The ideal proof points, as listed in the post, include “image and video processing, conversion and rendering; scientific research data processing; or financial modeling and analysis. However, my voice and mobile-oriented mind spins sees a mechanism for rate arbitrage when running a videoconference or Webcast; a source of call processing and media processing resources for “busy hour” in a customer care/collaboration session or other instances that are left to the imagination of the new generation of real-time, rich phone application developers.

The good news is that spot prices are often less than published rates. They are, in essence, loss leaders and ways for Amazon.com to make incremental revenue on unused capacity. The caveat is that, by design, “If you’re running Spot Instances and your maximum price no longer meets or exceeds the current Spot Price, your instances will be terminated.” So it isn’t the rock-solid, persistent connection that a company would want to make part of its critical path telephony.

This is a very promising development in the world of Recombinant Communications. Solutions providers and application developers have one more place to shop for affordable storage, computing, database management and queuing resources at the lowest price possible. It is an evolutionary step toward that will put pressure on alternative hosted service providers to become more fluid in how they price and offer resources on demand.

As part of the Skype for SIP open beta program, Skype has created a low introductory price for the monthly channel subscription of $6.95 per month. According to Phil Wolff’s post, the going rate for Skype Out is $0.2.1 per minute in 36 countries.

Netherlands-based Parkmobile Group positions itself as “the sole supplier to offer totally integrated solutions for management of all parking-related issues.” In Grand Rapids, it has contracted with VoltDelta On Demand Solutions to host an application which registers subscribers by having them speak their license plate number and credit card information from their cell phones. In subsequent transaction, it uses caller ID to identify and validate the originating telephone. It prompts callers to identify the “zone” in which they are parking and then processes the payment.

Callers can also instruct the system to send them a text message when the meter is about to expire. At that point they can extend their parking time without having to run out to feed the meter. A spokesperson for VoltDelta characterized the service as “the first of its kind” in North America; however, Parkmobile is a global company which, in addition to Amsterdam, has European offices in Athens, Brussels, London and Munich. Its North American operations are in Atlanta, Burbank, New York and Toronto.

The service then calls you and prompts you to “Press 1″ to initiate the call. A woman’s voice explains that all you need to do is press “**” (“star star”) when you are put on hold. At that point, the service tells you to hang up so that it can call you back when an agent is available. Call it status, but we did a few test calls to the companies that usually put us on hold (United, Comcast, Bank of America, Chase Cards), but all of them transferred us right to an agent, so we were unable to take advantage of what could be the most valuable aspect of the service.

Perhaps you won’t have the same luck, so the operators of Lucyphone have provided the user code “OPUSLUCY” to enable you to try the service. Please use it at your convenience and post your comments here, and through the feedback links provided on the lucyphone.com Web site as Tweet fodder or the subject of status updates on Facebook.

Happy phoning!

NavteQ has been holding these competitions since 2003. The mission is to foster new, creative uses dynamic positioning technology and (oh yeah) NAVTEQ® maps.

The resemblance to Facebook was striking and, we were told, quite intentional. Just as Facebook, with its most recent redesign, made its core “LiveFeed” into a clone of Twitter, Salesforce has given its core Web-based CRM service into a clone of Facebook. The customary heirarchy of tabs, which include “Accounts”, “Contacts”, “Opportunities” and the like, had recently been augmented with links to Twitter feeds. But that’s all going to be a thing of the past as new tabs appear to integrate profiles, groups, status updates, feeds and input from both Twitter and Facebook.

Since sales personnel tend to be competitive, the prospect of using Chatter for collaborative sales may not be as great as the use of Chatter in conjunction with broader marketing and customer support efforts. The service can illustrate trending topics just like Twitter and Facebook. It also has the ability to support “reputonics”, meaning that team members can assign trust levels and quality to other members and their posts or responses.

Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff described the service in his keynote address to DreamForce attendees. He said that it is in test mode among internal employees. But it is being made available to customers subscribing to Salesforce.com’s core CRM services at no extra charge (above the $50 per seat per month charge). The service as a stand-alone will cost $50 per seat per month.

More detail will be provided by product managers during the course of tomorrow’s sessions.

Azure provides cloud-based instantiations of many core Microsoft server software and middleware. It is going head-to-head against other service clouds, including Web services-oriented API-driven offerings from Amazon, Google, IBM and Salesforce.com. In terms of middleware, Azure will feature an “AppFabric” that will include the resources and interfaces that coordinate interoperability between enterprise data centers and the Azure cloud. In the first half of 2010, Microsoft hopes to attract more developers and partners by introducing Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0, which will make it easier to weave cloud-based resources into enterprise applications. Both are currently in beta.

SpeechCycle’s will position the service as “RPA On Demand”. With its applications running in Azure’s cloud, the company will provide its customers and prospects a way to deploy its services without making major capital investments. Just as importantly, the company will find that its early entry into the Azure community will give it preferential position in the development tools commonly employed by members of the Microsoft Developer Community. It also provides a computing environment that can scale as needed when enterprises expand their phone-based customer care operations. This is a win-win for both SpeechCycle and Microsoft.

Orange already offers social media service called Social Life in the UK. It provides a single site where users can access a number of social media websites, including Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. The roll-out of Orange’s Twitter TV offering is expected to move from the UK to France, Spain and Poland, initially, and then more broadly in Western Europe.

This article in the online Guardian UK provides some details. Mobile Twitter will be offered to Orange customers as part of their existing phone service. They will be able to put limits on the number of Tweets they receive, in order to control costs.

Looking back on the event, I believe that Cisco has introduced two radical new products that have game-changing potential in that they employ “auto-discovery” to broaden the reach of the IP-cloud and deepen its ability to help individuals find others who share interests, activities and responsibilities. Collectively, they improve IP-based networks’ ability to support rapid formation of teams to tackle business tasks quickly and efficiently.

The first product is called the Intercompany Media Exchange (IME). This new feature of the core Unified Communications Manager (UCM) platform provides a mechanism for an ordinary phone call to initiate the process of recruiting and authenticating new members into an IP-based cloud that transcends enterprise boundaries. Once a “phone” (meaning an IP-telephony end-point that can be a physical phone, softphone, videoconferencing device, or other) is authenticated, it will be as if it is part of a shared network for future IP-based chat, phone conversations, video sessions and collaboration.

There are some pre-requisites of course. The IT managers at both firms must install and enable IME on their UCM platforms. But once that is done, initiation of the service is the product of auto-discovery. When that first phone call is complete, a process begins whereby the UCM platforms confirm that the call did, indeed, originate from the phone ascribed to a particular IP address. Ditto for the destination phone. Future calls between the two endpoints are routed through the IP cloud. It eases the migration from the public-switched telephone network (PSTN) to the IP-cloud in a secure way that, if all goes well with the IETF, will become a standard for luring new traffic into the cloud.

Auto-discovery figures prominently in the social fabric created by a new product called Cisco Pulse. It is an idea that was conceived in Cisco Advanced Technology group two years ago. It uses employee generated content – in the form of emails, blog posts and even telepresence sessions – to impute areas of interest and activity. These can be converted into “tags” which are the raw material for the directory embedded in the Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform (ECP). Tags are created dynamically in near-real-time and they can become an important part of team building by enabling employees to discover others who are working on similar tasks or projects. For media feeds (such as phone-based teleconferences or the audio portion of videoconferences) the system doesn’t capture and transcribe the entire session, but it does use word-spotting techniques to identify recurring topics and phrases that can be translated into tags.

Admittedly, Pulse walks the fine line between surveillance and collaboration. However, in this age of multi-tasking and constant interruptions, many of people (like me) can lose sight of the many projects underway. As for including a complete list of interests or areas of expertise in a public profile, that’s always been the weak link in efforts to build effective social networks inside an enterprise or multi-enterprise team. Pulse is destined to be controversial. There is a Big Brother aspect to the whole process of collecting data and assigning tags to individuals. The next step should be to give end users ultimate control over their public profiles (including machine-generated tags). But, as I mention in this video with Tony Frazier, a Sr. Product Manager for Pulse, the service can be both a memory aid (what am I working on?) and a mechanism for self-discovery.

Cisco deserves credit for adding so many new features and functions to the enterprise IP-backbone. Assembled solutions largely from acquired firms (like adding the WebEx brand to the PostPath email service). It, rightly, moves the industry beyond a pre-occupation with “unified communications” for UC’s sake and has developed a foundation for greater efficiency and resultant cost-savings by disassembling and reassembling network and computing elements. It is the enterprise flavor of Recombinant Telephony.

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