James Siminoff

Tumblr + Bug Labs + Twilio = Ideal Phone System

Fred Wilson wrote a post a few days ago , “My Ideal Phone System” about his desire for a hosted VOIP system for his new apartment.  As a person who has been in and around VOIP and telephony my entire business life it shook me a bit.

What rattled me is that Fred was looking for something that just does not exist today.  He wants the simplicity of Skype with the functionality of a more traditional phone system.  The list of people who think they supply this is very long but really understanding what Fred wants, there is just no one out there doing that.

So I started thinking about what this would look like as a company and a product.  There are three key components to building his ideal phone system, and amazingly his firm USV has invested in what I would consider to be a stand out in each category:

Design and UI- Today’s hosted vendors have a lot of functionality and features but they do not deliver the experience Fred wants. Tumblr would be the perfect team to do this.  They came into a established market, blogging and kicked its ass by having incredible UI and design.  Marco and David (and the rest of the Tumblr team) are really geniuses here, put their talents into this very established and competitive market, VOIP/Phone Systems, and let them do their magic.

Equipment- Overall the VOIP devices are just old phones with new guts in them.  There are a few really cool ones coming out with video like the Tandberg E20 but there is still a long way to go.  Bug Labs has created some way out of the box developer sandbox hardware.  Channel that same energy into building devices from scratch that leverage a better UI then stand back and enjoy the ride.

Telecom/Infrastructure- There are a lot of people that are designing and building some really cool cloud based telephony.  One of those companies is Twilio which continues to roll out the pieces via a simple API to power the back end of such a system.  A few other candidates here would be Voxeo/Tropo, Cloudvox or more traditional providers like bandwidth.com and Level3.

I believe strongly that VOIP and telecom are about to enter a next wave of explosive growth and innovation as was seen in the 90’s with deregulation.  It is not going to be one company doing it all or even one technology it will be the wave of cloud based providers like Twilio increasing the attention of the developers who build the cool things like Tumblr to focus on voice.  When that happens the hardware should follow to take advantage of what is changing in the cloud.  Put all three together and you have the ingridients for incredible change.

As for the people that say the “phone system” is dead, I strongly disagree.  If you feel that way, get a HD video enabled desk phone like the Tandberg and start playing with it.  I think you will very quickly see why a separate device makes sense to have in the office or at home regardless of how fast and cool our computers and cell phones get.