Welcome to 1994…Again!

The proprietary, closed, black-boxy world of telephony is being liberated by open standards. Just as HTML and the Internet ushered in an entirely unimaginable class of web-based content, applications, and services, we now see VoiceXML and VOIP fostering similarly unprecedented change in telco.

The new reality is that it’s far easier to develop and deploy telephony apps. Ramification? Prepare for an exciting wave of novel phone-based products and services. That’s why we say welcome to 1994 again, an era when the Web was new and seemingly every engineer was at work on the next big thing.

I think that’s precisely where we are now. But a big advantage phone developers have over the first generation of web developers is they enjoy the distinct advantage of an installed base. For the developed world there is almost universal access to phones. So it’s simply a matter of designing the right app or service, and I have complete faith in the developer community to do just that.

One important clarification: when we say phone apps, we do NOT necessarily mean an app that only runs on a mobile device. To us, the big opportunity is with phone apps or services that lead with the voice channel, and then get mashed-up as needed with the web or mobile devices.

Some examples? If you’re in your 40s like me, you probably remember calling the “weather line” before school. Later on came the sports hotlines offered by many major newspapers, and later still was MoviePhone. Today good current examples of a pure-play voice app are the many ad-supported 411 services, and the hilarious novelty lines of RH Brands (check out www.rhbrands.com).

There are also many Voice 2.0 companies creating interesting Voice/Web mash-ups, such as Grand Central, Jaxtr, JaJah, SayNow, and many more. (Self–serving plug: our Voice 2.0 initiative is MyVox, and of course it’s the best of them all.)

And lastly on the mobile side, there are many interesting web to mobile services like mobile couponing. Users of services like Cellfire profile their purchasing interests, and coupons sent to them via SMS or MMS.

So where’s this all heading? To an exciting world of choice, of course. Right now in a garage near you, someone is developing a phone app/service that a couple years from now you’ll have no idea how you lived without.

So welcome back to 1994. The future once again looks quite bright.

J. Scott Hamilton
President/CEO
jsh AT voodoovox DOT com

Earspace

There’s this term we’ve come to like in the office called “earspace”. Earspace is at least three different things:

1. The space between your ears (aka, your brain)
2. The network and technology that connects phones (and, increasingly, apps) together
3. The collection of places where people collect to talk and listen over the phone, whether to each other or to a computer

In the last case, the analogy is to “cyberspace” - which, while maybe overused and dated-feeling, still conveys something very important about the sense of place and places that one experiences while online. “Earspace” asserts that a similarly powerful concept applies on the phone, especially as the line between online and on-phone blurs.

The earspace is an emergent phenomenon of several trends:

1. Mobile phones making it so the phone always with us, and a part of almost every physical space we inhabit
2. Those same phones becoming more and more sophisticated computing and networking devices, capable of interacting strongly with cyberspace
3. The creation of applications that stitch telephony onto online “places”, from social networking sites to instant messaging

And there’s doubtless more involved. But you get the idea, and why we are starting to really like the term.

Nick Branstator
General Manager, VoodooLabs
nick AT voodoovox DOT com

Hello!

A few months ago, we decided it was time to formally make an R&D group within VoodooVox. R&D’s always been a key part of what we do, but as the company grows and expands its activities - and as we have more resources dedicated to ongoing operations and core product development - it’s become time to separate out our exploratory work as deserving of its own focus and resources. And so we’ve created VoodooLabs.

We’ll be using this blog to do a few things:

• Talk about upcoming releases from VoodooLabs that touch the outside world
• Muse about the brave new world of telephony in which we participate
• Show off a few things that haven’t been released yet

We live in a world where the meaning of telephony is undergoing a fundamental overhaul. The ever-declining price of transport and interaction, combined with technologies that make development easier and more accessible to a larger audience, mean that there’s a whole new group of people playing with phones these days. As we’ve been saying within the company for years now, it’s not unlike the early stages of the Web, as people scramble to build new value chains and revenue models to support the explosion of new telephone-based applications.

Or maybe “explosion” is too strong a word - because it looks like the real explosion is yet to come.

Nick Branstator
General Manager, VoodooLabs
nick AT voodoovox DOT com