Rich Karpinski at TelephonyOnline did a great job of summarizing the conversations at the Telco 2.0 event in Orlando today, including a conversation between Thomas Howe and Ifbyphone CEO Irv Shapiro. Here’s the recap of their conversation:
Voice seems like an unlikely topic for an event looking at the future of telecom, but voice remains a necessary mode of communication, especially when combined with the user interfaces of the Web and the ability to route voice via flexibly coded business rules.
Voice mashup specialiast Thomas Howe led off the session, urging service providers not to let startups — such as fellow panelist ifByPhone — be the only players innovating in the area of business process-enabling voice communications. Those startups “will eventually be limited because they do not hold the the [customer] that service providers do.”
ifByPhone CEO Irv Shapiro argued that he much preferred to be in his company’s business — which he called “apptel,” or combing apps and communications — than competing in a world where the value of raw voice calls is getting closer and closer to zero. “Because we deliver applications, we don’t have to compete with the race for voice calls to the bottom,” Shapiro said, adding that ifByPhone assembled its cloud-based voice 2.0 service by wiring together 750,000 lines of proprietary code with open source products like Linux, Asterisk and open call routing technology.
His advice for incumbent service providers:
- Think applications
- Make all telephone numbers SIP addressable and charge for access to them. These incoming SIP phone calls, driven by business process-communications, can be charged for.
- Embrace voice developers and entrepreneurs
Read the full article here.
