIP tinkerers can set up their own mashup services.

In his latest blog post Thomas Howe, the master of mashup, was so kind to explain again what mashup means:

A mashup is an application that uses
1) modern Web integration technologies
2) to take content or services from two independent sources
3) to solve a unique or niche problem.

The first element of mashups are the integration technologies they use. These integration technologies create a web as platform architecture, allowing the mashup developer to integrate his software on top of the world class infrastructures provided by Amazon or AOL, simply, easily and safely. The most common technologies used for mashups include Web services calls, which either come as a SOAP or REST flavors, AJAX, Javascript and Ruby.

The second element of mashups is that they take content or services from more than one independent source. This is where the mashup word comes from. Mashups take things that might not go together, and puts them together in a valuable way. The classic mashup is the Chicago Crime Map, that took data from the Chicago Police Department and plotted it on Google Maps, so that you could see where the burglaries happened.

The "Sipgate API" is provided free of charge and can be used for mashups with every Sipgate account. Up to date the fax function of Sipgate can be used only with the German service.

To make integration easy, Sipgate publishes also the source code of the Firefox extension "Sipgate FFX" as well as several Perl examples and a KDE panel application under a GPL 2 license. Further more .NET developers will find with "sipgate API .NET SDK" a comfortable library to use the "Sipgate API" services easily. Over a mailing list developers can also exchange experiences and tips.

You will find all information about the interface and the exemplar applications including detailed documentations under www.sipgate.co.uk/api.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

Jim Courtney has a interesting take on the mashup of presence enabled calling meeting low cost call set up.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

"Oh yeah…." those of you who ever watched WWF will remember Randy "Macho Man" Savage and his famous "Oh Yeah" line that he would use just as he started an interview.

Well, that’s kind of what I’m expecting at the Mashup Mania event that O’Reilly’s crew has put together next week at the eTel conference which is shaping up to be great.

Om Malik has his first of a series of LaunchPad events, and a swank party which clients Covad and Grand Central are sponsoring on Tuesday night that has been engineered by the smartest guy I know, Surj Patel. There is also, as Bruce Stewart points out a MashUp event during eTel too that will be worth hacking around at.

This is where the chest thumping, bragging will happen and rightfully so. There is a lot of amazing new technology out there and my instincts tell me that LaunchPad and the Mashup events will be the highlights of eTel.