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September 07, 2006

AOL’s AIM Phone Line Developer Program: An example of the VON Community@Work

Since 1996 the evolving IP Communications industry has gathered at pulver.com events to gain industry insight and answer the questions: “what is now?, what is new?, where are we going? and who’s making it happen?” Throughout the years we have played the role of “connector” and did whatever we could to help advance the industry. Over time we have seen startups get funded and turn into market leaders and market leaders merge to form industry powerhouses.

Next week in Boston, while VON is going on, I fully expect to see the attending delegates benefit from the community that VON has helped foster over the years. At any moment there will be: people sharing ideas; people debating points of view; while others will be initiating and fostering new relationships. VON continues to be the place for people to meet their colleagues, friends and build their businesses. In many ways VON is also an ecosystem that breeds other communities, making it possible for new ideas to come to life, and in turn, new opportunities getting turned into realities.

Today’s announcement from AOL about their AIM Phone Line Developer Program is an example of how that ecosystem can work when it’s approached the right way.

Take iotum, a company run by my friends Howard Thaw and Alec Saunders. The two began bringing their idea of a “Relevance Engine” to VON, just about two years ago. Over that time they refined their product, have participated and presented at our conferences and received attention from the blogging community, and others. Along the way they also caught the attention of some of the bigger players in the game.

At Spring 2006 VON, AOL’s Senior VP, Ragui Kamel began talking to some trusted industry insiders about his desire to build an ecosystem around developers who could support AIM PhoneLine, the VoIP softphone based on AOL’s Instant Messenger (AIM), not the recently mothballed TotalTalk. Kamel is one of the speakers at Fall 2006 VON next week, and his vision ties totally into my concept of “Purple minutes”.

Kamel’s idea was to find companies who could be part of an ecosystem which he and his team are building around a set of API’s. It’s those API’s that make it easy for developers to be able to leverage and easily reach the AOL installed user base of AIM Instant Messenger users. One of the functions high on Ragui’s list was an advanced version of Find Me/Follow me that could make AIM Phone Line different. The iotum platform does all that (and more), and since Phone Line is SIP based, the ability to be a plug in was only a few months of work, not years.

For iotum and for MyNuMo, (a company that’s delivering ring back tones to AIM Phone Line), the whole idea of being able to work with a giant like AOL only happens when the ecosystem is in place to support it. AOL’s AIM team is building that by being an integral part of our VON events.

As someone who has watched many of these relationships get formed at VON over the years, it is always rewarding to see the “boy meets girl” and “boy marries girl” Cinderella stories happen.

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(c) 2006 Jeff Pulver. All Rights Reserved.
(This blog posting is copyright protected by Jeff Pulver. Portions of this blog posting may be quoted or abstracted if attributed.)

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Posted by jeff on September 7, 2006 08:00 AM | Permalink

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Comments

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Posted by: asdfasd at October 5, 2006 10:59 AM

Thank you for mentioning us. I will add that the power of the API enables us to go beyond the "choose a ringback for all" to allow the user to set ringbacks for individual callers. Not something you would find on most telephone systems.

Thank you,

William Volk
CEO, MyNuMo

Posted by: William Volk at September 7, 2006 09:20 AM