New Career Opportunity!
Sadly, today is my last day with @Voxeo and @Tropo. I have accepted a leadership role with @Bechtel, the world’s largest and most innovative construction company. I will initially be focused on their API, mobile app, and communications strategies.
It has been both an honor and a privilege to work with Voxeo. I’ve never met a more passionate team of people until joining Voxeo Labs nearly 2 years ago through the acquisition of Teleku. @Visionik and @JSGoecke’s leadership has been refreshing and inspirating. I can honestly say that Voxeo is in the right place at the right time with the right technology and vision to pwn the telecom CaaS (Communications-as-a-Service) market and reap the rewards of being an innovator in the cloud communications space. I am so proud to have been a part of this movement.
I will continue to champion Voxeo and Tropo. I am also looking forward to continuing to work with their APIs and platforms in my new career with Bechtel.
Chris Matthieu (N7ICE) interviews Arthur White (N4TRQ) about his historic hamradio APRS tweet through the International Space Station (ISS) and 73s.com to Twitter!
Voxeo Labs has done it again! Here is another historic first in telephony. We are now able to place real PSTN phone calls into a Chrome Canary web browser with no plugins - just pure WebRTC and Phono, our Javascript Phone API! http://phono.com/webrtc
Twelephone
If we were inventing a telephone today, what would it look like? How would it work? Would it be hardware or software? SIP or Jingle? Would it include text chat as well as voice? Would it be social? I have been asking myself these questions lately too.
The PSTN telephone network is outdated compared to today’s HD audio (wideband) VoIP technology. More and more people have been talking about canceling their voice contracts with their mobile carriers and only signing up for data plans. SIP-based VoIP apps run great over data plans and leverage wideband audio on mobile devices as well as web browsers using tools like VoxeoLab’s PhonoSDK.
Most of us seem to be more engaged on Twitter and Facebook on a regular basis than email or even Skype. If this is where our conversations are happening, it seems logical that the today’s telephone would be integrated with these social platforms and support conferencing for group conversations by default. It would support HD audio and allow us to initiate telephone phone calls via a web link.
Meet my latest experiment, Twelephone.com!
Twelephone.com allows you to sign-in via OAuth with your Twitter account and initiate a conference call directly from your twelephone user page such as http://twelephone.com/chrismatthieu. You can tweet out the link for others to join you or you can call others via their twelephone pages. As other Twitter users join your twelephone call, their avatar appears on your page automatically. You can mute yourself or others as desired or even hangup on other people that you don’t want to speak with online.
This is just the start of an idea. It’s written in Ruby on Rails and uses VoxeoLabs’ PhonoSDK and Tropo. The source code is published on GitHub so feel free to review it and send pull requests if you have ideas or time to make improvements.
Spree.ly Social Shopping
Just in time for Cyber Monday, I re-launched Spree.ly - a real-time, shop-with-a-friend technology. On Spree.ly, customers can shop on Amazon, Apple, and Barnes and Noble together with more stores coming later this year. There is no software to download or install. Simply sign into Spree.ly using your Twitter or Facebook account and share your social shopping link with your friends and family and begin shopping for Christmas items together online. In additional to browsing stores online together, Spree.ly also incorporates real-time browser chat and real-time Voice over IP (VoIP) conferencing powered by Phono and Tropo so that your friends and family can talk online while shopping together!
With everything becoming more social online, it was only a matter of time before the “mall experience” could be replicated with a web browser. This is a clever idea and probably best targeted to people who enjoy group shopping or sharing items with people online or even grandparents that would like to shop with their grandchildren together online.
Spree.ly generates its revenue from Affiliate Commissions. Most of the large e-commerce sites offer affiliate links to website owners where a small percentage of online purchases resulting from their link traffic gets returned to the site owner in the form of a commission check. Spree.ly hopes to create a better shopping experience for consumers as well as the retailers resulting in more revenue for the stores and ultimately sales commissions for them.
H4ppy B1n4ry D4y!
I am a such a n3rd.
As 11:11 AM approached today (Binary Day), I waited with baited breath to watch my digital clock read 11/11/11 11:11:11. As the countdown proceeded and the banging of the pots and pans erupted, the neighbors must have thought it was New Year’s Eve all over again.
As my buddy Graham McIntire pointed out, Happy 63 Day! We get to do this all over again tonight at 11:11:11 PM :)
