Leapfrog CX Strategies

TalkingHeadz is an ongoing interview podcast that features the movers and shakers of enterprise communications - we have great guests too. In this audio-only episode Dave and Evan discuss the importance of video with Michael Litt. 
 
Michael Litt is CEO and co-founder of Vidyard, a global video creation, hosting and analytics platform for businesses.

In this TalkingHeadz podcast Dave and Evan Go deep, well beyond the app layer, with Cullen Jennings of Cisco. This is the final episode of 2021. 

Cullen Jennings is the CTO for Security and Collaboration Business at Cisco. How do you become the technology leader at a technology leader? Practice! Cullen is Cisco Fellow (1 out of 19) with over 30 years of experience across startups, large organizations, and Internet standards. He has a thing for disruptive, real-time technologies. 

Cullen holds over 100 patents. Cullen is a member of the IEEE and ACM and has published numerous technical articles. He was heavily involved in making WebRTC the standard that has enabled browser-based communications. Cullen tends to have his hand in a lot of standards and solutions impacting real-time communications. Just weeks ago, the new Cisco Webex Hologram solution escaped from Cullen's lab.  

This podcast has a few more acronyms than usual, but will also leave you ROTFL. 

Follow Cullen here: 

• Twitter
• Github
• IEEE

In this TalkingHeadz podcast Dave and Evan have One Talk with Alex Doyle of Verizon.

Alex is the Executive Director, Advanced Communications Products at Verizon.  If you thought 5G was advanced, you are missing out on all the great solutions Big V has for collaboration, call centers, and UCaaS -- including its own mobile-first One Talk.  The products and solutions delivered by Alex and his team support Verizon’s small to global business customers and governments. 

Prior to Verizon, Alex was a member of the founding team at BroadSoft (acquired by Cisco), Director of Service Provider Solutions at Polycom, and VP Marketing at cloud video conferencing provider Vidtel. Alex began his career at Nortel, where he was responsible for product development for Nortel's mobile switching system solutions. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and a MBA from Johns Hopkins University. 

Dave and Evan meet with Philipp Heltewig, Co-Founder and CEO of Cognigy. 

Philipp is a German-Australian entrepreneur with profound technology experience working for companies in Europe, APAC and North America. He had the foresight to start up a conversational AI technology company in 2016. Long before anyone was talking about conversational AI. 

Since its founding in 2016, Heltewig has been the CEO of Cognigy. The company focuses on the automation of customer and employee services through Conversational AI. Cloud or premises-based, text or verbal, as well as employees or customer interactions. 

In this podcast you will learn more about how and why Cognigy stands out in a sea of conversational AI companies. 

Dave and Evan meet with Justin Mitchell, Founder and CEO of Yac. 

Sometimes voicemail can convey a message better than text, but voicemail isn't really a conversational tool. The answer is conversational voicemail. 

Yac provides conversational voicemail, and if you don't know what this, listen to this podcast. 

The reason enterprise chat has become so popular (and why email remains so popular) is because people really like async communications. Orlando based Yac brings back to async comms what chat apps leave out - voice. Yac works by itself or can complement apps like Slack. 

We all know that text has its limitations. For example, all caps just isn't the same thing as really shouting -- and sometimes shouting is necessary. Sure you can leave a loud voicemail. That's the message, but it probably won't result with an interactive or conversational experience, 

Put more emphasis on the conversational aspect than the shouting part and you have Yac. It is just in time because distributed teams are all the rage and nothing goes better with rage than all caps - I mean Yac. 

Justin started working in startups at 16.  At 19 he co-founded and launched his first company and 2 years later helped it IPO on the NASDAQ.  He bounces between design, engineering, and marketing  on his breaks from working on 27 patents.

Dave and Evan meet with Martin Taylor, a Co-Founder of Content Guru.

Content Guru is a leader in cloud-delivered customer engagement. Its Storm CCaaS solution is well known in Europe and expanding in North America. That's one of the topics we cover in this podcast. We also get Martin to explain the brands in his life: Redwood Technologies, Content Guru, and Storm.

Martin Taylor has been tinkering with technology since he was a child. “I was writing computer games when I was 10,” he says. He started Content Guru with his brother Sean in 2005, offering contact center technology as a service.

Martin has somehow managed to have one job since 1993. Even though his role, the key products, industry, and brand has changed. Perhaps this is why he's responsible for strategic market development. Actually, he has lots of tiles including  Deputy CEO, Global CMO, and Co-Founder. 

In his spare time Martin is a keen runner, having once been the Berkshire cross country champion and competing, along with Sean, in the English Schools Cross Country Championships.

Dave and Evan meet with Hugo Feiler the CEO and co-founder of Minima. A base layer protocol that brings blockchains to smartphones. 

Minima is the world’s first truly decentralized blockchain protocol that runs in full on mobile phones. Minima has created an ultra-lean blockchain protocol that fits on a mobile or IoT device, allowing every user to run a full constructing and validating node. It creates the possibility of operating a network that is decentralized, scalable, and inclusive, while remaining secure and resilient. A network that guarantees anti-censorship and no overarching authority. 

Prior to launching Minima, Hugo created global advertising campaigns for companies including Vodafone, Toshiba and Sony Electronics. He was previously General Manager of marcomms at Sony Europe for its computer and audio divisions.

It's not all fun and games when the net is down.

Dave and Evan meet with Mo Nezarati, President of Voice at Subspace. 

A funny thing happened to the folks at Subspace when they set out to improve gaming, they discovered how to upgrade the entire internet. Subspace harnesses the power of games to improve real-time apps. 

Latency and other network issues deprive us all from the online experience we deserve and expect. The obvious solution is to build a high performance, global platform that can personalize network performance for our specific situation - that's what Subspace did.  It uses gaming data to fix the performance of real-time applications around the globe. 

Mo is a voice pro. He has technical chops and understands the business side too. His career experience includes 26 years at Esna, a company he co-founded. Esna was acquired by Avaya in 2015, and that's where Mo launched Zang.  That service is now known as Avaya OneCloud Spaces and CPaaS, and are among Avaya's most significant recent launches. He did a short tour at Sangoma after Avaya and landed at Subspace about a year ago. 

Dave and Evan meet with Ray Pasquale,  CEO and Founder of Unified Office. 

Unified Office is a next-generation IT managed services provider focused on the Small and Medium-sized Business (SMB) market. Unified Office was built from the ground up focused on delivering business class communications services on the latest mobile devices. We take the latest in communications technologies and make them readily accessible by integrating them into an easy-to-use, scalable, virtualized service that extends from the desktop to mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones called Total Connect NowSM. This offering allows people to stay connected to their business, anytime and anywhere, in a hyper connected world of business that operates in real time.