robot-food-farm.vconparties.vcondialog.vconanalysis.vconattachments.vcon
robot food farm/field · analysis

Analysis.

Long-form writing, organized as arcs. Five threads run through the work before vCon, plus the bridge document that opens into it. Each arc lists its canonical pieces. Click a title to open the original at its source.

arc · 01/2007 — 2010

Mashups.

The era that earned the durable nickname Mr. Mashup. The argument: communications have to become composable software primitives, not vertical products. Voice as an ingredient, not a service. Two artifacts anchor the period — the O’Reilly ETel 2007 demo that put the thesis on stage, and the 2008 Voice Is A Spice deck that gave it a name.

Reading order: the three 2007 blog posts give you the live experience of the ETel demo; the 2008 SlideShare deck is the canonical artifact of the spice thesis; the 2010 STL Partners briefing is the cleanest industry-audience condensation of the whole period.

arc · 02/2015

KISST and the texting-first thesis.

The proposal that messaging, not voice, was the new center of business communications. Read the three pieces in order; they form the framing, the proposal, and the design rationale.

Proof-by-demo: Ballot Box won TADHack Global 2015 the same month KISST launched.

arc · 04/2018

Call avoidance and the contact-center critique.

The operational thesis: the central problem in business communications is call avoidance, and smartphone-native messaging is the answer the industry kept refusing to commit to. The polemic follows the proposition by three months.

arc · 05/2009 — 2021

Intermediary devices and session management.

The engineering line that ran in parallel to the writing and quietly became the substrate for vCon. Once a session can be an object, the next move is the conversation as an object.

The TDC Bridge family. Priority dates reach back to 2016, with antecedents in 2009 cloud callback work.

arc · 06/2020

Bridge — Addressing the Crowd.

The book-length manuscript that tightens the customer-contact and communications-design strands into something that wanted to be a standard. The immediate predecessor to the vCon proposal.

One year later, the TADSummit 2021 keynote proposes vCon by name.