Google I/O, morning report

I think most of us are used to a pretty dreary keynote experience at conferences.  The leading keynote – an opportunity to make the thesis statement for the conference – usually disappoints, offering an opportunity for industry leaders to issue platitudes and to state, and restate, the obvious.  Instead, Google took advantage of their keynote not only to give good demos of all the key products being explored at Google I/O, but also to make a number of exciting announcements about those products, from the addition of Java 5 support to Google WebKit, to AOLs announcement of adoption of OpenSocial within its products, to the complete opening up of Google App Engine to immediate use by any and all developers.  For once, I – and I could tell I was not the only one, walking through the hall – came away from a keynote energized, full of ideas.

One idea that keeps floating around in my head is the similarity of what Google is trying to accomplish in reaching out in myriad ways to the developer to our own goals at VoodooVox in doing the same.  Coming into this conference, one thing I hoped to do was to learn some lessons about developer outreach from Google, which largely does a very good job of the task.  You’ll hear Google executives talk often about how it is strategically worthwhile for Google to invest in the improvement of the Web, and that this is why, among other things, they put a lot of internal resources toward developing code and apps that they give away to the community for free.  Today, listening particularly to the Google App Engine product lead, this motive came into sharp focus, because it aligned so precisely to what we are trying to accomplish with MyVox.  Google wants to reduce or eliminate the barriers that keep developers from realizing their app deployment dreams – things like database handling, hardware deployment, scaling, maintenance, and so on.  APIs like the Maps API or the new image manipulation APIs then let developers add functionality without having to learn the ins and outs of these particular subjects.  Our goals with MyVox are the same:  let developers do things with voice without having to deal with deployment and learning details.  With MyVox, you can “do voice” without having to figure out how to do telephony-related programming, deploy hardware, figure out how to get phone numbers and connect them to your app, or pay for your connectivity.  The new functionality we keep launching corresponds well to the new API functions Google continues to put out there as well.

The comparison is rough, and we are, of course, in a very, very different position as a company from Google – so much so that any comparison is almost laughable.  We deal in a very different medium, one which is simultaneously much older (people have been making phone calls for a very long time, and working with voice apps for a while too) and much newer (the rise of Web-phone apps is quite new, and still in an embryonic state), necessitating perhaps a different response.  Still, it’s extremely interesting to see what an industry leader with huge resources does when it wants to push its particular medium forward.  I hope and believe there will be lessons for us to learn in the telco world from how they approach the development of the Web.

Meet us at Google I/O!

Are you attending Google I/O?  Then please look for us there!  I (Nick Branstator) will be attending, and may be bringing other folks as well.  So if you are interested in sitting down and talking about the brand new world of voice, phones, and how all this can be used in applications, please track me down.

In-Call Media Summit

Last week, VoodooVox worked with Jones Media and SoftBank to produce the first In-Call Media Summit.  The subject was the ever-expanding topic of in-call media: content, offers, applications, advertising, and so on, as applied to the world of telephony.  As the world of advertisers, content providers, and application builders draws closer together, we felt it was time for all the participants to begin the discussion about what we are doing, why we’re doing it, and how it can be done better.  You can see more in the press release.

By all accounts, it was a riproaring success.  I judge this based not only on positive comments, but on the amount of business that got done during and after the conference – and by the large percentage of people who stuck around after the conference itself to .  Or maybe they were just enjoying the view from our offices (which still blow me away)…

Photos here.

The Challenge Winners

The Developer Challenger winners have been selected. You can see them all here: http://www2.myvox.com/developers/getstarted_d.asp?ID=36

What really impresses me is the breadth of the ways developers have made use of MyVox.  You’ve got applications in each of these industries:

• Education
• Social networking
• Music
• Journalism
• General consumer

It’s not just that we hadn’t ourselves thought of these apps… but that we didn’t even previously recognize the value of voice to whole verticals.  And for most of the apps, voice is not simply a sidelight, but an integral part of the product (and, in the case of Learnit Lists, of the process by which the community content which drives the application is created).

Many of our participants are also in the process of seeking out their first rounds of VC funding.  We wish them the best in this effort, and hope their prizes not only help fund their development, but also attract that little extra attention from the VC community.

Voice is the new mobile app

One of our partners – an interactive agency – told us the other day that, in the search for exciting new mobile applications, they’ve concluded that voice is the real killer app. They like that everybody can use the voice channel, and all you need is a phone number to get somebody interacting. These are critical characteristics for a promotion; you can throw a phone number up on any surface, from a Web page to a billboard, which is a helluva lot more than you can say about downloadable applications. Even text messaging campaigns with short codes rely on educating consumers that what they are looking at is an address to be entered into the phone, and only work for demographics (read: teens) where texting is commonplace.

What was even more exciting is that the advertiser this agency is working with completely understood and agreed with the agency’s conclusions. Mobile spending is important to them, but they recognize that mobile can and should often mean voice, that voice is the most accessible channel for the vast majority of users, and that it’s time for agencies to start bringing voice-channel mobile promotions to the table.

It’s always a happy thing when you get ready to preach your gospel… and find that your audience is already preaching it back to you, before you even get there. Mobile marketing agencies need to get ready for the idea that mobile is not just SMS, WAP pages, or downloadable apps – it’s equally, if not more so, about voice applications.

The Developer Challenge, and Flash audio players

Apologies for the long time since posting… I guess travel and jury duty will do that.

Two things: The Developer Challenge entries have closed, and I think we have a very exciting batch of participants. They really show off the wide range of ways in which MyVox can be applied to solve problems and create new products. Now we have the hard problem of picking winners. Once that’s done, you’ll learn more about all the participating applications.

Secondly, it’s very common for MyVox apps to need a way to play back their audio after it’s created. While that’s technically not our business, we like to help our developers out with any reoccurring situations, and this definitely qualifies. To that end, we’ve put together a set of MyVox-branded audio player widgets, and have also put our stamp of approval on some freeware widgets that we think work well. Ours are here:

http://api.myvox.com/tools/players.jsp

And the freeware ones are here:

http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/

They are pretty easy to use, but if you’d like more information, check out the MyVox Reference Library, where permanent docs explaining the use of the Flash players will show up momentarily.

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.

Upcoming conferences

Looking to hear more about MyVox?  If you are attending one of these conferences, or will just be in the area when I am, look me up and we’ll chat:

• Feb. 28-29, Miami:  Future of Web Apps and BarCampMiami
• Mar. 3-4, San Diego:  Graphing Social Patterns, in conjunction with O’Reilly’s ETech conference
• Mar. 15, Cambridge:  MobileCampBoston (tentatively)
• Mar 17-20, Mountain View:  MashupCamp