According to this “guest blog” post on ARM’s Web site, the next generation of the mobile CPU maker’s flagship chip will be better suited to perform audio (and voice) processing. This development is especially interesting in light of joint announcement from ARM and Microsoft that they are extending their collaborative development efforts in ways that are expected to have the greatest impact in support of “embedded” versions of the Windows OS and the latest version of Windows Phone.

Even though Microsoft and ARM have a relationship that dates back to the mid-1990s, Microsoft Windows is, for good reason, most closely associated with Intel (WinTel being the predominant desktop combo in enterprise settings). Yet Ed Sperling gets it exactly right when he points out that ARM performs better than the Intel ATOM processor when it comes to power management, in battery-powered mobile or embedded devices.

Taking the two announcements together, we can expect Windows Phone-based products to have sufficient battery life and do a better job of recognizing and rending spoken utterances than current models.

One thing’s for sure, the age of Recombinant Communications (RC) has rendered moot the classic “Apps versus Tools” debate and obliterated an entire category of solutions providers. Since the turn of the millennium when the the voice application ecosystem bragged a pretty robust roster of “pure plays”, we’ve seen the numbers steadily diminish. BeVocal was acquired by Nuance; Microsoft absorbed Tellme; NetByTel split itself between Voxeo and TuVox. Apptera morphed into a mobile advertising aggregation and distribution platform. And now TuVox is becoming part of West Interactive pantheon of cloud-based resources.

TuVox was co-founded by Steve Pollock (coming over from Edify) and Ashok Khosla (who had been the Managing Director of Apple’s development labs in India among other endeavors). The two visionaries saw an opportunity for a high-tech firm that could use advanced VoiceXML, Eclipse-based application development tools and techniques bordering on artificial intelligence to shorten the time it takes to deliver speech-enabled applications that, in many ways, mimicked human-to-human interactions.

TuVox has long placed emphasis on rapid deployment and constant tuning/refinement over time. It has also exhibited high-levels of flexibility in terms of deployment strategies. It operates its own hosting facilities built largely on Genesys’ Voice Platform (GVP) technology in Texas, Florida and Georgia, but has also, at various times, had its applications running “inside” or “on top of” application servers in Tellme and Convergys’ clouds.

Going forward, West notes that AMC Entertainment, Canon, ACER (#2 PC manufacturer in the world), National Research Corporation and Progress Energy are among Tuvox’s largest clients. Over the years, however, TuVox’s tools and resources were employed to support new phone-based interfaces for an impressive customer list, that has included 1-800-Flowers.com, American Airlines, British Airways, M&T Bank, Motorola, Telecom New Zealand, Time, Inc., BECU (Boeing Employees Credit Union), Virgin America and USAA. Thus it has built an equally impressive library of showcase (but customized) voice applications for travel (especially airlines), entertainment, telecom, utilities, retailers and financial services.

With the acquisition, West Interactive is solidifying its expansion strategy, in terms of both geography and functionality. Both companies have extensive experience with GVP; but have “multi-platform” experience and aspirations. Both see growth potential beyond North America and have experienced success in Australia/New Zealand and Western Europe. Perhaps most important, they share an engagement model that promises clients rapid, rock solid deployment, constant monitoring and maintenance and reliable reporting and analysis. This product range addresses the expectations of the customers for cloud-based, hosted or “on-demand” solutions providers.

Tellme’s co-founder and entrepreneur can add “serial” to his title now that his latest company, Flipboard, successfully launched its eponymous product and initial set of services. The Flipboard app for iPad is a dynamic mashup of newsfeeds and social media features. Users are greeted with a front page along with the invitation to “flip” through to a “Contents” page that displays multiple frames of “flippable” content: including rapid access to feeds from Facebook and Twitter as well as multiple categories of curated content with names like FlipStyle, FlipPhotos, FlipBusiness (you get the idea).

In addition to the sui generis Flip(fill-in-the-blank) there are some preselected “winners” like GigaOm, The Onion, All Things D, The Economist and a few others that streamline access to content from popular online news sources and social media. Once selected, the source can be navigated by using intuitive finger gestures (flipping). There are also icons on each story that users can touch to “like” that story or to “reply” to the original post with a comment. It’s that simple… Almost.

We characterized the launch as a “success” only if you measure success by “overcapacity” (a variant of Apple/AT&T’s formula for demand creation). Featured prominently on the “Contents” page of Flipboard are the obligatory links to Facebook and Twitter. However, flipping to those links initiates a “pop-up” message thanking the customer for downloading the (free) app and admitting that “we are currently limiting the rate at which we are accepting new Facebook and Twitter connections” The good news is that they believe it will take only “several hours” to “deploy new server infrastructure”. This makes it a shorter wait than the line at the Apple store on the first day of iPhone4 sales.

As for the business side of Flipboard. The company has reportedly closed a $10+ million Series A round from Kleiner Perkins. As for monetization strategies, the company is admittedly “early stage” but, with leading branded content providers showing such deep interest on the new user interface and navigation technique, advertisers will not be far behind; nor will ideas for subscription services.

Avaya displays some very deft touches as it launched the next phases in its efforts to support transformational efforts of its enterprise contact center customers and prospects. The company is grappling with fundamental changes in how network based commerce is carried out; while, at the same time it is rationalizing and simplifying a portfolio of products and services that leverages the installed base of Avaya-branded platforms and software, Nortel’s legacy systems and services and a greenfield of multi-site, multi-vendor enterprise IT environments.

The corresponding transformation of Avaya’s contact center portfolio begins today with the introduction of five new products or major updates, including: two flavors of contact center to support “experience management”; two new “performance solutions” including IQ 5.1 for reporting and analytics across multiple channels and agent activities and a major update of Avaya Workforce Optimization (WFO); and a new application called Proactive Outreach Manager 2.0 which is part of Avaya’s Automated Experience Management Suite.

The new approach was described to analysts by Jorge Blanco, Avaya’s VP Product Marketing-Contact Center Solutions. He sees the core Contact Center Suite as a “multimedia work assignment engine”. Its components and architecture are depicted in this diagram:

Over the next 10 months, Blanco promises a rapid succession of product refinements and announcements. The result will be software, services and platforms designed to “orchestrate the user experience” across multiple channels, culminating in the introduction of the full-fledged Avaya Experience Manager in May 2011. At that point, the venerable Voice Portal will be supplanted by the next-generation Avaya Experience Portal as the contact center fulfills its role as an “Experience Center.”

Blanco explained that the product introduction strategy is predicated on the idea that managing the user experience is paramount and it is dependent on four major factors: orchestrating the user experience, applying real time data to support contextual or “purpose driven” collaboration, establishing the “full context” of a contact (so that data isn’t lost), and bringing live agents into the experience in order to accomplish “first session resolution” of a customer’s concern.

This sounds like a lot to accomplish, but Blanco asserts that the solutions that Avaya is introducing will not result in a forced migration to a complex set of products and services. Instead, as he put it, “We will have a complete, easier to sell portfolio when we’re done.” Acknowledging that Avaya’s Professional Services group has a major role to play, Ajay Kapoor, Managing Director, Strategic Communications Consulting, provided an overview of the support services that Avaya will bring to bear to make the fundamental transformation take place.

Avaya has a team of approximately 1,300 professionals comprising its professional services group. Traditionally, these were communications professionals, but the company it is in the process of changing the teams mix and chemistry to put greater emphasis on the business operations and front-end tasks like discovery, requirement design and defining what it takes to “get started” on business transformation.

One element of the Professional Services offering that will be especially important comes under the banner of “Assurance”. It includes “stress testing” and “readiness testing” based on simulation of real call traffic and customer activity in advance of bringing a new system, feature or service online. As companies grow more ambitious in their efforts to provide multichannel, multimodal and context-sensitive customer service, “assurance services” will be a necessity. Such confidence-building, risk reduction activity should provide enterprise decisionmakers the confidence they need to deploy new technologies that ensure a better user experience.

When I think of RackSpace, the word “garish” comes to mind. One need only visit its home page to catch a flavor of the company attitude. It is a dynamic destination designed to sell visitors on its hosted or managed “cloud-based” Web services offerings. Now that we’re well into the second year of Scobleizer’s affiliation with the Web hoster, the time is ripe for the company to take a giant step to differentiate itself from a formidable pack of competitors that includes Amazon Web Services, VMWare, Microsoft’s Azure and Google.

Monday marks the launch of a new program at RackSpace called OpenStack. At base, it is adopting the principles of open source as expressed in Apache 2. That means that it is “open sourcing” the code that powers its storage product (CloudFiles) and will soon make the whole shootin’ match involved in the middleware and runtime software underlying CloudServers.

In this post Scoble himself calls it “the end of lock in” for the companies and individuals that have come to depend on RackSpace to for cloud-based storage or application hosting. But implicit in the announcement is the idea that a RackSpace customer will have dozens of peers that are using the software and are willing to share refinements, improvements, executables and (basically) experience with a community of other customers. Based on Scoble’s post, the company things of this as an extension of its high-quality customer service, spiced up with the rhetroric surrounding open source’s ability to counter vendor vendor lock-in.

My own belief is that RackSpace has learned as much from watching IBM as it has from listening to the “voice of the customer.” Its management recognizes that there’s a time to declare victory and turn control of the market over to its core customers with the understanding that they will benefit from being extremely “partner friendly” during this time of architectural uncertainty. It is a brilliant, and pre-emptive move.

Mobile voice technology providers Apple, Vlingo and Nuance took actions that, to varying degrees, turn up the heat in the world of mobile voice. For its part, Apple has been granted yet another patent for a major component of a hands-free, voice user interface (VUI). In U.S. Patent Number 7,757,173 the inventor describes a dynamic or “updateable” voice menu. As described in the filing, the technology is designed to offer many of the context-sensitive attributes of a dynamic, graphical user interface for search and retrieval of “media”, like recorded music; but the filing notes that “songs” or “music” could be “generalized to any form of digital media, which can include sound files, picture data, movies, text files or any other types of media that can be digitally stored on a computer.”

Some of what Apple describes conceptually, Vlingo is putting into practice with the release of its SuperDialer for Android application. Greg Sterling writes about it here, noting that it is designed to take on Siri for local, mobile search. Yet, with “SuperDialer” Vlingo is delivering an easy-to-understand use case for a voice-based front end to messaging resources, social networks, search and, ultimately transactions.

Nuance, for its part, reminds us that the automobile is destined to be the ultimate smart, mobile device. The companies have jointly expanded the range of speech-enabled features and functions it is offering in conjunction with Ford as part of “MyFord Touch”. By adding more first-level commands and making the interface more dynamic and personal, the initiative is designed to make a person’s voice “the primary in-car communications interface.”

Establishing the primacy of a user’s voice for command and information entry in cars and on smartphones remains a tall order, but the speed at which solutions providers introduce new refinements is definitely accelerating.

Call it a “well-duh!” moment, but a series of posts by Greg Sterling on the Internet2Go site reflect that solutions providers are accelerating the pace at which they bring their technologies to market. Sales figures for smartphones read like the leader board at the British Open. The familiar names are all there, but the order changes slightly as individual firms gain or lose the elusive Mobile “Mo” (momentum).

Apple’s like the Tiger of old, with leadership that all others are chasing. Android OEMs and ODMs are the long-ball hitters that impress with their majesty off the tee but suffer from a poor short game (thanks to the fragmented nature of the OS and lack of an single, well integrated distribution platform-like iTunes). Then you get the regional, fan favorites: RiM, Motorola, Nokia: each with a following based more on nostalgia or inertia these days.

As with the British Open, we’re early in the first round. With the holiday buying season a quarter away, we’re bound to see some very entertaining action.

It may be a bit too “Inside Baseball”, but I can’t resist pointing to this post by Adam DuVander from Alcatel-Lucent’s latest acquisition, Programmable Web. What impresses me most about the post is the “open” approach exhibited by “The Gray Lady” as its staff aggregates a dynamic admixture of info, applications, widgets and gadgets.

The old joke was that, while the publication’s slogan was “All the News That’s Fit to Print”, the print version was constrained to “All the News that Fits.” It escaped those constraints more than 20 years ago by offering renditions of its information, resources and archives through various online channels and at a broad variety of price points. Today, the nytimes.com Web site is highly dynamic. Judicious support of multiple, open API’s make it a dynamic platform for advertising, as well as user-controlled services.

Dan Miller, senior analyst with Opus Research, was recently invited to speak at the SF Telephony Meetup sponsored by Orange Labs. In his talk, posted below, Miller explains how solutions built on broadband IP, Web standards and well-defined APIs are accelerating the development of applications to create a better user experience. These solutions are culminating in what he refers to as the “summer of Recombinant Communications.”

Last Friday, Microsoft Maven Mary-Jo Foley issued this report, unpacking details about Microsoft’s initiatives to marry its cloud-based resources with application development efforts involving Windows Mobile. The initiative, code named “Project Hawaii” is all about how Microsoft will encourage students – initially at the University of Southern California (USC), Univeristy of Wisconsin-Madison, and Duke University – to explore how to “use the cloud to enhance the user experience on mobile devices.”

Keeping with the Hawaiian theme, the program incorporates initiatives that have been conducted as part of Microsoft’s “Mobile Assistance Using Infrastructure” (MAUI) Project. Its purpose is to enable “a new class of cpu- and data-intensive applications that seamlessly augment the cognitive abilities of users by exploiting speech recognition, NLP, vision, machine learning, and augmented reality”. Based on experience with WinMobile 6 and 6.5, it determined that such a project is required to define how to overcome issues surrounding battery life (which it calls “energy limitations of handhelds) “by leaveraging nearby computing infrastructure”, which is believed to encompass resources in Microsoft’s storage and compute cloud (Azure) accessible over wireless networks (WiFi, WLAN, FemtoCell…)

In a nutshell, Microsoft says that the mobile “platform” runs on a Windows Mobile 6.5 smartphone (with Windows Phone 7 “in planning”). The services that are invoked in Microsoft’s cloud include Bing Maps for mapping services, and Windows Live ID for user identification. More detail on MAUI can be found on the Microsoft Research Web site.