Telco 2.0 - New APIs to Start the Revolution
Written by martyndavies on Sep 13, 2007 - 07:26 PM
With so much buzz from Web 2.0 startups, and seemingly more investment money looking around for businesses to invest in, it's good to see increasing interest in telephony and messaging as part of the mashup culture.
BT's own SDK project Web21c is an impressive set of tools that allows control of various services including conferencing, call control, authentication, presence and texting. BT launched their SDK in a beta back in 2005, so now it's a pretty mature library supporting C# and VB.NET, PHP, Java and web services. Just this week they also announced an agreement with US company Coghead, to integrate their two SDKs. Coghead, if you haven't come across it, is a site dedicated to business applications, using web-based templates and drag&drop tools. They claim that "tech savvy business people" can design apps without writing code. Once written the apps can be hosted by Coghead for a fixed monthly fee, in order to allow startups the ability to scale the business as they grow, paying more as their userbase and data footprint grows.
The recent interest in Facebook (FB) has spawned a lot of messaging and telephony efforts in the last weeks, including our own VoIP User presence applet that you can install on your profile there, and a similar effort for users of Skype. GrandCentral (now Google) and Sitofono (Abbeynet) have click-to-call applications that link into FB. FWD created a voicemail applet to allow FB users to leave messages for each other, and probably most impressively Alec Saunders' iotum created a free conference calling application hosted inside FB, although currently for users with US geo numbers. I have also come across many other companies in 'stealth mode' who have FB apps of various kinds in preparation.
UK VoIP service provider Sipgate just announced their own API in the last couple of weeks. The Sipgate API (also called Samurai in their documentation) allows SMS and call control, as well as a variety of status and acoount functions for registered Sipgate users. They have samples in .NET and and Perl, and also offer the source code to a Firefox plug-in. Fundamentally, they use XML messages transferred using HTTP, so potentially any modern programming environment can be used including the ever-popular Ruby.
Speaking of Ruby, Adhearsion is a framework written in Ruby, allowing Rails applications to control various functions in Asterisk servers. Adhearsion's creator, Jay Phillips, has been spending some time in London recently and we hope finding some interesting mashup partners here. Adhearsion offers many tantalizing possibilities including IVR control, IM integration (XMPP, GoogleTalk) and also integration with XML microbrowsers such as those in Cisco and Snom handsets. Snom themselves are promoting their own 3rd-party developer links via a competition.
Mashup enthusiast and ace telco-blogger Thomas Howe has been treading the boards at the Internet Telephony Expo last week, talking about telco mashups. He himself won the mashup competition at last year's O'Reilly Etel conference, and will be on hand to give out more of the same at Fall VON in Boston and then once more at Etel in 2008. Incidentally, we're just a few days away from the programme closing for Etel 2008, so get your sexy telco ideas on the agenda right away.
A press release hitting my desk just before deadline tells me that Conaito have just lauched two new SDKs, one apparently for desktop apps that need to integrate SIP and RTP functionality (i.e. embedded softphone) and another for conferencing clients.
Apart from mainstream telco services, we also have to consider the growing eco-system of tools for presence and micro-blogging such as Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook. There are many others, but these seem to be the mechanisms that my friends use. At its simplest, this is all about being able to change some status text to say where you are, what you're doing and how you feel about the world, and possibly comment on your friends' updates too. These tools are evolving, so have different features, but they can all produce and/or consume RSS feeds, and be updated and monitored via SMS and/or mobile web interfaces of one kind or another. Most importantly, they have APIs that allow other apps to automatically use, modify and enhance that data. One example of an extension is Twittervision, from creator David Troy, who visited London recently, which connects Twitter messages (and the location of their writers) to Google Maps, to give an engaging display of the World-wide pulse of Twitter. Twittervision itself exposes an API, to invite further integration and mashup activity. This touches on another area, that of Location Based Services or LBS, which in the hands of traditional mobile phone companies has largely stalled on the launchpad. Now, GPS equipped handsets can beam precise location information back to a web app over a data connection, bringing LBS into the Web 2.0 domain.
Telco services are touching the web world, and the low cost of APIs and development tools are creating an incredible democracy for people with good ideas and the time to put a few scripts together. The next two years will be fascinating to watch.
BT's own SDK project Web21c is an impressive set of tools that allows control of various services including conferencing, call control, authentication, presence and texting. BT launched their SDK in a beta back in 2005, so now it's a pretty mature library supporting C# and VB.NET, PHP, Java and web services. Just this week they also announced an agreement with US company Coghead, to integrate their two SDKs. Coghead, if you haven't come across it, is a site dedicated to business applications, using web-based templates and drag&drop tools. They claim that "tech savvy business people" can design apps without writing code. Once written the apps can be hosted by Coghead for a fixed monthly fee, in order to allow startups the ability to scale the business as they grow, paying more as their userbase and data footprint grows.
The recent interest in Facebook (FB) has spawned a lot of messaging and telephony efforts in the last weeks, including our own VoIP User presence applet that you can install on your profile there, and a similar effort for users of Skype. GrandCentral (now Google) and Sitofono (Abbeynet) have click-to-call applications that link into FB. FWD created a voicemail applet to allow FB users to leave messages for each other, and probably most impressively Alec Saunders' iotum created a free conference calling application hosted inside FB, although currently for users with US geo numbers. I have also come across many other companies in 'stealth mode' who have FB apps of various kinds in preparation.
UK VoIP service provider Sipgate just announced their own API in the last couple of weeks. The Sipgate API (also called Samurai in their documentation) allows SMS and call control, as well as a variety of status and acoount functions for registered Sipgate users. They have samples in .NET and and Perl, and also offer the source code to a Firefox plug-in. Fundamentally, they use XML messages transferred using HTTP, so potentially any modern programming environment can be used including the ever-popular Ruby.
Speaking of Ruby, Adhearsion is a framework written in Ruby, allowing Rails applications to control various functions in Asterisk servers. Adhearsion's creator, Jay Phillips, has been spending some time in London recently and we hope finding some interesting mashup partners here. Adhearsion offers many tantalizing possibilities including IVR control, IM integration (XMPP, GoogleTalk) and also integration with XML microbrowsers such as those in Cisco and Snom handsets. Snom themselves are promoting their own 3rd-party developer links via a competition.
Mashup enthusiast and ace telco-blogger Thomas Howe has been treading the boards at the Internet Telephony Expo last week, talking about telco mashups. He himself won the mashup competition at last year's O'Reilly Etel conference, and will be on hand to give out more of the same at Fall VON in Boston and then once more at Etel in 2008. Incidentally, we're just a few days away from the programme closing for Etel 2008, so get your sexy telco ideas on the agenda right away.
A press release hitting my desk just before deadline tells me that Conaito have just lauched two new SDKs, one apparently for desktop apps that need to integrate SIP and RTP functionality (i.e. embedded softphone) and another for conferencing clients.
Apart from mainstream telco services, we also have to consider the growing eco-system of tools for presence and micro-blogging such as Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook. There are many others, but these seem to be the mechanisms that my friends use. At its simplest, this is all about being able to change some status text to say where you are, what you're doing and how you feel about the world, and possibly comment on your friends' updates too. These tools are evolving, so have different features, but they can all produce and/or consume RSS feeds, and be updated and monitored via SMS and/or mobile web interfaces of one kind or another. Most importantly, they have APIs that allow other apps to automatically use, modify and enhance that data. One example of an extension is Twittervision, from creator David Troy, who visited London recently, which connects Twitter messages (and the location of their writers) to Google Maps, to give an engaging display of the World-wide pulse of Twitter. Twittervision itself exposes an API, to invite further integration and mashup activity. This touches on another area, that of Location Based Services or LBS, which in the hands of traditional mobile phone companies has largely stalled on the launchpad. Now, GPS equipped handsets can beam precise location information back to a web app over a data connection, bringing LBS into the Web 2.0 domain.
Telco services are touching the web world, and the low cost of APIs and development tools are creating an incredible democracy for people with good ideas and the time to put a few scripts together. The next two years will be fascinating to watch.
Reply from dean on Sep 14, 2007 - 07:58 PM
Ruby based applications like Adhearsion provide ultra-fast application development in the mashup World. It does have scaling issues, but from my experience these relate more than anything to execution speed (Ruby is excruciantingly slow - it was designed to make development easy, not to be streamlined). That said, the adage "processor cycles are cheap, developer cycles are expensive" holds true here. When you can buy a 4gb RAM dual core processor server for £500, who cares?
Ruby offers even newcomers to software development a simple platform to build things fast. That is an enabler to us all getting a little bit more creative. And that's a good thing.
Telco API's coupled to Ruby provide an environment where imagination is the only limit.
Reply from dean on Sep 22, 2007 - 08:55 AM
| Quote: |
| The short version: Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time. |
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