Martin Geddes Hypervoice Keynote
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Transcript of Martin Geddes Hypervoice Keynote
Martin Geddes www.martingeddes.com [email protected]
This presentation was given as the closing keynote at Metaswitch Forum 2012 in Orlando, FL on 4th October 2012.
It solely contains the opinions of Martin Geddes,
and has not been endorsed by Metaswitch.
Nonetheless, many thanks to Metaswitch for the speaking opportunity. Much appreciated.
© 2012 Martin Geddes Consulting Ltd. Do unto others…
A presentation about
Hypervoice Specifically, how voice joins the
constellation of web hypermedia, alongside text and images.
NOW
Past Future
The presentation starts by looking at the past of voice, then the future,
before returning to the present.
Telco
CONFUSION
?
? Web
The present is very confusing, because we are seeing the
collision of two conflicting sets of values and ideas.
I am putting forward a hypothesis as to what
emerges from that confusion.
Convergence Fragmentation
For telcos, there is increasing dissonance between the
values, beliefs and behaviours that made them successful,
and the current reality.
NOW
The emphasis on interoperation, federation,
standards, vertical integration doesn’t fit with the reality of
fragmentation of voice.
POTS PSTN + PLMN +
“Public SIP Interconnect System”
+ Skype + Xbox + …
Just a feature of the Cloud,
Web and Apps
As is readily seen from current
trends.
Three big future changes
1. User experience
2. Business model
3. Network technology
Reconciliation with reality requires three big shifts.
Telco
Let’s start with the trajectory of telcos.
PAST
And go back to basics and the very
beginning.
What is ‘voice’
Talk at a distance
This is both trivial and profound, as talking at a distance is subtly
different in many ways to talking to those physically present.
“So, what do you do for a
living?”
We take this everyday wonder for
granted. We shouldn’t! So next time someone asks you what you do…
“Work for the phone
company”
“So, what do you do for a
living?”
You can do better than that!
“Network equipment
vendor”
Sorry, even less cool!
Illusionist! The correct answer is that you are
an illusionist.
You conjure up the ghostly voice of someone from hundreds or
thousands of miles away, and trick people into believing a real person
is present.
“My Daddy is an ILLUSIONIST! What’s yours?”
Presence
This illusion has a name. It is called ‘cognitive absorption’.
The guy on the left isn’t falling for the trick – he’s just rubbing his ear with a lump of plastic.
We’ve been performing this trick for a long time. So long, that ‘voice’ and ‘telephony’
have become virtually synonymous.
When telephony was new, phone companies had to
teach people what to say; a new language of etiquette.
Telephony has an unconscious inner language,
a bit like a game of chess, with standard opening
gambits, middle game and endings.
“Hegemony
of the
caller”
This book from the mid 1990s studies hundreds of calls and documents that
language.
A critical feature of telephony is the power the caller has over the caller;
both in choice of timing, and the control of subject
matter when the call is answered. There is an innate
social imbalance.
And all these features were built in a very different era,
for different users, with different expectations, by a
very different kind of ecosystem.
As an example, consider the toll free number, introduced by fiat under the old AT&T
long distance regime.
Assumes our time is cheap…
…and calls are expensive
$
telephony labor
This implicitly assumes calls are expensive. After all, what else would the phone company desire!
A minute of labor cost less than a minute of
long distance telephony.
Equalized between c.1982-2000
$ $
telephony labor In c. 1982 you could
hire a college graduate at parity per minute with fixed-line long
distance calls.
By 2000, even a mobile minute was cheaper
than hiring a high school graduate for 60
seconds.
Today
telephony labor
$ Today, labor far exceeds the cost of telephony. It
is our time that is scarce, not our
machinery of talk.
Universal service
Emergency lifeline
Legal intercept
Telco social contract
However, that system left behind many critical social services and
systems that need to be preserved as part of our society.
Telco World
Service-centric
Telco device Telco access Telco service
Network roaming
Plus an extraordinarily successful system that has served to connect
billions of people around the world. Hurrah for telcos!
PRESENT So let’s roll forward to
the present.
Telco World
Service-centric
Telco device
Telco access
Telco service
Network roaming
OTT World
Experience-centric
Any combination of
device, access
and service*
Experience roaming
* Supported within any one ecosystem
Telcos exist in co-opetition with ‘over the top’ (OTT)
players for services revenue.
Corrosion
ARBITRAGE COMPETITION REGULATION
The three horsemen of the telepocalypse…
The temptation is to retreat to an undergound safe place in
Nebraska.
This is not a good long-term lifestyle choice.
Off-net apps are the new
‘mobile coverage’
CLOUD
ACCESS
COVERAGE
CLOUD
SERVICE
COVERAGE
So if you can’t beat them, join them.
Telco World
Service-centric
Telco device
Telco access
Telco service
Network roaming
OTT World
Experience-centric
Any combination of
device, access
and service*
Experience roaming
* Supported within any one ecosystem
Telco-OTT World
Product-centric
Mixture of telco and
3rd party devices,
access and services
? Which is giving rise to
a hybrid model of service delivery.
However, the Internet cannot and never will carry society’s real-time communications needs. It is
fundamentally unsuited to the job.
NGN Fixed
Recreating a VoIP PSTN
4G Mobile
Voice over LTE = Telephony over LTE
So telcos are left in a ‘groundhog day’ forever
re-creating telephony, rather than moving forwards.
How do I do ‘cloud voice’
So the telco challenge is to find a model of ‘cloud voice’ that works both technically
and economically.
Web
Let’s go look at the parallel evolution of the web and
hypermedia.
PAST
Again, we’ll go right back to the beginning.
“What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that
we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a
bicycle for our minds.” – Steve Jobs
Computer folk start with a different mind-set. Networks aren’t about
telephones and telegraphs, but about connecting computers.
Ideas
And specifically, they see computers as effort amplifiers
for spreading ideas.
doc → doc
HYPERLINK 1.0
…A ‘PLACE’ METAPHOR And as ideas naturally are
expressed via documents, these are amplified via hyperlinks.
Documents get URLs
Documents Homepages Blogs Which gave rise to this world. (With blogs being a stepping
stone to the next phase of the Web’s evolution.)
Hypertext
WEB 1.0
…MINIMAL IMPACT ON VOICE …SOME IMPACT ON FAX
So the first edition of the Web was based on hypertext, and had minimal impact on telcos
bar creating demand for dial-up and broadband access.
doc → event
HYPERLINK 2.0
…A ‘STREAM’ METAPHOR The world moved on. We came up with a new metaphor. The granularity of linking dropped.
We started recording and pointing to individual events.
Events get URLs
Images Status updates
@pointers #tags
Tags
There was an explosion of use and innovation based on this
new stream metaphor.
“Social web”
WEB 2.0
Which we gave a name to, as it amplified our ability to relate.
Hypermessaging
WEB 2.0
…SIGNIFICANT IMPACT ON SMS
Because in retrospect we had invented a new hypermedium.
Thoughts
Which amplified individual thoughts.
PRESENT
So let’s roll forward to the present.
Add new binary medium to browsers using a place metaphor
Assume it “just works” on the Internet
Everyone will figure out how to use it
The web folk are just as stuck as the telcos in accommodating voice! Just in a different way.
With their current approach being useful, but neither
necessary nor sufficient to make voice a native of hypermedia.
This standard lets web browsers send and receive real-time audio
and video.
How do I do ‘cloud voice’
So the same question applies to the web – how to bring voice into our
integrated online experience, rather than existing as a parallel universe.
Telco
Web
CONFUSION
And that is why we find ourselves in a very confusing place.
FUTURE
So how can we resolve that confusion as we plunge into the future?
“Cloud text”?
Hypertext A simple observation points the way.
Whilst we talk of ‘cloud voice’, we don’t talk of ‘cloud text’.
It’s ‘hypertext’.
“Cloud voice”?
Hypervoice So the resolution is to make voice
into a native hypermedium, through understanding its intrinsic linking
properties.
VOICE, WEB VOICE, HYPERVOICE
That means transcending the limits of ‘web voice’ as currently conceived, and instead moving to hypervoice.
Links what we say to what we do
HYPERVOICE
Just as we now routinely digitally capture our words and images, we will capture our voices. Voice need
no longer be ephemeral.
Memories Which makes hypervoice an
amplifier for our working memories.
Everything linked by time Notes you take
Slides you show
Screens you share
Messages you send
Web pages you browse
Documents you open
Customer records you view
Sales opportunities you edit
Trouble tickets you close
Hypervoice
WEB 3.0
…TRANSCENDS TELEPHONY
event → event
HYPERLINK 3.0
…A ‘TEMPORAL’ METAPHOR
Voice gestures get URLs
The web gets a new linking structure, one based on
time. Humans aren’t nearly as intuitive at managing
temporal metaphors as they are at spatial ones.
Magician! So hypervoice upgrades us
from illusionists to magicians.
“Daddy – you’re a
MAGICIAN too! How cool!”
As we can time travel as easily as we space travel.
Why should you care?
Your 20th century network voice product has to compete against
21st century cloud rivals
Three big future changes
1. User experience
2. Business model
3. Network technology
“Hegemony
of the
caller”
For example, computers will help us to rendezvous. The phone ‘call’ will become the ‘offer’ or ‘request’.
Audio will be recorded locally as well as send in real-time, given ‘audio make-up’, and the pristine result
uploaded in perfect replica.
Three big future changes
1. User experience
2. Business model
3. Network technology
PUBLIC ENTERPRISES
Co
nve
rsatio
n G
ap
Just as the move from text to hypertext gave rise to Google-like business models that
remove friction, hypervoice will enable new disruptive revenue models.
The money will be in making ordinary, everyday business interactions more
efficient, effective and secure – internally and externally.
Example: Fonolo
An example today is Fonolo, which enables hypervoice deep-links into
IVRs, using your smartphone.
Three big future changes
1. User experience
2. Business model
3. Network technology Networks are just large distributed supercomputers; the wires and
radios are the processor interconnects. But you knew that anyway…
DEDICATED NETWORK
Previously we have had - the fixed/mobile voice networks
(effective and efficient, but inflexible) - the Internet (efficient and flexible,
but ineffective for real-time)
Monoservice network
These are single class of service networks. Kind of like the networking equivalent of black and white photography.
IMS + SBC WORLD
We are building a world that is effective and flexible, if somewhat inefficient.
These are the kinds of technologies telcos use to deliver voice services over
Internet Protocol
Monoservice overlays
We do this via isolating flows using overlays.
So we’ve now got multiple shades of sepia.
CLOUD WORLD
The future will require us to learn how to multiplex
everything together much better.
Polyservice networks
Which means multiple classes of service; possibly even one
unique to every flow! Kodachrome networks!
Effective Flexible Efficient
Because we will need all three properties to deliver a
completely unified real-time world of distributed
computing.
CLOSING THOUGHTS WE’RE NEARLY DONE
Technological Revolutions &
Financial Capital
Carlota Perez
Steam, Coal, Iron, Railways
Electricity, Steel & Heavy
Engineering
Oil, Petrochemicals & Automobiles
IT & Telecoms ? Biotech, Nanotech
1770 2012
The Turning Point
Purpose-for-fitness Fitness-for-purpose
Each revolution has a period of around 70
years where we work out how stuff works.
Finally there is a golden age, as society re-organises
around the technology and reaps the benefits.
Then a bubble and financial collapse,
social disorder.
Technology becomes modular, reliable and
invisible.
Example: farms bought one motor, and lots of
adapters.
Example: your toothbrush has a
micro-motor.
Transistor in 1940s.
The Turning Point
Voice as network service
Voice as cloud function
Voice becomes as invisible and innate to your online
experience as the motor in your toothbrush is to your
waking-up experience.
Telco
Web
CONFUSION
Packaged Cloud
Services
“Libreville”
Focuses on containing failure modes of
applications. What telcos have always
done.
Experimental systems that trial new success modes. Even wilder than the Internet is
today.
NOW
Past Future
Back to the present…
Railroads vs roads
USF, ICC, PSTN transition…?
The railroad regulator is out of business, the
railroads are not.
Same issues in 19th century.
Roads changed the model, obsoleted these issues. Our roads are internet, cloud, cognitive
radios, community networks.
The telecoms regulator largely exists to perpetuate problems it was
invented to resolve a century ago.
Universal Service Fund, Inter-carrier Compensation, shutting down the old fixed network…
Focus on the
customer not the regulator
Else you’ll go down together.
What do you need to do?
1. Understand hypervoice future.
2. Get cloudy for service delivery.
3. Buy network flexibility.
4. Import inventive services.
5. Export successful services.
www.martingeddes.com
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Thank You
Need this quality of thinking and
communication inside your
organisation?
Contact Martin Geddes at [email protected]