These economic times don’t just try men’s souls; they squeeze corporate spending. Today there are pressures on both capital and operational expense budgets for companies of all sizes. This is the time when leading-edge companies try out the few new technologies that save them money while enhancing their ability to forge better connections between their customers and customer care resources. Office Depot’s selection of Transera’s Seratel platform provides a case in point.

Last week, longtime Microsoft watcher Mary Joe Foley opined that Microsoft has a “grand plan to eliminate phone numbers.” She cited direct quotes from speeches that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer have made among the international carrier community. Foley refers to a new software “platform” called Echoes designed to enable telecom service providers to sync diverse address books, seamlessly send messages between IM and SMS and assign a local telephone number to people using Windows Live Messenger.

Rather than concentrating on Echoes, Microsoft would have a better chance of eliminating phone numbers with “voice dialing.” It would involve speech-enabling the contact list, associating multiple “namespaces” (meaning phone numbers, IM user names, aliases on social networks, etc.) with an individual’s identity and then replacing dial-tone with a spoken prompt like, “what’s up?”

Unified Communications has entered into the silly season. After massive re-branding and promotional efforts by major communications and IT infrastructure providers, the term has lost all meaning. The UC landscape today is more like one of those multilevel, Plexiglass chess boards. But providing communications and content in a context that directly benefits end-user is the point and is the root of Contextual Communications.

A year ago, RSA, the security subsidiary of storage giant EMC, gave both prospective buyers and technology providers reason to believe that adoption of voice biometric-based user authentication was entering a new phase. By offering Adaptive Authentication for Phone, the… Read More ›

On the eve of iPhone’s first day of retail sales, there’s no better time to discuss a product’s legacy – especially when that brand is known for sleek, simple presentations but yet has no track record in phones.