Elliot Gold's Electronic TeleSpan

The authoritative source for teleconferencing news and analysis for more than a quarter-century. Taken from March 2, 2009 - Volume 29, Number 9

What if, when people "called" your Web Site, you answered? And, answered with voice, text or videoconferencing? Wouldn't this be the new "PBX"?
by Elliot M. Gold, Publisher.

Behind the scenes, I've been working on a theory that the entire phone and phone network paradigm is about to shift. While most folks have been focusing on single factors like VoIP, I've been looking at the whole landscape. Up unitil this week, I had identified two of the important legs of this paradigm.

(The first two legs have been edited out as they do not relate to Web Site Communicator.)

Last week, I found the third leg of my stool.

"I've been involved in network marketing and online businesses for 10 years, since 1999, before social networks, " said Rodney Brace, Founder of Top Dog Advantage Inc. "When you've got visitors to your web site you expect them to buy something or sign up for something. But it is very impersonal. I began to think about belly-to-belly communications and realized that was what was missing on the Internet."

Rodney fixed this with his own web site. When you go to it today, he "sees" you, and speaks to you. In fact, if you're one of the over 97% of desktops that has Adobe Flash, Rodney or his "operator" not only speaks to you, but appears on your screen from their web cam, and opens a screen to help you find things. If Rodney or the first Operator who greets you isn't the right person to help you, you will be transferred, live, to the person who can help you. Rodney does this with his new product called Web Site Communicator.

"Web Site Communicator allows people to connect with people behind the web site for audio, video or text communication," said Rodney. "It allows the web site owner to build relationships, add that personal communication, that belly-to-belly relationship."

Web Site Communicator, in its basic package, comes with support for three operators, 1) the Master Operator, 2) the Master Operator Assistant, and 3) the Operator. Depending on the web site visitor's needs, and the availability of the Operators, the visitor can be transferred to the correct Operator, who can be located anywhere in the world, connected by the Internet.

Technologically, it's all based on Flash, requires no download for visitors, and doesn't even require that visitors have a webcam. All the visitors have to have are speakers on their computers. If they have a built-in microphone, or have a headset nearby, great. If they happen to have a webcam, like 25% of all Skype users have on during their phone calls, they can have a videoconference, either point-to-point or multipoint, with folks at the company whose web site they called. And yes, the visitor, now caller, can turn off their web cam if they don't want the Operator to see or even hear them.

Top Dog Advantage Inc has Web Site Communicator customers mainly in the United States and Canada but have expanded into Australia, Africa, Tunisia, England, Switzerland, Sweden and other countries.

A pair of its customers are "credit repair" web sites, where visitors are attracted to find materials to help them repair their credit. With Web Site Communicator, visitors quickly find live Operators who, after a few questions, find solutions that their company provides, and that can be purchased by the visitor to repair their credit.

I guess it's "Click, call, solve, swipe," that last sound being that of a credit card going through the web site owner's machine.

Another Web Site Communicator customer is a teaching hospital, which, through TeleSurgies.com in Dubai, lets doctors from around the world watch surgeries being performed live over the Internet. The TeleSurgeries web site has an example you can view. Rodney told me that the TeleSurgeries.com is a more affordable solution to services like the Cisco TelePresence systems.

Another set of Web Site Communicator customers are motivational speakers. In these cases, the speakers have web sites that, when visitors come to learn about them, immediately connect them to live presenters, who hold virtual face-to-face motivational conversations with the web site visitor. One such site is run by an immigrant from Mexico, who, after migrating to the United States, had to painfully teach himself how to speak English, "one word at a time." "He's now using Web Site Communicator to communicate and train spanish speaking people," said Rodney.

Then, there's a pair of radio stations that are using Web Site Communicator via LiveVideoRadio.com for audio and video for their talk shows. They use split screen so others can see the talk show host, along with who's come in from the web site being interviewed by the host or participating as the co-host.

Here's a link to see the Web Site Communicator program being completely demonstrated.

Here's what I think.

This is the third leg (the first two legs have been omitted from this excerpt).

This is the new PBX!

I remember decades ago when I was an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), we used Centrex to route our incoming calls. If a caller didn't know an engineer's direct phone number, a live operator picked up the call and transferred them, in voice.

After about a decade, I got moved to an off-site facility, where they had installed one of the first AT&T PBXs, later known as the ATT-IS PBX. (ATT-IS tells you how old I really am!)

While nobody knew how to use the PBX at first, I began learning the features, and soon, I was showing others how to do three-way calls, call forwarding, call waiting, caller-ID, and voicemail.

Takes my breath away, those PBX features.

What I think is that Web Site Communicator has the potential to convert web sites into the new PBX.

Not because it's virtual and caters to VoIP, but because it can handle all forms of inbound and outbound communications - voice, text, video; really, full collaboration - and, more importantly, because folks are now "calling" our web sites more than they're calling our phones.

Don't believe me?

I checked with my webmaster and with the heads of two of the industry's teleconferencing service and hardware suppliers. One told me, "we get about 3,500 visits to our web site each month. While we don't track inbound voice calls, our sales data shows that about half of our serious sales leads come from our web site, the other half through phone calls."

At TeleSpan, our statistics are almost the same.

Then, I checked with another provider of conference calls. They have seen consistent growth, year over year, for the past decade or more. Today, each month they get 230,000 web site visits, and only 1,400 inbound phone calls.

Sure, I've got a tiny sample, and I'm not factoring in e-mail sales requests, or call to sales people's cell phones.

But consider the following facts:

TeleGeography, which tracks international phone calls, recently issued a report called the Telegeography Report -- Executive Summary.

The report has some brilliant facts, such as the fact that switched (TDM / PSTN) phone traffic fell from 73% of global calls in 2007 to 69% in 2008 while VoIP traffic grew from 21% of global calls in 2007 to 23% of global calls in 2008 and Skype calls grew from 6% in 2007to 8% in 2008.

Further, TeleGeography reports that while both mobile subscribers and minutes have been growing annually at rates of 25% to 40% for minutes and about 25% for subscribers, for the past eight years they've tracked it (2001 to 2007), the annual growth rate of TDM (PSTN) traffic fell from growth of about 16% a year to about 5% a year, while the annual growth rate of TDM (PSTN) subscribers fell from about 9% a year to 0% a year.

More important, though, is the fact that the annual growth rate of TDM and VoIP calls have fallen in three of the past four years (2005 - 2008) to growth of about 11% after a decade of annual growth of between 15% and 20%.

Too many numbers to digest?

Digest this: According to the Wall Street Journal, a small hometown newspaper, Internet usage is now growing by 50% a year (WSJ, December 15, 2008, pp. B1, B4).

Have I convinced you that we're about to see a paradigm shift?

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Elliot M. Gold, President, TeleSpan Publishing Corp.