Month: April 2007
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Skype provides more detail about the Call Transfer API
Continue Reading: Skype provides more detail about the Call Transfer APILast week Skype came out with a Developer Program newsletter that provided a bit more insight into the Call Transfer capability now available in the recently released Mac version 2.6. In the full version of the article, Skype technical project manager Morné van Dalen answers some questions about what the Call Transfer API is all about. It’s interesting to see the discussion here of Group transfer, specifically in this list:
- Skype to Skype (P2P)
- Skype to SkypeOut (P2P to SipOut)
- SkypeIn to Skype (SipIn to P2P)
- SkypeIn to SkypeOut (SipIn to SipOut)
- Skype to Group
- SkypeIn to Group
It’s quite curious, though, that transfer to SkypeIn and SkypeOut will only be available to Skype Pro customers, which of course is not available in North America! Seems a rather puzzling disconnect.
Anyway, it will continue to be interesting to watch these capabilities evolve…
Technorati tags: skype, voip, call transfer -
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Mitel announces $723 million agreement to buy Inter-Tel
Continue Reading: Mitel announces $723 million agreement to buy Inter-TelYesterday after the close of the market, my employer, Mitel, announced an agreement to acquire Inter-Tel. There’s not much I can say beyond what’s in the news release… but I can say that I am quite excited by the news!
Technorati tags: mitel, inter-tel, telcommunications, voip -
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Light blogging ahead for the remainder of the week…
Continue Reading: Light blogging ahead for the remainder of the week…It’s a school vacation week here in my part of the USA and I’m planning to be offline for the remainder of the week. Getting outside with my family… going on some day trips, doing some landscaping and otherwise enjoying the beautiful weather we are having right now. I expect to be back posting here on Monday, April 30th. See you then.
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Blue Box Podcast #56 posted, beginning a series of VoIP security tutorials
Continue Reading: Blue Box Podcast #56 posted, beginning a series of VoIP security tutorialsI posted Blue Box Podcast #56 tonight and with it Jonathan and I are beginning a series of mini-tutorials on subjects related to VoIP security. In this show, we talked about voice encryption. In the next show (already recorded) we will talk about signaling encryption. The idea is to cover some basic ground so that people not familiar with the area can have a basic understanding.
Just glad to get that one up – tomorrow I’m going to work on #57 to see if I can get it online for Wednesday. We’re trying hard to get back on a weekly schedule. (#56 was intended to go up last week.)
Technorati tags: bluebox, voip security, voipsa, blue box, voip, security -
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Microsoft: When simply having an IM conversation becomes a tool to raise money for nonprofits… is this for real?
Continue Reading: Microsoft: When simply having an IM conversation becomes a tool to raise money for nonprofits… is this for real?We’ve all undoubtedly seen the chain-letter email messages that circulate around telling you that by forwarding the email you will make money or receive gifts and most people with half a clue understand that this kind of thing is pretty much impossible. So it was with a whole lot of skepticism that I first greeted Microsoft’s “i’m” campaign because the premise is: for every IM conversation you have with Windows Live Messenger, we’ll donate some money to the nonprofit of your choice (from among nine choices). To me, it sounded just a wee bit fishy. In reading the “About” page you do learn a bit more. First:
Every time you start a conversation using i’m, Microsoft shares a portion of the program’s advertising revenue with some of the world’s most effective organizations dedicated to social causes. We’ve set no cap on the amount we’ll donate to each organization. The sky’s the limit. There’s no charge, so join now and put our money where your mouth is.
and then this:
Once you’ve signed up, every ad you see in your message window contributes to the grand total we send to the causes.
So it’s all about a portion of…
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Telephony disrupted: It’s darn hard to be a remote teleworker without Net access!
Continue Reading: Telephony disrupted: It’s darn hard to be a remote teleworker without Net access!About 1:30pm today, I lost internet connectivity. It was quite comical, really, how I noticed. For some reason, I did something I almost never do and hit the “Music On Hold” button on my teleworker sets hanging off of Mitel’s switch up in Ottawa. So there, in a wonderful use of bandwidth, radio station CHEZ-106 out of Ottawa was streaming into my home office down here in Vermont. (That’s what the trial guys are using as the MOH music source for the trial switch to which I am connected.)
All of a sudden, the phone started playing the same audio packet again and again and again… I felt like I was transported back about 25 years to the era of skipping records! I wondered what was up but then I noticed a browser window on my computer not being able to find a link I had just opened to a popular web site. I quickly looked at my other teleworker phones and they, too, were going into a resiliency mode attempting to failover to their secondary IP-PBX. A glimpse at my laptop showed that Skype, MSN, Jabber were all starting their contortions of trying to reconnect.
Uh-oh.
Being a network geek,…
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Asterisk running on a Roomba – "Press one to start sucking"
Continue Reading: Asterisk running on a Roomba – "Press one to start sucking"Here’s something for a Friday afternoon… yes, indeed, out at Emerging Telephony 2007 back in February, someone (David Troy) did indeed have Asterisk running on a Roomba. And yes, it was “Press one to start sucking. Press two to stop sucking.”
Pictures are now available on Flickr.
More precisely, Asterisk is running on a hacked Linksys WRT54G access point (which is Linux-based) and the controller is using a Nokia WiFi/GSM phone to connect to the Asterisk install. You could also control the direction of the Roomba using the other keys on the phone keypad.
Why would anyone do this? Well… why not?
As I mentioned in a recent post, the beautiful thing about VoIP is that it now enables people to “play” with telephony… and do wacky things like hook it up to a Roomba! 🙂
Enjoy the weekend! Perhaps next week I’ll actually get some time to upload the rest of the pictures I took out at ETel. (Hey, it was only 6 weeks ago… )
Technorati tags: asterisk, roomba, voip, play, open source, telephony -
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IETF approves RFC standard for adding dialstrings to SIP
Continue Reading: IETF approves RFC standard for adding dialstrings to SIPIn the usual (and ongoing) flurry of IETF announcements, there was one notice that caught my attention. It announces that an Internet Draft document about “dialstrings” has been approved to become a standards-track RFC. So what, you say? Well here’s a bit more info:
This document provides a way of incorporating a dial string into the SIP or SIPS URI scheme. A dial string is a cousin of a telephone number, but rather than taking the form of a fully-qualified E.164 or national-specific telephone number, it is a description of a literal set of dialed digits that would be delivered over a POTS line. As such, it may include pauses, omit prefixes like area codes, and its applicability is necessarily restricted to a particular context (an enterprise, a LATA, etc). Support for dialstrings was formerly a feature of the tel: URI scheme specification (back in RFC2806); since that functionality did not make it into the revision (RFC3966), it is provided here specifically for the SIP and SIPS case.
Think of it as extra digits you have to type when making a call… or extra keys you have to press to start a service. The challenge is that SIP proxies and…
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VoIP Now confirms that the cool kids hack telephony with their list of 74 open source VoIP / IP telephony projects
Continue Reading: VoIP Now confirms that the cool kids hack telephony with their list of 74 open source VoIP / IP telephony projectsAs I travel around giving presentations about the technologies that are disrupting telephony, one of the themes I discuss is that one of the most severe disruptions brought about by VoIP is that people now have the ability to “play” with telephony in ways that were never possible before. Pre-VoIP, you needed special (and typically costly) equipment. Yes, there have been any range of CTI cards that let you play to a degree, but buying the real equipment was just not possible for most folks who might want to “hack” in the original meaning of the word. Enter VoIP. Now all you need is an old PC and some open source software and… ta da… you’re playing with telephony.
What I also see out there is that this ability to hack on telephony is happening at the same time that hacking on networks or operating systems seems to be getting less exciting and interesting. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there’s still amazing things happening out there… but for people who want to “play” with technology, those areas aren’t as exciting or novel as they once were. So many of those early adopters have moved on to hack on other things……
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Issues with viewing this blog site with Microsoft IE6
Continue Reading: Issues with viewing this blog site with Microsoft IE6If you are viewing this site in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (IE6)
there are problems with my new design that cause it not to render
correctly. Until I can get time to fix it, your only choices are unfortunately to
either: 1) upgrade to IE7; 2) use Firefox; or 3) read the RSS feed.My apologies… when I was testing the site design and navigation bar on top,
I tested the site with IE7, Firefox 1.5 and 2, and MacOSX Safari., but neglected
to test with IE6.P.S. And if there are any CSS experts out there who know why my design
is messing up IE6, any such advice would be greatly appreciated.