randulo’s unblog

Thilo Salmon, co-founder and CEO of Sipgate.com was out guest last  Friday on The Voip Users Conference. Even if you are not a telephony  geek, you will appreciate several aspects of this story.
 
Sipgate has been around for several years, first in Germany then in the UK. They provide free phone numbers which we VoIP junkies refer to as DID, or Direct Inward Dialing. For example, if you know how to play with SIP, you can direct these free numbers to your own pbx or to a SIP phone. Here's how this matters to you, geek or not.
 
First, it's interesting how I happened to reach Thilo (pronounced "Tee-low", a thousand pardons to him for my pronouncing it wrong and thanks to John Todd for correcting me). I just happened to see "Sipgate" on Twitter. Although I don't know who that was (surely it
 wasn't Thilo Tweeting, was it?) with the exchange of about 300 characters, we had an appointment to speak live on our conference on Friday. So, interesting point number one, meeting Sipgate on Twitter was like being introduced to Sipgate's co-founder and CEO at a party, only no trees died to create business cards. I have never had a business card, by the way.
 
Second, the Sipgate people have done their homework. They have been around longer than Google Voice and longer than Grand Central which was the small outfit that became Google Voice. They offer, like GV, a free incoming phone number in the USA. Like GV, they say they may be looking into other areas of the world... someday. Also like GV, you can forward the number to one or more other numbers so your one phone number will ring both your cell and your home number, for example.
 
What Google doesn't do without some messing about, is allow an easy hookup to the wonderful world of a nice SIP phone. A SIP phone is a telephone that, rather than plugging in to a phone line, is connected to the Internet. They can have multiple lines so they can be connected to multiple services. Mine has six lines, connected to Sipgate, Gizmo/Google, OnSIP.com hosted pbx and toll free number, our French hosted pbx and a colleague's SIP phone in the UK. What that means is that I can get calls on an 800 number in the USA, several French numbers (main number, my direct line), my Sipgate number, etc.
 
The "pbx" adds things like voicemail, open hours, fax if you still live in the 90's and lots of other features.
 
It isn't the "free" part that I care about, or even the low rates of OnSIP or Sipgate, it's the flexibility. There's only one thing missing
 in telephony today, and that's total mobility without roaming charges. In other words, a single, international number that anyone can call for a nominal rate (equivalent to a local call) and reach you where ever you are in the developed world. It would ring your cell and any other phone you'd care to.

Typical Polycom SIP phone.

If you are interested in finding out more about SIP or VoIP or anything telephony related and how it can make a difference to your business or your life, join us some Friday and say hello live: http://vuc.me

I love doing live conferences. The ones I do are available as podcasts
through Talkshoe and can be downloaded, but I prefer the live part.
Plus, because I know they can be downloaded, I tend to want to edit
them to sound a little less idiotic. Fortunately, I'm also very lazy,
so I rarely edit unless something happens that needs to be rearranged.
Last week, Tom Cannavan got cut off for a bit and I did edit and
reorder things, removing the wait for him to call back.
 
Two years ago, Talkshoe CEO Dave Nelsen worked with me on producing
the first live 24 hour Kivathon, which was a terrific success,
bringing a lot of awareness to what was then not very well-known.
Since that time, Kiva has become so successful, you literally have to
wait in line to loan! Oprah and Bill Clinton's book are largely to
thank for that. Dave and I both very much enjoyed the fact that we
were able to have fun and pay back some of the amazing and wonderful
things the Internet has brought us.
 
Anyway, talking with a few friends about the whole Talkshoe thing made
me go take a look at the statistics for the conferences and I was a
little surprised to see that for the New Wine Consumer, which has few
live participants, the average download number for a particular
session is around 800. This is a small number compared to popular tech
casts like TWIT, where at least 200,000 people are hearing it each week. On
the other hand, those 800 unique IP downloads measured by Talkshoe are
people who actually listen to the recordings. We know that to be
motivated enough to click on listen or download, people are interested
in the subject on some level, whether professional or amateur.
Remember, those page views you see for your blog have plenty of chaff
with the wheat, lots of robots, lots of people wandered there by
accident but are not interested, lots of everything but your target
audience.
 
For the VoIP Users Conference (running 2 years since March 2007) we
have a highly focused group with an average of 30 live callers each
week. When we had Asterisk creator Mark Spencer on and simulcast in
video, we had about 100 live. I also did a live session with Chris
Brogan for his Grasshoppers initiative and there too we had over 100
people. The conference has not one but several sponsors.
 
Advertisers haven't come around in droves yet to understand the
podcast paradigm, although Leo Laporte has more than proven its value.
When a site is mentioned live on TWIT, it usually brings down the
server almost immediately.
 
I think we are still waiting for the easy way to join the
conversation. Twitter proves that "if you build it easy, they will
come". I am trying various methods to allow Skype with its millions of
users to call in to our conferences. One of these days I will find a
way to make this work reliably. If, in the meantime the applications
for iPhone etc begin to work well, things like Gizmo5 and iPhone Skype
app, the whole thing may be an enabler. If and when this happens, I
will be looking for communities to help make use of this technology
and I have the experience and ideas to make it work, I hope.

Incidentally, speaking of Gizmo and Skype, Michael Robertson is our guest
this Friday to talk about Gizmo5 and OpenSky.

At the end of a hard day, we like to look at 100% fantasy from the heavy Millenium to the light and airy The Pretender. What made me think of the Pretender just now was the opening sequence:

There are Pretenders among us. Geniuses with the ability to become anyone they want to be.

You don't need to be a genius to invent yourself on Twitter, but a little creativity goes a long way. I've been reading through countless 140-character bios of Twitter users, and it's pretty amazing what you find. The Pretender opening line popped into my head while reading some them. My own profile is pretty pedestrian, basically a list of my interests. What is fascinating is how people re-invent themselves in the mini bios.
 
I wonder if in a few years there will be psychology majors pumping out doctorates about how people fashion their personae on social networks (regardless of which social networks survive). [By the way, it's pretty amazing that a spell checker in my mail client knew the plural of persona, don't you think?]
 
How's Second Life doing? I have the impression it's faltering. Are companies leaving? Talk about Pretenders though, that's the place to invent yourself from A to Z. Back to Twitter, less is more is definitely true of much great art, but are all artists good at minimalism?
 
Here are a few comments I have about Twitter:
 
I don't care how many people are following me or how many read this Posterous series nor do I care how many people follow the people I follow. What I care about is the quality of connectivity. Can we have a short conversation of some kind? I just had three or four this morning. Actual thoughts and ideas were exchanged. The numbers are only important for the Pretenders among us.
 
If you have SEO, diva, expert and other like words in your bio, I know you are not of interest to me. You see, you are no better or worse than me or anyone else on Twitter. Calling yourself a diva or an expert marks you as a one of the Pretenders among us. My step mom used to say, "He who says, doesn't know. He who knows, doesn't say." You're one in a sea of Pretenders, humility and sincerity are in order.
 
When you auto-DM followers with "Check out my site" you are being like the people that come up to you on the street and try to talk you into their religion. This is an insult, in the one case because the religious claim to have a monopoly on the Truth and on the other because I've been on the Internet long enough to find your site if I'm interested. The auto-DM thing comes from the Pretenders among us.
 
You can be a successful Pretender on Twitter, but you won't be among me for long.

Tuning up is the bane of the mandolin player. I wish I had spelled bane correctly in the title. Thanks @voyagerfan5761 for the correction!

Poor service is the bain bane of our existence, yet we have the means to fix it. Email works, has proven laborious due to spam and other problems. Telephone hotlines are too immediate in some cases, and some things require research and a call back. Having used these, the agent often does not call back.
 
Twitter could be the most valuable customer satisfaction tool ever invented. GetSatisfaction.com isn't bad, but it's too laborious for the user. Twitter on the other hand could resolve a lot of problems with a simple trick. For one thing, the user is already registered. The 140-character limitation is a blessing. Once contact is made and an agent dispached, the rest can be handled via email. In cases that can quickly be solved, every return tweet giving the solution or confirming the resolution is like an advertisement showing how good the service is.
 
Using the Twitter API, build an (probably AIR) application that allows a single Twitter username to receive and log DM and Tweets, delivering them to one or more logged in agents, just like a call center. The agents can communicate on a back channel via Twitter, IRC or any IM. Every message sent and received is timestamped recorded in a database. An auto DM is sent to the [potential or current] customer after the first received message saying "we're on it" and the agent assigned figures out what to do and executes it.