Month: November 2007
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Truphone embeds an IAX softphone into Facebook that lets you make calls to regular phones for free
Continue Reading: Truphone embeds an IAX softphone into Facebook that lets you make calls to regular phones for freeThe major product Dean Elwood has been working on now that he has moved to Truphone is the Facebook application that Truphone announced two days ago. Their blog provides a link to the Facebook application and, of course, in true Truphone style, offers us a video with cows:
I’ve not yet had a chance to do more with it than install it and play a bit with the configuration options:
but I’m very much looking forward to giving it a try. There are several interesting aspects to this app for me:- It is an embedded softphone (Java-based). No extra software you need. Just click the button and you can call the person who has it on their Facebook profile. To my knowledge this is the first time we’ve seen this in a Facebook app.
- From the user side, you can link that button to any of the following:
- Your Truphone number.
- Any regular landline or mobile phones in the US or Canada.
- A SIP address.
- A Google Talk address.
- A GrandCentral phone number.
- The Facebook app uses the IAX protocol used primarily by Asterisk. This gets around all of the firewall/NAT traversal issues that plague SIP. …
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Large-scale conference calls with *better* voice quality than the PSTN (using Skype)
Continue Reading: Large-scale conference calls with *better* voice quality than the PSTN (using Skype)One interesting development in the world of Skype last week which I’ve seen little mention of is the fact that the folks at Highspeedconferencing.com have rolled out a Skype Extra that lets Skype users have large-scale conference calls. Like most such large conference bridges, they have moderation/”hand-raising”, call recording, email invites, etc. However, the key point to me is that their conferencing bridge uses the wideband audio supported by Skype! That is the key. You now have conference calling with audio quality that is far better than the PSTN! This is where we start to get into the space where VoIP can offer a truly different – and better – user experience than traditional telephony. The Skype blog touches on this:HighSpeed Conferencing is the only audio conferencing service available to Skype users that offers high-definition (HD) voice quality. There’s no degradation of audio quality, no matter how many Skype users participate in a conference call. And with unlimited usage during a conference call, you can talk as much as you want. Some people stay on the conference bridge all day.
I’ve not yet used the service as right now I’m not involved with large conference calls, but at the… -
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Introducing “Speaking of Standards”, a new Voxeo blog about industry standards, IETF, W3C, SIP Forum, etc.
Continue Reading: Introducing “Speaking of Standards”, a new Voxeo blog about industry standards, IETF, W3C, SIP Forum, etc.A large part of why I have NOT been writing here all that much in the past few weeks is that I’ve been busy in my new role with Voxeo working on a corporate blog portal. I’ve been covering a bit of that odyssey over on my Disruptive Conversations blog as well as in my weekly reports into the For Immediate Release podcast. It’s been a great amount of work but also a lot of fun – I’ve been very lucky to have a colleague who does amazing things with CSS and graphics, and so the sites look a whole lot better than they would if I were left to my own devices.
I’m very pleased to say, now, that we’ve reached the point where I’m willing to link to our work and talk a bit about what we are doing. The main blog portal is the predictable “blogs.voxeo.com” but the weblog that we’re really starting to use and could be of interest to readers of this blog is our “Speaking of Standards” blog found at:
http://blogs.voxeo.com/speakingofstandards/
I’ve obviously been very occasionally writing here about standards and some of that may continue, but I expect most of…
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Congrats to Dean Elwood for joining Truphone!
Continue Reading: Congrats to Dean Elwood for joining Truphone!Congratulations to Dean Elwood for joining Truphone as their Director of Platform Operations! I’ve known Dean for a couple of years now through Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast where he’s commented from time to time and also provided us the SIP-based comment line (sip:bluebox@voipuser.org) through his involvement with the VoIPuser.org web site. We had a chance to meet a year or so ago at the first Blue Box dinner we had in London and Dean also hosted a dinner at VON Fall Boston a few weeks ago. He’s a great guy with tremendous talent and I’m sure he’ll be a great resource for Truphone. Speaking of Truphone, they are also a fascinating company to watch and I’ve come to know a good number of folks involved over time. I’m looking forward very much to seeing what comes out of their work and I wish Dean all the best in his new role.
Technorati Tags: dean elwood, truphone
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New Facebook voice app: VoxCall lets you do free calls between SIP phones/numbers
Continue Reading: New Facebook voice app: VoxCall lets you do free calls between SIP phones/numbersBy way of my Facebook NewsFeed this morning, I learned that several friends had installed a new Facebook app called “VoxCall” (must be logged into the walled garden of Facebook to see the link). A quick Technorati search brought me to Alex Saunders’ blog post on the subject which clued me in to the fact that this was from the folks at Voxalot, some of whom I’d met down at Fall VON in Boston.
[Side Rant: This also shows the inherent weakness and stupidity of Facebook’s current implementation of “groups”. The Voxalot folks had posted info about this app in both the news and wall of their Facebook group, but of course I would never see it unless I just randomly happened to go there. Had they sent a message to all group users, I would have seen it in my Facebook Inbox, but it would be nice if instead Facebook had some way to notify you that you had new info in the groups to which you subscribe.]
The VoxCall app is basically a “click-to-call” app that makes use of Facebook’s directory. You simply click on the name of someone else who has the app installed…
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I’ll be out in Vancouver Dec 2-7 for the 70th meeting of the IETF.
Continue Reading: I’ll be out in Vancouver Dec 2-7 for the 70th meeting of the IETF.Just confirmed travel plans today – I will be heading out to the 70th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, from December 2-7. If any readers will be out there (either for the IETF or in Vancouver in general), please do drop a note and let me know. This will be my first meeting in my new role with Voxeo and I’m very much looking forward to renewing old acquaintances and also getting more directly involved with the work of the IETF.
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Verizon brings in 40 Gbps IP circuits… OC-768, anyone?
Continue Reading: Verizon brings in 40 Gbps IP circuits… OC-768, anyone?Having been online now since the early 1980s and having watched/used the ever-increasing amounts of bandwidth we have available, it still made me pause to read that Verizon Business has launched 40Gbps connections on its backbone using Juniper Networks routers.
40 Gbps?
Pretty mind-blowing, considering where we have come from. I’ll spare you all the tugging on my beard (that is now gray in spots) and reminiscing about how we all had to connect at 110 baud using acoustic couplers… I will say that back in the late 1990’s when I wrote the Networking Essentials Exam Guide, I did cover the OC-n naming convention for connections, but I don’t think we would ever have imagined that some day there would be “OC-768”. Pretty cool!
Not that we as consumers will necessarily see that bandwidth anytime soon… but it is nice to know it is there in the backbone. (Also interesting that they note that the growth of their VoIP offerings is one of the reasons for being interested in this backbone.)
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Did you know RFC 4733 had replaced/obsoleted RFC 2833 for DTMF signaling in SIP?
Continue Reading: Did you know RFC 4733 had replaced/obsoleted RFC 2833 for DTMF signaling in SIP?Did you know that RFC 4733 replaced/obsoleted RFC 2833? I just learned this myself through a SIP Forum mailing list exchange the other day. For those not aware, RFC 2833 and now 4733 define methods of carrying DTMF signals (and other similar signaling) in RTP streams separate from the main audio component of the RTP stream. A typical example of use might be where you were using a highly-compressed audio codec for audio between two SIP endpoints where the high degree of compression might make it challenging for the DTMF tones to be correctly interpreted on the receiving end. Using “RFC 2833 compliant” signaling, the sending SIP endpoint would send those DTMF tones as separate packets within the RTP stream.
My key takeaway from learning about RFC 4733 is that we should really be talking about “RFC 4733 compliant” signaling… but given that the industry is really only now starting to really talk about “RFC 2822 compliant” signaling, I’m not sure I expect to see that happening anytime soon.
Anyway, here’s the abstract from RFC 4733 – you can naturally read the rest of the document to understand more:
This memo describes how to carry dual-tone multifrequency (DTMF) signalling, other…
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Want to see the people I work with? – Voxeo’s office and people… as seen via Flickr
Continue Reading: Want to see the people I work with? – Voxeo’s office and people… as seen via Flickr
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Originally uploaded by voxeophoto As most of you know by now I’m now employed by Voxeo and the folks down in the Orlando office recently started using some camera’s to upload pictures to company Flickr stream. We did this largely because we’re hiring (more job openings to be posted soon) and we want potential candidates to see what a fun place it is to work… but it will also factor into some of the other blogging and other work we’ll be doing.Anyway, you can check it out. No photos of me there, yet, since I wasn’t around when the camera’s were being passed around. (I’ll upload a picture of me to the site, though, soon.)
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Jeff Pulver on the status of VoIP-related legislation in the USA…
Continue Reading: Jeff Pulver on the status of VoIP-related legislation in the USA…I haven’t written much here about the state of VoIP-related regulations in the USA, but Jeff Pulver just did yesterday on his blog with his post, “VoIP in America: The State of VoIP“. I would encourage you to give it a read, even if you don’t live in the USA. It’s great that we all are building useful technologies… but we also need to make sure that government regulations do allow us to use those technologies.
Technorati Tags: politics, regulation, voip
