the argument against numbers and URIs

 Posted by on March 10, 2013 at 23:26  applications, internet, telepresence, video calling, video conferencing  No Responses »
Mar 102013
 

Enterprise video conferencing endpoints need to surrender their numbers and URIs.  Enterprise VoIP should as well.  Addition by subtraction. Maybe multiplication by subtraction. The best way to force enterprise video out of its current architecture and into Internet community based architectures.

Remove numbers, cultivate communities

What if your EX60 or HDX 4000 videoconferencing unit didn’t have a number or URI?  Would you stop receiving video calls?

How many people have contacted you on IM, Facebook, G+, LinkedIn, Instagram and Tumblr over the past week? Any of them dial a bunch of random numbers to reach you?

The removal of the number would force Cisco and Polycom to deliver you an Internet community enabled video endpoint – to ship every new EX and HDX as if it was an IM client, social network node or interactive web page.

The numbers and URIs in enterprise video and VoIP are now obstacles instead of enablers. The best way for enterprise video to grow is to shed the enterprise model. Start by eliminating the numbers – it will force enterprise video into entirely new architectures – Internet community architectures.

Hold on, IT is voting “no”

Would stripping the number and moving to user-managed community architectures create issues for IT?  Sure.  All architectures create issues.  The key is to dictate which parts of the architecture are the foundation that can’t be compromised. Optimum user experience is non-negotiable and the foundation for optimum user experience is user-controlled communities.  We can build security around the communities - build instrumentation and controls on top of the foundation – but it needs to be built in the upper layers in a manner that doesn’t compromise the foundation.

Hold on, people outside my community need my number to reach me

Back to architectural foundation elements.  User experience within our communities comes first.  It is where 90% of our usage will be.  The numbers are preventing community architectures so the numbers need to go. Then, after we nail the user experience within the community, we can optimize for external calls in any manner that doesn’t compromise the foundation. Keep in mind that enterprise video is dominantly intra-enterprise today and enterprise B2B VoIP usually has at least one PSTN leg, thanks again to those numbers.  However, many models can develop on top of our Internet community foundation for the external calls.

  • First of all, external calls will be a much smaller slice of the pie than they are today.  Why?
    • We will extend our communities out across enterprise lines, starting with our dominant B2B transactions with key customers, partners and supply chains. Many of today’s external calls will move inside your communities.
    • There will be so many islands and communities that there will always be one that we can use – at least one that is in common to both you and I and matching our use case – and it will be easy to hop in and out of a given community.
  • There will be innovation to build virtual, transient, secure inter-community meeting places, built specifically for the situations in which they are required.  Current conferencing providers should be innovating int his space.
  • Lowest-common denominator solutions such as browser-based VoIP and video will serve as inter-community options (often with federated presence and third party authentication).

Replace my UI with CEBP?

What if we disable all user initiated calls?  You can’t even click an icon or soft key to call me – it isn’t exposed to your UI. Instead, some other app or service must hit a video calling API to call me.  Crazy?  Maybe, but let’s consider why you want to video call me in the first place?

  • To discuss how to close a deal – a deal in which all the other relevant notes are in SalesForce.com?  Then SFDC can use the API to enable you to video me…within the context of the notes on this deal in SFDC…with our conversation recorded and added.
  • To review the changes or comments I made in your doc?  Then Google Docs or Excel can hit the API.  And maybe in that case are conversation is converted to text and linked into the doc as a searchable file.

The forcing of API-initiated calls as the only call model is extreme for the sake of example, but consider the impact on communications enabled business processes (CEBP), hypervoice (see Martin Geddes) and purple minutes (see Jeff Pulver). Voice and video minutes become embedded in higher business value, more pervasive and more sticky interactions, processes and applications. This is also why WebRTC and CU-RTC-WEB are exciting. Even better if we can add traditional video endpoints to the mix.

Multiplication by subtraction

In telecom forests, standards bodies and industy forums there is constant discussion on B2B VoIP and video architectures – E.164, URI, prefix syntax, directories, LNP, ENUM, etc.  Great discussions.  But we might be lost in the trees.  Or in the numbers.  

Subtract the (user-exposed) numbers and (often inaccessible) URIs to force us to move into Internet community forests. Multiply how good our user experience is within our communities, enable us to easily extend our communities and provide room for innovation for specific use cases. We tend to stay in familiar forests, even if we know some of their faults. Sometimes we need a forest fire to move us out. In this case, we just need to get rid of the numbers that are keeping us anchored to this forest.

    SIP islands and Python communities

     Posted by on March 5, 2013 at 15:32  applications, internet, telepresence, video calling, video conferencing  No Responses »
    Mar 052013
     

    If I am playing with Python or MySQL and hit an issue, then I can very quickly find help in various communities.  Specific dev sites, personal blogs, Stack Overflow, IRC, etc.  And I can contribute to that same set of communities – the communities are open and the structures and people make it easy to contribute.  The whole becomes much greater than the sum of its parts: my input + your input = more than just two inputs.

    If I hit a question on TIP or BFCP content sharing or SIP SDP m-line mismatches while debugging a telepresence issue, then I am usually on an island. Resources (outside of my team) are limited to personal contacts, scarce notes on vendor controlled sites and speculation-level comments on scattered message boards.

    As a telecom industry – voice, VoIP, video, telepresence, UC, conferencing, collaboration, eventually integrated WebRTC based services – we need to emulate the software engineering folks and start building this set of communities.  An ecosystem of open, cooperative, continually evolving, user-controlled, peer-produced communications communities.

      great distance collaboration

       Posted by on March 2, 2013 at 10:01  applications, internet, telepresence, video calling, video conferencing  No Responses »
      Mar 022013
       

      Dave Gray wrote this nice post about his desire for great distance collaboration tools. Check it out – it is a quick read.

      Some of Dave’s points that really resonate:

      • “I think many of them are actually solving the wrong problem. Good collaboration is not about meetings”.  
        I think this is the single greatest cause of product failures – designing to solve the wrong problem, answering the wrong questions. The answer or product may be terrific. But users don’t care about products that don’t change their lives – products designed to solve the wrong problem.
      • “So good distance collaboration tools will be deeply integrated into the work. They will not be temporal (meeting time, agenda, we all get together to talk, etc.). They will be spatial.”
        This is the key obstacle for collaboration and UC technology. Which means it is a key opportunity as well. I think there is hope here. Internet and VoIP enable the voice and video parts of collaboration to be integrated within overall collaboration use cases – not artificially separated by technology limitations. WebRTC may help enable and accelerate. Hopefully we will enable voice and video to be a part of true real time communication platforms (not based on transaction-oriented protocols such as SIP and H.323).
      • “Think about what it is like to work in close proximity to other team members on a great team. You are aware of who else is in the office. You have a sense of what they are doing and working on…You are aware of all this in an ambient way. You don’t have to think about it. It’s like peripheral vision. It’s effortless.”
        Some nice elements of design goals for great distance collaboration in Dave’s notes above. Emulate proximity, ambient awareness, peripheral vision, effortless. Easier said than done, of course. But too many solutions aren’t even trying to get there.

        video conferencing analogy

         Posted by on January 20, 2011 at 22:02  telepresence, video calling, video conferencing  2 Responses »
        Jan 202011
         

        I think I stumbled upon a decent analogy to describe the problems with traditional video conferencing to folks now in our industry when talking with a friend.  I asked her:

        How many phone calls would you make on your cell phone if:

        • You had to share it with 50 other people in your office.
        • You had to schedule all your calls in advance, often in painful manner.
        • You could only talk to people served by the same carrier as you.
        • It would take you ten minutes to dial and setup each call.
        • You weren’t 100% confident that the call would work the way you wanted it to.

        …of course she replied that she’d do less phone calls and more text messaging…

        That’s been the experience for enterprise room-based video conferencing.  It can be easier and less risky to book a hotel room than a traditional video conference, especially if your conference includes multiple enterprises.

        Some of that’s changing as increasing numbers of video endpoints “move” from room-based prisons to our desktop and mobiles, but many of the key barriers inherent in room-based video conferencing use cases remain, and we’ll need close cooperation between vendors and service providers if we are to ever turn those video units into phones (any to any, ease of use, etc.).

        Meanwhile, place-based video conferencing and person-based video calling are merging (and crashing), creating both a new set of opportunities and additional barriers as the old video conferencing industry evolves into unified communications. We just have to keep in mind that we won’t succeed if the user experience is any more cumbersome than making a phone call…

          meet you at Starbucks in 10 minutes, any Starbucks

           Posted by on December 3, 2010 at 20:51  startups, telepresence, video calling, video conferencing  No Responses »
          Dec 032010
           

          Tandberg1700MXP_largeMeet your friend for coffee in 10 minutes, no matter the distance between your cities. Your friend appears on the screen in front of you as if he was across the table from you. Check-in (Foursquare, Google, Facebook, Gowalla etc.) to your local Starbucks and instead of just seeing the two people physically at your location, see any of your friends from around the world that are checked in to their local Starbucks, a telepresence call from virtually joining you for coffee.

          You’ll eventually do this from your PC or mobile, from anywhere. However, mainstream consumer video calling will be closer to phone calls than to face-to-face conversations until we get better end-to-end IP (especially for mobile), improved cameras, more processing power on the consumer PC or mobile device and a better, easier overall user experience. In the meantime, get it at your local Starbucks.

          This type of face-to-face, distance independent interaction telepresence quality exists today within heavily engineered public telepresence rooms and private enterprises. The public telepresence rooms are great for large corporate meetings – hundreds of dollars per hour – boardroom type environment. But we need a Starbucks type solution for the individuals that want the telepresence experience now, and in a much more social, ad-hoc way.

          Of course, doesn’t just have to be Starbucks. This is an opportunity for startups to build businesses from scratch around telepresence integrations, as well as service providers to virtually join the various islands such that I can easily and seamlessly call you, regardless of which type of telepresence location you are at.