Month: February 2011
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Photo Tour – Many More Shots of Skype’s Funky New Office (From The Designers)
Continue Reading: Photo Tour – Many More Shots of Skype’s Funky New Office (From The Designers)Want to see more (and better) pictures of Skype’s new funky office in Palo Alto? After I first wrote about photos of the new Skype office back in December, the designers of Skype’s office space let me know that they would have some photos of their own coming as part of their new website. Those photos are now online at:http://designblitzsf.com/projects/skype-hq/
And yes, indeed, they do give a better view of the whole space, and some narrative text providing some context for the design, too. Very cool to see… as a network geek, I’m hoping that that map is live showing interactive Skype conversations 🙂
Many more cool shots over on the designers’ website…
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Great Guidelines From NIST on Deploying IPv6
Continue Reading: Great Guidelines From NIST on Deploying IPv6As I wrote about over on Voxeo’s “Speaking of Standards” blog, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) came out with a great set of guidelines around IPv6. Formally titled “Guidelines for the Secure Deployment of IPv6“, the document follows the tradition of many other NIST docs in being more than just guidelines. It’s also a great tutorial around IPv6.
You can download the doc at:
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-119/sp800-119.pdf
UPDATE: Shortly after publishing this post, I was alerted that the URL does NOT work and I, too, have now been unable to retrieve the document from NIST’s website. I was able to view it just the other day, and my browser still has a copy in its cache (and I also have a local copy myself). The NIST news archive shows that as of Dec 28, 2010 this document was in fact live. Perhaps the NIST team pulled the doc to update it… I don’t know. Hopefully it will be available again soon, and if there is a new URL I will update this post.It’s only 188 pages long, including the appendices and will definitely help if you’re just now trying to come up to speed on IPv6.
Kudos…
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Skype 5.0 Easter Egg: Super Simple Way To Launch Conference Calls!
Continue Reading: Skype 5.0 Easter Egg: Super Simple Way To Launch Conference Calls!Wow! I might have just found a feature cool enough to get me to move over to Skype 5.0 for the Mac, despite my many concerns with it.
Hidden among the many IRC-style chat commands (but not included on that list) is this one that you can type into a group chat using either Skype 5.0 for Windows or Mac:
/golive
When you do that, everyone in the chat (using 5.0) gets a notification that there is a conference call and can choose to join into the conf call right then.
What’s even cooler is that the call can be either audio or video. Of course, video is only available if someone has a Group Video Calling subscription.
What’s even more cool is that the act of typing that command will generate a URL that you can simply pass along to anyone else to have them join a call. You’ll see the URL in your chat window. It takes the form (for me) of:
skype:danyork?call&token=1234
You can now send this URL to people via Skype IM… via other IM… via email… via Twitter… via Facebook…
Anyone who clicks on that link will…
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Free webinar Tues, Feb 15 – Deploying Apps: Cloud vs. Premise vs. Hybrid
Continue Reading: Free webinar Tues, Feb 15 – Deploying Apps: Cloud vs. Premise vs. HybridWith all the buzz around the “cloud” and “cloud communications”, what is the reality amidst the hype? That’s a topic I’ll be discussing in a Voxeo webinar on Tuesday, February 15th, called “Best Practices in Deploying Communication Applications: Cloud vs On-Premises vs Hybrid“. Given that Voxeo’s had literally hundreds of thousands of apps deployed in both our hosted cloud and also on customer premises, we’ve learned a thing a two that I’ll be sharing. I’ll talk about questions such as:
- What are the advantages of deploying voice and SMS applications into the cloud?
- What are the disadvantages?
- What are the security issues you need to be aware of?
- When is it more appropriate to deploy applications on your premises?
- What kind of hybrid architectures are now available and what are their pros and cons?
Tuesday, Feb 15, 2011
8:00 AM US Pacific, 11:00 AM US Eastern, 5:00 PM Central EuropeanIt should be a fun session… and we’ll have time at the end for Q&A.
If you can’t watch it live, the webinar will be archived for later viewing (and if you register, we’ll alert you when the archive is…
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Skype Releases Hotfix for Skype 5.0 for Mac OSX
Continue Reading: Skype Releases Hotfix for Skype 5.0 for Mac OSXSkype this week released a “Hotfix” for the Skype 5.0 for Mac OSX. Surprisingly the upgrade/update process is not automated… I chose “Check for Updates…” in the Skype menu of my 5.0 client and it told me I was up-to-date. However, when I clicked on the download link in that Skype blog post, I downloaded the new version and was able to drag it to my Applications folder to do the update.From a user point-of-view, there don’t seem to be any new features in this release. It really is just a “hotfix” for a number of bugs, including the issue with Skype not letting other applications use the video camera that I affected some folks I know.
Anyway… Mac users who have gone ahead and moved to 5.0 may want to upgrade now (I have on one system and am still on 2.8 on another). The Skype blog post has a few more details on what was fixed.
P.S. If you haven’t been paying attention to what’s new with Skype 5.0 for the Mac, you may want to read about the “Gold” release, the launch of the beta of 5.0 for the Mac or my other Skype-related posts
If…
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Skype Adds H.264 Support to iPhone App And Supports Skype TVs
Continue Reading: Skype Adds H.264 Support to iPhone App And Supports Skype TVsThis morning’s visit to the AppStore on my iPhone brought news that Skype had rolled out version 3.0.1 of its iPhone client. The only news of what was in it was:
You can now make video calls to a wider selection of Skype clients and devices, such as Skype for TV.
It turns out (via a Skype blog post) that what this really means is that Skype has added the higher quality H.264 video codec to the app. As noted, this will let you do a video call with a Skype-equipped TV. (Which you bizarrely could not do from an iPhone before.)
While I don’t personally know anyone with a Skype-equipped TV, I’m looking forward to trying this out to see if it changes the quality of the video calls I make. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve used the iPhone quite a bit for video calls and been impressed so far.
Anyway, if you are an iPhone user, you can head on over to the AppStore and download this new version…
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Nokia and the Ongoing “War of Ecosystems”
Continue Reading: Nokia and the Ongoing “War of Ecosystems”Is Nokia about to drop its entire mobile platform for Android or Windows Phone 7? Yesterday the buzz in the telecom space was all about an apparent memo to employees from Nokia CEO Stephen Elop that said Nokia was on a “burning platform” and needed to make some hard choices. The text of the memo, which Engadget has in full, is brilliantly written. The metaphor of the worker on a burning oil platform is well done… and I expect we’ll hear more usage of that in the future by others.
The memo is also a very well done and brutally honest assessment of where Nokia stands in the mobile market and where the competition sits. What I found most compelling, though, was the commentary around the “war of ecosystems” (my emphasis added):
The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we…
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Want to understand where Voxeo is going? Watch this video…
Continue Reading: Want to understand where Voxeo is going? Watch this video…Would you like to understand what Voxeo, my employer, is all about and where the company is going? Want to know about all the cool tools and services we make available for free for developers?
If so, just watch this video interview that I recorded at ITEXPO with TMC:
I spoke with TMC’s Pat Barnard about the panels we were on at ITEXPO, as well as Tropo.com, Phono and the other services and products we offer for free to developers.
The amusing part was that this interview was not scheduled in advance but was rather a result of walking by their video area and being asked “How about recording an interview right now?” It was fun to do…. I actually love doing things like this, even just on-the-fly like this. Only one mistake I noticed… the “Facebook Telephone” app is at http://apps.facebook.com/telephone, not the URL I gave in the video.
I also noticed that I talk fast! And as far as I can recall, this was BEFORE any kind of caffeine. 🙂
Anyway, if you’d like an understanding of where Voxeo is going and all the cool things we are doing, this video should help in that…
If you found…
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Gogo In-Flight WiFi At Least Allows Skype Chat
Continue Reading: Gogo In-Flight WiFi At Least Allows Skype ChatIf you go back in time to September 2008 and recall the whole kerfuffle over the Gogo in-flight WiFi service NOT allowing VoIP calls (which we also covered on Blue Box podcast #83), one of the threads that was floating around was the wish that they would at least allow chat over Skype. If you couldn’t make calls, at least you could have IM conversations.
I didn’t really pay any further attention to the matter and didn’t find myself on planes with Gogo WiFi until this past week… and found that yes, indeed, sometime in the last two+ years Gogo did relax the Skype chat restriction (at least on Delta flights).
The FAQ now clearly states that Skype IM is allowed, while VoIP services are still not permitted:
While I was on a short flight and didn’t feel the need to pay for the in-flight WiFi, it was nice to know that I could have used Skype IM if I had wanted to.
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