Month: November 2010
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A *CRAZY* Week In Collaboration / Communications News – A Summary from Dave Michels
Continue Reading: A *CRAZY* Week In Collaboration / Communications News – A Summary from Dave MichelsThis has been an absolutely insane week of announcements relating to the Unified Communications / collaboration / VoIP / etc, etc. space… it’s been a while since I can think of a week that had so much news packed into it.
I think it’s called… “everyone wants to get all their news out before it is US Thanksgiving and people start ignoring news because of the holidays!”
Regardless of why, the fact is that each day I’ve watched the Twitter stream just scrolling by with tons of items I’d love to write about. Unfortunately, I, too, have been slammed – and unable to write all that I’ve wanted to.
Thankfully, Dave Michels pulled together a nice summary over on No Jitter:
Watta Week!
Check there for pointers to stories about Microsoft Lync… Mitel Freedom… Cisco’s zillion video announcements… and news from Polycom, Avaya and HP, too.
Some week, I’m hoping to write about each of these myself… but that week is very definitely NOT this week!
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Today’s VUC call at noon US Eastern: FREETALK Connect – Skype-connected IP-PBX
Continue Reading: Today’s VUC call at noon US Eastern: FREETALK Connect – Skype-connected IP-PBXIn about 40 minutes, this week’s VoiP Users Conference call will start with Jim Courtney talking about the new FREETALK Connect IP-PBX. It includes:- Skype connectivity for all phones.
- Auto-provisioning works with almost all models of desktop and conference IP phones
- Install wizard configures all basic networking, telephony system and user functionality on the FREETALK Connect
- Remote administration capabilities that enable the system to be administered from anywhere Internet access is available.
I’m intrigued by the system because it integrates an Asterisk-based IP-PBX with Skype – and is “certified” by Skype. I’m looking forward to hearing what Jim has to say about it.
If you’d like to listen live, there are regular, SIP and Skype contact phone numbers to dial into the VUC. You can also jump on #vuc on IRC to join in the text backchannel.
If you can’t join live, a recording of the call will be posted to the episode’s web page sometime in the next few days.
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Meet My Spam Honeypot for Telemarketers (Otherwise Known As My Desk Phone)
Continue Reading: Meet My Spam Honeypot for Telemarketers (Otherwise Known As My Desk Phone)The phone on my desk rang a second time today. I glanced at the console, didn’t recognize the Caller ID and simply ignored the call. A minute or two later a text message buzzed on my iPhone with a transcription of the voicemail left by the caller. I took one look and knew right away:
Yep, another telemarketer!
Just like another call earlier today. As I did my little glance-ignore-wait-for-text-message routine I realized yet again how my communications channels have changed over the years. Here is the reality:
I pretty much NEVER answer my desk phone.
Why not? Pretty simple, really:
The people who I want to speak with already know how to get in touch with me!
And the “how” comes down to: unified communications and mobile.
Unified Communications
For instance, we’re huge users of Skype internally at Voxeo. I have everyone in the company as a contact, and am in a zillion various group chats with internal employees. If someone within the company wants to reach me, they will:
- Check my presence on Skype. Am I online? If so, am I “away”? or “busy/Do Not Disturb”?
- Send me an IM – asking if they can call me if…
- Check my presence on Skype. Am I online? If so, am I “away”? or “busy/Do Not Disturb”?
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Want a Tropo.com USB Bottle Opener?
Continue Reading: Want a Tropo.com USB Bottle Opener?I have to say this is one of the coolest giveaways I’ve seen for bit… yes, it’s for a service of my employer, Voxeo, but regardless, it’s a cool piece of schwag (and I had nothing to do with it):
It worked out perfectly when I wanted to open a beer for a late night of writing blog posts! (Now, whether the beer helped with the coherency of the blog posts is a different topic…)
What’s even cooler from a geek point-of-view, is that the contents of the USB drive are all managed using the Git version control system! Adam Kalsey wrote about how he assembled the drive content using git, and particularly git submodules, and then about how he loaded the content onto the USB drives. Pretty cool stuff!
If you’d like to get your hands on one of these USB bottle openers, all you have to do is speak about Tropo at an event or host a meetup – the Tropo team will ship out a meetup kit that includes a few of these.
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Tim Panton: Contrasting Digium and Skype’s Developer Programs and Outreach
Continue Reading: Tim Panton: Contrasting Digium and Skype’s Developer Programs and OutreachLongtime telephony developer Tim Panton wrote a great story this morning contrasting recent developer outreach from Digium with that of Skype:
The way to create a new product or service when you already have one.
I do agree with Tim that Digium did a great job in reaching out to the community in developing the Asterisk SCF… and I do unfortunately agree with Tim that this continues to be an area where Skype struggles. Skype is now on perhaps its 5th or 6th iteration of a “developer program”… maybe more… I’ve lost track, quite honestly, over all these years… still working on finding a program that builds a strong ecosystem of developers around Skype. They’ve hired some great people at Skype… and I’m hopeful that their newer work with SkypeKit will be positive… but we’ll have to see.
[In full disclosure, my employer Voxeo has been involved with Skype’s developer programs for a long time, dating back to the first “Voice Services” program back in 2005/2006 (which was later discontinued) and continues to be involved in Skype programs. However, I’ve not been directly involved in those programs on Voxeo’s behalf.]
Tim also pointed to this great TechCrunch guest post…
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Video: AstriCon Keynote Demonstrating Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF)
Continue Reading: Video: AstriCon Keynote Demonstrating Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF)Want to learn more about the Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF)? While I wrote about Asterisk SCF last week, Digium has now posted the video of the keynote session. It starts with Digium CEO Danny Windham and then at about the 5:45 mark Kevin Fleming takes the stage. At about 10 minutes Kevin starts bringing some community members on stage to tell some stories… all building up to the actual SCF announcement about 33 minutes in 🙂
Regardless of the long buildup, it’s worth watching if you want to understand where Asterisk is going… the demo is pretty cool, too!
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Under 2 Hours Left in Skype’s Twitter Contest (for a $1500 Apple Store Gift Cert)
Continue Reading: Under 2 Hours Left in Skype’s Twitter Contest (for a $1500 Apple Store Gift Cert)Speaking of Skype, there is only a little bit under 2 hours left for you to enter their contest on Twitter for a $1500 USD Apple Store Gift Certificate.What contest?, you may ask. Indeed, outside of 3 tweets on their @Skype account I haven’t seen much to promote this contest… but Skype is giving away a Apple Store gift certificate to some random person who has tweeted out their favorite feature using the #SkypeMac5 hashtag. As you can see from the Twitter search stream for that hashtag, there are some people out there tweeting away…
Official rules and all that are at: http://offerpop.com/skype/1609
Of course, I probably shouldn’t mention this as I wouldn’t mind winning! 🙂
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3 Interesting Omissions from the Skype 5.0 Beta for Mac OS X
Continue Reading: 3 Interesting Omissions from the Skype 5.0 Beta for Mac OS XSince the launch of Skype 5.0 Beta for Mac last week, I’ve continued use it on one Mac and simultaneously using the current Skype 2.8 on another Mac. In using both, I’ve been struck by a couple of interesting omissions.One is somewhat trivial but was always kind of fun to see – the 2.8 client listed the number of people online in the bottom right corner:
As a numbers/stats geek, it was kind of fun to see that number change over time, both in terms of hours of the day and also the overall growth. If this number is somehow visible in the Skype 5.0 Beta, I’ve yet to see it.
UPDATE: This was added to a 5.0 release, but through a typed command, not directly in the user interface as it was in Skype 2.8. You can now go into any chat in the 5.x client and type: /mac users to see the number of users currently online.
UPDATE – 5 Mar 2012: This
/mac userscommand no longer works in at least the Skype 5.5 client for the Mac.UPDATE – 6 Mar 2012: It turns out that the command in Skype 5.5 for Mac OS X…
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Congrats to Mark Headd for joining Voxeo Labs and Tropo.com
Continue Reading: Congrats to Mark Headd for joining Voxeo Labs and Tropo.comFlickr credit: ecommconf
I was delighted to see the official word go out today that Mark Headd will be joining our Voxeo Labs team to work on promoting our Tropo cloud communications service. For the past few years I’ve had the privilege of working with Mark as an “external” developer on a range of projects related to Voxeo’s platforms. Mark has a very strong interest in “open government” which is also a passion of mine (although I don’t get to work too much on issues related to it) and maintains his Vox Populi blog where he outlines many of his various projects connecting voice, IM, SMS and Twitter to various government projects. (Usually using one of Voxeo’s platforms or various open source systems.)
One cool aspect about Mark is his flexibility in languages and topics. He’s equally at home contributing a series of guest blog posts about VoiceXML, writing about building an IM (and Twitter) Bot for the NY State Senate Legislative API, writing a series of posts about building multichannel transit apps with PHP and Tropo or showing how to connect Phono and Tropo to a CCXML app to enable screen pops via…
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VIDEO: Review of Skype 5.0 Beta for MacOS X, including Group Video
Continue Reading: VIDEO: Review of Skype 5.0 Beta for MacOS X, including Group VideoWant to SEE the new Skype 5.0 Beta for MacOS X in action? Over on the Voxeo blog for my Emerging Tech Talk video podcast, I posted a video review of the Skype 5.0 Beta for MacOS X. You can see the new UI and see the Group Video calling capabilities:
I’m using the Skype 5.0 Beta for Mac on my personal iMac, where screen real estate isn’t a problem at all and so far it’s interesting… it definitely takes a good bit of time to get used to. Over on my work MacBook Pro, I’m still using Skype 2.8.x until I’m really sure I want to make the switch. 🙂
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