Allison Smith: Randy?

Randy Resnick: You’re about to take part in the VoIP Users’ Conference, VUC.me.

We get together every Friday at 12 noon EST, and the conference is made possible by people like Voxeo Labs. You can check some of their latest work at Phono.com.

You’re listening to this in full audio color, thanks to the ZipDX wideband conference bridge.

We’re talking to Michael White from E4 Strategies about some sweet deals for next year that’ll be available only to VUC members, so take Allison Smith’s advice, “Look to the skies. Keep watching the skies.”

Delphi says, “I’m ??? OMG!” Listen to the conversation while you read.

Randy Resnick: There’s no need to shout, Delphi. Suzanne Bowen, I’m so happy to have you here. Thank you for coming.

Suzanne Bowen: It’s a pleasure. I really appreciate you asking me.

Randy Resnick: It’s great. I’ve been meaning to ask you for a long time. I know you follow the conferences. You’ve been kind enough to retweet stuff and write about VUC, and mention it in columns and your blogs.

You are all over the place. Before we get into what you do now, what is it with the career transformation? You were a fitness instructor, is that right?

Suzanne Bowen: Yeah, I was a fitness instructor for a while, managed a fitness center and I was a teacher for about 20 years. Those are a couple of my past careers, yes.

Randy Resnick: Right. That fitness instructor thing has got this image in my mind … let me just savor that for a second. Okay, let’s move on.

Suzanne Bowen: (Chuckles.)

Randy Resnick: The name of the company … I keep thinking I should call you “Super Woman” because why? You co-founded the company Super Technologies, also known as SuperTec which is known as the nickname of that company. I guess that is part of the domain name, right?

Suzanne Bowen: Gotcha. That’s right.

Randy Resnick: Maybe the best known is DIDX, right? Best known offering of the company. Or not?

Suzanne Bowen: I would say so definitely. People have never heard of Super Technologies or Suzanne Bowen, but they know about DIDX.

Randy Resnick: We are going to talk about this a little bit later … DIDX. I wonder if it was DID X or DIDX, I wasn’t sure. DIDX is a subject that comes up very often on the Asterisk-Biz mailing list, and I warn you that we would ask about that later. Not a big deal, but it would be interesting to hear your take on that.

Aw, that’s the other Suzanne Bowen. There is another Suzanne Bowen as well. There is either an author or actress. Obviously there are different people by that name. Anyway Suzanne, back to you.

Let’s talk a little about the beginnings of Super Technologies. So, can you tell us about that?

Romantic story?

Suzanne Bowen: I wish I could tell you something like that. Everybody would go to sleep. Anyway, I think maybe back in 1994 or 95, I was playing around a lot with the Internet because as a teacher I got an Internet account called FIRN. I was really excited about it.

Using it in my classroom … I brought a computer from home, a Tandy I had into the classroom. I got a grant and put a phone line in there and connected over dialup. Had the students talking to people, families, businesses all over the world.

We were using voice over IP also. The Vocaltec’s Internet Phone, and I’m telling you my classroom just turned upside down. Everyone could not wait to come to school every day. I got to know people involved in VoIP.

I’m not a software developer, but I’m quick to see when something will basically empower people. That is how we met different people in VoIP , for example, Rehan Allahwala.

He’s the one that I eventually started the business with in 1999.

Randy Resnick: I was trying to bring that URL up. It is S U P E R T E C dot com. I wanted to paste it into the IRC. DelphiWorld is talking about Virtualphoneline.com. I wonder if you remember … because my first memory was dialpad.com.

Suzanne Bowen: Yes, Craig Walker, yeah.

(Dit, dit, dit … sound.)

Randy Resnick: Woah, was that me? I heard a cell phone or mobile phone. Dialpad.com had … I was on the modem … you know, dialup at the time. So when we called using Dialpad, we were calling on 56K at the best. It rarely rarely worked. We’ve come a long way if you zoom forward to even to 2005 – 2010, where already most of us are on DSL or cable.

So, the dialpad.com days are over. There are a million operators out there. Let’s speak what DIDX is about because that is a wholesale operation which would be interesting to some of the people on this call.

Want to talk about how it got started?

Suzanne Bowen: Sure. A lot of our clients in the beginning were in remote areas of the world, like very much emerging. To make a phone call with PSTN, it cost about $5 per minute to call from Vietnam to the USA. Places like that and Lebanon, Pakistan, places like that.

So, we were selling dialup Internet phone adapters to people in these areas. Many of them wanted to have a local presence in a country that they were not actually physically in. Rehan got together with some of our developers and created something called VirtualPhoneLine.com.

I think we had interconnected with around 10 different carriers for phone numbers. We thought … but again, this was really Rehan’s idea. He said, “Let’s ask them if they would like to be a part of an exchange where they could automatically have an interconnect. We had already completed an interop and interconnect with each of them.

Those ten said, “Yes.”

Around the beginning of 2005, we formalized it into actual … had a webpage and everybody could log in. It’s kind of grown from there. Now, there are around 18,000 members from around 163 nations.

We’ve had our challenges but also plenty of joy.

Randy Resnick: Over the years, I have tried various services. Everybody remembers Nufone and everything that followed the “pay as you go” stuff.

This is actually a seriously professional-oriented service that has a minmum, right? You can’t just go get an account and buy one number?

Suzanne Bowen: Correct. You’ve already got lots of companies who you can buy one number from. There are also groups that have more of a wholesale approach and problem. We want to keep DIDX as wholesale because if we say, “Anyone can buy just one number or spend just 10 bucks per month, then we are actually competing with our customers.”

Randy Resnick: ZipDX is presumably one of your customers, I guess, or at least that is the type of operation of someone who needs a bunch of numbers.
 

Suzanne Bowen: Yes, I respect ZipDX, no doubt.

Think of David Frankel, well-known in the San Francisco area and around the USA for his emphasis on quality and HD sound in the ZipDX service. He shared his experience with DIDX, in particular, the excellent customer service that DIDX team member Muneeb Iqbal provided during ITEXPO West 2008 in video.

Randy Resnick: (Chuckles) A lot of people have called into the 1567 number which must come from DIDX.

Suzanne Bowen: It is likely to be a fact. I know we’ve sold millions of those 1567 numbers. They seem to be just fine. I even have a 1567 number.

Randy Resnick: I’ll have to look into that next time because everyone is complaining about that ours only starts at noon. I just changed that because people were calling in too early.

Are you interested in speaking about other products you are doing? There is even some medical stuff as I recall?

Suzanne Bowen: I don’t mind taking questions. I can say we have an awesome group of researchers and developers. They are involved in all types of open source like freeSWITCH, Kamailio, Asterisk, so we have a lot of services that are in alpha, beta … We have the HealthManagementSystem which recently won one of the Mobile Monday Peer Awards 2010.

We started an online magazine called Techistan. We have video production with a social media twist at Muntwo.com.

We have a great time promoting our customers, people in the industry even if they are not our customer, different events that we think are really important to participate in. We do that with the media channels I just mentioned. We have a really fun podcast channel. It’s at http://www.didx.net/podcast.

Some of the people who have logged into this call, we have interviewed such as Leif Madsen.

If you have more questions or anyone else, I’d love to answer.

Randy Resnick: All questions are welcome. Karl has a question.

Karl Fife: Strange, huh? It’s the beginning of the call. Hi, Suzanne. How do you work around the legal restrictions that sometimes exist in different countries?

I know, for example, we’ve looked into getting a number in Germany, but I know that they have restrictions that say you must have a physical address in order to get a geographic number.

Are you able to offer numbers in such areas, and how do you work this out?

Suzanne Bowen: I think that is an important question, Karl. In the agreements that participants in DIDX sign off on, there is a section that states something about the responsibility of the members to follow the law. Also take a look at http://kb.didx.net and click “Documents Requirements.” “KB” as in knowledge base …

You will find a list of countries, and it shows what that particular is requiring. If you use our API or manually login and buy a DID in one of those areas, you will see a “pop-up” that will say there are some government requirements, and in order to complete the purchase, there needs to be a conversation between our team and that buyer.

Randy Resnick: You mentioned Vietnam. Are you much in Asia? Is there much activity there?

Suzanne Bowen: Absolutely. As you know, Rehan and I were the ones who co-founded this company. He’s in the East. I’m in the West. He has a strong influence and great network in the eastern part of the world.

One of the guys from Asterisk (Digium‘s Greg Vance) was in a meeting with Rehan and I (shame, shame, should be “me”) at Gitex in Dubai. He stated that some at Digium felt there wasn’t much participation in open source telephony (Asterisk) in the East and there was much more in the West.

But actually, just type in “Asterisk User Group” on Yahoo!, Google, or Dogpile, and you’ll get a huge plethora of user groups such as in Malaysia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, even Afghanistan.

Randy Resnick: Wow.

Suzanne Bowen: There are really sharp developers all over as well as people who are entrepreneurs, taking advantage of open source telephony … options they can choose from.

Like … CommunicAsia (which we are a media partner for) is a big conference in the East. It takes place in Singapore around May or June each year. Many in open source telephony participate in that conference every year now. It had doubled, tripled, quadrupled its participation since the first one I attended.

I think it is because of the growth of mobile, wireless, voice over IP, whatever, you know … in China, India.

Randy Resnick: Many countries have jumped over the fixed line, and everyone is using mobile. Obviously in Africa, that is the case which has some problems with infrastructure. It is also largely the case, I guess in China because Chinese mobile accounts from what I was able to observe there in May. You can buy a SIM card cheaper than you can in Europe.

You can make calls incredibly inexpensively. So, how does that affect what you guys are doing?

More transcript from this podcast soon.