The Voice & Video 'Good News Fire Hose'. It's Comcastic!

It seems like once a quarter, we go into overdrive on encouraging news for the emerging communications space. This past week qualified with flying colors.

From funding to exits, from products launching to products maturing, and from opinion pieces to hard facts - everywhere I turned this week, the fire hose was pointed my way. Some highlights to feel bullish about...

Hosted VoIP for Business Continues Upstream:

• For the second time in just over three months, Comcast dipped (this time big time) into the Hosted VoIP business services market with its take-over of NGT.
  
• Ironically this news came only days after this piece circulated on how Hosted VoIP is finally moving upstream, and that consolidation is coming. This prediction of VoIP reaching near 80% penetration in a few years didn't sting either.

More money for integrating voice into the Web:

• ViVox, the company that deeply blends voice into online gaming, social networking and other interactive web sessions got what it deserved: almost $7m. Suddenly, Web communication feels light without a voice attached. Not long ago, the roles were reversed.

Video gets thumbs-up from the Enterprise...and plots its assault on the home:

• A recent survey added validation to what we already know: the enterprise is buying more and more video communications gear. Just wait 'till they use it for more than conferencing.
• Between Skype on TV, and the promises of video calling on the Ipad, the home market never looked so good. The Ipad will put video firmly in the kitchen, where we love to talk.

Iphone Apps that actually have voice in them:

• Andy's right when he says that Cisco's Voice App is me too. But he's also right that it will drive the market. Moves mobile VoIP deeper into the enterprise, while giving users what they want - UC on their mobile, not their desktop.
• Call recording is obscure right? Maybe not anymore. Cogi - an innovative company destined to make archiving voice conversations no different than saving a Word file - launched their Iphone app. The dictaphone is back, and it's better than ever.
  

Good week, no?

Google Voice: Friend or Foe of (Very) Small Business Telephony?

I find myself increasingly torn when it comes to Google Voice. As a very early adopter of the original GrandCentral's services back in ‘07, I've always appreciated the offering for its innovation and simplicity. And of course held great respect for GrandCentral’s founders (and for anyone else who can sell voice companies to both Yahoo and Google in one lifetime!).

But since the official launch of Google Voice (GV) – and its gradual evolution of (often compelling) features – I have sometimes grown frustrated of the doomsday predictions or questions surrounding the sustainability of the many micro-business telephony solutions, in the face of this free set of services.

Micro-business is typically understood as companies with 1-5 users, of which there are millions in the US alone. I’ve been fortunate to be on the go-to-market side of more than one startup focused on this segment; it’s a population rich with opportunity, yet one that that adopts at varying speeds.

Google Voice actually serves as an excellent reminder to us all of how deep this very small business market is, and of just how long it takes to get to its long tail. You see, features such as the ones included in GV have been available to the micro-business for five if not more years now. In fact, the virtual PBX (a name dying for a makeover) was perhaps the first example of telephony moving to the cloud. Yet since GV’s market entry, one would think its features just dropped from the sky.

Yes GV is free. But for the micro-business person, free is not always the answer. Value, vendor relationship and access to support play key roles in spend decisions. After all, the telephone experience is – now more than ever with mobile proliferation - the first impressions theses businesses offer its customers.

When Google Attacks: Could be good news.

In late December, Om Malik wrote an insightful blog on a related issue called ‘When Google Attacks’. It recounts how Toktumi, a small business telephony provider, ran into the Google Voice wall. Its original product packaging no longer separated itself adequately from GV, so it shifted gears, added a more mobile front end, fine-tuned its customer acquisition (using Google, ironically) and went full speed ahead.

And when I talked recently with the CEO’s of market leaders like Grasshopper and Phone.com, I heard more of the same: GV is, in a fashion, good for business. All around me, I see other evidence of growth from innovative companies delivering features or services that form Google Voice:

• Long Distance: GV, especially on its app, make this easy. But the calling card business does not go quietly, and next gen mobile services like Truphone or Vopium are accelerating.

• Call Recording: This has gone mostly unsaid, but GV allows for the recording of calls. This is really an untapped market that requires demand-stimulation. Companies like Cogi are moving fast and gaining traction.

• Voice Mail Transcription: This could be the most controversial or talked about feature. But companies like PhoneTag have so far come through the battle with flying colors.

Sure, for all these companies, GV’s entry was and continues to be cause for alert -- and surely resulted in more than one call of concern from their respective investors. But alerts are healthy. It forces a re-check on product packaging, customer acquisition/retention formulas and on overall focus. And as Google integrates Gizmo5, and possibly it existing business apps, the feature set will grow - and this cycle of alerts will repeat.

For now Google Voice and its ever-expanding set of smart features serves the sole proprietor and the mobile professional well as either an over-the-top or primary telephony solution. But it's not killing a market; rather, it’s expanding one. Its marketing muscle is pushing next gen telephony into the late adopter pool.

Besides, as James Siminoff recently declared in his keynote address at StartupCamp Telephony...'if you can’t deal with Google coming into your space, then get out now'. 'Cause they're coming.

Battle for the Voice Cloud is on: Ifbyphone Snags Cloudvox.

I first met Irv Shapiro in the late fall of 2006. Scouring the wire as I always did for companies doing new things in voice, I came across Ifbyphone – a Chicago based startup at the time touting its hosted IVR platform, among other things. Frankly, I can’t remember what their press announcement at the time was about – some voice blogging widget perhaps – but it caught my attention. And a few phone calls and a trip to Chicago later, I found myself with the good fortune of working alongside this visionary entrepreneur for the next 18 months.

Irv – an outsider to telephony at the time – was unequivocally convinced that the voice market was headed for explosive growth. This was 2006 though, and so convincing others of the same was no small task. At that time, the notion of moving telephony to the cloud was at best in its infancy. We still called it ‘hosted’ back then and even at that most traditional telephony people – and the VC community – wanted little to do with it.

If anything, the voice community was still immersed in stealing minutes using VoIP. Irv though was focused on building voice applications that would give the SMB new sales and marketing tools with which to both make and save money. He saw the race to zero in VoIP coming but he also saw an SMB market that lacked affordable access to applications that could materially affect their businesses.

Fast-forward to January 2010 and the little Chicago company that could just made the first move in the battle for the voice cloud. Today, Irv Shapiro – CEO of Ifbyphone – announced that they have acquired Cloudvox, an upstart voice application development platform company out of Seattle.

For Irv and his team, it’s actually a little of ‘what’s old is new again’. Let me explain. Back in early 2008, Ifbyphone launched Phonemashup.com in an effort to open its platform to the development community. The intent was to enable developers to leverage its robust and open platform to build applications of their own, or simplify the process of integrating voice into web apps. Great concept and well received, but ultimately a bit too early. When compared with the growing levels of engagement we witness today, in 2008 the development community wasn’t quite ready.

Recognizing this, Ifbyphone stay focused on packaged voice apps for small business – voice broadcasting, outbound IVR and more – and built itself a niche and stronghold in the direct marketing and advertising space. Companies all over the country and of all sizes now rely on Ifbyphone’s platform to generate leads and to talk more with their customers. As Irv likes to say, he has built the company the old fashioned way – with revenue.

Now, several rounds of financing and thousands of customers later, bringing Cloudvox into the fold instantly broadens its reach into the fast growing segment of third party built voice applications.

The voice cloud is indeed alive and well.

Now arriving: Over-The-Top Voice Applications.

An "over-the-top" application is perhaps best described by its very namesake. It implies a solution that can ride on top of existing infrastructure, rather than require heavy integration to get its value into the hands of end users.

Therein lies the real value of these. Developers and marketers of over-the-tops can truly focus their efforts on problems end users are challenged by. The result: applications that bring significant change to a given user experience.

In the voice world, the maturation of APIs and open development platforms are encouraging more of these. Ribbit Mobile--an offering that goes "over-the-top" of your mobile service to enhance its value through better online call management, among other features--is one example. Fonolo (disclosure: they're a client)--a call center solution that goes "over-the-top" of IVRs and ACDs to empower the end user with a better experience--is another.

And recently, I read about Poketypoke, a new service by Ditech Labs released recently at CES in Vegas. Poketypoke aims to solve the long-standing problem of missing or arriving late to conference calls because of dial-in code issues, user error or plain-old bad memory. And yes, is going over-the-top to do it.

Poketypoke is the brainchild of Jamie Siminoff who applied the same method to conceive it as he did to birth PhoneTag (recently sold to Ditech, and arguably an earlier version of an over-the-top): found something that drove him crazy and set out to fix it. In the case of PhoneTag, he wanted to read his voice mail. With Poketypoke, he saw a very sub-optimal process in place in a huge market--conferencing.

The service works like this. A user forwards an auto-generated email from a conference bridge, to Poketypoke. The application scrapes the emails for the relevant information--combining automated and, where necessary, human processes--to insure the system confidently grabs the key data (dial-in, pass codes, etc...) it needs to dial the user into a conference call on their behalf. On time, of course.

Like the others I mentioned earlier, Poketypoke is focused on fixing an end user experience that is highly repetitive, but that needs work. Surely there are user experiences out there in the voice-related world that could be improved. And going 'over-the-top' - while leveraging the many emerging voice development platforms to get to market quickly - is an opportunity for the taking.