Disruptive Voice

Top 5 Voice Mashup Wish List II

My last wish list of voice mashups — apps that voice and calling features could be added to — spurred a few more ideas from colleagues. So here’s a second Top 5 Voice Mashup Wish List:

 

1. iGoogle. A simple yet effective app would be a VoIP call control widget for personal iGoogle start pages. You could activate features such as Do Not Disturb from your most-used web page.

 

2. Twitter or Yammer. The micro-blogging tool Twitter is hot… when its servers aren’t overloaded. Yammer, winner of the TechCrunch50, is expected to take off as well. Yammer is essentially Twitter for the enterprise. One pretty cool idea is to use Twitter or Yammer via a mobile phone or PC to send a text message to your VoIP network to activate or deactivate features. Imagine tweeting to turn on Simultaneous Ring. 

 

3. Social network widgets. If you haven’t tried the Click2Message Facebook widget, I suggest you give it whirl. Click2Message allows your friends on Facebook to call you using any phone simply by inputting their number into the widget. The widget keeps your number private. Well, it’s time to expand widgets like this to more social networking sites, such as MySpace, the Korean site Cyworld, & Hi5, which is popular in Spanish-speaking countries.

 

4. Active contact lists. Contact lists can become more valuable by extending caller ID capabilities to contact lists. Imagine a mashup that pulls info from multiple sources—such as Facebook, Plaxo, and LinkedIn profiles—to give you a 360 view of contacts. Then maybe you can begin a phone conversation by asking about the contact’s political interests (“How about that Obama speech?”) or the last book they read.

 

5. Dating site widgets. Connecting with someone via an online dating site is full of risks. But a widget that protects the phone number of both parties can let women get to know a love interest without worrying about stalking. Users should be able to activate the widget only for matches that interest them, and turn it off when there’s no love connection.

 

Of course, voice mashups are only possible with voice over IP platforms that have APIs and active developer communities. Anymore great ideas for voice mashups?

 

Voice Mashup Wish List

This week Web 2.0 Expo storms into New York, and many innovative companies will make news announcements. Among them will be BroadSoft, which will announce its Voice Mashup Contest winners.

 

BroadSoft and Ribbit really got the telecom industry and Web developers thinking differently about voice services this year. While telecom service providers have watched their margins become thinner as their services increasingly become commoditized, these two companies began to push voice as an application that can be added to other business and consumer applications.

 

So, here’s a short wish list of voice mashups I would like to see:

 

·  An iPhone VoIP application. There’s been plenty of blog chatter that we can expect as many as 100 VoIP apps for the 3G iPhone. Wouldn’t it be great for one of those apps to be carrier-grade for secure business use?

 

·  Sticking with mobile devices for a sec, how about a mobile VoIP & IM app for social networking. Nimbuzz.com has an API that’s just waiting for a money-making VoIP platform.

 

·  Open-source CRM applications. Telecom service provider SimpleSignal recently announced its success in delivering a mashup of salesforce.com with BroadWorks to SMBs, proving the productivity enhancements that come from adding calling features to CRM. So let’s see more voice mashups with open-source CRM apps like vtiger and SugarCRM.

 

· Online collaboration tools. Anyone who has used Basecamp for project management and collaboration has probably had to call one of the team members or participate in a conference call. Shouldn’t you be able to make that call or launch that conference from within the tool? Adding calling features to Basecamp, Zoho or Google Apps makes these online tools vastly more useful.

 

What voice mashups are on your wish list?

LinkedIn for iPhone

LinkedIn, the premier online network for professionals, has announced an app for the Apple iPhone. Available through the Apple App Store, no doubt this will be a hit among business users of the 3G iPhone.

 

But is LinkedIn open enough to satisfy the ever-increasing social networking expectations of its users and hold on to its lead among professional networking sites? Recently LinkedIn reported having 25 million “members” in 150 countries and was valued at an astounding $1 billion in June, proving that profitable, business-to-business Web 2.0 companies deserve great valuations as much as unprofitable, advertising driven consumer sites.

 

But challengers such as Xing (6 million members) and Ryze (half a million members) are emerging all the time, because of the low barrier to entry. Even consumer social networking phenom Facebook is being used more as a professional networking tool.

 

Granted, LinkedIn is all about business. Therefore, silly apps like “owning” your friends or contacts have no place in this serious networking environment. But what about other apps that help facilitate business development?

 

I should be able to tie a carrier-grade VoIP phone system like BroadSoft to my LinkedIn account to enable click-to-dial calling of contacts who have granted me permission to do so. Imagine 400-plus BroadSoft telecom service providers touting this capability to their enterprise customers. How about making my profile and selected content from my other online accounts—such as Facebook and Plaxo—available in my LinkedIn profile?

 

LinkedIn could do so much more to facilitate professional networking by tapping the expertise of app developers. Maybe those apps could be available for a fee in a LinkedIn app store, thus weeding out the useless and inane, while adhering to the professionalism of the site. What apps would you like to see integrated with LinkedIn?