This podcast is a speech from the 2007 Cisco IP Telecommunications Users Group Conference held at the Austin Convention Center Oct 29th through Nov 1st 2007.  The speaker is Greg Royal, CTO of Cistera Networks.

According to a recent CIO Magazine, fully 86% of CIOs knew what Unified Communications was. When asked to explain what Unified Communications was, only a small fraction could actually define it. Greg argues that their is too much preoccupation with personal productivity tools with UC and not enough discussion about team based processes for unified communications. Greg outlines the future of unified communications and a definition that makes sense.

While the Apple iPhone Train continues to capture the imagination
of the consumer smartphone market, there are a number of
companies, such as Blackberry, Microsoft, and Palm battling it out
in the business smartphone market. What is less well known is
that there is an Open Source Mobility platform that is making waves
in Europe. Funambol is a company and an open source community
dedicated to making further mobile device interoperability progress
through support of open standards such as SyncML.
 
Fabrizio Capobianco, a serial entrepreneur and veteran executive at
Reuters and Tibco, is CEO of Funambol. He founded the first
Italian Web company, Internet Graffiti, in 1994. He also founded
Stigma Online, developer of an information portal product
with customers that included Kraft, Novartis, Italian Broadcasting
Television and the Italian Stock Exchange. Capobianco has taught
courses on wireless and mBusiness strategies at the University of
Pavia in Italy, where he holds a Ph.D. in computer science with a
focus on usability. Fabrizio was recognized in 2007 as a top "40
under 40" leader by American Venture Magazine and by the readers
of Mobile Village for being a consumer email visionary.
 
This weeks song is “Telephone Line� by Robyn Tymm from the
United Kingdom.  This interview is courtesy of IT Conversations.
 
This podcast is published under the Creative Commons License
version 2.5. 

Seth Godin: Sliced bread and other marketing delights

In a world of too many options and too little time, our obvious choice is to ignore the ordinary stuff. Marketing guru Seth Godin spells out why, when it comes getting our attention, bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones. And early adopters, not the mainstream's bell curve, are the new sweet spot of the market.

"Seth Godin may be the ultimate entrepreneur for the Information Age," Mary Kuntz wrote in Business Week nearly a decade ago. "Instead of widgets or car parts, he specializes in ideas -- usually, but not always, his own." In fact, he's as focused on spreading ideas as he is on the ideas themselves.

After working as a software brand manager in the mid-1980s, Godin started Yoyodyne, one of the first Internet-based direct-marketing firms, with the notion that companies needed to rethink how they reached customers. His efforts caught the attention of Yahoo!, which bought the company in 1998 and kept Godin on as a vice president of permission marketing. Godin has produced several critically acclaimed and attention-grabbing books, including Permission Marketing, All Marketers Are Liars, and Purple Cow (which was distributed in a milk carton). In 2005, Godin founded Squidoo.com, a Web site where users can share links and information about an idea or topic important to them.

David Ippolito and 'Talk Louder - The Cell Phone Song'is courtesy of music.podshow.com.

VOIP Panel: Quality, Ease of Use, Security

Stuart Chesire and Benjamin Kowarsch discuss Zeroconf and Bonjour, which make Asterisk clusters work without asking users to perform complex configuration. Installations of these server clusters could make wifi VOIP in hotels many times easier to deploy.

VOIP has only recently become practical, with the comprehensive rollout of broadband to consumers. Wireless roaming is still a challenge. Matthew Gast examines why VOIP is so hard in 802.11 networks. The trick is making VOIP devices act more like cell phones, making load balancing and roaming easier.

Whenever potentially sensitive conversations are broadcast over the air, encryption is critical. Philip Zimmermann, the creator of PGP encryption, takes a look at the history of public key infrastructures and concludes that the industry needs to move away from centrally managed key servers. He presents his solution to VOIP encryption, including the ability to detect eavesdropping.

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In Episode 19, The talk of two Malcolms, Malcolm Gladwell spoke of the genius of Howard Moskowitz and his ability to fundamentally grasp the nature of consumer taste. In this episode we continue the thread of Product Design and Consumer Behavior with an interview with Howard.

How do companies figure out what consumers want? For example, when you look at all the different types of spaghetti sauce in the grocery store, do you wonder how the endless varieties were developed? In many cases, the companies may have just guessed, but they also may have used methods developed by Howard Moskowitz, an expert in the field of psychophysics, and author of the upcoming book Selling Blue Elephants. Howard Moskowitz is the CEO of i-Novation Inc as well as President of Moskowitz Jacobs Inc., a firm he founded in 1981. He is both a well-known experimental psychologist in the field of psychophysics and an inventor of world-class market research technology.

We also reach back into the archives for a 1954 General Motors Chevrolet sponsored short film entitled "What Mr Bell had in mind". This features DON AMECHE recreating his famous movie role as Alexander Graham Bell. Mr Bell discusses proper telephone etiquette.

The music features Robin Tymm and "Telephone Line" courtesy of music.podshow.com

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This week is from the floor of Voicecon Spring Conference 2007, March 5th through 8th at the Gaylord Palms Hotel in Orlando Florida.  We talk about Voip Trainer, a unique interactive traning tool for IPT Telephony and the founder of 4What Interactive, Jim Cossetta. We then talk about Open Telephony and the challenges of identity for VoIP Systems. All of this is broadcast from the floor of Voicecon.

Voip Trainer and 4What Interactive

Jim Cossetta is an established business entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience working with start- ups to Fortune 500 firms worldwide.  As President and CEO of 4What Interactive since 1995, Cossetta has successfully directed a team of creative business professionals in the creation of innovative marketing, training and communication solutions that continue to improve the way companies do business.

In 2001, Cossetta helped champion the development of 4What's first product line the VoIPTrainer.  Today the VoIPTrainer is considered the industries leading end user training and support solution for IP Telephony, and Cossetta has successfully built a team of in-house and industry resellers to continue to grow it's success.

Open Telephony and Open Identity

Slow adoption of open mobility platforms is not the only hurdle faced by consumers and open source advocates--government legislation and the complexity of managing your identity are also holding back innovation. At the 2006 Emerging Telephony Conference, Bill Weinberg, Brad Templeton, and Johannes Ernst discuss some of the difficulties open telephony must overcome. Learn about the adoption of open platforms, the innovation-killing CALEA law, and how we can take back control over our digital identities.
This is courtesy of IT Conversations

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This weeks episode is about the intersection between telephony and Web 2.0. We have two talks, one from a carrier perspective and one from a software developer.

Norman Lewis is the director of Technology Research for the Home Division of France Telecom.

The last five years in telephony have been nothing short of a bombshell for the incumbent telecommunications companies. Dr. Norman Lewis of France Telecom, believes that the telcos have no one to blame but themselves and their own business models.

Lewis refers to many blunders made in recent years, such as the way most phone companies handled their implementation of 3G wireless services. Billions were spent to create WAP, a Web experience on the mobile phone that was too slow and cumbersome for most users. Instead, mobile phone customers turned to SMS text messaging as a primary communications channel, a move Dr. Lewis believes no business analyst predicted ahead of the phenomenon.

In this keynote address to the telephony developer community, Lewis explains why a company with billions in voice related revenue at stake finds it so hard to innovate on voice related applications.

David Beckemeyer is CEO of TelEvolution.

Using a metaphor from the Matrix films, David Beckemeyer of PhoneGnome challenges us to look at the future of voice over IP. He argues that the current state of IP telephony is much like internet 1.0: Service providers determine the services, applications, and innovation available. Consumers, once they've chosen a provider, are basically locked in.

Beckemeyer explains that the internet of today is more open. Consumers are not locked in by their service providers. Rather, innovation can be created anywhere, and the marketplace decides which ideas are successful. His question, then, is how to move to this kind of thinking in the voice over IP market.

In discussing his new venture, PhoneGnome, Beckemeyer describes the beginnings of this VoIP 2.0 vision. This different approach to VoIP allows users to shop around for plans to call PSTN phones rather than forcing users into a plan. To create an open future for VoIP, he argues, providers must create services that give people value now and are flexible enough to allow consumers and developers to move to a new era for VoIP. According to Beckemeyer, innovation and wealth are created only in a climate of freedom and choice, and this is the future he is trying to foster.

This weeks music is Geoff Smith with 'Mr Telephone' from http//music.podshow.com

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This weeks Gtone is all about Application Driven Telephony and what people are doing from a hosted perspective as well as what is happening on the Mac. We have interviews with John Philips, Editorial Directory of Maclife Magazine, Jonathan Taylor, CEO of Voxeo and Kevin Ford CEO of Parliant.



John Philips - Editorial Director - MacLife Magazine - the leading independent magazine devoted to today's passionate Mac users, talks about Mac Products and their reference to consumer communications use. As Apple's technology is more widely deployed it is driving computing and communications for the consumer closer together. John argues that Apple has captured the imagination of the phone using public. This is courtesy of Berkeley Groks. http://www.maclife.com

Jonathan Taylor, CEO of Voxeo, is the driver behind the Voxeo platform for telephony application platforms. At his prior start-up, he learned first hand how painful and expensive it was to build phone applications. With a desire to change the state of the industry, he founded Voxeo, a company whose goal is to enable any person or business to create and deploy telephony applications quickly and easily. This is courtesy of IT Conversations. http://www.voxeo.com

Parliant has deep roots in the Mac community. Founder and CEO Kevin Ford is a celebrated serial entrepreneur who has devoted his high tech career to several Mac-related product and services companies. Kevin Ford discusses the award-winning product and how it puts the capabilities of a corporate PBX phone system in the hands of any Mac user at a price that is a fraction of any competing product. This is courtesy of Berkley Groks. http://www.parliant.com

This weeks music is by New Maximum Donkey and their song "Telephone" and humor from "The FuMP" with "Sudden Death - Cellular Degeneration". These are courtesy of Podshow Music.

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If you have been in a coma you would have not known that Apple has announced an Internet/Wide Screen IPod/Cellular phone yet to be called the IPhone. This device is nothing short of a complete transformation of the smartphones for the consumer market. This week the Guys from MacBreak critique the IPhone from the floor of the MacWorld Expo. Then we are going to take a different angle and talk about cellphone design with Jeff Han. Jeff is a research scientist for New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Here, he demonstrates for the first time publicly his intuitive, "interface-free," touch-driven computer screen, which can be manipulated intuitively with the fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Courtesy of Ted.com )

Ross Lovegrove is an industrial designer, best known for his work on the Sony Walkman and Apple iMac. In this highly visual presentation, he presents his recent work from furniture to water bottles which is organic in form and inspired by nature. (Recorded February 2005 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 20:14 Courtesy of Ted.com)

This weeks music is Luigi Cappela with  Telephone Card -from Auckland New Zealand and is courtesy of Podshow Music at http://music.podshow.com

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This week is our Christmas episode and we have highlighted two conversations with Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and best-selling author of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference and Blink. In this talk, filmed at TED2004, he explains what every business can learn from spaghetti sauce. This was recorded in Monterey California in February 2004. Malcolm talks about the science of happiness.

In the second conversation Malcolm explores why we can't trust people's opinions -- because we don't have the language to express our feelings. He highlights why not listening to customers can be a very good thing.

Malcolm is courtesy of Ted and IT Conversations. Music this week is courtesy of Podshow Music at http://music.podshow.com and includes Derek Miller with "We Three Kings", Ayla Brown with "Rocking around the Christmas Tree" and Mario Ajero with "Away in a Manger".

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Telephony is inherently a consumer product. Although it is purchased by IT Administration, the ultimate arbiter of how a product is used and successful is how the telephony user gains from the use. This week we cover product design. Don Norman used to be known as a critic of unusable things but now, he says, he has changed. He has transformed himself into an advocate for pleasurable, enjoyable products. Beauty is good, says Norman. Successful products should a pleasure to use, and convey a positive sense of self, of accomplishment, and pride of ownership. In this keynote address, Norman shares work from his latest book, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. This is courtesy of OReilly Emerging Technology Conference.

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