Conversationware

Now I don’t know if Mitel have proof that Shoretel ’stole’ their ideas, but from the comment in this post, it would seem that the recent patent claims are so broad as to be laughable. I await the details with interest.
More than that, to file a complaint such as this on the morning of the Shoretel IPO, no less, even if it turned out the infringements were justified, is going to inflict maximum cost and negative publicity. In the wrong light, it could be viewed as a form sabotage, and it has to make you wonder just how desperate Mitel are starting to look, in an industry in turmoil (once more)
The patent system itself would seem to have just managed to achieve precisely the opposite of what it was designed to do. The little guy was supposed to be protected, and instead you can see innovators becoming dead meat. Incidentally, some people don’t deserve to own an idea - particularly those who are terrible at executing them.
Because of the timing, I’m sure Mitel have shot themselves in the foot. I for one am not sure their motives will escape the inevitable scrutiny.

According to Michael Arrington at Techcrunch, Google is to acquire GrandCentral shortly. Thanks for the point Alec, are you next ? Google acquisitions are at a frantic pace right now.

This is remarkably quick work, as I only asked them for Unified Communications in my post on Saturday.

I believe this is a great move for Google, and I’m sure they’ll be pleased I think so. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure this puts them closer to Unified Communications than most any other provider.

Google have email, voice mail..sort of, instant messaging and video conferencing and now they ‘have’ telephony - the inbound flavour at any rate.

This may be considered a consumer move, but actually, not having to integrate with a company’s existing infrastructure to deliver functionality, and get users, is a key point. Integration is one of the harder aspects of on premises Unified Communications platform integration. It certainly confuses customers at any rate - the first question is usually “is it voip or not?”, and the answer is usually, “well, it could be”. Not a great start.

Inbound call handling is one of those items that is difficult to solve with on premise equipment because callers can choose to ring through different networks (mobile or landline) before the call even gets to the PBX, and if somehow manage to persuade callers to route all inbound calls through the company’s PBX first, there are extra call charges to consider when diverting off net, plus you don’t easily get telephony status, or ‘presence’ from the switch for trunk to trunk calls to mobiles - this is achievable, but in some (not all) cases can be extremely expensive.

Google (Grand Central) don’t need to bother with all that, and will appeal to individual consumers, but don’t forget that all consumers usually work for someone too! If this news is true, people could use Google Inbound services immediately without involving internal IT, by overlaying the service onto existing numbers.

It reminds me a little of when Rim and Blackberry started with marketing mobile email to high value individuals, and then steamrollered into the Comms room later on, once hearts and minds had been won.

One of my first posts on this blog was that Hosted Unified Communications was unlikely (ok, I said no chance), mainly because companies were unlikely to trust hosting companies. BUT, I hadn’t taken into account the Google factor. Google has so much invested in being trustworthy with companies’ and individual’s data already, that one might trust them - despite all of the rumblings from those technically savvy commentators.

Another post was about Google disrupting corporate email, because the reduction in costs could be colossal if only corporations would trust a hosting company with their email. The potential reduction in costs is massively increased if replacing Unified Communications as well.

Over on Aswath weblog, there is a useful suggestion on how Jajah could enable their dialing service without users having to be in front of their PC - Jajah are already promoting the ability to call without headphones - something that always put me off Skype.

I like the idea of a home phone being internet enabled, I guess everything will be before long. But if this is the case, perhaps the phonebook be online and automatically accessible by the phone display instead. 

A centralised phonebook accessible from any device, with click (press) to call would give the same experience as the PSTN, but improve it, because numbers are then also available from your desktop and from your browser enabled mobile.

The strength of Jajah, that calling is ubiquitous and doesn’t rely on any specific islands of connectivity, unlike some voip, is enhanced by giving contact information the same qualities.

Until then, phonebooks on mobile devices will continue to be a handy way of ‘encouraging’ call traffic through whichever network the devices are connected to - a lot of remote workers will still use their mobile because the numbers are on the phone….mainly because inbound callers’ details are so easy to add to the address book.

I always thought that connecting to someone (calling) should be done by clicking on a link, and that these links would ‘front’, or mask, the eventual device the call is delivered on. Abstracting contact details from the device you receive the call on would deliver us from yet another pain point - and deliver my personal holy grail, being a self updating phone book.

A phonebook that updates itself anytime a user changes device, which could be up to three or four times a day. That’s neat.

I’m an advocate of Gmail, with instant messaging, voice and voicemail built in - this coupled with desktop notification is significantly more useable for me than collections of web and client software from other vendors. Especially impressive is the ability to pick up gmail (and voicemails) on your mobile There is now a meebo-like web embedding of a group web chat facility,

The integration of a RSS reader with the email is more than convenient and with feedburner joining the ranks, I can see all of these things eventually supplementing the google desktop search tool to deliver me a very personalised search and delivery of tailored information.

Google has provided google docs, online hosted documents for groups to share, be updated and notified about. The aquisition of Jotspot hasn’t really hit yet, on the surface at least, but I’m looking forward to some basecamp type project collaboration from that, and now with google aquiring Zenter, we can have online slideshows and presentations too.

Youtube is starting to get quite useful, and I didn’t even mention google maps yet, which apart from giving me a quick, and slick, way to calculate journey times, has now gained a user business review facility

People question whether it is right to trust all your information to google, in the same way we trust banks with our money. But when I used Google Checkout to pay for a new laptop recently, instead of paypal, it occurred to me that many of us already do.

Where’s our unified communications Google? I know we can get voicemail through the mobile email, but surely that’s only the start.

The way I look at it, the term ‘Mobile Presence’ seems to be a contradiciton in terms. 

I originally read this linked article and found myself thinking the issue was very complicated. And now, having mulled it over in terms of whether this technology was something I would actually ‘use’ or not, I’m skeptical.

Leaving aside the ability to see if someone is on the phone or not….till another time at any rate…

My first thought was;

Because I always have my mobile with me does that mean I’m now always present?

Trouble is - I don’t want to instant message via a mobile phone if I can help it - as I’m usually busy being mobile and away from my desk.

Looking back, ‘Presence’ was coined by the Instant Messaging PC client, and therefore, to say I am ‘present’ actually means that I am at my PC desktop and contactable. Not being present means I have wandered off and am not going to respond.

In my book, this concept can’t be extended to a mobile phone, so ‘mobile presence’ is a misnomer. OK, enough with the re-iteration already already.

The meaning of Presence, has started to morph into ‘availability and willingness to interact’, and to that end a lot of discussion is being put into handling contacts, grouping them, and puttings rules against VIP versus double glazing people. And the bottom line is, I’m not sure about this.

So, in the instance I am away from my desk, I would pitch my voicemail against ‘presence’ technology as being most useful. Give me a call, and I’ll decide on the spot whether I’ll answer you or not, and, unlike a rules engine, I won’t ever get it wrong.

So, if I really can’t talk to you now, then leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as it is convenient. Of course, leaving a voicemail should in itself move the conversation onwards, so this isn’t a waste of either your or mine time.

I think that’s a lot easier than maintaining a presence engine via some small mobile screen that you forget to check every ten minutes, don’t you?

So couldn’t the communications industry just define Presence to mean Whether I’m at my desktop, or not?

It’s not perfect, so perhaps we should think more about how conversations are initiated, a more formal process that simulates that so repetitive IM, “can we talk?” 

That permission element is going to be all important

A useful article here, which has gartner predicting that enterprise IM will go from 25 to 100% penetration in enterprises by the end of the decade, and it has some market figures.

There are some other predictions, like “by 2012, presence technology will be offered independently of IM and email products”

I thought this sort of thing was called a busy lamp field in days gone by, but I could be wrong.

Someone I was speaking to recently said that companies don’t need blogs if they’re using message boards - and it wasn’t the first time I’d heard that.

Instinctively though, I felt there was a difference in terms of how companies could engage (have conversations) with a wide audience - with current blog technology in the early stages at least.

Having a scout around my favourite ‘principles of blogging’ sites, I found Tom Chandler doing his usual excellent job of articulating just why blogs are better, with other links around the subject.

It’s interesting that companies worry about blogging, and yet allow a ‘free for all’ within their message boards. Perhaps its just that anything new = automatically bad until proven otherwise.

Another favourite blogging (copywriting) site The Copywriters Crucible pointed out this youtube video, with poor sound, but very ‘new-media’ funny.

It seems that businesses don’t really know what UC is, or how to justify it yet. Apparently voip vendors agree what UC is - although I haven’t seen them explain it in too many places myself!

Interesting article from an interview with Irwin Lazar from Nemertes research

The boss sat at the back of the room, full of 12(!) people, and said

“Because we deal with a lot of people in Continental Europe, who naturally have a wide variety of accents, we would like our colleagues here to test your speech driven auto attendant system”.

I could barely understand them when they called and asked for my colleagues on our live AVST system,

However, when the boss then asked them to “now put on an accent”…. it was all I could do to keep my head out of my hands.

It was a bit surreal watching two normal looking fellas making faces as they put on weird accents probably never heard on the planet - but, we got through it with flying colours!! (thank you Nuance)

Whenever I go into a company to talk about Speech Recognition products, I know I will quickly be into the ‘live demo’.

People don’t yet believe the technology exists in a form they can seriously use, and so calling in is the best way of proving the concept, and having some fun, before moving on to the more serious questions.

Showing instead of telling usually works so much better.

The demo is also the best way to give yourself a coronary, as there are just so many factors waiting to trip you up.

So what can go wrong?

Unlike my hands free in the car, the boardroom hands free phone may be of questionable quality - you become a master at tapping the phone in case the non duplex phone clips what you’re saying.

Despite warnings, people in the room tend to get excited about the recognition and start babbling loudly around the handsfree phone as soon as they hear the first accepted command. Before you can say ‘pause session’ the speech system is still listening, and tends not to expect any of the following:

• ‘blimey, it really works’,
• ‘how does it handle swearing?’,
• ‘how long does it take to train?’
• or whatever

On this particular occasion I knew I was in trouble immediately - but once the system proved itself I started feeling brave.

Pushing it to the limit, I used my loud speaker mobile on the desk instead and called in to access my messages, contacts, calendar and handling settings as this never fails to impress,

At Which Point

- the boss jumped out of his seat and whacked up the air conditioning onto full blast. “This is just like being hands free in the car isn’t it”…he said smugly, over the din.

He looked so disappointed when it coped ok - I still don’t understand why really.

Perhaps there was a receptionist that had interviewed very well. Sometimes there is just a hidden agenda :-). Proud but without an order, it was a hollow victory.

Unified Communications as a concept has a number of interfaces around which technologies are consolidating

Interfaces are converging around Messaging, Real Time Conversations and incoming call handing - complemented by applications being ‘enabled’ for communications.

Speech Recognition (the user independent variety) is another method to access Unified Communications technologies, usually from a mobile telephone, but being new, it is difficult for companies to position different solutions and make buying decisions.

So, one of the first questions I would put forward is ‘how many speech interfaces does a user want?’

Do they want to call in and access and handle messages and contacts, call another system to set up their voice/emailbox and change their incoming call handling settings, and perhaps yet another number to access their Speech enabled application. Perhaps a different server could run the speech driven company directory transfers?

Perhaps not.

Each speech platform will have it’s own ‘logic’ in terms of users interfacing, so learning more than one will likely be more than users can stand. This should be a way of filtering out some one trick ponies!