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Fonolo announces API and SIP support

Published August 4th, 2008 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

I am attending the Clue Con Telephony Developer Conference in Chicago today and tomorrow. This is a great show for getting into the technical nitty-gritty of emerging telephony technology. Tomorrow, I will be giving a presentation here on 3 exciting new developments with Fonolo …

1) An API

It has always been on our roadmap to release an API (application programming interface) for Fonolo. We decided to accelerate its release in order to capitalize on the excitement and interest that Fonolo has generated in the community, in particular with carriers and mobile developers.

Today’s release is focused on Deep Dialing. It exposes functionality that lets you
•    Search Fonolo’s directory of companies;
•    Display the full text of the phone menu for a selected company;
•    Initiate a Deep Dial process to any node in the phone menu;

(If you’re wondering what Deep Dialing is, read this.)

2) A developer program

To go along with the API, we announced a developer program. Because the API allows you to place phone calls, we have to put some safeguards around its use. So we set up a form at developer.fonolo.com that lets you request a developer account. Each account has a unique key that will help us track usage.

3) SIP support

We now allow you to route calls to any SIP address, as well as any North American PSTN number. At the moment, SIP routing is only available through the API, not the web interface.

The API does not include access to any account-based info such as call history, call recordings, personal bookmarks or call notes. That’s coming in a later release. (For technically minded, the API is based on JSON-RPC requests over HTTPS.)

You can read the full press release here.

Shai on Squawk Box tomorrow

Published August 3rd, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

I’ll be interviewed tomorrow by Alec Saunders on Squawk Box at 11am Eastern time.

Squawk Box is a call-in show hosted on Facebook and powered by Calliflower. If you’ve never attended a Squawk Box session before, it’s really easy to tune in and they have a very friendly approach to participating: You can either write your question on the “wall” or you can raise your hand and ask your question through the microphone.

If you’re on Facebook, just click here and join.

UPDATE: You can hear a recording of the show here.

An avalanche of Fonolo press

Published August 3rd, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Wow! Our traffic went through the roof on Thursday after this article in The Consumerist:

Fonolo Slash-and-Burns Dread Phone Trees

Love that title. They also called Fonolo “an industrial-powered buzzsaw for hacking down phone trees”. Makes the work we’re doing here seem so action-packed! (I’m sorry to say that, in reality, spidering phone trees is a fairly unexciting process.) As a long time fan of The Consumerist myself, I’m thrilled with the coverage. Thanks guys!

I also want to point out this ZDNet article which says “Imagine this: you have to make a phone call, but you don’t want to sit through the umpteen-level phone tree awaiting your poor ear… [Fonolo] is like music to your ears — without the endless loop of Kenny G’s greatest hits.”

Finally, Boy Genius Report upgraded us from “buzz saw” to “chain saw” in this post saying “This is the kind of service worth waiting for.” Thanks! Speaking of waiting…

To the thousands of you waiting for beta invitations: We’re working as hard as we can to make the system ready for more users. Please stand by!

Gary Kim on Fonolo

Published July 21st, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Who loves their bitstream?

That’s a line used by industry analyst Gary Kim during his keynote at the recent Voice Peering Forum. He was driving home the message that carriers need to add services that drive user loyalty.

As he wrote here, "One of the themes [here] has been the absolutely central role applications now play in the whole communications business."

His advice to carriers was "make your platform attractive" because 3rd party developers will be the source of those new applications. That topic is one I’ve cared about since the beginning of Fonolo because we’ve always viewed carrier partnership as the best way to extend the reach of our product quickly. The difficulty lies in the large and slow-moving nature of carrriers and the lack of competitive forces incenting them to innovate. (See here and here.)

Two weeks ago, Gary posted an article titled "Watch Fonolo" that explained how our product fits well into this trend. Here’s an excerpt…

Lots of people think telcos are too "dinosaur-like" to keep up with the fast-paced world of IP communications….[but] In fact, there’s now widespread recognition that rapid software innovation is necessary, and cannot be done on an "in house" basis… So consider Fonolo… the sort of third party innovation carriers are looking for, and need, to create new value… Fonolo is an excellent example of how application developers and carriers can work together to create and popularize new applications that enhance and change the communications experience.

Thanks Gary!

The iPhone Canada launch and the Rogers backlash

Published July 14th, 2008 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

I just came back to Toronto from Calgary and can confirm that iPhone frenzy is in full force there. It was the lead story in the evening news even though Calgary’s annual "Stampede" festival was in full swing. (If you’ve ever been to Stampede, you know how worked up Calgarians get about it.)

The print, radio and tv coverage all seemed to follow the same template: A) People are waiting in long lines to get one and B) There’s anger at Rogers (the exclusive provider in Canada) for their pricing plan. This article at the Globe and Mail has a good explanation and a chart that shows the impact of the data pricing.

Lots has been written about the pricing fiasco and the eventual capitulation by Rogers to the consumer pressure. But I haven’t seen anyone point out the parallels with what Apple itself did when launching the iPhone.

If you recall, Apple’s initial price for the iPhone was quite high ($600) but was still purchased by the "must have it any cost" people. That was followed by rapid price drop (to $400) a few months later. Apple took some bad publicity for a few news cycles (Apple drops iPhone price by a third, early buyers not amused) but in the end, iPhone is still a coveted (even worshipped) device, and they made money off that early crowd. (Call it the "fanatic bonus".)

Rogers tried the same gambit and fell on their face. They had to back down on the pricing before the launch so they took the PR hit but didn’t get the pay-off. And worse, the sub-headline in every news story — and now in the consumer mind — is that "Buying an iPhone will lead to a large monthly bill". Instead of a bonus, Rogers got a fanatic backlash including some protest sites like this one with 60,000 members.

More from Mark Evans (Is the iPhone a PR Fiasco for Rogers?), Jon Arnold (Rogers Backlash on iPhone Pricing) and ITBusiness (Canadians welcome iPhone, pan pricing plans).

Alan Quayle on Fonolo

Published July 14th, 2008 in VPF, Fonolo and Carriers. 0 Comments

I met Alan Quayle at the recent Voice Peering Forum. He moderated the panel Telco 2.0 and Web 2.0: Making Money Together? which was on the same track as the panel I was on, Service Delivery Platforms: The intersect of Web 2.0 and Telecom (I’ll post a review of that panel shortly). Both panels tackled a theme that was in the forefront at the conference: How can carriers and 3rd party developers work together to bring innovative services to market?

I spoke with Alan during the show about our product and how it fits into the new carrier landscape. He gave the Fonolo beta a whirl and posted an article titled Start-ups to Watch: Fonolo, stopping the IVR Hell!:

"I’ve used the service a couple of times, and it ‘does what it says on the tin.’ You can select where you want to go for a range of companies’ IVR menus, and it calls you once connected to an agent…. set-up takes less than a minute and it works on any phone, you simply click on the webpage, get on with your life, and when the agent is connected you receive a call…"

Thanks Alan!

VPF Review

Published July 5th, 2008 in Mobile and Carriers. 0 Comments

I attended the 2008 Voice Peering Forum last week in San Francisco and found it extremely informative. Hats off to organizer Shrihari Pandit.

You can read good summaries of the show by Rich Tehrani here and by Alan Quayle here.

Analyst Gary Kim kicked things off with a keynote address that focused on a topic that was central to the whole conference: changing business models for carriers. Below are some of the driving forces he listed…

1) Competition
No news here. Traditional phone companies continue to lose customers and revenue to cable companies, wireless companies and PC based alternatives. A key factor here is “Landline Substitution” which refers to consumers (especially younger ones) who are abandoning landlines for a pure-wireless existence.

2) “Over the top” services
This term refers to any service being delivered to the mobile device using an internet connection, as opposed to using a carrier-selected approach. For the carrier this boils down to loss of control. Specifically: difficulty in capacity planning (see the next point) and unwanted competition for their pre-selected alternatives. This issue connects back to the long running smart pipe vs dumb pipe debate that I wrote about here. But it also connects with the central question of what model works best for adding innovative mobile services. (This was a central topic of my panel. More on that in a later post.)

3) Mobile bandwidth demand
The new wireless standards keep pushing up the bandwidth available to the handset. This is exciting for consumers but presents carriers with a tough pricing dilemma. If you price too high, you discourage use and your shiny new services never reach a critical mass. If you price too low, your cell towers get overwhelmed by the throughput during peak times (Imagine downtown at 5:30, with everyone waiting for the bus and watching YouTube clips) which leads to bad user experience and lost revenue down the road. (See here more on the “backhaul bottleneck”.)

For a good example of this pricing problem, look no further than the furor over Roger’s recently announced iPhone pricing plans. (Globe and Mail, Mark Evans, Jim Courtney, Jon Arnold.)

Analogies
As we work to understand the role of carriers in the new ecosystem, it’s natural to reach for analogies from other businesses. Gary had two analogies: Cable TV (which charges less popular channels a monthly fee for a slot) and retail chains (which charge for “shelf space”). Both are ways to make money from “upstream” partners, while keeping costs to consumer low. This is another way describing the “two-sided” approach that the folks at Telco 2.0 have been promoting. (Great intro post here and slideshow here).

New Video of Fonolo’s Premier at EComm

Published June 24th, 2008 in Fonolo and EComm. 0 Comments

The world got its first glimpse of Fonolo at Emerging Communication Conference a few months ago. The raw video from my presentation there has been up on their site for a while, but it lacked some impact because you couldn’t see the slides I talk about or the live demo of Fonolo. (Did I mention we won Best New Product?)

Our marketing department just finished making an edited version of the video which mixes in the slides and demo. I also wanted them to add a laugh track so that my jokes seem funnier but that didn’t work out. (I swear there was chuckling in the crowd — my lapel mic just didn’t pick it up!) Enjoy…

Voice Peering Forum on Monday

Published June 19th, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

VPF icon I will be attending the Voice Peering Forum on Monday and Tuesday in San Francisco. Looks like it will be a very interesting show. I will be on a panel titled Service Delivery Platforms: The intersect of Web 2.0 and Telecom.

I was on a conference call earlier today with the participants and the moderator, Thomas Howe, and we all agreed that the session’s title was “unfortunate”. I don’t think we’re going to talk about SDPs in the formal sense but rather in the more general sense that carriers are becoming “platforms” for advanced telephony services. And that’s a topic I’m really excited about.

The panel will include:

Thomas Howe — CEO, The Thomas Howe Company (moderator)
Garry Galinsky — Director, Product Innovation Call Genie
Crick Waters — SVP Strategy and Biz Dev, Ribbit
Pankaj Shroff — Chief Applications Architect, Sonus Networks

Skydeck’s approach to smarter call history

Published June 2nd, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

skydeck

Just read about Skydeck on TechCrunch. From their site: “Skydeck turns your phone bill into a map of your relationships with friends, colleagues, and customers - your true social network. We show you who called you, whom you need to call, and who never calls back. And since we also keep track of how much you’re spending, you’ll never get a surprise bill again.”

According to Mashable, “Skydeck is a service that essentially scrapes your cell phone bill, and offers up all sorts of information that your wireless provider doesn’t care to share with you”.

I’ve applied for their private beta, and I’m eager to try it out. But let me point out that this won’t work with any Canadian phones — currently they only support Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility, Sprint/Nextel, and T-Mobile. (Luckily I’ve got a US T-Mobile account.)

One of the pain points we identified early on in the development of Fonolo was that call history, in its current incarnation is nearly useless. We all receive the multi-page bills in the mail with tiny printing, listing every call by phone number. The unfriendly format means that the useful information contained in that data dump remains trapped on the page.

ch1

Skydeck also saw this opportunity and seem to be focusing on two particular (and quite distinct) aspects of that call record data: 1) Understanding/ predicting your bill and 2) Seeing an alternate representation of your social network. I can certainly see the value there. I also like the search feature.

With Fonolo’s focus on consumer-to-business calling, our perspective is slightly different. We wanted it to be easy for a user to answer basic questions like “How many times did I call Acme Corp?”. Today, you would have to scan phone numbers trying to match up Acme’s number. What if Acme has multiple numbers? (For example, maybe you originally called their 800 number, but then followed up by calling a different department directly.) And what about the calls made from your other phones? (Your cell phone, your office phone, etc.)

call h 2

By using Fonolo to reach Acme, you have an automatic call history generated, regardless of which phone you use. In addition, you have access to recordings of all those calls (if you opt-in) and you can even play back those calls while you’re on the phone with the company! And of course, our Deep Dialing feature means you don’t ever have to navigate Acme’s phone menu.

I’m glad to see other people tackling the challenge of creating useful call history systems, and I see both solutions existing together nicely.