• E-mail this page
• |  Print this page
• | 
• | 
• | 

The Next Big Things In Voice

Telecom alpha geeks, unite! From a kid who rigged a phone to respond to movement as an undergraduate to a bicycle-powered network for aid agencies working in rural areas to a camera phone application that locates people based on photos of gum spot patterns on sidewalks, there were plenty of far-out ideas at the first-ever O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference I went to this week in San Francisco. But there was also an undeniable groundswell of cooperation and consensus on the next generation of voice communication: It will be driven by applications and added services, it will be pervasive in any environment, and open source and standards will play collaborating roles as voice-over-IP matures.

Typifying the creativity of the conference was Phil Zakielarz, a recent MIT graduate who showed off a Windows CE phone that, just by shaking or flicking it in certain directions could perform any number of programmable tasks. He said it could be used to detect presence: For instance, if it is shaking consistently, you probably have the phone in your pocket and are moving around. He demonstrated the phone browsing the Web by flicking right or left to scroll through recently visited pages. And if there's a mobile map on the screen, he's written an application that by tipping the phone to the side, depending on how far you tip it, the map scrolls a certain speed in the direction you tip the phone. Even odder was that all of this was developed as a part of a project for France Telecom ... who knows how it wants to use it. Samsung recently developed a model with similar possible functionality.

Joining Zakielarz was a chorus of students from New York University who had developed programs like the aforementioned gum location application and a way to pay for parking on your cell phone without ever talking to an attendant. There's definitely a sense that barriers to entry into the telecommunications industry are dropping, especially with applications like these and the wealth of open-source and developer tools showcased over the week. There's been talk about making it easier for developers to write applications, extensions, and application platforms for, and there's been discussion about easy-to-use soft phones with extensive functionality (and the ability to add more) built in.

One obvious point of the O'Reilly conference--and of this blog--is that developers and vendors are increasing the functionality of voice by integrating it with other applications and embedding applications into voice itself. All week long, there was talk about presence, delivering calls based on their relevance to the receiving party, location-based services, and integrating voice into a wide range of applications. Voice over IP adoption will drive this evolution, and it will make the choice to go with VoIP all the clearer. It's not just about cheap access anymore.

« Learning From The Best Of Business - And The Worst Of The Web | Main | Oracle’s SOA Push »