The Talkies Have Arrived!
by Gregor Fisher

Well, that may be a little bit of an over simplification, but “The Talkies” is a useful metaphor for changes taking place in the world of web development. The Talkies refer to the film revolution of the 1920’s that changed the filmmaking industry form silent movies to movies that could talk. The Talkies brought a whole new feel and meaning to movies of that era and beyond.

I can’t think of a better way of describing the changes taking place in the world of internet based applications. The parallels are striking, not only in terms of the technical innovation of adding telephony as an integral part of web applications, but also in terms of the effect it is going to have on society and the world at large.

But first let me give you a little background on the changes I am talking about. I have been a web developer and student of the web since about 1993. In the formative days of the web, the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) specification addressed the need to support non-ASCII characters so that a richer variety of character sets could be used with the web—think foreign languages, etceteras. As the web continued to evolve the MIME standard came to support images, audio, and video. In those days, when even web surfing was still new to the masses, we were blown away when we created a web page and could view our work in a browser. And boy were we excited when we figured out how to add images and maybe a sound clip or two! Indeed, we have come a long way…and in just over a decade.

In fact, we have come so far from the days of garish web pages that beep and flash at us that we have a real aversion to them. I do anyway. But “The Talkies” I am talking about is not the ability to play a loop of sound in a web page. I am talking about the full integration of VoIP and telephony into web applications and into the application developer’s toolkit. The Talkies have indeed arrived.

Before diving more deeply into this analogy, a couple of points should be made that may help put this change into perspective. The first is that telephony concepts are moving from being obscure and not well understood to becoming a part of the broader IT field and application developer landscape. This is a huge change. Telephony in the past has been a closed world. The second has to do with the changes this enables in terms of the kinds of applications that can be created by developers.

Typically, when a company needs to establish telephone services they go to a vendor, ATT, or whoever else, and choose a package of services and features. A technician comes out and enables the features on a PBX owned by the local exchange carrier. The technician will also set up the actual RJ11 phone jacks that map back to a physical switch on the PBX. In this whole process the IT department provides only an oversight role. In concert with management, it selects the services needed and facilitates the installation by the technician. At this point, the telephone system has become a “set it and forget it” proposition. Any changes or new services require telco intervention. Perhaps obviously, this is not a great model, lacking in flexibility among other things.

The second point has to do with the kinds of applications that VoIP enables. To date the kinds of applications that are being created vary widely. Many applications mimic existing TDM based applications, such as conferencing, IVR, PBXs, caller ID functionality integrated with proprietary database applications for call centers—often times these are custom solutions. The value in these applications that provide the same functionality as existing TDM systems is not that they are new, but in the fact that they are IP based and use open, standards based, technologies (Eclipse, JBoss, Java, Linux, etc.). Anyone (any programmer that is) can build applications using these free, open source technologies. Making these applications IP based and using an open, standards based, approach to development leads to innovation and the potential to reconfigure these applications into new and potentially better applications. And in all likelyhood, for less money.

There are also, however, really new applications being developed that make VoIP technologies even more compelling. Such things as “mash-ups” that allow you to link a web application to call control functionality, integration with Microsoft client applications using smart tags, IMS enabled fixed-mobile convergence that allows you to go seamlessly from one network to the next (landline/wireless/WiFi), IPTV, voice enabled IM, and media gateways to name a few of the more prominent ones.

Often it is unclear which applications will survive and mature. Many progenitors of VoIP technologies are in pursuit of the Golden Fleece, otherwise known as the next “killer app.”. Regardless of whether or not the next killer app. is found, it is clear that the core technologies that enable these new applications (IMS and SIP, which has a prominent place in the IMS stack) will create revenue for those that build new applications based on them. It seems fairly obvious that, over the next several years, the telecommunications industry will become a major market for application developers.

I started out this article making the analogy between “The Talkies” and web based applications adding telephony. It is indeed an interesting and very appropriate analogy.

The first talking motion picture (Don Juan with John Barrymore) came out in 1926 and synched sound effects and orchestral music with the on screen action. Crude by today’s standards, but a real breakthrough in 1926. While the film enjoyed success, most people at that time thought talking movies would be a passing fad. In 1927 the movie “The Jazz Singer” first matched pre-recorded dialogue to an actor with Al Jolsen’s brief, extemporaneous line “…you ain’t seen nothing yet!” In 1928, Lights of New York was released by Warner Brothers as the first all-dialogue film. VoIP has had a similar journey from obscurity when there were many doubters of the new technology (and perhaps rightly so, it was pretty lousy early on) to its growing acceptance as a legitimate technology with a very bright future.

It wasn’t until 1933 that King Kong was released by RKO Studios that sound in motion pictures took a huge leap forward. Murray Spivak, the sound man for the picture, was the first person to manipulate sound in a creative way by using a lion’s roar slowed down one octave for the sound of the ape. Not long after that, sound and sound effects became a major part of motion pictures and movies as a form of entertainment were on their way to becoming what they are today. While I don't think there has been any single event that is responsible for VoIP taking off, cleary we are in the post Kong era.

Much like it took the giant ape to reach the tipping point for the acceptance of motion pictures as the major form of popular entertainment, the addition of sound and multimedia will do the same for internet applications and the devices that run them. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

In hindsight, the marriage of sound to movies seems obvious. It was “a natural”, a compelling evolution/revolution for the film industry, a revolution whose success has touched many other industries and the world at large. The addition of sound to movies enabled a slue of new technologies, products, and industries including surround sound stereos, high fidelity DVDs, and home theatre sets—to name only the most current and obvious! The addition of telephony and the other multimedia content that SIP enables to web/internet applications will, over the next 5 to 10 years, have the same effect across other industries. Are we ready for Web 3.0?!