Martin Geddes talks "hypervoice" at the 2012 Metaswitch Forum. Video version and other Plenary presos available at http://bit.ly/Plenary

1. 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.
Martin Geddes
www.martingeddes.com
mail@martingeddes.com
© 2012 Martin Geddes Consulting Ltd.
Do unto others…

2. A presentation about
Hypervoice
Specifically, how voice joins the
constellation of web hypermedia,
alongside text and images.

3. The presentation NOW
starts by looking at
the past of voice,
then the future,
before returning to
the present.
Past Future

4. The present is very
confusing, because
we are seeing the
collision of two
conflicting sets of
Telco
?
values and ideas.
I am putting forward a
hypothesis as to what
CONFUSION emerges from that
confusion.
Web ?

5. For telcos, there is increasing
dissonance between the
values, beliefs and behaviours
that made them successful,
and the current reality.
Convergence Fragmentation

6. The emphasis on
interoperation, federation,
standards, vertical integration
NOW
doesn’t fit with the reality of
fragmentation of voice.

7. PSTN + PLMN + Just a feature
POTS “Public SIP of the Cloud,
Interconnect System” Web and Apps
+ Skype + Xbox + …
As is readily seen
from current
trends.

8. Three big future changes
1. User experience Reconciliation with
reality requires
three big shifts.
2. Business model
3. Network technology

9. Let’s start with the
trajectory of telcos.
Telco

10. And go back to
basics and the very
PAST beginning.

11. What is
‘voice’

12. 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.

13. “So, what do We take this
everyday wonder for
granted. We
you do for a shouldn’t! So next
time someone asks
living?” you what you do…

14. “Work for the
phone
company”

15. “So, what do
you do for a
living?”
You can do better than that!

16. “Network
equipment
vendor”
Sorry, even less cool!

17. 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?”

18. 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.

19. We’ve been performing this
trick for a long time. So long,
that ‘voice’ and ‘telephony’
have become virtually
synonymous.

20. When telephony was new,
phone companies had to
teach people what to say; a
new language of etiquette.

22. Telephony has an
unconscious inner language,
a bit like a game of chess,
with standard opening
gambits, middle game and
endings.

23. This book from the mid
1990s studies hundreds of
calls and documents that
language.
“Hegemony
A critical feature of
telephony is the power theof the
caller”
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.

24. And all these features were
built in a very different era,
for different users, with
different expectations, by a
very different kind of
ecosystem.

25. As an example, consider the
toll free number, introduced
by fiat under the old AT&T
long distance regime.

26. Assumes our time is cheap…
…and calls are expensive
labor telephony
$
A minute of labor cost
less than a minute of
long distance telephony.
This implicitly assumes
calls are expensive. After
all, what else would the
phone company desire!

27. Equalized between c.1982-2000
labor In c. 1982 you could
telephony
$ $
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.

28. Today
labor telephony
$
Today, labor far exceeds
the cost of telephony. It
is our time that is
scarce, not our
machinery of talk.

29. Telco social contract
Universal service
Emergency lifeline
Legal intercept
However, that system left behind
many critical social services and
systems that need to be preserved
as part of our society.

30. Telco World
Service-centric
Telco device
Plus an extraordinarily successful
system that has served to connect Telco access
billions of people around the Telco service
world. Hurrah for telcos!
Network roaming

31. So let’s roll forward to
PRESENT
the present.

32. Telcos exist in co-opetition
with ‘over the top’ (OTT)
players for services
revenue.
Telco World OTT World
Service-centric Experience-centric
Telco device Any combination of
Telco access device, access
Telco service and service*
Network roaming Experience roaming
* Supported within any one ecosystem

33. Corrosion

34. ARBITRAGE COMPETITION REGULATION
The three horsemen of the
telepocalypse…

35. The temptation is to retreat to
an undergound safe place in
Nebraska.
This is not a good long-term
lifestyle choice.

36. Off-net apps are the new
‘mobile coverage’
CLOUD CLOUD
ACCESS SERVICE
COVERAGE COVERAGE
So if you can’t beat
them, join them.

37. However, the Internet cannot and never will carry
society’s real-time communications needs. It is
fundamentally unsuited to the job.
Telco World Telco-OTT World OTT World
Service-centric Product-centric Experience-centric
Telco device Mixture of telco and Any combination of
Telco access 3rd party devices, device, access
Telco service access and services and service*
Network roaming Experience roaming
Which is giving rise to
? * Supported within any one ecosystem
a hybrid model of
service delivery.

38. 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.

39. How do I do
‘cloud voice’
So the telco challenge is to
find a model of ‘cloud voice’
that works both technically
and economically.

40. Let’s go look at the parallel
evolution of the web and
hypermedia.
Web

41. Again, we’ll go right back to
PAST
the beginning.

42. “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.”
Computer folk start with a different
– Steve Jobs
mind-set. Networks aren’t about
telephones and telegraphs, but about
connecting computers.

43. Ideas
And specifically, they see
computers as effort amplifiers
for spreading ideas.

44. HYPERLINK 1.0 Documents
get URLs
doc → doc
…A ‘PLACE’ METAPHOR
And as ideas naturally are
expressed via documents, these
are amplified via hyperlinks.

45. Documents Homepages Blogs
Which gave rise to this world.
(With blogs being a stepping
stone to the next phase of the
Web’s evolution.)

46. WEB 1.0
Hypertext
So the first edition of the Web
was based on hypertext, and
had minimal impact on telcos
bar creating demand for dial-up
…MINIMAL IMPACT ON VOICE
and broadband access.
…SOME IMPACT ON FAX

47. HYPERLINK 2.0 Events get
URLs
doc → event
…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.

48. Tags Status @pointers Images
updates #tags
There was an explosion of use
and innovation based on this
new stream metaphor.

49. WEB 2.0
“Social web”
Which we gave a name to, as it
amplified our ability to relate.

50. WEB 2.0
Hypermessaging
Because in retrospect we had
invented a new hypermedium.
…SIGNIFICANT IMPACT ON SMS

51. Thoughts
Which amplified individual
thoughts.

52. PRESENT
So let’s roll forward to the
present.

53.  Add new binary
medium to
browsers using a The web folk are just as stuck as
place metaphor the telcos in accommodating
voice! Just in a different way.
 Assume it “just
works” on the
Internet
 Everyone will
figure out how to
use it

54. 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.

55. 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.

56. And that is why we find ourselves in a
Telco very confusing place.
CONFUSION
Web

57. So how can we resolve that confusion
as we plunge into the future?
FUTURE

58. “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’.

59. “Cloud voice”?
Hypervoice
So the resolution is to make voice
into a native hypermedium, through
understanding its intrinsic linking
properties.

60. VOICE, WEB VOICE, HYPERVOICE
That means transcending the limits of
‘web voice’ as currently conceived,
and instead moving to hypervoice.

61. HYPERVOICE
Links what we say
to what we do

62. Just as we now routinely digitally
capture our words and images, we
will capture our voices. Voice need
no longer be ephemeral.

63. Memories Which makes
hypervoice an
amplifier for our
working memories.

64. 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

65. WEB 3.0
Hypervoice
…TRANSCENDS
TELEPHONY

66. HYPERLINK 3.0 Voice gestures
get URLs
event → event
…A ‘TEMPORAL’ METAPHOR
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.

67. Magician!
So hypervoice upgrades us
from illusionists to
magicians.
“Daddy – you’re a
MAGICIAN too! How cool!”

68. As we can time travel as
easily as we space travel.

69. Why should you care?
Your 20th century
network voice product
has to compete against
21st century cloud rivals

70. Three big future changes
1. User experience
2. Business model
3. Network technology

71. For example, computers will help us to
rendezvous. The phone ‘call’ will
become the ‘offer’ or ‘request’.
“Hegemony
of the
caller”

72. Audio will be recorded locally as well
as send in real-time, given ‘audio
make-up’, and the pristine result
uploaded in perfect replica.

73. Three big future changes
1. User experience
2. Business model
3. Network technology

74. 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.
Conversation Gap
ENTERPRISES PUBLIC
The money will be in making ordinary,
everyday business interactions more
efficient, effective and secure –
internally and externally.

75. Example: Fonolo
An example today is Fonolo, which
enables hypervoice deep-links into
IVRs, using your smartphone.

76. 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…

77. 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)

78. Monoservice network
These are single class of
service networks. Kind of like
the networking equivalent of
black and white photography.

79. IMS + SBC WORLD
These are the kinds of
technologies telcos use to
deliver voice services over
Internet Protocol
We are building a world that is
effective and flexible, if
somewhat inefficient.

80. Monoservice overlays
So we’ve now got multiple
shades of sepia.
We do this via isolating flows
using overlays.

81. CLOUD WORLD
The future will require us to
learn how to multiplex
everything together much
better.

82. Polyservice networks
Which means multiple classes
of service; possibly even one
unique to every flow!
Kodachrome networks!

83. Effective Flexible Efficient
Because we will need all three
properties to deliver a
completely unified real-time
world of distributed
computing.

84. WE’RE NEARLY DONE
CLOSING THOUGHTS

85. Technological Revolutions &
Financial Capital
Carlota Perez
Electricity, Steel
& Heavy
Engineering
IT & Telecoms
Steam, Coal, Oil, Petrochemicals ? Biotech,
Iron, Railways & Automobiles Nanotech
1770 2012

86. The Turning Point Then a bubble and
financial collapse,
Each revolution has a social disorder.
period of around 70
years where we work
out how stuff works. Technology becomes
modular, reliable and
invisible.
Purpose-for-fitness Fitness-for-purpose
Example: farms bought Example: your
one motor, and lots of Finally there is a golden age, toothbrush has a
adapters. as society re-organises micro-motor.
around the technology and
reaps the benefits.
Transistor in 1940s.

87. The Turning Point
Voice as Voice as
network service cloud function
Voice becomes as invisible
and innate to your online
experience as the motor in
your toothbrush is to your
waking-up experience.

88. Focuses on containing
failure modes of
applications. What
telcos have always Packaged
Telco done.
Cloud
Services
CONFUSION
Web Experimental systems
“Libreville”
that trial new success
modes. Even wilder
than the Internet is
today.

89. NOW
Back to the
present…
Past Future

90. Universal Service Fund, Inter-carrier Compensation, shutting down the old fixed network…
USF, ICC, PSTN transition…?
Same issues in 19th Roads changed the model, obsoleted these
century. issues. Our roads are internet, cloud, cognitive
radios, community networks.
Railroads
vs roads
The telecoms regulator largely exists
The railroad regulator to perpetuate problems it was
is out of business, the invented to resolve a century ago.
railroads are not.

91. Focus on the
customer
not the regulator
Else you’ll go down
together.

92. 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.

93. Free newsletter
www.martingeddes.com
New user experiences,
business models and
network technologies.

94. Need this quality of
thinking and
Thank You
communication
inside your
organisation?
Contact Martin Geddes at
mail@martingeddes.com