As the industry evolves and changes, the Web 2.0 world shifts and moves in parallel. This is my last post here on the Realtime Unified Communications Community.

In late 2004 Realtimepublishers.com and I joined forces to create what began as the Realtime VoIP Community. That community grew quickly, with discussion forums and participation from around the globe. In early 2006 we shifted to this blog as the central hub of activity and broadened our focus with the Realtime Unified Communications Community. Our posts and articles broadened to embrace mobility, wireless and later social networking technologies, all as part of the great field of unified communications.

The Realtime Nexus, a fantastic resource and incredible wealth of information, is going to be growing and taking new shape in the coming months. If you haven't used this resource already, please click the link, register and see all the depth of information available to you.


Sheryl and I treasure our great working relationship and fabulous friends at Realtime. We're looking forward to a variety of books, Essentials Series and other projects together as those opportunities arise. You can expect to see us around here and working with Realtime for a long time to come.

Thank you for all your participation, support and comments here over the past several years. You have been a marvelous group of readers to talk with, and Sheryl and I both look forward to continuing the conversation.

Technorati Tags: Ken Camp, Sheryl Breuker, Realtimepublishers.com, Realtime Unified Communications Community

Posted by Ken Camp | News and Trends, Unified Communications | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reflecting back over 2008 I've tried to think of the things that we real highlights among close friends and colleagues in the industry. I've come up with two highlights. Let me tell you what they are first, then I'll explain why they're highlights.

First from my friends Pat Phelan and Florian Seroussi, we saw TwitterFone. It's an interesting little integration between Twitter and the telephone network that let's you call a number and post a "tweet" from your phone. Speach to text in a nice little integration package.

From other friends Stuart Henshall and David Beckmeyer we saw Phweet. It's a different sort of integration between the telephone and Twitter that lets you set up a conference call via Twitter.

Side Note: Read Stuart's great story about Phweet and his year end wrap post My Year End Review and Thanks).

Why are these two apps important you ask. Let me explain.

I believe the interface to computerized resources is changing in the months ahead. I believe the old fashioned GUI is going to give way to a new VUI (Voice User Interface) as speech-to-text and text-to-speech conversion engines get faster, more efficient and cheaper. TwitterFone exemplifies the prototype of how the next generation of Communications Enhanced Business Processes will operate. While this app might seem silly to people who aren't Twitterholids, it demonstrates how users will be able to interact with voice to corporate systems for placing orders, supply chain management and any number of business activities in the future. As the work force becomes increasingly mobile and requires new tools to be productive, this technology shines a real light on that road to the future.

Phweet does something else that's new. For telephony geeks, we remember that before SS7 signaling was implemented to take phone network signals out of band to a separate network, signaling frequency (SF at 2600 Hz) was carried within the voice badn. SS7 took signaling out of band to a separate packet network. Phweet also moves signaling out of band, but to the Internet. And not just PSTN signaling. It's an example of using IP-based Internet technologies not just as a collaboration tool for ad hoc conference calling, but for using IP as a command and control channel for network resources in a new way.

These are two new solutions we saw in 2008 that excite me still because they demonstrate where we are headed in communications technologies rather than hang on to the past. They don't make any effort to prove VoIP is something new (it isn't). They don't cling to the past. They simply integrate pieces of the past and present in simple elegant ways that demonstrate how we'll be using communications systems and resources in the future.

That's a big deal. Kudos to Pat, Florian, Stuart and David for showing the gloabl communications community what can be built when you simply have a rock solid idea and a thought leadership mindset on how the future will evolve.

Posted by Ken Camp | Mobility/Fixed Mobille Convergence, Unified Communications, VoIP | Permalink | Comments (0)

I found this as I was wandering around perusing some industry news. It's not unified communications, but some of the old cabinetry work in telephony history is the finest workmanship the industry will ever see.

The Von Slatt deconstructed workshop telephone

Jake made this funky-cool workshop phone by uncasing a classic Bell System wallphone and refinishing and remounting the parts. As he points out, if you do a phone like this, you'd likely want to cover the terminal block for safety purposes.

Workshop Telephone

Technorati Tags: telecommunications history

Posted by Ken Camp | | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cisco made a couple of announcements recently and one that stood out was their open commitment to the consumer electronics niche.

Talk about hollow words echoing from the past. Yet they have to do something with LinkSys.

Om said it well in his post linked below:

There have been several occasions when Cisco spoke about their commitment to consumers, but it's all been hollow talk. And this is just more of the same. Cisco isn't a consumer company and doesn't have the DNA to become one. They're a powerhouse in networking, albeit one that's completely lost a taste for real innovation in my view. They aren't and won't be a consumer electronics company and they don't stand a chance of penetrating that market without a 70% shakeup in leadership. That's my two cents worth.

Cisco is everywhere. Cisco is big. But Cisco is simply vanilla ice cream in networking.
Related posts
Rich Tehrani - Can Cisco Become a Consumer Electronics Company?
Om Malik - Cisco's Misguided Foray Into the Living Room

Technorati Tags: Cisco, consumer electronics vanilla ice cream

Posted by Ken Camp | News and Trends | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've been seeing a lot about Truphone lately, but have been a bit reluctant to comment. Reluctant because the folks at Truphone are friends. But, I feel compelled to be honest, and my friends know me for speaking my mind.

First some links to the current conversation:

Truphone Looks Forward to an Exciting 2009
By Greg Galitzine, Group Editorial Director
Truphone (News - Alert) is a free application that's designed to allow users to inexpensively make international mobile calls from their own phone over the Internet. Earlier this year the company announced a native VoIP client for the iPhone developed with Apple's (News - Alert) own SDK, available via the online iPhone App Store. The solution routes calls over WiFi, so if the user finds themselves near a hotspot and needs to make a call, they can simply call up the Truphone application on theiriPhone ( News - Alert) and place the call.
[Read Greg's Full Post]

Greg's very up on Truphone, and his interview questions with Matt Rowntree reflect that. There wasn't anything but fat pitches in there - not one hard question.

Truphone is a finalist in the 2008 Crunchies.

And they've gotten lots of praise in the traditional press. Check the bottom of their home page.

So why am I not jumping up and down? I've been a Truphone user for a while - a long while, and yet I rarely find it useful or usable. I don't think I'm the anomaly either.

I used Truphone a bit on my N95, but I move my AT&T SIM from phone to phone. I've been haggling with the Truphone gang for ages to put up a Blackberry version. Recently they did. And if it worked, I might say good things about it. But it seized control of the BB without noting it would in the nonexistent documentation (FAQs and docs are very thin). Then, naturally, it wouldn't work. I could close my account and open a new one. It's tied to the SIM so moving it is impossible without support involvement that is interesting when we're across the pond.

So why is a service that's tied to my phone number on my SIM set up in a way that I can't actually use it when I move the SIM without closing the account, losing the credit, dealing with admin overhead of readding the credit. And if I move my SIM daily(and I do)? Ahh, so Truphone doesn't fit. And to my testing, the Blackberry version may work. I've heard a couple of reports that it does. Non glowing from people I know. I've seen a lot of "my friends at Truphone tell me..."

Then we got the iPod Touch release. Sheryl installed it and we managed to make one call successfully. One success to Gizmo SIP URL only, and that after two hours of putzing with it. So I installed it on my iPod, and my account can't work with it. I need yet another Truphone account apparently. Excuse me?

So in the interest of fairness, I went digging for info and found Sorry to our iPhone App users. We don't have an iPhone, but to be honest, two for two failure doesn't engender the kind of assurance that would send me rushing to install Truphone on one anyway at this point.

I want to own up to something. The gang at Truphone are friends. Yes, I could spend time on the phone working with them, helping them see the problems and rectify them. As a good friend, I should do that. As a consumer, if I have to do that, where does that leave all the people who are loading this stuff and having problems who don't actually have the Truphone gang as friends?

I'm disappointed in what I've seen from Truphone. And I'm disappointed to see a product at this level up for a Crunchie. It speaks ill of our industry, devalues awards and recognition, and doesn't serve the public well.

I'm very disappointed.

Technorati Tags: Truphone, Blackberry, iPod Touch, iPhone, Crunchies

Posted by Ken Camp | Mobility/Fixed Mobille Convergence, Unified Communications | Permalink | Comments (0)

My good friend Jon Arnold wrote a great piece this morning on VoIP. Great because of the discussion it opens up. My comments are below the snip.

VoIP in 2008 - "I'm Not Dead"

I've been writing my Service Provider Views column for just about a year now, and VoIP has been a constant theme. Mainstream service providers and VoIP have for the most part never gotten along very well, even though at one point VoIP seemed to be the Holy Grail of telephony.

Technorati Tags: Jon Arnold, VoIP, unified communications

Posted by Ken Camp | Unified Communications, VoIP | Permalink | Comments (0)

This being the Christmas holiday week, news has really been fairly light. Many companies across all business sectors have been shut down and quietly celebrating family time.

There have been a few stories that caught my eye in between shoveling snow (and yes, it's still snowing in Spokane. We got another 3-4 inches here last night).

Another $100 Million for Palm From Bono & Pals

It must be Christmas, as the guys at Elevation Partners are feeling generous enough to invest another $100 million into beleaguered smartphone maker Palm, which has been slip-sliding away for a very long time. Elevation Partners, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based private equity firm headed by Roger McNamee, previously invested $325 million in Palm (for about 25 percent of the company) and brought in new management -- many of them former Apple executives -- to save what was once an iconic brand and chief instigator of the smartphone revolution.
[Read Om's full post]

Om and I have long been Palm fans and friends, but we swapped a couple of notes about this. While we both think it would be very cool to see Palm remain in the market, this seems. at leastw to me, a foolhardy investment. Palm has demonstrated complete inability to compete over the past 2+ years, and an infusion of cash isn't going to help the weary, tired lack of leadership and innovation.

On a sad note, we've been following this story across a number of sources. Here's Rich Tehrani's post:

A Tale of Bribery, Cockroaches and Raid

One of the most fascinating articles I have read in a long while is about the Siemens global bribery scandal where the company spent $1.4 billion on bribes from 2001 to 2007. Of that, get this - telecom accounted for $800 million or 57%! Consider the company also had divisions in industrial, transportation, control systems, healthcare and other areas and you see just how out of whack the telecom bribery spending was.

This leads one to wonder a few things... What would have happened if $800 million in telecom bribes weren't paid during this time period? Would Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya and others have done better? One would imagine they would have.

Would the terms of the Alcatel-Lucent deal have been different? How about Avaya being taken private - would the valuation had been higher if the bribery by Siemens didn't take place?

Then there is product development. Did it suffer over the past decade? Did Siemens need to innovate if it was selling more product than it should have? Is its innovation behind others?

Furthermore, if other companies were selling less, did they in turn have less money to put back into their own R&D?

Did Siemens in fact cause innovation in global telecom to slow?
[Read Rich's full post]

This story saddens me because I've been a strong voice supporting Siemen's leadership. Rich asks the big question - Did Siemens in fact cause innovation in global telecom to slow?. Time will tell, but it's an interesting problem as to whether Siemens action hurt the entire industry. They certainly hurt countless smaller players in the space, but is that simply part of free market competition? Or are there deeper ethical issues, given that in many parts of the world bribery is simply how business gets done?

For an upbeat note, there's a look at 2009 and what's ahead by Emerick Woods, CEO at Global IP Solutions.

Focus is Everything

As 2008 comes to a close and I look forward to 2009, I am reminded of golf pro Harvey Penick. He once said, "Golf tips are like aspirin. One may do you good, but if you swallow the whole bottle you will be lucky to survive." I think the same principle applies to IP communications and business in general. Focus is everything.

Over the past few years, we saw some great technological advances. The iPhone phenomenon, for instance, is an incredibly promising development for advanced mobile communications. The openness of the iPhone platform and the support for seamless multimedia capabilities is driving a host of innovative applications. The past year also represented a big step forward for Unified Communications, as established players like Microsoft, Cisco, and IBM gained significant traction in the enterprise communications space. Buy-in and competition from such heavy hitters can only mean that we can expect to see greater convergence among applications and devices. Finally, 2008 was a year in which video conferencing became legitimate. From full-fledged telepresence, to more flexible and accessible desktop video conferencing applications, vendors have overcome a host of technical and business issues to offer a wide range of video communications solutions.
[Read the full post]

And our good friend Jeff Pulver, posted 12 ways ti use VoIP to improve the holidays, but these are generally great ideas the whole year through.

Top 12 Clever Things Ways to Use VoIP to Improve Your Holidays This Year:

The following list was compiled by Jim Kohlenberger and the VON Coalition

• Need to pay for presents in a down economy?
• Late on your holiday cards? Send a personalized video holiday card.
• Can't think of anything creative? Sing with the King.
• Forgot to give Santa your wish list?
• Need to Connect for Hanukkah?
• Want a fun way to wake up the kids?
• Want ring in the New Year the right way?
• Have someone who doesn't believe in Santa?
• Need a clever way to send a message?
• Need a half mile of wrapping paper?
• Can't afford to travel this year?
• Want to do something for those serving overseas?

[Read Jeff's post for the full details]

Posted by Ken Camp | Unified Communications, VoIP | Permalink | Comments (0)

Life has been hectic the past week with record snowfalls here in Spokane. It's been a real chore to dig out every day. For the first week there were no plows and we were trapped in the neighborhood with not many options to escape.

Things are clearing now, although the snow continues to fall this Christmas morning. Having to go shovel every few hours made posting and keeping up with things a real challenge.

Sheryl and I just wanted to take a moment to wish all our readers, friends and families a safe and happy holiday season. And David too

Click to Play

Posted by Ken Camp | | Permalink | Comments (0)