Click here to Subscribe

Emerging Telephony
By John Latta, WAVE 0606 2/10/06

San Francisco, CA
January 25 - 26, 2006

O’Reilly is the organizer of the first Emerging Telephony Conference and one would expect an open source bent. What surfaces is non-traditional thinking about how to apply the Internet, mobility, voice and open source tools such as Asterisk. The result is that notions of an operator, services and applications are either technology or user centric. Most of the presenters do use open source tools and even license policies to push the boundaries of what might be loosely called telephony.

There are over 500 here and they ran out of seating. The conference is centered on dense presentations and networking during the breaks. Most of the presentations are only 15 minutes and without questions and answers afterwards. The result is that the presentations must be concise and on time – they are. Some of the more interesting talks come from the Lighting Talks – 5 minutes. There is only one track and thus one can listen to everything during the event. Overall the conference is very well organized, the speakers well prepared and every individual we spoke with rates the O’Reilly events as one of the best they go to.

Peter Cochrane Keynote – The Exciting Part is Just Beginning

Peter Cochrane, ConceptLabs, and former head of BT Research gave an entertaining and interesting presentations.

The pace of technology has created a pace of wealth generation which has shorten the time of significant wealth creation, >$100B, to 4 years and less.

The most important bits to be transmitted are emotional bits.

When it comes to emergence of technology: 5 years away it is in the lab now, 10 years it is likely in the lab and we need to find it and 20 years we are blind.

Significant trends are that:

Positioning systems will have a major impact on communications systems

          PodCasting will replace radio and TV

          Robots will directly impact individual lives

          Machine Decisions will complement individual decisions

By 2015 one can buy an iPod with all the music ever recorded on a single devices and 10 years later the same for video.

Two paradigm shifts coming are Position Nets and Sensor Nets

The glory days of telephony are gone as everything becomes a commodity. This has already happened in food, clothing, travel and IT.

The commonly held view is that the more of the same is better. In the cell phone world it is that the cell phone will take on all mobile and portable personal functions. This convergence will not work. The result is that one gets poor single functions in converged devices. What is more important is connectivity not convergence.

Maps will become living entities.

In Japan in 2007 every cell phone will have a GPS receiver in it.

Major growth areas in mobile are: positioning, tracking, monitoring, sensors, healthcare, navigation and security.

There is a myth that spectrum is in short supply. The reality is that most spectrum is not be used. There are portions of the spectrum in large supply, i.e., >30GHz.

RFID will revolutionize every aspect of the supply chain. In the field of healthcare it will save lives, increase efficiency and reduce costs.

Google Outlines VoIP and IM Efforts

Sean Egan, Google, described Google’s efforts in IM, VoIP and Video communications. Google’s approach is to use standards and open source. Gaim is the software they are using to support multi-protocol, cross platform IM. To date AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, ICQ, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, and SILC are supported. Google Talk is an open standards based IM and PC to PC voice calling. XMPP is used for messaging, presence and session initiation. The server-to-server federation makes Google Talk a subset of a larger communications network. To implement Voice over IM Google is not using Gaim-vv but Gaim CVS, which also supports video. The direction is to use Farsight which aims to to encapsulate IM services native voice and video protocols as dynamically loaded plugins which can be used by any IM client. There are currently modules for MSN and Yahoo! Webcams.

Yahoo Lays out Voice Strategy

Jeff Bonforte, Senior Director, Product Management, Messenger and Voice gave hints to the top level the directions at Yahoo.

Voice fits into Voice 1.0, Voice 2.0 and then Voice 3.0.

At Yahoo we are driving to Voice 3.0 where:

Voice is totally integrated into the network.

The cost is per application or transaction

Voice is tied to content on the network.

An example was given that during a voice call one person can say “dodgers score” and the network would immediately respond with the score.

Yahoo will use its 425m users as the means to enter the market with voice products.

The Yahoo search engine will be fully integrated into the voice offerings.

Expect that voice, location based services and search will be combined.

Yahoo! Stakes Out Much More Than Telephony

Marc Davis, Yahoo! Research Berkeley, outlined the directions that Yahoo! is taking to integrating voice into its platform. Yesterday, Jeff Bonforte, Senior Director, Product Management, Messenger and Voice gave only a broad outline previously. Further insights surfaced today.

Marc used a triangle to show the direction of the integration of at Yahoo! This includes:

What

          Free Text
          Tags
          Structured Metadata
          Image Analysis
          Weather Service

Who

Tagging
Searching
Sharing
Remixing

Context

Where

CellID
GPS
Bluetooth
Image Analysis

When

Network Time Server
Calendar Events

An example was used of the Campanile on the Berkeley campus. The task is how to relate the content, i.e., a picture of the Campanile, to the context. There is also a sensory gap, where images of the same object appear dissimilar. By the same token different objects can appear similar. That is the Campanile may look like the Washington Monument or the tower on the Stanford campus. This problem is addressed by relating the space, time and social space. The example shown was the ability to track movements and actions near continuously to construct this space. Thus, the ambiguities can be resolved. One means to address this is the cell phone as a context device, a sensor and a means to share context/content.

Another implementation of shared context and sensor information is by Bluetooth Pooling. Two devices can determine that photos share the same metadata. Thus, the devices can share content based on common metadata.

Another form of context collection can happen with Context-Aware Face Recognition. That is, by facial recognition additional context can be established and the metadata can be made richer.

Marc ended the talk with the declaration that the Yahoo! Network is a Platform. This includes the data stored in it, the applications that reside on it and its APIs.

OpenZeop – Announces Open Source Voice Engine for Browsers

Erik van Eykelen, OpenZeop, announced a VoIP engine for browsers, applications and games. On the client it is an engine which supports P2P, PSTN telephony and IM. There is also a server side API which will support authentication and accounting. The current features including in and out bound P2P calls, Outbound PSTN calls, IM, Presence and phone book. Two licenses available are GNU/GPL and a commercial license. Potential additions include: PSTN in and out, Voice mail, SMS and conferencing.

RadioHandi – Communities on Phones

RadioHandi announced a service which allows individuals at any location on any voice device to create voice communities.

AmSoft Systems – Managing Communications Identity

AmSoft announced its Context Aware Telephony service. The issue it addresses is the proliferation of communications means and how these can not be best used, from the individual’s perspective. That is, once a cell phone is give out it can be called at any time and the same applies to e-mail and spam abuse. AmSoft proposes one identity which is a proxy for all the other identities. This proxy will only be used for a cell phone call when the recipient will accept a call from the caller. The service was implied to be deep and very oriented to the user.

Identity Crisis

Johannes Ernst, Founder and CEO, NetMesh discussed how the namespace issues has blossomed out of control.

It is not uncommon for an individual to have >100 identities. These include: phone, e-mail, IM, websites, blogs, VoIP and more.

Today’s identity landscape includes:

URL- Based with the YADIS.org as the basis.
Liberty – Based – Liberty Alliance companies
Microsoft – WS - * which will go into Vista

The YADIS.org model has the following attributes:

OpenID Authentication
LID authentication
Identity URL’s with YADIS Capability Discovery

Making Technology work in Uganda

Bob Marsh, Inveneo, described the efforts to bring computers and communications to remote villages in Uganda. The WAVED also spoke with Bob.

Inveneo is a non-profit social enterprise which designs, integrates and deploys information and communications technology in developing regions of the world.

There are 2.5B individuals with little or no access of any kind to communications or electricity.

1B individuals are within 100km of a market town with communications – this is Inveneo’s target population.

>1B individuals are unreachable at a sustainable cost level.

Communications access is often hours or even days away, sometimes on foot.

Many individuals live on less than $1/day.

Inveneo’s approach is to entail community involvement in its projects. As much as possible each installation is customized and localized for that user population.

Local organizations are responsible for operation, upkeep and billing. This creates jobs and improves the local economy.

In order to create value their solutions include:

Open Source
Integration of low cost components
Needs based
Ruggedized
Alternate power sources
Affordable
Sustainable

This latter point is an especially challenging one. Any installation is of little long term value if it fails and cannot be made operational again with local resources.

An installation was described for an NGO, ActionAid International, which was a pilot project for 5 villages serving 3,200 villagers. It was made operational in June 2005.

One of the most popular services was telephony, which there was none prior to the installation. This was accomplished with a hub link to a cellular network but the village to village connection was accomplished by 802.11b/g. The village telephony was carrier out over this network. Asterisk was used as the phone switch – OpenSource PBX.

One of the most challenging aspects of the installation is power. Solar power was used in all the remote villages. Gel deep-cycle batteries were used to run the equipment. Animal power and bicycle power was used to charge the batteries. But virtually all aspects of the design were driven by the need to keep the power consumption as low as possible. An LCD panel was used because it was much lower power than a CRT. The experience was that the most power problems happen in the hub village which was connected to the power grid.

Another important environmental consideration is dust which pervades everything.

The computer system was based on an AMD Geode CPU and 128MB of Flash and 256MB of RAM. There are no moving parts in the processor. The software includes: Debian, Pebble, Puppy or DamnSmallLinux. Other components are: Firefox, Sylpheed, GAIM, OpenOffice and Asterisk (PBX).

This effort was to bring communications, networking and Internet access to the village. There was no educational purpose. The villages were interested in hosting web sites and this is on going. The most popular service were the phones, which were hardware phones attached to the computer. As Bob stated, one does not need to know how to read or write to use a phone. A village application in development was a herbal medicine data base. This is a village created medicine index that is to help treat AIDS patients with locally available treatments. Any other medication is too expensive.

Bluepulse – Bringing the Gap Across Cell Phone Technology

Benjamin Keighran, founder of Bluepluse described how he was able to write a middleware layer for virtually any cell phone which bridged the gape between Symbian, Java, Brew, Aggregator and Billing to allow any phone with data access to have full Internet access. The software is called Bluepulse OADP and operates between the cell phone and the web content. The illustrations were impressive.

Gestural Phone

Phil Zakielarz, of MIT, presented his efforts to create a gestural phone in only 10 weeks as a summer job at FT Labs in Boston. By integrating a microcontroller and MEMS accelerometer on the back of a PocketPC. A simple demonstration was shown how web pages could be transitioned with the simple flick of the PDA. Future applications we suggested with integration with Google Maps.

WAVE Comments

This was a telephony conference but it also was not. We heard the words over and over about convergence – that is, voice is a digital network application. At the conference some said convergence was a big deal and others trashed it. It is easy to get mired in the endless debates about voice and telephony. The real issue is innovation in network use. Be it social constructs supported by a network, integration of a search engine into a phone call or contextual awareness, these are all concepts discussed at the conference which went well beyond telephony.

The other part is that telephony is a form a media. As we have called casual media – media which the individual creates – this took center stage at Emerging Telephony. At Digital Living Room, the economic prospects of user created media was dumped upon because no one could figure out how it could be monetized. Here it was just the opposite. The tact is that a service provider, web site or search engine can use the support of casual media is the draw to their properties - “Our contextual services are better than yours.” It is here that voice and video are integral to the support of communities and individuals. At the same time the business models are making possible major changes – see below.

It has been sometime since we have seen such excitement around software. In a time where attracting youth to software as an educational path is increasingly difficult, we experienced the union of youth, excitement and innovation at Emerging Telephony. Yes, Open Source had something to do with this but it was much deeper. There is a pyramid effect. Open Source has created a foundation of software which works, is available in source code, and can be used in limitless ways to build new uses upon. When Inveneo creates a solution for a village in Uganda, one can readily understand the appeal this brings. It is much more than economics which makes creating such a solution possible – modularity and choice are important elements.

If there was one surprise at Emerging Telephony it was Asterisk, the open source PBX software. This turns a PC or any computing device into a telephony switch. One of the talks was about how much of a phone switch load could be sustained by a PC. It was described how a low end PC could support an E-3 circuit. Impressive. But much more important is that now the domain of circuit switched media can be fully integrated into a packet network. It is here that the innovation came. Inserting Asterisk into the software stack changed significantly what the computer could do. Again the Inveneo project was a good example. Adding Asterisk made it possible to add telephony services to the villages. As Bob Marsh stated, this was the most popular part of the system – an individual did not have to be literate to gain from its presence. Asterisk was a big deal.

Comments?
E-mail webmaster
Page updated 1/24/07
Copyright 4th Wave Inc, 2007