MashupCamp VoiceMap

At MashupCamp speedgeeking, I asked the people making the rounds to participate by putting a map point on their hometowns, and then calling in and recording themselves saying their names and what they thought of MashupCamp.  Here’s the result.  (Most people liked MashupCamp.)

MashupCamp so far

MashupCamp has been a great experience, and we still have a day to go. It’s a special experience getting to share a room with a bunch of like-minded geeks looking to investigate a topic or take on a challenge. I’ve been fortunate enough to attend three unconferences this past month; MashupCamp has been the best of them.

I both led a session and “speedgeeked” yesterday. Speedgeeking is like speed dating, except you are demoing your app instead of yourself. I showed off the VoiceMaps app from our gallery, having each visitor add a point on the map with his or her hometown, and then recording that person saying something about who they are and what they think of MashupCamp. You can see the result here. Lots of fun, and also exhausting… five minutes sounds like a long time to talk to somebody about your app, but in reality it was never, ever enough.

The session was good too. I focused less specifically on MyVox and more on sharing what I knew about the tools and approaches available to folks who want to incorporate telephony or voice into their apps. Most of the folks here have never thought about telephony and how it fits into their development world, and it seemed like a number of folks got a lot out of the experience. While I was hoping that there would be folks from Ribbit around to comment on their take on APIs and voice mashups, some attendees of the MashupUniversity were able to relay what they learned from Ribbit’s presentations there. You can see my hasty notes on the session on the MashupCamp wiki.

Coolest app seen so far:  Yahoo’s FireEagle.  Still have to delve deeper into this one, but as somebody who’s been trying to figure out how best to bring location-based services into the mix of things we work with, this looks exciting.

Gallery, press, and new feature roadmap

For those who have not heard, the MyVox Gallery site is now in place.  This is where we feature all manner of apps that combine phone and screen (be that your laptop screen or your mobile screen) in cool ways.  You can check it out at http://gallery.myvox.com.

We’ve gotten a lot of press over the past week as we’ve done the really-truly-official launch of MyVox out to the world.  Here’s at least some of it:

• TechCrunch
• Media Post
• WirelessDevNet
• Adotas
• Telephony Online

Some MyVox developers have asked me for a roadmap of upcoming feature releases.  Here are some of the things we plan to release soon, though I can’t give you an exact schedule:

• Starting with the phone:  Right now, all MyVox interactions start with the user in front of some sort of screen, so that you can get your phone number and PIN.  However, there are a lot of great apps that become possible if the user can begin interacting while away from the screen - so we will enable that soon.  More details to come.
• Dedicated phone numbers:  If you need your own phone number for people to call into, we’ll be able to set you up with one.  This is also important for making the above feature work well.
• Emailing audio files:  You’ll be able to have MyVox recordings go to an email address instead of being stored on our server or uploaded to a URL.  This is mostly a convenience feature; there are plenty of ways for developers to do this themselves, but we thought it would be nice to build it into the API.
• Podcasting:  When you think about it, a RecordingList is very similar to a podcast feed.  In both cases, you’ve got a set of recordings that have been made at different dates and times, and which other people may want to consume.  Soon you’ll be able to get RecordingLists with the appropriate RSS formatting to allow podcasting directly from MyVox.  This will be great with apps like VoiceBlog.
• Caller ID:  Sometimes it’s nice for an app to be able to access the phone number of the caller, so we’ll be making that available soon as well.

Got another feature you want to see?  Let me know in the comments.