Long time VoIP personality Jeff Pulver, is back in the communications business with the recent funding of Zula, his cloud based mobile collaboration venture that he's starting with one of the original founders of DeltaThree, Jacob Ner-David. Pulver is best know for the VON Conference Series which he once sold, reaquired and then saw pulled out from under him by lenders, and who also was credited in playing a big part in the start of Vonage,
The initial source of outside venture capital came from OurCrowd, the hybrid VC-crowdfunding platform for accredited investors based in Israel, and which invests in companies coming out of the country.
Pulver, for many years has been cultivating and investing in companies in the land of Milk and Honey, and has established a close kinship with Yossi Vardi, best known as one of the people behind ICQ, a forrunner of today's Instant Messaging apps and services that was acquired by AOL.
If there ever was a time when Skype was ripe for being knocked off their throne, it's now. You see, Skype despite all of Steve Ballmer's promises to telecom leaders after the acquisition was first announced, and the claims that Skype will be an independent company, under Tony Bates' leadership, all signs indicate that Skype is really just another app inside the Redmond company.
The integration with Lync that's coming, as well as the recent XBox news involving group video calling continues to demonstrate just how tightly woven Skype is getting.
If you remember ever asking "do you have a toll free number" or if you have ever dialed one, you always were thinking how calling that number saved you money, and maybe realized that the cost was being paid for by the receiving party. Most times the number called was for some type of service, support or reservation.
With unlimited long distance, 800 numbers sorta for many became irrelevant, and with mobile calling plans really being unlimited in nature, the need was sort of also reduced as people stopped paying for minutes, with one exception. The party on the receiving end of an 800 number.
Last week in London, uber-analyst Dean Bubley and I had one of our regular get togethers over a cocktail, some food and conversation where we chat without an agenda and let stream of consciousness and relevance become the compass. As we chatted we got onto the topic of both WebRTC and Skype and how the 800 toll free market was a common target for both.
Dean quickly pointed out something that has been in the back of my mind, the upcoming Skype/Lync integration, and how instead of advertising toll free 800 numbers, or usually being regional in nature, how the presenters of toll free numbers could start presenting SKYPE ID's as with Lync, the interconnection into the "PBX" in the call center occurs. Then we switched to talking about the same implications of WebRTC and how this all occurs in the browser.
If you think about it, already inside the browser we get pop ups asking for a chat if we are filling out forms, struggling with a reservation, or making a transaction that seems to be taking longer or is being rejected.
Both Skype and WebRTC would work to remove the barriers of geography, further driving more call centers in more places, but with call transfer ability for both Lync and WebRTC - once it interconnects to the PBX, means more expertise available. The current path of WebRTC is richer than what we have seen so far from Microsoft, but I don't think their not thinking about the on screen, in browser experience. Quite the opposite, I feel that they are, and that we'll see more screen sharing, on screen video calling with remote support and collaboration from them, all within the browser as Skype partially migrates from an installed app to a Web app and has that Lync connection going.
But if one thinks about this, and as Dean and I discussed, this is also where Google has a running start, as the Android OS is already seeing beta builds of WebRTC inside Chrome, and since it will be natively available on Android devices that operate on both Wi-Fi and LTE, this means in many situations, "calling for support" doesn't have to mean dialing up over the PSTN any longer. Conversely, Microsoft and it's Windows Mobile is going nowhere fast.
But the more one looks at it, the more one sees WebRTC and Skype as having all the potential of being a massive disruptor to the toll free and call center markets, so it's no wonder why the telcos are both looking at WebRTC (Telefonica buying TokBox, Ericsson fueling AT&T's Foundry, etc.) and trying to manage its deployment.
Back in the heydey of VoIP, circa 2006/2007 GrandCentral was the "buzz and da bomb" quickly gaining likely some hundreds of thousands of users before getting snapped up by Google and turned into GoogleVoice. But they had rivals, not direct competition, but services that did different things. Two of the rivals that ultimately fell to the wayside were TalkPlus and Jangl.
TalkPlus and Jangl each did something that today, many turn to GoogleVoice for. To be a "hook up" number for those in the dating world. While GoogleVoice has the Get lost feature where you can block anyone's number and send them a "this number is not in service" to the "dumped" or "jilted", TalkPlus gave people the ability to add a second number to the mobile phone by using the network to present a second number on the outbound, or route a call to your phone from that number-basically call forwarding on the inbound with data showing up telling the recipient what number was incoming, or spoofing the ANI and Caller ID on the outbound via the network switch. Jangl was a bit similar, but it used a series of numbers to pair up between callers. Jangl was eventually acquired by Jajah, as part of a mercy sale, with Michael Cerda taking on a BizDev role there for a short time.
Well now some dating service AshleyMadison is bringing back the combined ideas of both TalkPlus and Jangl for the hook up crowd. Both companies, TalkPlus and Jangl were ahead of their time, as the apps world was not really alive yet. Basically, only BB, Nokia Series 60 and Series 40 and some Windows Mobile devices were able to have more apps installed, and finding them, and often times getting them to work perfectly was an issue.
With companies like Twilio, Plivo and Voxeo squarely in the API space, and clients Voxbone in the numbers biz, and Flowroute in the SIP based origination and termination world, creating these kinds of services in the cloud isn't hard, so expect more of these "disposable" type operations to rise up.
One can only wonder if TalkPlus and its team led by John Todd, Jeff Black, Julie Lynch and Michael Topel had been around fully in the era of apps with iOS and Android, because back then, the idea of a private number was their's first, and the market for dating clearly defined. Same with Jangl as they cut deals with match.com but the uptake was limited, and the churn rather high.
Well today, people can use GoogleVoice for their dating number, but as the term coined by Microsoft in their counter to Google as a search engine service I can see "scroogled" taking on a whole new meaning too. Bada Bing!
Note to the Tony Bates-if you have customers, bill them as Skype, not an unknown, back office company. It's called Branding 101. You see, it's been a few years since Skype started to charge for services, so one would think that in an era of global transactions that they would get their payment act together, especially since they are now owned by Microsoft, but treated as an off-shore owned entity.
In the past they and many of the leading USA banks have had the same problem I've seen with other off-shore merchants-they fall into the high risk of fraud, so the credit card companies and banks take a careful look at their transactions. Now that Skype accepts the American Express card, a sign that more businesses are using Skype, one has to educte their credit card companies about them. At one point Skype and CapitalOne had issues, then Barclays, all in how they presented their data to to them.
Enter WorldPay, a European processor of credit card transactions. Today, the account security group of American Express flagged some renewals on various Skype accounts we use in my agency. Of course, Skype is who I do business with, but instead of Skype being the "merchant" presented to American Express, the name provided was WorldPay, a company that has only transacted business with me four times in the past few years, and those were for purchases in the UK.
It took a while with the very helpful AMEX rep, Ahmed, who basically said "oh, yes, we often see WorldPay flagged and it ends up being Skype."
To me it would be easier if Skype processed transactions in the USA, not offshore, but my guess is there are reasons why they don't. Most likely it has to do with tax avoidance and regulatory matters, but the inconvenience of having to spend time figuring out what WorldPay was, and back track that to Skype took longer than to write this post.
8x8's CEO Bryan Martin was featured in an NBC TV news feature in the Bay Area about the second coming of the technology boom in Silicon Valley as the Nasdaq, where many tech companies list their stock reached a twelve year high. Watch the video.
My take--we're seeing a new renaissance of sorts in technology. Quickly we have moved away from a hardware based economy to one of apps and services. Devices, though being replaced faster and faster, are also more relevant longer because of it. A two year old Android or iOS device is still usable and able to present data taken from the cloud and presented, while the server in the cloud gets updated every so many months with faster chips, better code and is connected to a faster, lower loss network.
The San Diego area is known largely for bio-tech and mobile leadership, largely due to Qualcomm and its dominance on the local technology scene. But quietly, the region is becoming home to some of the more rapidly growing VoIP companies on both an infrastructure level.
Whose here? Well for starters here's three---Sansay, Phone.com and Telcentris.
Sansay, led by long time friend Andy Voss who co-founded Nuera Communications in 1995, continues to be a force in the Session Border Control sector. The little heralded technology, is an integral aspect of the telecom technology eco-system, making it pretty much a necessity for ITSPs and mobile operators to deliver high quality calling and services, including the ever increasing demand for real time video and WebRTC.
While the industry goes ga-ga over Broadsoft and its softswitch technology, without companies like Sansay and Acme Packet producing technology that insures the maximization of performance and profitability for IP communications companies to route, peer and secure telcos services, much of what makes VoIP able to be better than the PSTN wouldn't happen. With Oracle's recent acquisition of Acme Packet the likely need for SBCs will only increase down to the enterprise level on a regular basis is my guess.
Phone.com, with headquarters in Newark, NJ, recently outgrew their tech side office space in Poway, CA so they moved next door into bigger quarters, as the San Diego Business Journal noted, along with SoCalTech. The growth, and recent funding led by ff Venture Capital and the Edison Innovation Venture Capital Growth Fund shows that investment in IP based communications continues.
Telcentris, best known for their unified/social/OTT offering VoxOx also has recently been growing. They raised another $5,000,000 and made some strategic hires of late adding PR and Marketing exec Joe Lawrence from the CDG and Tristan Barnum, best known for being a co-founder at Switchvox, which is now part of Digium and befoe that working with long-time friend Michael Robertson at MP3.com.
One of the neat things about IP based calling companies is the fact that most are founded by innovators at heart. That's why today when I watched the video OnSip Busy Lamp Field note from CEO Mike Oeth, I just had to share it.
What the busy lamp field means is users can now see when someone is on the phone-whereever on the network they are. Sweet.
I love WhatsApp. I use it daily, especially to stay in touch with friends in Europe and elsewhere to avoid the costs of SMS. Sure, I can use GoogleVoice, but if those across the water don't have a US based GoogleVoice number it means an international SMS. Whatsapp helps me avoid that.
Recently rumors of a Google possibly making a purchase of Whatsapp made the rounds. And maybe there was some truth to it. Companies like Google always talk to smaller businesses about partnership or acquisition. Sometimes the negotitiations move along to a point where price is on the table, but often what Google and others like them are doing is looking under the hood to see if what's there fits into their long term strategy.
Candidly, the best buyer right now in Silicon Valley is Yahoo for WhatsApp, not the also rumored Facebook. The reason is simply this. Yahoo has basically moved in the direction of the mobile web, while Google is all about the browsable web. The fit between Yahoo and Whatsapp is likely better, as the Whatsapp team could likely be longer term players inside a new Yahoo and shape direction, while at Google it's all about Tim, Larry and Sergey and always will be for a long time. But at Yahoo, the opportunity has become more of a greenfield play.
But while all this is going on, and it goes on all the time, the best thing for WhatsApp to be doing is to keep driving user growth and to keep signing up mobile operators because in the end, those two metrics along with user retention and usage stats will be how the company is ultimately valued by whichever buyer pays the price.
But while Boingo (a former client up to their IPO date) has hundred's of thousands of accessible access points worldwide, the way the press release was phrased leads me to believe that the access is limited to only the actual Boingo owned and operated hotspots, most of which are in major airports and large commercial building or sports facilities.
The key phrase is "managed and operated by Boingo's subsidiary, Concourse Communications Group." Those are not all of the access points in the Boingo worldwide network, but are indeed the ones that Boingo can do things like guarantee a level of service and insure that access really works.
In a lot of ways this is good for Boingo, and their partners. Too often some providers of Wi-Fi hotspots lag in keeping up with all the new standards or implement odd ball authentication schemes that make it difficult for early adopters, or Mac users, to connect. Having experienced this roaming issue first hand as a multi-account Boingo subscriber, I have also expeirenced how effortlessly all my apps work when I connect at a Boingo operated airport vs. a roaming partners' network. VoIP, Video, collaboration and cloud services sometimes work at partner locations. At Boingo locations, everything works.
And for AT&T and their customers, the gold standard approach dictates that everything has to work, or the cost to support it outweighs the value offered.
