Speak2Leads’ (S2L) proposition is simple, respond immediately to a customer lead using voice powered by Tropo, with up to six in total carefully timed call attempts. 78% of all sales go to the first company to return a prospect’s call. Sammy James the founder and CEO of Speak2Leads explained, “A Kellogg study on Lead Response Management (LRM) revealed the odds of connecting with a lead increases by 100 times if attempted within 5 minutes versus 30 minutes after the lead is generated. And the odds of converting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes increases by 21 times. Put simply, using Speak2Leads can triple a company’s sales.” The core of the business is a call, which is sales people talking to leads at the right time for the lead, hence Speak2Leads uses Tropo to connect those sales people to leads as fast as possible, generally in under 30 seconds. This can raise the leads contacted from a typical 40% to over 90%, more leads contacted means more sales, more leads contacted first means more sales, a doubling and in some cases a tripling of sales can be achieved.

When Speak2Leads receives a lead; which can come from many sources, for example the lead fills in a form on the internet with their contact details; S2L’s automated lead response application then calls the appropriate sales person for that customer, the sales person hears an announcement and is prompted to press 2 to speak to the lead. This is all powered by Tropo. Getting the sales person and lead to connect is more complex than this scenario suggests, and the service must be integrated into the business processes of S2L’s customer to make the lead response management measureable. Solving this hard real-world problem is the competitive advantage of the S2L platform. S2L works with the leading CRM’s, email service providers, landing page and marketing automation platforms, such as Salesforce.com, Unbounce, HubSpot, InfusionSoft and MailChimp.

Speak2Leads has been in operation for 7 years, in building the business they have experienced a number of telephony platform providers upon which they’ve run their business. “We need the very best Telephony network we can buy,” said Sammy, “and Voxeo Labs is in our experience the best network on the market. It’s the lowest Total Cost of Ownership because it’s just got to work, no ifs, ands, or buts.” Sammy explained, “Voice is complex, calls can drop when you consider the computers, switches, wire and fiber-optic cables involved and when they do you need; a partner that knows voice networks inside out and will respond fast and furious to identify the source of the problem and get it fixed. Also we’re adding features every 4 to 6 weeks, hence we need a platform and a partner that can work with us to meet our specific customer needs. Voxeo Labs provides the world class support and advice so we’re the best we can be.”

Sammy has impressive plans for the expansion of Speak2Leads. “International is tough given the mobile call charges, we’re exploring with Voxeo Labs how Phono and other options can help us expand our business faster into international markets. We’re happy to white-label, and looking to expand internationally through partners as well as directly. Voxeo Labs is proving to be an important partner in helping us grow our business.” Sammy’s advice on his experiences in building this business are, “Keep it simple, don’t disrupt the customer’s existing business complement it, zero training required, no IT required, measure, measure and measure. Using Tropo enables us to seamlessly insert our value into what businesses are doing today, with a reliable and highly programmable platform, and unmatched support in the industry.”

During the CTIA 2013 conference  will be the RCS Summit – Enabling OTT-like services while preparing for HTML5 & WebRTC organized by Informa.   Vish Nandlall, CTO and VP Strategy & Market Development, will moderate the Future of Advanced Communications Technology panel.  And on the panel will be our own Jason Goecke of Voxeo Labs; expect a frank and forthright discussion on the challenges and opportunities RCS (Rich Communications Services) and WebRTC (Web Real Time Communications) bring to service providers and their customers, both consumer and enterprise.

Jason Goecke and Kile Brown will be at CTIA on May 22^nd in Las Vegas, please contact us  if you’d like to meet to chat about Communications APIs , WebRTC and Web Communications, and the future of communication services.

And by the way, Jose de Castro of Voxeo Labs gave a WebRTC workshop at the IMS World Forum.  Quoting Larry Baziw from Rogers, “Super valuable both from a level set and also a great cross section of the emerging WebRTC ecosystem and solutions.”   And from Wilfred Nicoll from Telefonica, “Thanks for an excellent workshop, it was by far the best workshop I’ve ever attended.”

By Cristina Moe Salanova

Spring brings many things, warm weather, girls in sundresses and angels.  That’s right, this May Tropo will join AngelHack on their 2013 world hackathon tour!

Not only is this the largest hackathon competition in the world with over 6,000 hackers in 30 cities but these angels also take the winners of each city and put them in a 12 week accelerator program then introduce them to Silicon Valley investors. Talk about a heavenly gig!

If you are in San Francisco, AngelHack will be here on Saturday and Sunday May 4th & 5th and you can register here.  Not in the Bay Area, no problem.  Check out the many other cities and Spring dates you can participate in.  If you’re coming to the SF AngelHack, we’ll see you there with wings on.

By Diggz

Last week we had great fun visiting Manila with the Globe Labs team for Globe Labs Developer Day, where they previewed their new Voice API powered by Tropo.   Globe is the latest of the world’s leading telecom operators to open up the Tropo API to their developers.   As you may recall, Deutsche Telekom’s Developer Garden launched the Telekom Tropo API last summer, followed by the launch of AT&T’s Call Management API (powered by Tropo) in January of this year.

Following the success of last weekend’s Developer Day, Globe Labs has now announced the Globe Labs Voice API Challenge 2013.   The Globe Labs Voice API Challenge 2013 is a call-for-apps program which aims to provide incentives for developers to build new and innovative apps that leverage voice capabilities using the Globe Labs Voice APIs.

Developers will have the chance to receive P50,000.

Globe Labs Voice API Challenge is open to all individuals and companies registered with the Globe Labs Developer Community. Registration can be done on-line via the Globe Labs Developer Portal (https://www.globelabs.com.ph). Participants can be individuals or teams.

Developers can join the program by submitting your app idea / proposal via this Voice API Challenge proposal form , and submitting it along with the other requirements via email apichallenge@globelabsbeta.com or via snail mail on or before April 29, 2013.

For more information, visit the the Globe Labs website:

Globe Labs – Voice API Challenge 2013

By Cristina Moe Salanova

Ever day dream about working at NASA?

Well if you didn’t actually become an astronaut now is your chance to live out your fantasy at the International Space Apps Challenge this weekend on April 20th and 21st.

This international collaboration is held in 83 cities all over the world and you can find Troponauts, Cristina and Johnny Diggz, participating in San Francisco and all the way over in Krakow!

This exploration of space uses problem solving with open-source solutions to both life on Earth and life in space.  Join a team and provide solutions for challenges including developing a greenhouse for missions on the moon and underwater robots that explore where no human can go, there is something spectacular for everyone.

You may not have gone to space camp but now you can join thousands of others to help provide a collaborative solution to advance space exploration and improve the quality of life on Earth.

By Cristina Moe Salanova

Looks like there is a lot more going on in Poland’s capitol than amazing vodka and Kielbasa (Polish sausages)!

Besides Krakow’s famous Gothic and Renaissance architecture it is now becoming famous for its killer tech conferences and communities.

This April, the cool kids at Applicake are putting on two conferences, Railsberry, The European Rails Conference on April 23rd-24th.  And with a different twist than last year. They will be challenging Rails developers to focus on everything BUT Rails. A conference for the curious.  If you have yet to see the legendary Railsberry Grand Finale performed by our own Johnny Diggz last year, you must watch and see just why he had a standing ovation!

And just days before on April 18th-19th they will host Mobile Mobile Conf , a conference for developers, designers, creatives and creators out there who LOVE mobile.

Learn everything from Appanomics to Why Marketing Ain’t Bullshit with a big balloon party at the end. You don’t want to miss this!

If Diggz did a finale last year that even made it onto Github, who knows what he will do this year and with TWO conferences!

If there’s anyone up for the challenge, he is.

By May Yip

Alan Quayle is well known in the communications API space, and he’s been chatting with our customers about their experiences with Tropo and Phono. We’ve reprinted his recent weblog entitled Tropo’s Secret Sauce about his interview with Frank Geck, Director of Tropo Sales.”
Enjoy!
———————————————————————
Tropo’s Secret Sauce by Alan Quayle

Voxeo Labs continues to give me free reign across their customers to chat about their experiences in running their businesses on Telecom APIs; such as myaNUMBER, Crunched, TeleSmart and there are many more weblogs to come. It’s a wonderful experience to see real businesses built on telecoms APIs and those businesses loving it. Love is a common theme, from the interviews with Voxeo Labs’ customers, I’d go as far as to say they have a fair bit of love for what Voxeo Labs is doing for them, it’s beyond happy. So I took the opportunity to chat with Frank Geck, Director of Tropo Sales at Voxeo Labs who’s been letting me at their customer, to better understand how they’ve made it happen.

AQ: “What does Tropo do to makes its customers so enthusiastic about Telecom APIs?”
Frank: That’s easy, Tropo is carrier grade. Now, it’s easy to make the claim, so let me point to the direct objective evidence to back up that claim. Carriers worldwide have selected the Tropo platform for their developer community, such as AT&T and Deutsche Telekom. Their requirements are exacting to say the least, and we exceed them. Another fact, the software that manages our audio/voice/messaging processes over 80,000 concurrent conversations on a daily basis. It’s a scale unmatched in the industry for communication APIs. A reason you’re talking to such happy customers is many of our customer wins came to us when prompted by problems on other platforms. We came to the rescue just as their business was ramping up and problems started to seriously impact their business’s growth. And finally Tropo is design for best performance, it’s built by a team that brings decades of experience in cloud communications, none of our competitors can match our depth of experience.

AQ: “Support is a significant source of satisfaction with your customers, TeleSmart being a good example, how are you doing it?”
Frank: Our customers are running their business on Tropo, we have to be there 24*7. Technical support is free to all customers because of the confidence we have in our platform, while its paid on competitors because they are not as confident. And support is not just about problems, it’s about innovation, we have a technical account management team that helps customers do more with Tropo, Phono, Ameche and all the capabilities we’re constantly adding. When our customers are successful so are we, as TeleSmart and Crunched clearly demonstrate.

AQ: “In some of the interviews your customers mentioned Tropo has the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO), can you explain what they mean?”
Frank: Evaluating the cost of a service isn’t as simple as looking at pricing terms on a web page. And, for many customers they are new to telecommunications applications, so it’s a challenge to evaluate their choices. When I talk to a customer I show them what all the considerations are in their business decision. When you consider technical support, application functionality, value of a high quality network – we typically see savings of 20-40% over anyone else in the market. We’re not trying to be the lowest cost vendor in the market – we’re trying to be the best overall value. For start ups, it’s even more critical. The rule of thumb is that it takes seven times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to keep an old one. Start ups invest heavily in customer acquisition. We also know that a poor experience results in losing potential customers. So you’re a start up – you’ve had a great launch at a trade show and now a percentage of your callers don’t have a good experience. Would you rather have selected a carrier grade platform or saved fifty dollars a monthly in fees?

If a customer has 100,000 voice minutes or more a month, we’ll put together a package that provides significant savings compared to the others in the market. We don’t hide fees, everything is upfront. And critically costs associated with poor quality are massive, as it impacts your brand, revenues, and distracts the organization from the prime objective of excellent customer service. If you care about your customers’ experience, then you have to consider if saving a few hundred dollars a month is worth it. All this comes together to deliver the lowest TCO in the industry.

AQ: “Another common theme was the confidence customer have in Tropo as a partner into the future, where is that coming from?”
Frank: Voxeo Labs continues to be a technology leader, and that leadership gives our customers an edge. We were first to market in web-based communications with Phono launched back in 2010, and we are an editor of the WebRTC (Web Real Time Communications) specification, that’s enabled customers like Crunched to easily add wide-band voice to their service. We’re the only vendor who’s invested in multiple API’s for implementing applications. We have a Web Services API just like everyone else but we also have native API’s in Ruby, PHP, Javascript, Python, and Groovy. We’re leading the market with our innovative Ameche platform that opens up new application concepts and distribution of those applications across Telcos. Then, combine Tropo, Phono and Ameche and you have even more solution packages that you can create. If all you care about is long code SMS messaging, then we’re not the best vendor for you.

AQ: “Are there any other secret sauce recipes you think are important?”
Frank: We’re truly international. We have local telephone numbers in more than forty countries which gives us the best global coverage. We support twenty-four speech recognition languages. We have speech to text voices in twenty-four languages twenty-four speech recognition languages- and more options in US English than anyone else giving developers and user interface designers the most choices. We’ve been SIP from day one – just just adding it later. We’re free for development to make it as easy as possible for anyone to get started. All these features and options are important when evaluating a SaaS platform because you may not know today what you need in the future but you can rest assured that Voxeo Labs will have it for you when you need it.

By cmoe

Power up with voice!

On April 13, 2013 key members of the Voxeo Labs team, our CTO Jose de Castro and Chief Developer Evangelist Johnny ‘Diggz’ Higgins will be sharing how to power up your application with Voice API.

The event will be held from 9am-5pm at the Globe Corporate Showroom, Ground Floor, Valero Telepark, # 111, Valero Street, Makati City (venue Map).  Tickets are available now and you must reserve a seat for Globe Labs Developer Day.

Bring your laptop and join in for the hands on session and mini hackathon and you might just get Globe premium items!

Voxeo Labs and Layer 7 Technologies announced today their joint solution of Voxeo Labs’ Tropo and Phono APIs with Layer 7’s API Management platform. Layer 7 will be demonstrating the joint solution at their Mobile World Congress stand in the App Planet area, Hall 8.1 Booth A47. Layer 7 were again rated the highest ranking vendor in the latest Forrester Wave for API Management.

The joint solution is important for two reasons:

• It demonstrates Tropo and Phono are complementary to API management. This is a point of confusion in the industry, many ask if the APIs from Voxeo Labs are competitive to API Management from the likes of Apigee, Layer 7 and Mashery. This announcement clearly demonstrates they are not. Put simply, Voxeo Labs builds an active community of developers around the developer-centric Tropo and Phono APIs, while API management provides everything Telcos need in order to securely expose the APIs to partners and developers.
• It also enables Voxeo Labs’ customers to get to market faster and at lower cost through the joint solution.

Tropo from Voxeo Labs enables developers to make and receive phone calls and text messages from any web or mobile application, using a simple web API and pay-as-you-go pricing. Tropo also offers voice recognition (in 24 languages), text to speech (with more than 70 voices), conferencing, even recording and transcription – all using the web technologies and languages they already know. Telcos such as AT&T and Deutsche Telekom have deployed their own instance of Tropo that is built for the Telco cloud, tightly integrated into their network, and backed by the innovation power of Voxeo Labs 150,000 member strong developer community.

Phono is a simple jQuery plug-in that turns any Web browser into a multi-channel communications platform, capable of placing and receiving VoIP telephone calls from the browser, as well as handling real-time chat communications and beyond. Phono is a pure client-side solution and requires zero server-side logic on the part of a developer; all communication is handled transparently by Voxeo Labs Cloud Infrastructure. Phono is WebRTC compatible and royalty free – use it in your existing Web applications, it’s designed to be “skinnable” and flexible to support any brand. See it in action or try it yourself at Phono.com and at the AT&T Foundry at att.io.

The Layer 7 API Management Suite is a turnkey solution that provides Telcos with everything they need in order to securely expose contextual, content and service APIs to partners and developers, onboard, manage and foster developer communities, and facilitate the building, testing and rollout of third‐party applications. Available as an on-premise or hosted solution, the API Management Suite is ideally suite to Service Providers that need to better manage and empower their internal and external application partners.

Last post I showed you how simple a Moho application looks like. Now let me explain a bit more how that simple Moho application works.

To develop a Moho application, you have to start with a Java class that implements Application interface. This class must be a public class with a public default constructor. The two abstract methods defined in Application are to notify the application about lifecycle changes. So a simplest do-nothing Moho application looks like the following.

public class HelloWorld implements Application {
  public void init(ApplicationContext context) {
  }
  public void destroy() {
  }
}

Next let’s add some code to accept an incoming call.

public class HelloWorld implements Application {
   ...
  @State
  public void onCall(Call call) {
     call.answer();
   }
}

Now HelloWorld application can receive and answer an incoming call. The @State annotation has something to do with Moho’s state based event dispatching, which I will talk about in the future.

To make this application deployable to Voxeo PRISM, all you have to do is to pack this application into a WAR.

moho.2.war
  |--- WEB-INF
         |--- classes
                |--- HelloWorld.class

To run this application, simply copy the WAR to <prism>/apps directory. To test, simply use a softphone to dial something like sip:moho@localhost.