Posts Tagged ‘teleku’

This week insideCTI: 8/8/10 – 8/14/10

Need to catch up on this week’s posts on insideCTI? Allow me to do you a favor here and save you some clicking…

InsideCTI wrapped up the SpeechTEK 2010 coverage earlier this week with a climatic “Tidbits” post. Check out the photos all taken with the iPhone 4, which sadly doesn’t really work around Times Square. The highlight of the trip? Paying homage to Apple at its Fifth Ave. Store. Wait, I take that back — the highlight was definitely meeting all the good folks in person since we’d last seen each other at previous other conferences.

The 2600hz Project also came into the spotlight. Hooray for another open source telephony software project! Seriously, this world can never get enough of open source stuff. Thumbs up, guys!

I weighed in somewhat pessimistically on the Polycom-Microsoft partnership announcement. Let’s just say that I deemed the “F” in UCIF as something other than “Forum.” Is the world ready for Microsoft Communications Server “14″?

By far the biggest news to break this week was Voxeo acquiring Teleku. The news broke on the night of Wednesday, August 11 — I just happened to check Twitter that night, otherwise I would’ve missed it. Even its official press released specified August 12 as the announcement date. Voxeo continues its shopping spree — what’s next in the competitive Web/cloud telephony space?

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Web telephony landscape rapidly changing, what’s next?

With the latest Voxeo acquisition of Teleku, one thing is certain: Web and cloud telephony is front and center in today’s communications landscape.

Consider this: Phoenix-based Teleku started in January 2010, went private beta in February, became publicly accessible in March, picked up by TechCrunch in April, and acquired by Voxeo in August. So not even six months as a publicized startup, Teleku has been absorbed into one of the premier Web/cloud telephony companies.

Mark Headd on his Vox Populi blog shares his insight about the trend:

Portability – underscored not only by Teleku’s support for the open standard VoiceXML, but also the Tropo crew’s involvement in the Asterisk world, and the defacto standard for building Asterisk apps in Ruby - Adhearsion.

SIP integration – remember this kids: true cloud telephony has SIP baked in – the rest is just marketing fluff. Both Tropo and Teleku support SIP interoperability and make it very easy for developers to use SIP as part of their applications.

Multi-channel / multi-modality – Both Tropo and Teleku have big multi-modal chops. Being able to interact with users on multiple communication channels from one code base is a key tenant of unified communications and cloud telephony, and this will become increasingly important in the future.

Speech recognition – cloud telephony isn’t your grandfather’s way to build a phone app, so why should users be restricted to their grandfather’s way of interacting with a phone app? Speech recognition is fully supported in both Tropo and Teleku, and this will matter more and more to cloud telephony developers going forward.

This trend is undeniable. As I’ve blogged before, the new generation of telephony apps will be created by developers comfortable with mashups, Web standards, and scripting languages. So what movements can we expect going forward and from this acquisition?

Obviously, all eyes are on Twilio, the biggest competitor to Voxeo-backed Tropo. There’s a tweet that stood out to me, by @christoffe, which alleged that Twilio wanted to buy Teleku but “didn’t move fast enough.” Teleku founder Chris Matthieu confirmed that he did meet with the three cofounders of Twilio in San Francisco. But alas, Twilio and Teleku were not meant to be together.

Twilio has some good and well-known DNA in its leadership. It lists Dave McClure of Founder’s Fund and Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures as board directors, two VC names that need no further introduction. Other notable investors listed on CrunchBase include Mitch Kapor (of Lotus fame) and Chris Sacca (one of the first investors in Twitter). Total funding dated 12/2009: $3.7 million. No chump change, but now it has to face Voxeo’s $9 million (at least).

Will Twilio look for an exit? Obviously it understands the need to create a stronger organization with its interest in Teleku. Now it definitely needs a partner that is deep in telecom yet focused on the Web transformation. One company that comes to mind is Alcatel-Lucent, a company that’s made some interesting moves recently too, such as acquiring ProgrammableWeb.

Of course, there’s no telling which company Voxeo may gobble up next to change the game again.

Voxeo acquires Teleku

Fresh off SpeechTEK and giving insideCTI a hint of acquisition plans, tonight Voxeo announced buying out Teleku (covered on this blog before), a Web telephony API provider. Voxeo, of course, is behind Tropo, one of the first Web and cloud-based telephony development platforms.

The acquisition makes a lot of sense since Teleku is already using Voxeo technology. But I think Voxeo was looking beyond the semi-competitive technology and wanted founder Chris Matthieu to be part of the Voxeo/Tropo team. After all, Matthieu was the sole founder of Teleku and worked tirelessly to grow the product and a loyal following quickly in its young lifespan.

According to Om, Chris Matthieu will join Orland-based Voxeo as Director of Business Development. Here’s an interview of Matthieu for the latest Voxeo Emerging TechTalk episode.

Matthieu summed it up nicely in a tweet: “…Teleku was a Voxeo customer and Tropo competitor – Now it’s a serious Twilio liability.” Watch out, Twilio, and congratulations to both Voxeo and Teleku.

Future (it’s dated 8/12) press release from Voxeo:

Orlando, FL – August 12, 2010 — Today Voxeo Corporation, the leader in Unlocked Communications™, announced it has acquired Teleku, a startup enabling web developers to build powerful voice and SMS applications. Teleku founder Chris Matthieu will join the Voxeo Labs team to focus on business development and enterprise adoption of Voxeo’s Tropo cloud communications service.

Teleku provides a platform for web developers to create voice and text-based communications applications using common web programming languages. Hundreds of developers have used Teleku to build applications including outbound notification systems, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), real estate talking houses, language translators, driving directions, games, and more.

Using any Web programming language, developers send XML or JSON instructions to Teleku over HTTP. These instructions tell the Teleku platform how to interact with users, and can use industry-standard VoiceXML, Twilio-proprietary TwiML, or Teleku’s PhoneML formats. The Teleku platform then interacts with users via voice calls, text-messaging (SMS), or Instant Messaging (IM). Teleku Voice applications can make use of both automatic speech recognition (ASR) in multiple languages or touch-tone/DTMF input. Teleku Text-messaging works with any SMS capable phone. Teleku Instant Messaging works with AOL, Cisco Jabber/XMPP, Microsoft MSN, and Yahoo IM clients.

Voxeo Labs is the innovation, incubation, and open-source focused R&D division of Voxeo. Voxeo is a profitable, employee-owned company that began building the largest world-wide communications application cloud in 1999. Voxeo’s cloud platform includes seven hosting facilities in the US, EU, and Asia and is used by half of the Fortune 100 and over 150,000 developers. Voxeo Labs’ Tropo service leverages the Voxeo Cloud to deliver reliable, mission-critical infrastructure for its customers.

Teleku was already a Voxeo customer using Voxeo’s proven real-time cloud infrastructure to deliver services and connect to voice, SIP, Skype, SMS, and IM infrastructure. Teleku will be combined with Voxeo’s Tropo (http://tropo.com) service. Existing Tropo and Teleku applications will continue to run without modification on the combined solution.

“Teleku shows how Voxeo’s cloud platform enables extremely rapid design, deployment, and scalability of new services that can respond quickly to changing developer and enterprise requirements,” said Teleku founder Chris Matthieu, “I’m excited to join Voxeo and help accelerate the adoption of the Tropo cloud communications service. Tropo enables both innovative web developers and enterprise call centers to deliver automated communications applications quickly and easily, and is an amazingly simple platform anyone can use to build multi-channel communications apps that leverage voice, SMS, IM, web and social channels like Twitter.”

“Voxeo has been making a concerted effort to provide multichannel development tools and solutions to their partners and enterprise customers. This is especially important as consumers from all walks of life adapt new devices and endpoints through which to communicate. It’s no secret that SMS is now one of the most frequently-used channels among younger consumers. Moreover, we’re seeing significant uptake of IM and Twitter as channels through which consumers interact with enterprises. Voxeo’s stack just got more powerful.”, says Ryan Joe, Associate Analyst on Ovum’s Customer Interaction team.

The Tropo.com cloud communications service is the flagship product of Voxeo Labs. Launched in 2009, thousands of developers have used Tropo to build applications that use voice, SMS, instant messaging and social channels to solve real business problems and create superior customer experiences. Tropo supports automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) in 8 languages, inbound phone numbers in over 30 countries, international outbound dialing, support for communication via Twitter and voice integration with traditional phones, SIP VoIP, and Skype.

“Voxeo’s mission has always been to make communication application development and deployment unlocked and uncomplicated for everyone,” said Jonathan Taylor, CEO of Voxeo. “Our focus on open standards and open source removes vendor lock-in. Our focus on the consumerization of IT and free services for developers and trials removes complexity. Chris and Teleku clearly share our vision. We are delighted to welcome Teleku to the Voxeo family.”

More information about Teleku, Tropo and how to get started with free developer accounts can be found at: http://www.tropo.com/telekufaq

About Voxeo

Voxeo unlocks communications. We loathe the locks that make voice, SMS, instant messaging, Twitter, web chat, and mobile web unified communication and self-service applications difficult to create, manage, analyze, optimize and afford. Every day we work to unlock the neglected value of these communications solutions with open standards, disruptive innovation and a passion for problem solving–fueled by a company-wide obsession with customer success. We do so for more than 100,000 developers, 45,000 companies and half of the Fortune 100 from our headquarters in Orlando, Beijing, Cologne, and London. Visit us or join our conversations on the web atwww.voxeo.com, blogs.voxeo.com, or twitter.com/voxeo.

Voxeo Media Contact

Megan Maxwell
Voxeo Corporation
Phone: +1 (407) 455-5848
megan@voxeo.com

Teleku joins Tropo and Twilio in competitive Web telephony

The Web telephony space welcomes another competitor today: Teleku (a project of GetVocal, Inc.). For all you Web developers in search of telephony APIs, rejoice! for you have another set of programming goodies to choose from.

Why Teleku over competitors Tropo and Twilio? According to this TechCrunch piece:

So how does Teleku differ from Twilio? It’s a matter of flexibility, according to founder (and sole employee) Chris Matthieu. He says that when you use Twilio, it’s an all-in-one deal: you write your code in Twilo’s easy-to-use syntax called TwiML, which is then sent to Twilio’s telephony services in the cloud that are hosted on AWS. That’s great (and may be even preferable to some people), but with Twilio you can’t port your application to a cheaper service should one become available.

With Teleku, you can write your code using TwiML, or you can use Teleku’s own simplified telephony scripting language, called PhoneML. Your code is then sent to Teleku’s servers, which translate it into industry standard (but harder to write) VoiceXML. Matthieu says you can use that code on any of a variety of established telephony providers, including Voxeo and Plum Voice, and it will also work with enterprise systems that rely on VoiceXML.

Matthieu says this gives Teleku users a few advantages: first, they can swap between various providers if they find a better rate. And he also says that Voxeo and other telecom services have better optimized their servers than AWS has to work with voice traffic, and that they offer a few features that Twilio doesn’t yet, like speech recognition.

Finally, Teleku offers a wizard for building web-enabled telephony services for people who don’t have any coding experience at all. This allows you to select actions from a dropdown menu, like “Play”, “Speak”, and “Transfer” (you then fill in text dialogs to instruct the application what to say or what number to transfer to). You can drag and drop these actions depending on what order you’d like to execute each action. Watch the video below for a complete demo of the wizard.

Sounds like a good combination of features and user experience. VoiceXML is certainly the industry standard and would be a plus to developers who’d want portable applications. The behind-the-curtain star is certainly Voxeo, for providing the platform and speech recognition feature. But no doubt Matthieu did a tremendous job in designing PhoneML and the user-friendly online tool for making it work seamlessly.

And judging by the fact that founder/developer Matthieu tweeted last at 2:30am and got TechCrunched, he’s probably having a very busy day…