IVR Deconstructed

The San Francisco earthquake that hit today in 1906 was one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history. The quake resonated all along the West Coast from Los Angeles to Oregon and also inland into Nevada.

The quake and fire that followed destroyed some 28,000 buildings, displaced almost a quarter million people (over half the city’s population) and claimed upwards of 3,000 lives, according to the USGS.

From a scientific perspective, though, the San Francisco quake changed the way we look at earthquakes. Its unusual horizontal displacements and long rupture length (stretching nearly 300 miles along the San Andreas fault) led to all-new seismic theory.

Sadly, the figures of the San Francisco quake won’t touch those of the quake and tsunami in Japan. The human count there alone is almost 14,000 people dead, nearly 5,000 injured, another 15,000 still missing and almost 140,000 displaced, according to CNN.

We don’t know everything the Japan disaster will tell us about earthquakes, if anything. But we do know what it’s telling us about technology in the aftermath—that it’s essential, particularly communications technology.

At the moment, search teams are still trying to account for missing persons while workers at the Fukushima nuclear power plant work to keep that nightmare at bay—they’re now using a remote-control robot to further investigate the plant.

Meanwhile, millions of Japanese are trying to get on with the business of putting the country back together. Which means keeping the Japanese industry and economy going. Which means working.

But with rolling power outages, clogged commuting and general destruction and mayhem, the Japanese are finding it hard to get to work. So they’re turning to communications technology to help.

According to the BBC, the nation’s leading telecom company, NTT, has sold way more telecommuting service plans since the quake—five times more, actually.

For a nation tied to the office, traditional work habits and even traditional office technologies (despite its tech-savvy reputation), this is a big change in conservative business practices.

So this natural disaster has already changed the way Japanese think about some things.

Here are some pics of the San Francisco earthquake and fire…

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/The-Great-1906-San-Francisco-Earthquake-119815334.html

Facebook is taking over the world.

It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or War of the Worlds or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen if the Autobots weren’t around to save the day.

Okay. That’s an exaggeration (sorry, Mark Zuckerberg). But what is it anymore, anyway? Seriously.

Facebook isn’t a social networking site. That’s what most people use it for, how most people think of it and certainly how it started. But that’s just the face of it these days (pun intended).

Did you know you can rent movies on Facebook now? Warner Bros. has some of its blockbusters up for rent, payable by Facebook credits.

That may seem like a redundant (cynical) or simply clever (slightly less cynical) idea until you think of the implications. It’s not about the movies. Facebook is creating a marketplace with a virtual currency.

And virtual currency is for real. The money we move around via bank accounts and credit cards is virtual money—it’s not tied to gold or anything substantial anymore.

NPR has an interesting Planet Money podcast on its website about Pacific Islanders who for centuries used giant stone coins as currency. The huge coins rarely moved, although ownership did.

In one case a stone fell off a boat, but even though the stone was at the bottom of the ocean, the islanders still incorporated it into circulation. (When you have 20 minutes or so…http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/02/15/131963928/the-friday-podcast-a-giant-stone-coin-at-the-bottom-of-the-sea.)

So Facebook is doing movies and creating currency now. And for a long time people have been talking about a voice over IP service for members. The company is also trying to get developers to make apps that run on Facebook.

It’s to the point that big companies like automakers are doing major advertising for their Facebook pages instead of their own Internet websites.

Which is perhaps part of what Facebook is becoming…a second Internet. Why we need a second Internet owned by a private corporation—like a walled garden in someone else’s backyard—who knows.

Facebook owns all the information on its website. When it was just friends talking to friends it was one thing, but now that businesses are on there it’s a whole different omelet. It’s the hot business advertising spot.

But it’s way more than that. Because there are 600 million people on there continuously voicing their opinions while uploading photos and links, Facebook is maybe the largest database of consumer information on the planet.

Again, Facebook could be the largest market research database on the planet. And it’s owned by a private corporation with a window looking down on everything we do.

So no, Facebook isn’t just a social networking site anymore. What it actually is, who knows. What it will eventually be—again, who knows.

What is Facebook?

Mark Zuckerberg, do you know?

Plum is expanding our sales and marketing operations to support a growing customer base and to accommodate increased demand for the Plum VoiceXML platform, QuickFuse and Plum’s IVR survey products.  Plum has recently hired several new account executives to provide increased customer support as well as sales executives to manage national and international territories.

Over the last two years, Plum has seen record growth in both its onsite IVR system sales and hosting services.  Adding additional staff will help Plum’s sales and marketing organization respond to customer demand in a more expeditious fashion.  To make room for new hires, Plum is expanding its Colorado office in Denver’s historic LoDo neighborhood.   Due to its centralized location, Colorado serves as the perfect hub for Plum’s sales team to manage national accounts and to visit prospective customers anywhere in the nation.

The Fukushima power plant disaster in Japan is now officially on the same level as the 1986 Chernobyl incident in Ukraine. Some Japanese are worried and wondering if the effects will be worse than their government has said.

On Monday the Japanese government upgraded the incident to level seven on the International Nuclear Event Scale (the highest level—major accident). The only other accident to reach that level is Chernobyl.

Up to now, Fukushima was a level five, although some believed it should have gone up to seven when it moved from four to five last month. The raise comes from a reassessment of the massive release of radioactivity in the days immediately following the earthquake.

This reassessment has residents from the exclusion zone and across Japan worried about the long-term effects of the radiation, according to the BBC. It also has them wondering if the Japanese government has been as forthcoming with information as it could have been.

Several residents told BBC that they’ve lost faith in what the government has told them. They want to know how bad things really are at the plant, how much radiation has leaked, how far it’s traveled and how the radiation could effect them.

And they may not get those answers for some time, even if their government is completely transparent.

According to the World Nuclear Association, the initial radiation release at Chernobyl (much larger than Fukushima) resulted in 28 deaths within three months from acute radiation syndrome.

Authorities evacuated some 45,000 residents from the nearby town of Pripyat the day after the event. A few weeks later they evacuated some 116,000 people from a 30-kilometer radius. Over the next few years, they continued to relocate another 220,000 people into less contaminated areas as they applied more strict regulations on exposure levels, according to the World Nuclear Association.

Although they’re both level seven events, it’s hard to compare Fukushima and Chernobyl. Media reports put the amount of radiation released at Fukushima at only a tenth of that at Chernobyl.

Also, while Chernobyl’s reactor core was clearly compromised, the ones at Fukushima are still mostly intact. This enables workers to get into the facility and limit further damage, unlike at Chernobyl.

Both Fukushima and Chernobyl require long-term measures, however. (They’re still working out how to build a structure to seal the Chernobyl core for good.) And assessments for both changed over time.

Hopefully Fukushima won’t have as great an impact on the Japanese as Chernobyl did on the Ukrainians. Assessments vary on the total number of deaths from radiation at Chernobyl (mostly from thyroid cancer)—as few as 50 or as many as a million.

Here are some pictures of Pripyat today…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/02/chernobyl-25-years-after-_n_816902.html#s233577

We’ve talked about a lot of different ways to use IVR systems in this blog. From emergency alerts and aid funding (Japan) to high-touch business practices (delayed-flight notifications) to entertainment (the Cricket World Cup).

And now…celebrity IVR.

Wait, think about it. Every celebrity on the planet—from Hollywood A-Listers on down to the characters they find for Celebrity Apprentice or whatever—all have their own Twitter accounts.

Every day, millions of fans all over the world follow their favorite celebrities on Twitter. Or they follow the celebrities who entertain them (the train wrecks, like…well, no names…yet).

Fans learn the inner workings of their minds, or just what they had for breakfast, depending on tweeting style. It’s extremely popular.

If you happened to read our post on Charlie Sheen (name) and his NCAA Tournament bracket (March Madness, Warlock Style), you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Sheen set the Guinness World Record for fastest person to a million Twitter followers. He did it in 25 hours, unstoppable force of nature that he is (tiger blood).

So why not celebrity IVR systems?

If you also happened to read the cricket post (A Wicked Googly), you’d already know IVR can work much the same way as Twitter, providing information updates on a continuous basis. And it can actually do it in a number of different ways, with texts, alerts and voice messages.

With celebrity IVR, fans would get an even more personal connection because instead of tweets, they’d get voice messages—their celebrity talking to them. And on the other side of the coin, the celebrities could make voice messages all day long much easier than making tweets, no matter where they were or what they were doing.

I imagine Charlie Sheen’s voice messages might actually drag on a while. (He’d just leave it recording all day.) But that’s another post…