The rest of the morning was dedicated to “live demos” by phonetrepreneurs (meaning developer/entrepreneurs) who lived the dream of moving from “hackathon-to-productization-to-liquidity event” in weeks or months rather than years. First on stage was Steve Martocci, co-founder of GroupMe, the year-old text messaging management service that was recently purchased by Microsoft’s Skype for $68 million. There were other demonstrations of interest, but I was particularly impressed by the use of Twilio by AirBnb, the community-driven service for discovering, listing and booking places to stay around the world. Developers at Airbnb took only a couple of days to whip up a service called Voice Connect that enables a prospective renter to call and talk to a property owner from his or her mobile phone without revealing either party’s telephone numbers.

As Andrew Vilcsak, Airbnb’s Mobile Platform Lead Developer, explained to the audience, “they just want to hear each other’s voice to seal the deal.” That’s just human nature.

But one of the breaking news items was the launch of a new service delivery regimen called Twilio Connect, which enables developers to set up their apps on Twilio but have usage billed to another customer’s Twilio account. This direct billing arrangement removes some of the complexities associated with building rate cards for services that are a combination of “minutes of use” (MOUs) on Twilio’s network, software licensing fees and maintenance. The end-user may end up paying two bills (for the app and for network usage), but in some cases that’s the best way to introduce pricing certainty even when demand is uncertain or highly variable.

The other breaking news from Twilio Conference will be made manifest this evening when Dave McClure, the man of 500Startups, announces more winners of grants from the $250,000 Start-up pool for Twilio-based applications.

West’s approach captures the spirit of Recombinant Communications (RC) by making it simpler for companies to preserve and extend the service lives of the resources that work well for them, meaning premises-based servers that perform speech-processing, call-processing and self-service applications. At the same time, it lays the foundation for them to incorporate or “splice in” the latest technologies, tools, data and meta-data that make Conversational Commerce within reach. That’s how West’s managed, on-premises model a transformational product (or service) fits the need for companies to lean on 3rd parties take the risk out plans to take advantage of what is now called “The Cloud,” but could, just as accurately be thought of as hosted services. Thus it will accelerate the transformation to cloud-based instantiation of self-service while maintaining flexibility in their deployment strategy and maintaining the resilience of their time-tested on-premises solutions.

With its new, managed services approach, West supports the “hybrid” deployment strategies that are becoming commonplace in these very dynamic times.

During Day One, Lee laid the foundation by announcing four finalists for the contest, including a mobile service from Hold Free Systems, Logica and BludPlanetApps. BioProximity is an app that runs on a range of platforms including Android. The HELEX application, called BioProximity, runs on Android-based phones and provided a method for providing strong authentication of people logging into a location-aware, mobile collaboration platform. It was chosen because, it is an application that judges believe incorporates voice biometrics as a critical component to user authentication in a way that immediate commercial potential while, at the same time, lays the foundation for broader applications and deployment scenarios in the future.

Both Opus Research and VoiceVault see this sort of challenge as a highly visible means to promote awareness of voice biometrics among mobile application developers. We anticipate holding similar promotions in the future.

…and “yes,” both the name “2600Hz Project” and “Whistle” are references to the first “phone hacks” (back in the 1960s), which used a plastic whistle that came as prize in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal in order to generate audible tones (2600Hz) that spoofed the network into providing free long-distance service. Today, as co-founder Darren Schreiber explained to the Meet-up attendees, the company has found that today’s developers appreciate the availability of freely circulated software that can control the popular open source call processing resources, specifically FreeSwitch, but also including the Asterisk and YATE libraries.

Instead of a plastic whistle, the Whistle suite uses other tools of the trade. OpenSIPS, an open source rendition of a SIP Server, provides for basic call control. Flexibility and scalability are ensured by the use of computer languages and database schema that are relatively new to the telephony domain. The system employs the document-oriented CouchDB. As an open source product from Erlang Ltd, its scripts and programs are written in Erlang, which is described in company-provided documentation as “a general-purpose concurrent programming language and runtime system.”

Then there’s Chef, “an open source systems integration framework” from OpsCode. It is process automation software that allows developers to write source code that describes how they want each part of the infrastructure to be built, then it applies apply those descriptions to the servers. Thus it creates a fully automated way to add or take away servers.

I’m told by the folks who anticipate using Whistle for some heavy-duty call processing that direct access to AMQP (the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) is also the secret to scaling, right-sizing and load-balancing. As Zhao Lu, organizer of the SFTelephony Meetup explains in his evaluation of the meeting, “Direct access to AMQP will be extremely useful for some of my use cases.” Presumably, granular control of message queuing is especially interesting when the call volumes (need to establish and tear down calls) are hard-to-predict or highly variable.

All in all, I was amazed at how quickly things are changing in the world of telco app development and multi-modal mashups. Whistle, which is designed to run in a highly-distributed way can be instantiated locally (or on premises) or in any number of hosted platforms (for example Voxeo’s Tropo, Twilio or Amazon Web Services EC2). With its JSON-based API’s it can make easy access to highly-reliable, open source call processing and voice processing resources a reality.

Understanding the relationship between OAuth, healthcare, biometrics and, specifically, voice biometrics requires significant connecting-of-the-dots. Adrian’s post describes the power of OAuth to overcome the balkanization of EHR across healthcare providers, institutions, medical disciplines, vendors and insurance carriers. The metaphor of a “valet key” which lets its user drive the car without gaining access to the trunk or glove compartment, or drive more than 30 miles, is a powerful one because, it introduces the possibility “simplicity and transparency.”

The link with biometric authentication does not percolate to visibility until you begin to read the comments that follow. There, Alan Viars, CEO of Videntity Systems, Incorporated (VSI), elicits a sincere discussion of the suitability of biometrics as an authentication mechanism in the OAuth environment. He points out that OAuth creates many instances that are only as strong as the “username/password” combo that governs access to Twitter or Facebook. He then asks the non-rhetorical question whether biometrics might be a better way to give strong confidence that the patients or doctors are, indeed, who they claim to be.

Alan says, “Biometrics, implemented properly could do a lot to solve the master patient index (MPI) federation problem.”

Amen.

Adrian provides his very thoughtful response to Alan; and so a meaningful dialogue regarding biometric authentication has begun. We will, soon enough, get to the merits of voice versus iris versus fingerprint versus facial structure in today’s increasingly mobile world. But, in a world where our phones have morphed into indispensable, highly personal, virtual assistants that house our location, appointment calendars, contact lists and call histories (if not medical histories) the idea of using one’s voice to assert one’s identity should be obvious.

A: Both have made acquisitions of companies that specialize in E9-1-1 (Emergency 911) service providers. As reported here, Bandwidth.com has acquired dash Carrier Services for an undisclosed sum of money. It puts the VoIP provider on track to reach $100 million in revenues in 2011. West bought Intrado back in 2006, which was early in its acquisitive path toward becoming a $2 billion company.

Today West Corp. is organized into two major areas of operations. Unified Communications is made up primarily of conferencing services, “hosted collaboration” facilities and outbound alerts and notification. Its Communications services division includes operation of contact centers (with live agents) and “Automated Services,” an umbrella term that lumps Intrado’s E911 services with the speech-enabled IVR offerings of West Interactive (which now includes HollyConnects and Tuvox).

Bandwidth.com is, admittedly, another kind of animal in the Recombinant Communications Genome. Its core operations are “lower in the stack” of communications solutions. Where West might be thought of as an ASP (Application Service Provider) 2.0, Bandwidth.com is primarily an ISP (Internet Service Provider) 2.0, that distinguished itself by being an early entrant into the VoIP (Voice over IP) marketplace. Its Phonebooth.com service was one of the first self-service VoIP products targeting small businesses and bringing low-price enhanced telephony features to any business with Internet access.

The dash acquisition could be transformational to bandwidth.com. It brings an advanced form of location-awareness into Bandwidth.com’s fabric. At one point dash was characterized as a “reseller” of Intrado services, but a company spokesperson tells me that dash has its own, proprietary software, systems and infrastructure for E911. The key components include “address validation” utilities that show 98% accuracy even for calls from “nomadic” (i.e. “mobile”) phones. Its ability to locate callers is not dependent on the static data from the “Master Street Address Guide” (MSAG) that traditional 911 has always depended on. dash also tells me that dash maintains its own files of geographic boundaries for the areas served by individual Public Service Access Points (PSAPS), which are the contact centers where 911 dispatchers work.

With the acquisition, Bandwidth.com strengthens its position as a carriers’ carrier and a key enabler as VoIP carriers continue to compete for a growing share of business, residential and “nomadic” conversations. Incumbent carriers used to shoot down competitive threats from Vonage and its cohort of competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) based on their inability to provide E911 services. Now it is becoming routine for VoIP carriers to have access to emergency services that are qualitatively better than those offered by the incumbents.

dash also offers a full suite of wholesale carrier products and services, such as domestic
and Canadian SIP origination and termination, CNAM (which is Calling Name delivery that supports CallerID), N11, and directory listing services. Bandwidth.com’s customers and go-to-market partners can build some formidable service offerings from these building blocks. That’s what Recombinant Communications (RC) is all about.

Along a more serious vein (literally), IBM’s researchers are joining forces with speech technology specialist Nuance Communications to use IBM’s “Deep Question Answering (QA), Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning capabilities” in conjunction with Nuance’s speech recognition and Clinical Language Understanding (CLU) solutions (not to mention its life-like speech synthesis) to provide hospitals, physicians and payers access to critical and timely information. Doctors and professionals at Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine are collaborating with IBM and Nuance. Physicians at Columbia and helping to identify some specific incidences where Watson’s technology can be of greatest use and doctors at Maryland are helping with user interface design.

The two companies expect the first commercial offerings from the collaboration to be available in 18-24 months. It is part of a much larger joint development effort that is described in this press release from IBM’s Web site.

Google uses its own speech recognition/dictation resources as well as Google Translate to perform the transcription and translation operations. It is thought to use SVOX’s text-to-speech rendering software to recite the translated output, although its acquisition of Phonetic Arts leads me to believe that the search giant is getting ready to incorporate its own text-to-speech rendering (probably with a human-sounding voice that conveys emotion.

Does Google’s entry spell the end for competing products? Not necessarily. As Greg Sterling noted in a post on Internet2Go, the “free” Google Navigation application for Android phones barely made a dent in Telenav’s business. The take-away is that creativity and attention to a great user experience is rewarded in the marketplace. Google’s technologies for speech recognition, translation and synthesis will continue to be important resources for its own products and services, but other, product-oriented companies will continue to introduce services that successfully bond with customers, even if they compete directly with the technology that they are employing.

Several languages and dialects are supported, as are frameworks and software to support mobile, multi-modal interactions. You can keep up to date by referring to this descriptive page on the Nuance Web site.

It is becoming increasingly evident that we are well into an era that takes us “Beyond the SDK” in the mobile world. While this offering does not fall into the category of a speech API, it does overlap with many of the initiatives that mobile API providers have launched to fire up the creative juices of the app developer community. As the makers of “tools,” “reusable code,” and “development environments well know, developers gravitate toward the well-understood, well-documented and familiar. Spoken input and output from mobile navigation devices and apps conform to those three criteria.

West has partnered with TFCC for roughly fifteen years and the companies are well acquainted with one another. West will position TFCC’s services as part of its Unified Communications segment, where the foundational acquisitions include Intercall (for conferencing), West Notifications Group (which is tightly knit with multi-modal alert company Televox) and SKT Business Communications Solutions, which was acquired in August 2010 to provide the professional services and project management skills that make it possible to knit together cloud-based solutions with enterprise IT infrastructure.

The acquisition signals that West Corp. is well-aware that outbound alerts, in all their modalities are one of the largest opportunities among so-called Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBPs). TFCC’s niche, of high-volume call handling and notification is a near-perfect application for hosted services because they provide an automated, resource “on-call” for times when spikes in call traffic occur by definition. Providers of such services customarily charged a fixed monthly fee for keeping guaranteeing call-handling capacity during times of emergency and these charges make for a nice annuity for service providers.

Dating back to its acquisition of CenterPost Communications (which customized notification services to suit the whims of United Airlines customers and passengers), West learned that the ability to customize intelligent alerts is both a differentiator and a source of professional services revenues. The acquisition of TFCC positions West to garner the full spectrum of revenues: Non-recurring professional services, annuity and activity-based while leveraging both home-grown and acquired assets, clients and experience.