Voip (finally?) Getting Interesting

Posted on May 23, 2007 by Thomas Purves

According to this piece at the inq Intel has a crack at computer telephony by way of the WSJ, Intel (of all people) is looking to finally deliver on the promise of voip.

Voip for a long time has followed the all too common path of disruptive path of not really disrupting anything at all. The voip story for a long time has been all about copying exactly what the old technology did with a new technology at a lower price – rather that trying to radically re-think what’s possible with the new media outside of the old constraints.

Out of the blue, here’s Intels remedy for reimagining voip:

Intel is working on ideas that will give broader access to online meetings with TiVo-style playback, instant captioning of conversations and translation into multiple languages.

It also wants to make improvements to the quality of calls and improve security and reliability. By 2008, Grobman expects to add an isolated layer of software called a “collaboration virtual appliance.” Once installed, the crash of a PC’s main operating system wouldn’t interrupt a VOIP call or conference.

Other tools could include identification of the the current speaker during a conference call, or to mute a participant who is generating background noise. Grobman said that he would like to see automatic transcription or translation of conferences. more

I just though this interesting in the context of my last post on Enterprise Search. Of anyone, you would think the MS Office/Sharepoint crew should be thinking hard about indexing audio and the future of voip… etc.

Intel is, of course, behind any new idea that means we all need faster chips (multiple streams of transcoded, transcribed, translated and voice conversations (all neatly tagged and auto-indexed) done realtime on every desktop sure would do the trick).

What do you think is the real killer app for digital voice in the workplace?

(and I know what your are going to say, that Nortel had this all figured out in 1993 and cisco and nortel probably even ran dueling tv commercials on the idea in the dotcon days, but what became of that right?)

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iDubya’s are Enterprising Searchers and other things learned on MSoft’s Bar Tab

Posted on May 18, 2007 by Thomas Purves

The good folks at Microsoft and High Road invited a dozen or so of us types out for drinks last night to talk all about Microsoft and Enterprise Search to us. After taking, of course, the (dubious) precaution of well saucing us in advance. We bloggers are a surly lot of soapboxers at the best of times.

This is what I learned:

# Microsoft actually calls their enterprise search product by what it does “enterprise search”. Kudos. More companies should do that. Esp, this from a firm that once brought you branding horror shows like “Windows Live Local”.

# Microsoft calls Information Workers IWs, pronounced i-dubya’s

# IW’s want to be able to find information and expertise inside their organizations

# Search increasingly interface of choice – (though Bryce points out there’s frequently also a backlash because today Enterprise Search tends to be so bad in reality
Good/better specialized search products tailored for various industries exist but very expensive

# Consumer web search (eg product search) keeps getting better and raising the bar. Users expect Enterprise Search to work as well as Google internet search and the i-dubbya’s get upset because it doesn’t.

# Search is not just about search boxes but also something to do with “facets” and intuitively narrowing down results by ticking through categories of results (like eBay or Amazon searching). Letting users build sophisticated queries step by step without them even knowing they’re doing it.

# Microsofties consciously try very hard not to use “google” as a verb in regular conversation. Unsuccessfully.

# The trouble with Enterprise search is because “pagerank” doesn’t work as well in the enterprise. There’s much less useful link structure in corporate intranets to help identify most relevant content.

# [Social Media in the enterprise a.k.a. Social Computing is clearly the answer to this]

# Microsoft thinks that social side of search will be the killer app in the enterprise – but they don’t really have a credible story (yet) as to what they’re going to do enable that. Technically
Sharepoint supports blogs and wiki’s, and technically these are “social media” but I don’t believe MS quite “gets” social computing in the enterprise just yet (they are thinking hard now though, wait for SharePoint 2011).

# Potential long term MS advantages in search, they control the desktop, the user directory, the intranet portal and the rest of the hydra that is SharePoint, so theoretically they have a lot of implicit and explicit data they could be using to inform search.

# MS is looking to search as the catalyst to sell/upgrade SharePoint 2007 into organizations

# Other troubles with Enterprise Search: i-dubya’s find stuff they weren’t supposed to find, customer data, search for “confidential” in docs etc. and all that porn stashed on the shared folder.

Things I learned from what MS didn’t talk about:

# MS is not talking about visual search. (get idée for that!)

# MS is not talking about federating desktop search across multiple desktops. (Damn, for someone who works from 3 computers). I guess that’s what Groove is for.

# MS is not talking about video or audio search (Sutha and I were thinking about machine transcription and indexing of voip conference call meetings or video media)

# MS is not talking about Enterprise Search as a filter for driving better search results on the outside web. This is another (theoretical) killer app talked about by social computing types.

# MS is not talking about Social Bookmarking at all (but then I have mixed feelings about social bookmarking myself).

Thanks to Jared Spataro of Microsoft for the show and tell.

Posted in Archive, Business, enterprise2.0 | 2 Comments

Enterprise 2.0 Conf and Camp Update

Posted on May 17, 2007 by Thomas Purves

e20 Things are coming together for the event on the 29th. I’m happy to announce a great looking lineup. We’ve added John Bruce who’s Enterprise Social Media Company iUpload recently raised 7M in VC funding. John will be providing a real world perspective from their experience deploying Enterprise 2.0 to major organizations (iUpload’s client list includes firms from McDonalds to Deloitte to the New York Times)

The workshop roster is also looking great:

Ticket sales are doing well, more than half way sold out. Get yours here if you haven’t yet.

The main thing we need at this stage is sponsorship. We’re still looking for 1-3 sponsors at either $500 to $1000. With 1 more sponsor we can afford to upgrade from continental to hot breakfast (yay!) and with 2-3 sponsors we can provide lunch to all the Workshop attendees. Let me know if your company can sponsor EnterpriseCamp.

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