Irv's Blog
2010 Predictions about Cloud Telephony
Now that we are well into the new year, and the dust has settled on the annual predictions from all of the popular industry experts, I would like to add my own observations to the mix.
Thoughts About Clouds
My thoughts about the evolution of cloud computing and cloud telephony.
The Evolution of the Telecommunications Industry
The Telecom Industry Evolves: From "Old" and "New", to App-Focused Telcos
Over the past 20 years the telecommunications industry has undergone two fundamental transitions: first, from "old telco" to "new telco" and now, to application-focused telcos.
As Martin Fransman, Professor of Economics at the University of Edinburgh wrote:
Ifbyphone Interview about Cloud Telephony with TMCnet Rich Tehrani
This interview between Irv Shapiro CEO of Ifbyphone and Rich Tehrani of TMCnet explains the Ifbyphone services and their integration into the telco ecosystem.
The Telephone Technology Pendulum and AnyPhone Technologies
Arthur Schopenhauer a German Philosopher, wrote an often misstated quotation, "Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom". We can apply this quotation in general to technology and specifically to telephony. Telephony technology swings between complacency and advancement. In these exciting times, when telephone technologies are rapidly advancing, we are often faced with the pain of innovation.
The Great CLEC Squeeze
As a result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the number of CLECs providing telephone services exploded. A CLEC (competitive exchange carrier) provides telephone services by leasing local loops (phone lines) and interconnecting those local loops to their own or sub-contracted long distance services. For most of the past 23 years, CLECs have primarily competed with the incumbent telephone carriers (ILECs) on price. Those days are over.
CLEC SIP Application Warehouse White Paper
We are very excited to announce the availability of our partnership program between the telephone carrier community and Ifbyphone. To better understand this initiative lets look together at the evolution of the world wide web and how SIP signaling is following a similar evolution.
Google Voice - Not Ready for Business
As I have shared in a previous blog post, I believe Google Voice is a fantastic addition to the Telephony 2.0 ecosystem and will help to establish the concept of supplementing a dial tone telephone company with additional resources from a telephone application service. However, for business users I find the current Google offering lacking.
Here is why:
eComm 2009 Ifbyphone iPhone Mashup Tutorial
I recently led a session at eComm 2009 on how to build an Ifbyphone-to-iPhone App. We've uploaded the session to YouTube. You can find it on the Ifbyphone YouTube Channel, and I've also listed the URLs for the 7 parts below:
Part 1: Introduction to iPhone Applications
It's the applications, stupid or what telco can learn from Salesforce.com
It seems that a popular business model today is to deploy some telephone softswitches or Asterisk servers into a data center, contract for call termination services, and anounce that you are in the telephone API business. Unfortunately this business approach ignores the lessons learned by following the grand daddy of cloud computing, Salesforce.com.
Why Skype for Asterisk is more important than Skype for SIP
Back in September of 2008 and now today, Skype has announced initiatives to open the Skype network to SIP users. These two solutions; Skype for Asterisk and Skype for SIP are very different and offer significantly different capabilities.
Google Floats all Boats
Over the past week and a half, Google Voice has prompted an exciting increase in the volume of discussions about Voice 2.0 and the evolution of telephony from a facility based to an Internet based service. This evolution will free millions of businesses from the limited features provided by their local telephone company.