For those interested in tracking this data, here’s the top 10 popularity list (representing ~8.7 million connections from ~70,000 users). It’s important to note that most VoIP User users are not consumers, but early adopters and techies.

Click the Chart to See Full Size Version

If you’d like to have a look at the raw data, comprising of nearly 400 unique SIP user-agent names, you can download the .xls fomat spreadsheet here:-

voipuser_uas_to_august_2010.xls

There are a few interesting ones in the raw data:-

FF-ExtensionWindows/1.0

This looks like a Windows FireFox extension. I’m guessing it’s the Abbeynet Toolbar plug-in.

YAMAHA

I have a feeling I’ve asked this question before, as I’ve seen this fellow in the past. But do Yamaha make a SIP device ?

BT

If this is, as you might guess, British Telecom, then I guess there’s a few hacked HomeHubs out there

VaxSIPUserAgent/3.0

I had to Google this one, as I first of thought some crazy person had actually ported a SIP stack to a DEC VAX computer! Sadly not, it’s an SDK toolkit…..

N/A

These are SIP Devices which either present no user-agent, or it’s in a strange format that we simply don’t understand, like Chinese character set.

Anything else interesting in here that I’ve missed?

Anyone care to guess how many of these devices will support WideBand/HD codecs?

Perhaps the best aspect of the new site is to be able to showcase some of the work we have done this year. Like many company’s we can’t talk about everything we do, for confidentiality reasons. However, we’ve been fortunate to have been involved with some amazing projects in 2010 and these case studies hopefully give a sense of the kinds of things we do at Voxygen. After all that’s why we come to work. We’ll be adding more case studies over the next 12 months, where we’re able to do so.

The site design was put together with Will Smith at Authentic Style who has been fantastic to work with. We are also grateful to Chris Moyse for the photographs. And yes the shoot was as fun as it looked.

Skype over 3G on the iPhone

Those of a certain age who were living the UK in the early 1990′s will remember a mobile company formed by a consortium including Mercury and C&W and called “one-2-one“.

Their consumer proposition was this:-

“The service features a unique pricing plan that allows subscribers to make free local calls in off-peak hours, 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. Free local calls are an anomaly in the United Kingdom because even fixed wire and mobile telephone users are charged for all airtime used, even local calls.”

What was particularly interesting at the time was the definition of “local call” which in One-2-One speak included “on-net” calling. So you could call another user on the One-To-One network, for free (and hence the company name).

The service, and company, was ultimately bought by DT/T-Mobile to enable it to enter the UK market.

Skype, with the newly released V2.0 of its iPhone application is going for round 2 in the mobile On-Net calling stakes. But this time it’s not about the pipe, and it’s not about the provider, it’s about the network. The Skype cloud network. And it’s no longer a handset or a contract, it’s an application.

The Skype 3G iPhone proposition is “hi-definition audio”. Skype are claiming that it is “near CD-quality”. I’ve used it, and it’s pretty damn good – I described it as “amazing”.

The proposition for Skypes shareholders is the fact that you have to be on the Skype network in order to get the “near CD-quality”. Because you don’t get hi-def when you call a regular landline or mobile, only another Skype-enabled device. So if you want to make hi definition audio calls to your friends, they all need to get on the Skype net. Goodbye cheap minutes, hello quality experiences.

So Skype are playing the One-2-One game. The first difference this time, is they haven’t had to spend £100m (a lot of money in the early 90′s) to buy licensed spectrum to do it, they’re just an app (and haven’t yet played their hand on what they will charge users). The second is that they don’t need customers to churn away from their favourite 3G dumb pipe supplier. They just need them to install an app (admittedly only the on iPhone so far, but I bet that will change and I’m sure Nokia will be up next). That makes it even more disruptive than the Mercury / C&W alliance of 20 years ago.

It’s a strategy that might work, might not. But Skype do have a brand and customer base (520m users) big enough to have a damn good second crack at it. I’m sure we’ll see other companies try and follow suit with hi-def offerings, but my money is on Skype due to the large user-base and being first to market with a (usable and meaningful) mobile VoIP service.

It’s the mass-market adoption of Skype that makes it work. You need to be on their network, along with other contacts you call regularly, to make it work for you. So in the absence of native interconnect, which Skype do not currently do, your a. n. other mobile VoIP carrier has to start from the ground up with their hi-definition strategy. Dave McClure summarises this well in his own unique way when talking about the On-Net nature of Social Networking:-

“at a minimum, you’re gonna need to have or acquire 10-50M users (active/frequent, not just registered) and have or signup 1-2M local businesses (perhaps more?).  this is customer acquisition cost on a scale that only a few big players can fathom, or a few larger venture / private equity players can go after.  And that’s with a ton of execution risk. “

Of course, even if we see a ton of M&A, the Skype net is at least 10 times larger than all the significant others added together. And that could leave the others in a real spot of bother. Dean Bubley of Disruptive Wireless is thinking along similar lines with his “Coalition of Losers” post :-

“Having 53 previously-ineffectual companies attacking a strong individual player usually just proves that 53 x Zero = Zero”

And the point really driven home by this Reuters report – 5 million users downloaded Skype’s 3G application in 3 days. This isn’t about Voice over 3G, this is about access to the Skype network:-

Nearly 5 million consumers have downloaded a Skype Web telephony application that launched Sunday, allowing users of Apple Inc’s iPhone to use privately held Skype’s service over the cellular network for the first time, Skype said on Wednesday.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65159420100602

Sure access has been commoditised, but useful access, especially on the move or abroad can still be a lottery. Simply put, more and more of what we do takes place in the cloud, and on the move. Our expectations of being connected all the time and the number of people using devices whose capabilities seem to expand daily are increasing. All the trends suggest that useful access, rather than merely access, is set to become even more important to us.

Yet will the infrastructure be in place to deal with increasing demands and expectations of consumers and also be able to help realise the potential of ever more sophisticated devices and services? In practical terms, will all this great stuff be actually usable?  How will service providers such as hotels or mobile operators make decent connectivity available? There are some real challenges ahead.

The New York Times ran a great article on Sunday about how Apple has been successful with a proprietary strategy which is contrarian to the supposedly open, connected nature of the web. At the same time though, who is going to provide the kind of infrastructure which will enable all these lovely mobile devices to maintain the kind of connectivity they and their apps need? Yes the iPad holds amazing promise for things such as interactive maps, but Apple’s ‘proprietary system’ described in the NY Times won’t mean a thing if you don’t have decent connectivity. Just imagine all the new people who are going to join the ‘revolution’ as a result of the iPad? If you are designing mobile Apps, are you considering how the software copes with poor connectivity?

Dave Mclure’s forthright post on 500 Hats on the 10^th of April describes the ongoing battles between some of the major players. The commercial battles are fascinating but people also need a way of usefully connecting to Location Based Services. The infrastructure has to cope with growing user base and traffic demands not just at a server level but at a carrier level. If you’re looking for a funding challenge look no further than international digital infrastructure. This stuff is as important as roads and the costs involved make starting a successful social network site seem like dinner money. A day back on narrowband would remind us of how important the backbone is in the overall ‘system’.

(Note – It’s worth reading both these articles just for the contrasting writing styles alone).

Back in 2004 while working at Pipex (UK internet provider) there was much debate about who would ‘win’ between network (infrastructure) providers, hardware manufacturers or content providers. A discussion fueled by the fear of commoditisation of core services such as broadband and the scramble for value adds and new revenue streams.

The last place you wanted to be in the value chain at that point it seemed was the connectivity provider. It was clear that it was already commoditised.  Product meetings were “Jenkins, what do we do with our £10.99 product offering? “How about £9.99 sir?”  Then Talk Talk launched free broadband and changed everything. It became all about bundled propositions. The idea of differentiating through connection performance vanished as decent home and office connectivity became taken for granted and available at a low prices.

In the intervening period commercial battles and rate of technological change have intensified but certain forces such as mobility, apps and social networking have changed the game completely. However, maybe, just maybe the idea of quality connectivity will come back in vogue again; this time for mobile and roaming. For example Andy Abramson said in a post about hotel connectivity “As someone who falls into category 4, the business traveller, I’m not opposed to paying for quality bandwidth and connectivity”.  In future with more pressure on obtaining decent usable access be it for business or pleasure, perhaps people will pay more for a connection capable of realising the potential of a new generation sophisticated devices and software. If the right connectivity isn’t in place can we honestly say that the massive promise will be realised? I can’t see it. It is after all a co dependent system.

My Paris hotel experience reminded me that if fixed line and mobile access have been commoditised, usable roaming or mobile access can’t be taken for granted. The sums of money involved certainly make this a government level issue. While the infrastructure has to be in place, service providers be they mobile operators or businesses like hotels also need to step up to the mark by providing decent access be it via WiFi, 3G or some other future spectrum.  Voxygen for example has recently designed and built a tool for a multinational communications provider that allows businesses to test the suitability of their network for VoIP. Hotels could use such a tool to see if the connectivity they provide to their guests is good enough or a source of frustration and complaints.

Oh while we’re at it, can someone start a kite mark for hotel internet connectivity?

As we approached the store for the aforementioned item it was unduly packed. What’s all the fuss about? Suddenly it dawned on me. Dooh! I took a few pictures with my camera phone before catching the plane home.

First observation, is just how many staff Apple had laid on. Look at all those Blue T-Shirts! Plenty of Apple people to answer customer questions. In fact I was proactively approached twice by staff who asked if I needed any help.  Apple again thinking things through and executing brilliantly on a sometimes neglected customer experience basic. No sense in undermining the launch of a brilliant product with a home goal on customer service.

The second observation, perhaps not unexpected, it’s 6 p.m and interest in the iPad is still going strong.

The above point is underlined by this photo. I guess no one was interested in the iPod Touch today. You’d think the store was empty from this angle.

It’s important to remember when we speak of the “cloud” that what we are referring to is, in reality, hundreds of thousands of servers residing in data-centers across the globe, all consuming electricity and generating heat. So with that in mind let me start with a highly pertinent and often cited statistic from McKinsey:-

“The combined carbon footprint of the data center industry globally is now estimated to exceed that of the airline industry”

This highlights a real concern. However I know of at least one way that communications providers can actually reduce their carbon footprint by utilizing the Cloud more effectively. But let’s first examine the benefits that make solving this problem worthwhile.

You would be hard-pressed to find a word in the telco/tech space more overused in the past couple of years than “cloud.”. There are probably as many variations in the ingredients of those references to “cloud” as there are variations in the individual clouds above our heads. And, like the real world phenomenon itself, definitions of “cloud” offered up by industry are all too often nebulous, amorphous, insubstantial and lacking in comparability from one to the next. So let’s be as clear as we can be about what we offer, what it consists of, and what the benefits could be – where possible, through real world examples.

Having now flown the flag for clarity, I should also say that I think the cloud communications phenomenon will grow robustly. This is despite how we choose to define or promote it, as the inevitable result of a number of developments being driven primarily by the consumer. Think about the dramatic proliferation of netbooks, which demonstrates consumer demand for a more portable form factor and longer battery life, typically at the expense of both storage and processing power. Regardless of these sacrifices, netbooks continue to rack up impressive sales figures, and increasingly they come with integrated GSM cellular internet, which also demonstrates consumer demand for a mobile computing experience with ubiquitous connectivity.

Whether on netbooks or smart phones, within this highly connected mobile computing environment, consumers typically move back and forth dynamically between a number of communications flows. These interactions also now span multiple platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, IM, Skype, VoIP, email, blogs and gaming. I think there is a great opportunity to enrich these individual platforms, and the user experience, by exploring how they can be tied together, or at least how we may help make the transition of conversations from one medium to the next richer and more satisfying.

So let’s think about the implications of a rapidly growing universe of uber connected thin-client devices, contributing and consuming content and communication interactions across multiple platforms “in the cloud”. There are obvious user benefits to this scenario, if the tools are in place to deliver them:

• Battery life. The “thin-client” model takes the grunt work off the user machine and put it server-side;

• Safety of Data. Ignoring the thorny issue of privacy concerns, placing data in the cloud does increase its safety, at least in the sense that users know it will always be there to be retrieved again, regardless of whatever hardware failure issues may afflict them in the real world. Photo sharing sites offer a useful example, if one were needed, of a cloud service achieving this (e.g., Flickr’s Pro accounts) and where consumers feel strongly enough about to pay real money for, in order to have reliable, secure storage of treasured data.

• Availability of of Data. Related to this sense of security is the benefit of universal availability. As long as I have access to the web, my data is available for me to retrieve, and with the increasingly ubiquitous nature of connectivity, the cloud can be viewed as a hard drive rather than a “backup” service.

So, we think the key demand drivers of cloud services are in place and that consumers are increasingly positioning themselves to be consumers of such services. Moreover, we know that the key enablers are also in place: increasingly ubiquitous access, abundant online storage and address book functionality, and lightweight communications mechanisms between thin client and application server (otherwise known as APIs). Given all this, what sort of cloud communications services can we envisage will arise? I can think of many, but there are two in particular that excite me:

• Conversations 2.0 – I see this opportunity as being about transitioning conversations from medium A to medium B. For example, a conversation starts on Twitter, and transitions to a Skype IM chat or voice call. Having the metadata surrounding the call can assist that transition – e.g., could the Twitter API integrate to the Skype API to help this conversation flow from one to the other more seamlessly, even if both parties are not “buddies” on Skype?

• Cloud contacts – If we assume that voice and SMS are still “Killer Apps 1 & 2” of the communications world (an assumption that may no longer be true?) then certainly Killer App 3 must be the address book. Having my address book in the cloud and accessible by communications product APIs may help me by enabling my communications to start from any product and, if necessary, transition to another, and back again.

As exciting as I find this vision, the reality is that all this “stuff” in the cloud means more servers, more data centers, more power consumption and more OPEX for communications providers. And this is the elephant in the room that either no-one wants to address, or it’s been missed.

The Problem

In terms of OPEX, communications services are being driven downwards in terms of pricing, and the shortage of data center supply is getting more serious (Facebook is currently building its own datacenter). In terms of the dirtiness of this cloud, the key statistic is that most servers in a data center typically run at c.10% of their capacity, but over 90% of their energy consumption is devoted to power supplies, fans and associated cooling plant. To repeat the McKinsey statistic : the combined carbon footprint of the data center industry globally is now estimated to exceed that of the airline industry – a figure most people may not be aware of, but which regulators can be expected to pay very close attention to in future.

A Solution

There is a solution, I believe, in the form of virtualized hosting, which can help reduce energy consumption. An additional benefit is that this solution reduces cost. Virtualized hosting can get each physical server operating at close to maximum efficiency in terms of both power consumption and OPEX for the provider. This can be done through intelligent use of the virtualized hosting companies’ APIs, by having virtual machines expand and shrink in near real-time, based on demand.

For example, Slicehost, now owned by Rackspace, has an API that allows the user to expand or shrink a virtual server. My Company, Voxygen, has found that this can be controlled by software which monitors demand and capacity. When the system enters a period of increased load, the Slicehost API can be called and a bigger “slice” (a virtualized server), or additional slice, can be requested. During quiet periods, those slices can be downsized or even deleted completely. This means that a service running on such a system is only using as much energy, processor horsepower and disk space as it needs at any given moment in time. This reduces OPEX for the service provider and boosts the efficiency of the data center. In my opinion this type of hosting may ultimately be the measure of the long term success or failure of cloud communications services.

Clean Cloud Communications with Blabbelon

Blabbelon is a push-to-talk VoIP service targeted at online gamers who want to talk while playing a game. It was developed by Voxygen for founder Ed Ikeguchi, who previously founded Medidata, a NYSE-listed company which runs a thin-client oriented SaaS service for pharmaceutical companies.

The design of Blabbelon was cloud-oriented from the beginning. To this end, it’s thin-client, running in the user’s browser under JAVA, using Skype’s SILK super-wideband codec which we ported. All servers and infrastructure are in the cloud. Hosting is provided by Slicehost, and the Blabbelon backend is based around a self-scaling, self-healing system like the kind mentioned above. We use the Slicehost API to control server availability – if at any time the system requires more space or capacity in the cloud, an API call to Slicehost from our backend (which is completely automated) either upsizes an existing “slice” or creates a completely new one. Similarly, having some slack in capacity means a slice will get automatically downsized or removed making the whole system very efficient in terms of data center resources. In this manner, Blabbelon achieves energy efficiency from being in the cloud.

In terms of the Conversations 2.0 transition point from medium A to medium B, Blabbelons users are already using the thin-client reference point of URL’s (which are used to invite users into a conference) through Twitter, by posting their URL into the Twitter stream. Several conversations eminating from Twitter and transitioning to Blabbelon occurred within the first few days of Blabbelon being publicly launched and have resulted in a steer towards more seamless integration.

Like many people, we find sketching an incredibly useful way of developing and refining thinking in the same way you would use sketching to develop a 3d form.

Most of the discussion so far appears to focus on the device itself and its features. This is regardless of whether you were at the event, have experienced an iPad first hand or whether you’ve just seen the pictures. What does it feel like to hold and use? Does it run flash, can I have more than one application open at a time, does it have a camera and so on. So far the reception seems mixed. That may change once people start using the iPad (certainly Stephen Fry’s view in today’s Guardian) and Apple products do have a history of improving with later models. The fact that the focus of the debate is about the device itself is understandable, but following the iPad launch via a live blog there was something that bothered me at the time. A few hours later I realised it was this picture…

a slide from Steve Job's presentation at the launch of the iPad

Looking at these 3 devices together it struck me that the real opportunity here is the new system the iPad creates rather than the device itself, which after all, some are interpreting as an enlarged iPod. An evolution rather than revolution.

Apple is a leader in ‘joined-up’ and design thinking. For example, they saw that an MP3 player is just a commodity without a compelling way to access music. So they created a ‘system’ which included access to content. It’s the combination of the iPod with iTunes which is so powerful. Again they nailed this with the iPhone and the App Store. The iPhone would just be another smart phone in the long run were it not for the App Store. The ‘system’ has preserved the longevity and robustness of the iPhone’s popularity.

Don’t get me wrong, the iPad itself makes a lot sense. It is a milestone device that will further enable and change the way we interact and experience the online world and other content. The device’s dimensions also address the problem that no matter how good a small device like the iPod can be, some activities just require a larger scale. Either because of ergonomic factors such as keyboard size or some content such as newspapers or movies are best experienced at a large size.

So the iPad is perfectly placed to fit into, and will no doubt add momentum to many influential themes such as convergence, mobility, social connectedness, open source, cloud computing as well as opening new possibilities for applications and content.

But here’s what’s bothering me, at least. In another sense the iPad is anti convergent. As good as the functions and features it offers are, in reality it‘s another device that people will have to carry around and use along with the other ones they already have. The iPad is not a replacement for the phone or laptop and people will need all of these. So stepping back from the device itself and looking at the system it fits into, it’s not actually the step forward it could be.

For some situations you just want the real thing, be it a camera with a decent lens or a proper sized and tactile keyboard. At some point, the amount of features you can stuff into a device leads to compromises, whereby in the end you still revert to specialised devices. We just end up with more gadgets and complexity, not less. So rather than focusing on how many features can be put into something, perhaps the opportunity is how brilliant devices connect and interact with each other. The iPhone, Macbook and iPad are 3 such devices. Give me a really good camera that easily talks to the other devices it needs to.

Rather than applying design thinking just within each vertical i.e. iPod to iTunes, iPad to app store, the new device is a strategic opportunity to extend the idea laterally between the devices as well as a great product in it’s own right. In other words Apple had, and still has, an opportunity to apply design thinking up another layer by thinking about the way these 3 types of devices (phone, tablet, laptop) could interact and connect with each other in the physical and virtual sense and also extend this through to other elements outside the Apple system. Now that would have been a revolutionary launch context for the iPad.

System or "Joined-Up" thinking used by Apple

So am I the only one thinking…

The above sketch crudely illustrates how considering the way the devices interact in the physical and virtual sense would create some interesting outcomes. In this context, perhaps the iPad is actually just the next generation of laptop screens which are detachable, multi-function, gestural devices as standard. You have a main unit with a powerful CPU and large hard drive, a proper keyboard (i.e. all the benefits of the laptop). You have the ability to detach the iPad for a tablet mode and you have an integrated dock for an iPhone which, with an interactive casing and screen, could double up as the mouse. The devices could share one power supply as opposed to having to lug three around.

There may be some interesting options for the way the devices could interact with each other as well. The way they could share data, be sync’d to the same cloud access points such as the app store and control and talk to each other. Perhaps, a new type of device will emerge that connects all these things together.

Whether devices combine in this exact fashion or not, isn’t really my point, after all the idea of a modular computer is not new. But there’s a deeper opportunity here. Sure the iPad creates another clever niche, but as good as the promise the device holds in isolation, the real opportunity is how Apple’s core product range works as a system. iSystem anyone?

For those who are just learning about Blabbelon, it is a push-to-talk communications product that we helped conceive, develop, create and build, using a combination of proprietary (patents filed) technology and cutting edge open source software.

The most interesting thing for me about this one, and the reason I jumped on the project in the first place, is:-

1. Blabbelon is not about cheap minutes
2. It’s VoIP, but it’s not telephony
3. What better a use-case do you want for demonstrating that VoIP has value of and in itself other than a bunch of online users that have a genuine need to talk to each other?

After an initial few weeks of discussion, deciding that yes we can do this and agreeing to take on the project, we worked with Blabbelon to crystallize the vision for the product:-

1. Provide great sound quality that would be unduplicated in the gaming industry
2. Delivery one click simplicity for the user where possible
3. Offer a feature set that solves the problems gamers face when using existing VoIP products targeted at them

This presented a number of problems that we had to find technical solutions for.

First, a one-click experience generally means web-based applications (no downloads) and a URL based infrastructure. So we knew Blabbelon had to be web-based, but browsers are not really designed to service high quality voice applications.

Secondly, being web-based meant we had to find a codec that we could embed in either Flash or JAVA.

The codec we wanted from the get-go was Skype’s SILK codec, which has both superb audio quality and a small network bandwidth footprint. A few conversations with Skype and we had an early BETA version of the SILK binaries which we then set about making work in a browser. For this I hired Westhawk Limited, a leading expert on JAVA and VoIP services to execute (probably the best in this field in the world). Together we got this to work, through some clever code trickery that makes the underlying OS run a binary that is native to the OS, and isn’t running under JAVA, yet is still controlled by the browser. Problems solved.

Our process in order to achieve the best possible user-experience for gamers was to employ gamers. A group of early adopter and big Ventrillo users from a Guild in World of Warcraft became our testing companions for the next few months as we developed a feature set and more detailed set of requirements based on our early prototyping. This revealed to us a number of interesting findings and set us off into quite new directions – concepts such as audio being the primary user-interface (most gamers inevitably have a game in front of them, not the Blabbelon UI).

The whole process has taken about 10 months, end-to-end, to achieve a launchable BETA product. It’s not perfect and we still have some work to do, as well as some kinks to iron out. But as with every new software launch, especially one where boundaries are being pushed further and further, requires a period to effect a full test, complete with real users and users with a fresh set of eyes.

Our commitment to our client now becomes one of remaining agile and adapting to user reactions and feedback as quickly as possible. We anticipate another 6-8 weeks of fairly intensive development work on the back of Blabbelons now rapidly growing user base.

The work never stops, and we’re already starting to roadmap out to version 3 for the client with planning out budgeting requirements and strategies for 2010.

Thankfully, my client is only one click away.

Caller ID once was one of the most promising ideas of the telecommunications landscape. The disheartening part to that story, though, is that in the 20+ years since Caller ID was first mass marketed, not much about the technology has changed. Sure, it now has features that make it available on handsets, and it can enable you to block certain callers. But it is no longer considered a preeminent telecommunications technology.

That’s exactly why we at Voxygen have developed a software-based technology known as Next Generation Caller ID. At its core, the technology replaces existing Caller ID with a session-based link between voice and data, which provides context around voice sessions. It does this using existing user behaviour, whereby the user just calls the number on a website or application, unlike traditional click to call systems which use an embedded software client.

What this means for carriers is they now are able to provide their customers with an abundance of information that is invaluable. For instance, instead of just telling a user who’s calling, Next Generation Caller ID tells a user why the caller is calling, what they want, when the call originated, and from where the call is originating, such as from a PBX, a business number or a home.

Thinking about this in a few practical applications enables you to appreciate why Next Generation Caller ID can be extremely powerful. For instance, think about booking a flight online, only to get to a certain point in the process that requires you to speak to a live person. Despite that you’ve already spent time typing in a great deal of the information necessary for your flight, you’re forced to repeat everything again for the airline customer service representative. With Next Generation Caller ID, that information is pushed along to the operator, so you don’t have to repeat everything, and the problem is solved without duplication and wasted time.

In another scenario, you might call technical support about a problem with your computer. Instead of having to provide the technical support staff with information about your operating system, firewall, and other computer details, the information is provided to him automatically through the Next Generation Caller ID platform.

Voxygen now is in the process of working with one of Europe’s largest global carriers to take this patented software solution to market. Because Next Generation Caller ID is a product that works with all current telephony phone systems – both landline and mobile – it requires no network upgrades, and installation and training are simple to implement.

Businesses stand to benefit the most, as they more effectively learn how to deal with calls with rich data added to the context of the Caller ID information. One prime example is the elimination of one of the most reviled telephony dinosaurs in existence: interactive voice response (IVR) units.

IVRs almost always create a bad user experience, and users are ready for the next evolutionary step that will make business calling easier and more efficient. Next Generation Caller ID pulls so much information at the beginning of the call that it literally pushes the user straight through to the right person, intelligently, instead of forcing the caller to try to figure out who the right person is. This is made possible as our software provides context around why the user is calling and where (and if necessary how) to best route the call.

Users also will benefit from the software as they are able to accomplish their goals more quickly and experience improved customer service from both their telephony provider and businesses that implement the service. Gone will be the days of wading through endless voice mail systems or spending hours on the Internet to make a purchase, only to have the system freeze and send you to an operator who has no idea what your browsing history was.

But telephony providers also stand to inherit quite a legacy from Next Generation Caller ID. The software provides them with an incredible value-added service that is simple to implement, easy to maintain and of inestimable benefit for all of their customers. As with our European customer, other telephony customers now can start developing ways to bridge new relationships between who their customers are, what they need, where they are and how they’re communicating with other clients that utilise services across their networks.