Find me. If you can.

I now know why the term 'find-me/follow-me' meant so little to the friends I used it with 3-4 years back. At the time, it seemed like such an intuitive term - in itself somewhat of an anomaly in technology. Afterall, 'find me' or 'follow-me', what's not to get. And as a telecom person, I had heard the term for so long myself that I just figured people knew it. Not so. Call forwarding seemed to work, but for me, didn't really do the package justice.

Fast forward to now where everyone is being found or followed. The proliferation of personal, web-based telephony applications like GrandCentral, Ifbyphone and GotVMail have certainly helped. Or at least done what their predecessors - over-featured key systems - perhaps couldn't.

Forward even faster and like we see so often, as soon as the masses start to 'get' something, we change the game. The beauty of Find Me apps is that when properly managed, they do just that. They take the finding and following out of the equation for the caller. But there's a hitch. The call receiver has to program and then intermittently manage the application. Garbage in, garbage out. Don't tell your assistant where you'll be at five, they probably won't find you. Neither will your phone.

Enter presence-based find me solutions. These come in a few flavors. There are those where you can log in and out so the application knows which 'rules' to follow. And now there's 'touch' based presence. Haven't typed on your Mac (or PC) in a while, your phone will figure you're away and your find me rules will kick in. Fonality introduced this feature this week and others have it. Just don't expect your friends to understand it for a while....

Ribbit does not hop alone.

As a veteran of voice services and someone who pays close attention to Voice 2.0, I am very encouraged to see Ribbit so successfully get visibility across the technology noise machine. It’s great for Voice as a whole. And from what I can tell, their focus to aggressively bring voice to the developer world, like other technologies have done before them, is well intended - and should pay off in some fashion.

It is my opinion, though, that next generation voice services will need to succeed in the B-B space to create meaningful results for investors. In order to do this - whether through developer or other channels - applications have to be easy to deploy and must generate repeatable results for business.

The enterprise equation for voice is clearer as, in some format, we have been delivering value adding applications to this group for some time. Small business is less obvious and as we know, a more difficult and disaggregated group to market to. But this is where I believe the opportunity is greatest as this is the market that - short of basic telephony - has been under served. With the now more obvious intersection between voice and the web in front of us, there is so much small business can benefit from.

There are a number of exciting, newer companies in this space - something us voice veterans could not claim a few short years ago. One company I suggest having a look at - a little quieter perhaps that Ribbit (in the frozen tundra of Chicago) but very advanced in their product and distribution - is Ifbyphone.

Is Google Good for Small Business?

My friend Irv Shapiro, CEO and founder of Ifbyphone (www.ifbyphone.com), has for a couple of years now been asking people this question. He contends - and I must disclose that I am now a believer - that people do business with people they know. And, more importantly, since relationships are built in person or at a minimum over the phone, small businesses need to receive phone calls as a direct result of their Internet Marketing spend.

Sure, Google in some way is arguably an important part of any online strategy, but if it doesn't produce phone calls, is it good for Small Business after all. Read this post at Ifbyphone's new blog for more on this. There's also plenty else there worth reading. This is a company to watch.

Skype News. To Jajah or not to Jajah.

When this type of stuff ends up in the Skype Journal, you know the gloves are off on what Ebay should do with Skype. There are even articles circulating these days on who Ebay should sell Skype to! Funny enough, as a full time user of Skype services - well at least for peer-peer voice calls - it never even crosses my mind that Ebay owns it. So much for the planned synergies.

I have been fortunate enough to be involved at the client level with click-to-call for over a year now. I say fortunate because while it is rather simple technology it is significantly changing the Internet landscape. The phone is back. This posting at the Skype Journal on the click-to-call battle reminds me of what a client of mine said a year ago when estimating Skype's ultimate role in the click-to-call market. People still want to use a phone over a computer and more importantly, the phone will always be the universal interface. Meaning, everyone knows how to use it. And websites want to appeal to everyone.

I join everyone else is my curiosity of what Skype will be when it grows up. For the moment though, I continue to use it for what it's best at and nothing else. After all, with Jajah, Lypp, ifbyphone and a slew of others, I have no lack of options.

Voice 2.0 in Chicago?

Thirty months can be a long time to work at anything, except maybe when it ends with a large money transfer from VC's nibbling at their piece of the 'new voice' pie. Ifbyphone, a wonderful company located in the distant (at least for telecom) land of Chicago, announced a closed round of financing this week.

I was fortunate enough to be present during some of the 30 months since Irv Shapiro decided that building telecom applications wasn't just for telco guys anymore - or the enterprise for that matter. More than anything I have seen so far, Ifbyphone brings the web world into the telephony one and with it a whole new set of distribution channel opportunities.

Great product and vision notwithstanding, raising money in Chicago for a
voice play was not for the faint of heart. It was indeed a fresh reminder
of why more companies move to or get started in the Bay Area - it's still where the money is. All the more reason to believe that ifbyphone is doing something special.

Congratulations to Irv, Josh, Cindy and everyone else at ifbyphone. You earned it.