The following post doesn’t really fit in line with the normal spirit of the blog, simply because it’s not funny nor directly related to technology. It’s called Business 2.0, as it relates to the ever problematic question any business owner has: “When should I grow and how?”.

As you may know, I’ve been a freelance Asterisk Platform developer since early 2003, turned to freelance development (Penguin for hire) around April 2007. Since that time, I’ve built systems and platforms for some of the better known brands around the world. Be it working directly with the customer or through a 3rd party (as a sub contractor) – I can easily say that I’ve completed over 120 different large scale projects within 3 years time. Now, when I refer to projects, I’m not referring to installing PBX systems, I don’t do that at all – I’m referring to highly complex application level development, creating some of the most innovative Asterisk based systems I’ve ever seen.

Image via CrunchBase

Image via Wikipedia

Putting aside everything, finalizing a rough estimate of 40 development projects on a yearly base, most of these performed solely by myself is a fairly challenging task. Sure, at times I’ll outsource some work to other freelancers like myself, specifically in fields where I’m not all that fluent (Database, Web Development, UI) – but yet, doing that means that I’m conducting 3 – 5 projects on a monthly basis.

After doing so for 3 years now, I can’t help but start thinking about expanding my business, taking it to the next level by hiring more people and building it up to a new level. Question remains for this: “How? What is the natural track of expanding your business?” – of course the simple answer would be: “Just hire another developer or two, and start doing more sales” – it’s not as simple as it sounds. After thinking about it for some time, I’ve concluded there are a few models of expansion:

Model 1: Organic Growth

Organic growth can be described as the simplest way of growth: “Hire a new guy and get more work in”. The problem with this model that it is fully reliant on your ability to sell more. However, as you concentrate on sales more, you take time from the development and delivery process – thus, the addition of the new developer is not a 100% addition, it’s actually 100% (developer) minus 40% (you) – so you are not at 200% capacity, you are 160% capacity. Surely 160 is 100, however, for the initial 6 months, till the guy learns the ropes, you are not at 160, you are actually at 80 – can you and your business sustain that?

Thus, the main issue with Organic growth is cash flow, can your business sustain the elevated expenses with less income for the period of transition? If the answer is NO, then you need a different method. If the answer is YES, then you are in the best place in the world, however, bear in mind that taking someone to work for you is a responsibility – people are not resources, they are human beings, with families and children – taking someone to work for you is like taking responsibility for their lives.

Model 2: The Partner

A partnership with a person who is equally matched to you is always a good option. Technically speaking, it means that you are teaming with someone who generates as much work as you do and is capable of finalizing the work as fast and as good as you can. Yet, taking a partner doesn’t negate the requirement for a new employee or two. In this case, you may end up with too much sales with too little staff to deliver – that is a big problem.

Another issue with partners is the issue of trust. While most partners tend to rely on each other and trust each other, that trust can easily be broken (in most cases by stupid things). It’s enough for one partner to now carry its weight in sales/development to initiate a chain reaction, shortly ending in the partnership dissolving.

So, the partner is a good option, however, may prove to be problematic if the wrong partner is chosen – in addition, dissolving a partnership solely on these issues isn’t all that simple – and usually ends up in litigation and other judicial issues – YUCK!

Model 3: Un-intrusive Angel

Some people ragard Un-intrusive Angels as “Stupid Money” – an Angel investor that doesn’t interfere in your company business model and operations. In many cases, this is how start-up companies start – someone gives them a lump sum of money to start their business, signing off to own a portion of the new company.

An un-intrusive investor usually gives you the money and pays you a visit once every few months to see how his money is spent. Don’t expect to raise a whole lot from these people, usually you will get anything from 25K$ to around 250K$ – tops. If you are getting an investment from an Angel, make sure you plan your business carefully – and make sure your investor knows what he is getting into. The Angel is not a found piggy bank, he is a business man looking for profit – if you make sure his expectations of profits (time frame, amount, percentage, etc) are kept within the reason of your business – he will make an educated decision and invest accordingly. Promises like: “you’ll double your money in 3 years” are stupid – make sure it’s realistic and to the point. If you promise the moon, and reach a star – that’s a problem, if you promise the skies and hit a start – that’s wonderful.

Model 4: The Strategic-Intrusive Angel

Image by TheFemGeek via Flickr

A strategic angel is similar to the previous one in terms of funds, however, he is more capable in assisting your business meet its goals. Usually, it would be someone who is already a well established figure in your business sector, had made his money from previous companies and is now looking for new ideas and businesses. I call him an intrusive Angel, as sometimes he may have ideas as to where your business should go – and he will make sure you hear his ideas. You may regard it as annoying, but you should still listen to your Angel and pay him the respect he deserves.

Sometimes this Angel may invest in your business due to the fact that he has a hidden agenda. An agenda can be: The angel looks at your business and see a certain potential you are not planning, he’ll invest and try to re-direct your company to the agenda he sees. This is usually the case when your angel is invested into several endeavours that is either parallel to each other or may have orthogonal intersection points. These angels can be the builders of your business or the destroyers, it is up to you to make sure the latter doesn’t happen.

Prolog:

So, which model did I choose? – I didn’t choose yet, I’m still figuring it out myself. What ever the model may be, the choice isn’t simple nor straight forward. At best, whatever choice I’ll take will have a profound impact on my business and me – so I’ll need to weigh my options carefully. If you can think of an additional model, I’d love to hear about it – so just comment on this post.

Revenue sharing is one of the oldest methods of earning profits, actually, I believe it may just be right up there with trading of goods and food. For those of you not in the know, I’ll explain what revenue sharing is:

1. A content provider wishes to distribute a certain type of content – charging for it.
2. The content provider has not ability to charge the consumers directly, thus he partners with another party – the transport maintainer.
3. The transport maintainer charges the consumer, while keeping a certain percentage in his pocket.
4. Everybody’s is happy.

In general, this model works really well in many markets – specifically those that are driven by unique content – for example the mobile content market (ringtones, screen savers, games, apps) – the Apple App store is a wonderful example of how this works.

In the telecom industry, the revenue shares business is very common – however, in many cases it is highly guarded as a secret – main reason is that now one wants anybody else to know how they do it. This hiding of information, usually results in some problems – as when there is hiding of information, only those in the know are able to access it. Those in the know are called “mediators” or in Herbew “Machers”. In this entire ordeal, the mediator also takes a small percentage – leaving the content provider with slightly less. So, now it looks like this:

1. A content provider wishes to distribute a certain type of content – charging for it.
2. The content provider has not ability to charge the consumers directly, thus he contacts a mediator to find him a transport partner.
3. The mediator engages the prospective transport maintainer.
4. The transport maintainer charges the consumer, while keeping a certain percentage in his pocket and passing some funds to the mediator as well.
5. Everybody’s is happy.

So, if everybody’s so happy – why am I bitching about it? very simple – people are Greedy and always want more – putting the entire model into a frenzy. In order to give an example, let’s imagine the following scenario:

1. Company A provides IVR based content utilizing Asterisk server, connected to the internet.
2. The mediator engages a premium number company, getting the total revenue of 0.08$ for every inbound minute of traffic.
3. The premium number company leaves 0.01$ in its pocket and also pays the mediator a fee of 0.01$ per minute.
4. The content provider gets 0.06$ of the 0.08$ – 75% of the net profit goes to the content provider.
5. Content provider says: “Hell, I want the mediators 0.01$ as well, and I think the premium company should only get 0.005$, so I would get 0.075$ at the end”
6. Content provider contacts the premium provider and starts complaining
7. Premium provider negotiates and strikes a deal for 0.07 to the content provider, leaving the premium provider with 0.005$ and the mediator with 0.005$
8. Premium provider says: “I’m not making enough money on this, actually, I’m loosing money – I’ll find a better alternative service for that access number”
9. Premium provider asks mediator to bring in a new customer, providing similar content – mediator has sure incentive here
10. Premium provider gets new customer and transfers the access number to the new customer – returning back to previous profits
11. Original content provider is left with no profits and only greed in his hands

Over the past 10 years, I’ve seen this vicious cycle happen over and over and over again, in various formats and scenarios – but always ending in the same outcome – the content provider always suffers. If you’re a content provider and you provide IVR based services, let the people that provide you the access make their cut and the people in the middle, without them, you will have a service with no access – which means no service at all. Don’t go about thinking you can keep all the profits to yourself, you will break the equilibrium of this business, and eventually, no one will want to do business with you.

When most of us think about PBX systems, we usually associate these with cumbersome usage, confusing dialing codes and in most cases – a PBX system is automatically associated with the annoying task of transferring a call from one handset to another. Lately, I’ve been thinking deeply about how people use PBX systems, is this really the only way to use a PBX system? is there something else to the mix? can we really enrich one of the oldest operational paradigms in the world? – and for that matter, can the public be re-educated to assimilate a new breed of PBX systems or services?

As to answering the question of re-educating the public, I guess I’ll have to leave that question to the head shrinks. As to answering the latter, enriching the PBX experience is both achievable and advisable. When I say enriching, I mainly talk about your ability to bring to the IP phone functionality usually not associated with it. Imagine to have the ability to receive a stock exchange RSS feed to your phones idle screen, notice that you stock is either rising or falling, and by the flick of a button – either sell or buy. We’ve all come accustomed to IP phones that look like the one of the right. A whole bunch of buttons, that in most cases have no direct use when our phone is utilized using a single account. However, these buttons can be externally re-assigned and re-programmed to achieve greater functionality – surpassing the normal behavior of just making phone calls.

The technology involved exists on almost every high-end IP phone on the market (well, at least those made by SNOM, Aastra, Cisco and Polycom – most of the Chinese makers don’t have this) – it’s called a Mini Browsers. Mini Browsers are exactly what they are called, these are simplified versions of your typical Internet browser. Some vendors had produced their own XML based Mini browser markup language (SNOM, Cisco, Aastra) while others had decided to provide a sub-set of XHTML (Polycom). The variations between the vendors are at the neck deep of the problems of using Mini Browsers, and that is that the formats are considerably different. Sure, SNOM had more or less adopted Cisco’s general structure, however, it still varies.

Through the utilization of this technology, it is possible to create phone based browser applications, that seem native to the phone user, as the general interface resembles the native phone interface. It is now the developers job to make the web interface displayed to the user as seamless and as native as possible, keeping in mind that the developer must remain agnostic to the information retrieval layer. Most companies leave their phone systems and these tasks to their system administrators and infrastructure team, however, this task is far beyond their capabilities and skill set. Creating an agnostic IP phone minibrowser dislplay layer, capable of utilizing multiple vendors and models, is a question of content management and content rendering, very must similar to the content transcoding problem that is common to the mobile content world – in other words, a sys-admin will create an ad-hoc solution, a programmer will create a proper, well structured, well designed solution that carry the enterprise beyond its initial needs and requirements.

A short example of how these interfaces work can be found here – on my company blog.

Today I got the chance to speak at a Polycom half-day convention, mainly to speak about Asterisk and HDvoice. Now, putting aside the part about HDvoice (I’m getting a post about that on its own), I gotten to the point where I believe that I’m currently perceived as being an eccentric.

So, why am I eccentric? very simple, I’ve reached a point where I can say things that may be perceived as rude – and write it off an being an eccentric quirk.

I’ve talked about Asterisk ability to support Video, while the current Polycom VVX1500 video phone isn’t yet supported at its fullest. One of the people in the crowd mentioned some sleezy,al-cheapo, SIP Video phone (to be more exact, he’s the local distributor) – and I claimed that I don’t count that phone as a comparison to Polycom or other VoIP Video phones, simply because in my view it’s not a worth while comparison. Comm’on, let’s be realistic, can you compare a Polycom VVX1500 (an HDvoice Video phone) with some shitty sub-VGA SIP Video phone from China? the mere comparison is simply insulting for Polycom.

Shortly after negating that phone, the person stood up and left the room. At the break, a friend said to me that I shouldn’t have said that, in order to come out the bigger man. Common, the guy is surely making a joke of himself. I commented: “I’ve said what I said, I stand by my opinion – besides, you know I’m eccentric – eccentric people say eccentric things” – he agreed that I’m eccentric, after all, you can’t be an Open Source evangelist without being an eccentric – now can you?

As I recently explained to a good friend of mine, the essence of Jewish holidays is, more or less, the ever growing consumption of food – due to our great fortune with people trying to kill us and not being able to do so. Putting that aside, now a days, the essence of Jewish holidays, at least in Israel, is to basically sit at home and do nothing.

Last week was Passover. For those not in the know, Passover is the weird Jewish holiday when we’re not allowed to consume any bread or bread like products. On one hand, it reminds us our ancestors who travelled the desert for 40 years, and had to leave Egypt in a rush, so their bread didn’t rise. So, we eat Matza Bread to remember that time. However, today, you can make bread from a multitude of other ingredients, not only White Flour. For example, you can make bread from Potato Flour, Soy Flour or even Rice Flour – in other words, anything else by White Flour. I’m confident the orthodox Jew will claim that I’m wrong – but hey, that’s my 2c on the matter. In any case, Passover started on the 7th of April, and lasts 7 days. The first 2 days and the last 2 days are national holidays. So, the only work days that remained were: 9th, 12th, 13th. The 9th was a Thursday, no use working for one day, 12th was a Sunday, most of my customers abroad are not working, 13th was a Monday – hence – a single day of actual work to do. For a workaholic, like myself, that is more or less a nightmare.

VoIP Providers

Recently, a post on voip-info.org had caught my eye:

• 2009-04-15 - VoIP Providers Ranking AZ-VoIP-Providers publishes latest International Top 10 VoIP Providers Ranking on 15-April-2009.

I’ve decided to visit that website and take a look at the providers the “so-called” list offers. So, in general, the site is nothing more that a so-called “VoIP Link Farm”, promoting some services over others. In general, the site only contains some logos of service providers, a shit-load of Google banners, and some poor content relating to the actual pricing of the service providers – in other words, nothing new. So, if you’re looking for the real thing, stay away from this site, there is nothing special in there.

Digium Releases Fax for Asterisk

Per Digium’s website, the Digium Fax for Asterisk is:

Digium's Fax For Asterisk is a commercial facsimile (Fax) termination and origination
solution designed to enhance the capabilities of Open Source and commercial Asterisk
as well as Switchvox. Fax For Asterisk bundles a suite of user-friendly Asterisk
applications and a licensed version of the industry's leading fax modem software from
Commetrex. Fax For Asterisk provides low speed (14400bps) PSTN faxing via DAHDI-
compatible telephony boards as well as VoIP faxing to T.38-compatible SIP endpoints
and service providers. Licensed on a per-channel basis, Digium's Fax For Asterisk
provides a complete, cost-effective, commercial fax solution for Asterisk users.

Ok, Fax is one of the most anticipated parts that Asterisk had been in need, since the creation of Asterisk. While back in the days of SpanDSP and Hylafax you were able to go about and send/receive faxes, in a somewhat reliable manner (who am I kidding, it was only 80% reliable), Digium’s Fax for Asterisk is surely a new step-up. This new add-on shows that Digium is maturing, becoming increasingly serious about their approach to the Enterprise market. I’ve been working with the FREE Fax-For-Asterisk license, which provides a single license and I have to admit – it works fairly well (what am I talking about, currently, 100% of faxes pass through without a hitch!).

New blog – The GreenfieldTech Blog

Well, after working on my own, for a period of more or less 2 years time – I’ve finally expanded GreenfieldTech. GreenfieldTech now enjoys 2 distinct divisions: the telecom division and the web analytics division. To read more about it, you’re welcome to visit our new company blog at http://blog.greenfieldtech.net/

I keep a vigilant eye on Google Alerts. To be more exact, I’ve got a few alerts defined, in accordance to subjects that interest me. Two of these subjects are Asterisk and FreeSwitch. Recently, the following had been posted on a personal blog:

Our PBX/IVR web-based generator Telfa has been moved from Asterisk to Freeswitch. Why?

Asterisk just seems to come from a different world than what I am used to. Inflexible and problematic. Very long configuration files with ancient syntax. Now I’m far from pretending I’ve used Asterisk enough to understand it pros and cons well, but I have a decent software development experience and I can tell when something “smells.” I didn’t want to build our system (that I want to be flexible and scale well) on some old technology that is only living from its past.

And (most importantly) there are many people experienced with both Asterisk and Freeswitch favoring the latter: Anders Brownworth, Jonathan Palley (creator of Telegraph, a Rails plug-in that lets you talk to Freeswitch), or of course the creator of Freeswitch (and former Asterisk developer!) Anthony Minessale himself.

[Extract from: http://onruby.flempo.com/2008/10/28/chose-freeswitch-over-asterisk/#comment-58]

Reading the above simply flames me UP – WHAT A LOAD OF BULL!

The writer admits that: “Now I’m far from pretending I’ve used Asterisk enough to understand it pros and cons well, but I have a decent software development experience and I can tell when something “smells.”” – If he’s such a worthy developer, the above simply proves that he’s simply an RTFM!

Asterisk provides a multitude of methodologies for configuration management, dialplan logic programming, programmatic API structures – basically, all the tools you need to go about and create your application. While I admit that FreeSwitch is slightly better at the “Core Switching” environment, implementing a near true Soft Switching architecture – Asterisk is a totally different thing.

A while back I decided to develop a couple of my better systems on FreeSwitch, as a test of my abilities. To see if I can be as proficient with FreeSwitch as I am with Asterisk. I re-developed the applications on FreeSwitch from scratch, however, FreeSwitch’s somewhat annoying XML configuration structures made it a hell for me to develop something that I would ask my customers to put their money on.

I started working with Asterisk in 2002, and starting 2003 I tried to have people in Israel start using Asterisk. I can honestly say that the first ever true adaptation of Asterisk in Israel came about only late 2005, and even that wasn’t for mission critical applications. Asterisk had achieved a point in which it is now considered a valid replacement for classic IN and NGN applications and engines, such as SigValue. I suspect that FreeSwitch will become a more dominant contender in that part within a period of 18 to 24 months, as its developer community will grow – time will tell.

In my large installations, I like using Asterisk as my IVR/Application engine envrionment and using FreeSwitch as my routing and LCR environment, simply because it’s capable of handling slightly more SIP-to-SIP connections than Asterisk – but that is the only reason, all the rest is Asterisk.

Both projects are wonderful tools, each one with its own set of strengths and weaknesses. Learn how to balance the use of the two, utilize the best of both world – and stop being a bloody purist, that’s exactly what leads to poor technologies such as Microsoft and poor life practices, like wars and terror.

Well, it’s quite common to get a flame here and there on any Internet technical maling list, but the following really caught my eye. Here’s an extract from the TrixBox forum:

———————- CUT HERE ———————-

Subject: SS7 on Sangoma a101D

Over the past 12 months, I’ve been heavily involved in the development of high-speed dialers. While many companies published a prolific number of automatic dialers (power, predictive, broadcast) – none of these companies ever announced there top speed dialing capability.

An so I ask myself: “What is the reason not to release these numbers publicly?” – interesting, isn’t it. So, I decided to experiment myself and see if I would release public numbers for my dialer. I’ve designed my dialer to be capable of generating upto 35 calls concurrently. My questions was this: “While the dialer is fully capable these numbers in a test scenario, will this number be reached in real life?”

So, I started experimenting with my code – doing a very simple test. I’ve installed my dialer on a Dual Quad Core system, 8GB RAM, and a RAID-1 array as the storage. Now, I’ve setup the system to generate up to 35 calls every second, allowing the server to sustain a total of 180 concurrent calls – 360 channels.

What happend was actually this: the dialer generated about 180 dials within a period of about 8 seconds, and then, simply waited till some of the calls completed in order to generate additional calls. Ok, that is understandable, however, what is the throughput of the dialer? So, I decided to do another test, I filled up my queue with a total of 50,000 records. In addition, I’ve arranged with my carrier to terminate the calls to on of their SigValue systems, to sustain the enormous number of inbounds. In addition, I asked them to perform a small measurement of the average call inits per second. I was shocked with the result!

While the dialer simply peaked upon startup, after 20 seconds of operations it started normalizing at around 6 call initiations per second. But how can that be? how can it be that a dialer capable of dialing 35 calls is slowed down to crawl? – the reason is simple, the latency imposed by the PSTN/VoIP network, the time it takes for the calls to terminate and the actual time the call is left on the air, while the dial happens. All these factors together had given me the notion that there is no practical top speed, as it is in direct relation to the demographics of the dialer operations.

Having said that, is it possible to devise a formula to calcualte this number on a per demographic basis? maybe on a per PSTN/VoIP carrier type? maybe a combination of the both? will a formula such as that will enable for the better creation of broadcast/predictive dialer? – no use dialing tons of number into a demographic that can’t handle it, while at the other side of the spectrum, what demographics will benifit from the utilization of an automated dialer?

As some of you noticed, I’ve started a “Say No To TrixBox” campaign. In order toPL go about and monitor the usage of the banner, and it’s deployment across the net, I’ve installed an OpenX ad server to support the campaign. I guess that I didn’t realize what the little campaign would do!

Current statistics show that the banner had been deployed to over 300 different websites across the world, had been viewed over 60,000 times and had been clicked on for about 800 times. Not a bad CTR ratio for a little community oriented campaign.

If you are an Asterisk user, and you are fed up with the way Fonality/TrixBox had been conducting their business over the past 3 years, it’s time to show your support and put this banner on your website. If you have a blog, a company website, an Asterisk oriented business, show your support to FreePBX and other Open Source Asterisk oriented projects and website by showing the world that the community has power.

I am all for competition, as a healthy competition always keeps us on our toes and makes sure we always progress and improve – but Fonality/TrixBox’s actions must be denounced and rejected.

OK, I’m fairly psyched out at this point, actually, I would say that I’m ecstatic. The first ever Asterisk Bootcamp training will be taking place on the 25th of May, in Ramat-Gan, and I’m the trainer

If you are not from Israel, you may regard this as: “What’s so special? Asterisk bootcamps are all over the place!” – but for me this is something really special. In 2002 I began a journey into the world of Asterisk, starting to develop various applications and voice systems based upon this wonderful piece of software. As time progressed, my interest in Asterisk grew, and thus, also my interest in the adaptation of Asterisk to Tier-1 telecom infrastructures.

In 2006 I’ve finalized my first Tier-1 Asterisk application, an International Operator Assisted Dialing platform. If you are from the telecom business, you are most probably familiar with the Nortel TOPS platform. The platform that I’ve developed replaced a Nortel TOPS system, that was installed at Bezeq International in Israel. This was the first ever Asterisk installation as a critical Tier-1 carrier service, within a Tier-1 carrier. Just to give you an idea of the big ho-ha, in Israel, this platform is a regulatory issue – no system, no license – no license, company go bye bye!

A year ago I left Atelis, the company that I help found and manage – a Digium channel and reseller in Israel and the UK. I’m now a freelance consultant/developer, focusing mainly on the integration of Asterisk in various applications and business structures. This training session, to me, is somewhat of a climactic event – as it bring my 5 years of Asterisk experience, into a situation where I can share this experience and know-how with a select group of people – who all share the same goal: they want to learn Asterisk to the fullest.

Training will begin on the 25th of May, and I will try to post each day of the bootcamp, telling you my thoughts, feelings and news from the bootcamp – I’ll even throw in some pictures to match

Since I’ve released my dialer framework demo about 2 months ago, I’ve been swamped with many requests from various contact centers around the world – to utilize my dialer framework for the development of a custom made predictive dialer.

For those of you who are not in the know, a predictive dialer is a tool that is capable of analyzing the performance of each agent in a contact center, accurately predicting when his current call will be completed, and thus, start calling outbound to ensure that the agent is utilized as much as possible.

Most contact center managers believe that if an agent is utilized 100% of the day (or at least a close enough number), they will maximize their profits and work will be done faster. This is not always the case, and there are some cases where predictive dialers will be nothing more than a “White Elephant”, sitting in your call center, doing nothing.

Considering the following scenario: We have a contact center selling computer insurance plans by phone. Each agent is trained to make a sale, that is: “Don’t get off the bloody phone without a credit card!”. One of the issues with such a contact center is that there is no-way of predicting how long a sale will take. Lets imagine that one call a sale happens in 15 minutes, while in the next, we start with the kid in the house, move to the older brother, move to the mother, move to the father, ending up making a sale after 35 minutes. In other words, we have no way of profiling an agent, as there is no proper profile to the customers.

So you can argue that by utilizing statistical models and proper targeting of potential customers, we can go about and perform more accurate predictions. However, these predictions will all go up in flames, the minute a deviation from the norm of the statistic happens. We then immediately create a form of ripple effect, that is then carried across the entire contact center.

In the book “The Goal“, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, the author tells us a story about a group of boys walking in the woods. The group of boys constantly are unable to walk the path at the designated speed, due to various timing and synchronization issues. In theory, a predictive dialer is used to better synchronize the contact center intake (numbers to be dialed), with the contact center’s ability to perform (the ability to make a sale). However, this model fails when the sale constraint is unknown, thus, making the entire model fail.

In most cases, contact centers are better off using “Preview Dialers” and not “Predictive Dialers”, unless, the contact center is highly targeted with its campaigns and sale strategy. A “sell or die” contact center strategy immediately negates the possibility of accurately measuring the contact center performance and bottle necks, thus, having an automatic pace creator in such a scenario will become redundant and will most probably just cost funds.

As most of you already know, I’m heavily involved within the Asterisk Open PBX project. Over the course of the past 5 years of my dealing with Asterisk, Asterisk had always suffered a serious flaw, and that is, a single-threaded Manager interface – which usually led to serious dead-locks when writing a multi-threaded server that connects to it.

One of my long time challenges was to surpass the 4-5 originate requests to the Asterisk Manager interface, enabling me to automatically dial more than 4-5 calls at the same second. My initial work had began with the idea of increasing that by a factor of 50%, going up to around 7-8 calls per second – I had achieved that using a combination of smart synchronization between the manager interface and my originating server – and also enabling asynchronous originate requests – however, that methodology had proved to be problematic – in terms of reliability.

I understood that something else had to be devised, something that doesn’t rely completely on the manager interface, and that will allow me to originate calls freely, without clogging up the manager interface. So, I decided to move my interest from the Manager interface, and concentrate on understanding Asterisk’s channel handling, especially, how do calls originating from the manager interface are handled by the Asterisk spooler and the Asterisk channel drivers.

more will follow…

I guess that in every parents mind, their child is always a genius. The child may actually be the stupidest person on the face of the planet – however, for the parents, the child is a genius. I think this way of thinking is somewhat a constant across the universe, however, in Israel – adding the “Polish Mom” syndrome into the equation and you get a highly intense environment believing that what ever the child says, be it as moronic as a toon, is considered sheer genius.

Now, why am I ranting about this? well, in the course of my work, I meet with various people. At least once a month, I get to meet with “The next big thing” in telephony, or so it claims to be. A few weeks ago, I’ve received a phone call from a prospective customer, telling me he came up with a wonderful business model for VoIP services and he’s going to kick Vonage’s ass out of the water. While I admit that I like people that talk like that, I must also admit that the extremely young voice behind the phone got me wondering. I politely asked for the persons age, shortly to get an answer saying: “Oh, I’m 18 – my dad is the prime investor!”. I asked the kid to put his “prime investor” on the line, as I would like to talk to him…

Now, my cynic reactions are well known to people who know me well, but when it comes to customers and people I work with – I do my best to tone that down (not everybody has my sense of humor or share my views on things – you know). So, the father comes to the phone and we start talking. The following is more of less what was said:

Me: Hello Sir, may I inquire what school does your son attends to? does he study computer science?

Dad: Listen, I’m telling you, my son is a genius – he’s been using a computer since he was 10.

Me: Well, I admit that after talking to your son I’m impressed, however, you hadn’t answered my question.

Dad: Well, he doesn’t study computer science. He studies automatic services but he’s a computer genius I tell you. I’m willing to invest any funds in needs in building this service, even 2500$.

At this point in time, I had to explain to the “prime investor” that the initial investment is well beyond the 2500$ mark and that 2500$ won’t even cover the monthly operational costs for the service the “genius” intends to build. That sentence was slightly interrupted by the sounds of various loud slaps coming from the other side of the phone. However, as I do believe that computer geniuses come in various shapes and sizes, I’ve commented to the man saying: “You know, your son interests me and I’d like to meet him. I always wanted to take an intern to train and your son may fit the profile – I’d like to meet you and your son”.

A week later, we met at a coffee shop in Tel-Aviv. I sat down with the father and the son – asking the son to tell me his expereince and show me his work. The son begins telling me that he’s been using computers since he was 10 and that every year his father bought him a new computer, because the old one wasn’t enough for his needs. I asked what were his needs, he said that the recent games were no longer running smoothly on his computer and that Windows had become sluggish. I then asked him to show me his work – the kid replied that he has one of the best web sites available on the net. This interested me, so I looked deep – trying to find the genius within – guess what, I didn’t! The kid showed me a web site that was built using a free web site engine template, using an israeli service called tipo.co.il – lets put it this way, my 9 year old niece has a website in tipo.co.il that looks better and is more functional. I asked the kid if he has any experience with any type of computer programming language, to which he replied: “programming languages are in English and English isn’t really my strong point”. At this point he started telling me about his adventures into the VoIP world using Skype, and that he tried installing Linux on his Windows XP machine, but he couldn’t as it was incompatible with his Windows installation, which is 64bit (how stupid can you get), and that he downloaded Asterisk from the Internet, but couldn’t install it because he didn’t find the setup.exe file. At this point I bid my farewell from the two, explaining to the father that while his son may seem like a computer genius to him, the fact is that he’s far from it.

So, what conclusions had we come to:

1. The “Polish Mom” syndrome had been replaced by the “Greedy Father” syndrome.
2. Genius is a relative term that is thrown in the air all too often.
3. There are no free lunches (well, apart from those I take people to).
4. Before you go about investing in your child’s ideas, make sure that he is what you think he is.
5. If you have a dream of making it big, especially in VoIP – make sure you are ready to invest big.

* This post was translated from a hebrew post of mine on the cafe.themarker.com website.

Well, it has been almost 4 days since VON Boston and I’m sorry to say, that not much has changed since last year – apart from the fact that this year’s VON had seemed to be a little smaller to me.

As some of you may know, I’ve teamed up with Jeff Pulver’s Free World Dialup (FWD) team. If some of you are familiar with FWD, it was the first ever FREE VoIP community network. Much before networks like Skype, almost 12 years ago, the vision of free communications had been planted by Jeff Pulver and other pioneers. It has taken almost 12 years for the technologies to mature into a state where the vision is now close to being complete. Our intention is to be the driving force behind the community oriented telephony, providing a telecom’s vision into the Web 2.0 infrastructure, but not limited to Web 2.0. To learn more about FWD, please visit http://www.fwdnet.net, where you will learn more.

As a personal favorite of mine during VON, I was more than happy that Digium’s Asterisk pavilion had grown into the first – Digium Asterisk World. As some of you may know, I’ve devoted my last 5 years to the promotion and adoptation of Asterisk technologies and Asterisk based products and I’m extremly happy to see that Asterisk had become a dominent force in the VoIP market. All around the conference, you would see comapnies openly stating that they are compatible with Asterisk, proving again that open source can easily be considered a valid alternative for the telecoms market.

I hope that next years VON will introduce more Asterisk solutions and additional companies operating with the Open Source sector. I really hope to see more open source projects featured at VON, projects like OpenSER, FreeSwitch and Yate. While OpenSER had been around for a few years now, FreeSwitch is fairly new to the market and experts had adopted to it nicely – however, the entry bar is still too high.

I’ve attended the OpenSER administration training that took place during the last day of the convention. I can say one thing about the Daniel, one of the creators of OpenSER: you are a wonderful coder, but leave the teaching to other people – you are so boring!

Really, I like the guy, but after 3 hours of mind numbing listening – I simply left the place as I didn’t learn anything from the training. Just downloaded the presentation from the website and I’ll use mostly that. Daniel, if you are reading this, I suggest that you get some other member of the OpenSER team to do the lectures for you, someone with a bit more flair and showmanship.

Well, that’s it for now, if you’ve been to VON Boston, drop me a line.