Month: March 2011
-
/
Skype’s Mini-Outage On March 30 – And The Need For Greater Transparency
Continue Reading: Skype’s Mini-Outage On March 30 – And The Need For Greater TransparencyYesterday Skype had another outage. This one apparently was only minor and affected people logging in to Skype or using inbound phone numbers (what we used to call “SkypeIn” numbers). It didn’t affect me at all – Skype worked fine for me.Skype’s recovered from the outage… but what I find a bit annoying is that there seems to be no real information about what happened.
There is a brief post on the Skype Heartbeat site which says only that things are “returning to normal” but that there might still be problems with:
- Signing in to Skype, Skype manager, the developer site, and the forums
- Buying Skype Credit or subscriptions
- Making calls to landlines and mobiles
Tales From Twitter
The best guess is what we can glean from their Twitter stream:
So apparently per this tweet the outage was caused “by an ISP failure“.
On The Need For Transparency
Here we are a day later and there is complete silence from Skype’s online sites. Nothing more on Twitter. Nothing on the blogs that I could see. I poked around a bit in the…
-
/
VoiceOnTheWeb Reviews Skype’s Qik Video Connect
Continue Reading: VoiceOnTheWeb Reviews Skype’s Qik Video ConnectWant the scoop on Qik Video Connect for the iPhone and iPad? Shortly after it was released last week Jim Courtney (of VoiceOnTheWeb) and I made our usual calls to each other to try out new apps. Unfortunately, I was slammed with a brutal cold/flu sickness last week and haven’t had the cycles to write up my own thoughts on the new app… nor do I see myself doing so anytime soon. Sooo… let me point you over to Jim’s views on the subject:Qik Video Connect: New Video Directions from Skype
I’ll add to Jim’s commentary that I did also use the free Qik Video Connect app on my iPad2. The app is not designed for the iPad – it’s just the iPhone app running on the iPad2 – but it did work perfectly fine to make and receive video calls. In the multiple calls to Jim I spoke with him from both my iPhone and iPad2.
I did not test out the live streaming due to the fact that I was quite sick and did not honestly want people to see me on video! 🙂 I’m looking forward to trying live streaming, though, at the next event I…
-
/
Stuck With Old Nortel PeriPro Apps? Check Out This Migration Tool…
Continue Reading: Stuck With Old Nortel PeriPro Apps? Check Out This Migration Tool…Did you spend a significant amount of time, money and energy building voice applications with the “Peri Producer” (a.k.a. “PeriPro”) tool formerly owned by Nortel and now by Avaya? Would you like to move away from proprietary lock-in to a standards-based platform with a clear future? Would you like to move your PeriPro app beyond simply voice and add in communication channels like SMS/text messaging, IM, mobile web and even Twitter?If so, do check out what my colleagues within Voxeo have come out with as the “VoiceObjects Migration Manager“:
http://developers.voiceobjects.com/support-training/voiceobjects-migration-manager/
It’s a tool that helps you move those PeriPro apps over onto Voxeo VoiceObjects where they can then work with either Voxeo’s IVR platform or the IVR platforms of about 30 other vendors. My colleague Tobias Goebel put together this screencast that talks about what the migration tool can do:
There was also an hour-long webinar earlier in March where Tobias and Dan Evans discussed the tool at great length and answered many questions from attendees. You can view the webinar and/or download the slides at the jam session page at:
http://blogs.voxeo.com/jamsessions/2011/03/07/jam-session-march-10-2011-peripro-migration-too/
While PeriPro apps were the first type of app to be converted by the VoiceObjects Migration…
-
/
Summary: Links to Posts on Calling Google Voice using SIP
Continue Reading: Summary: Links to Posts on Calling Google Voice using SIPGiven that I’ll be the guest on today’s VUC call in about an hour discussing this topic, here’s a list of some of the posts involved in the recent saga around Google Voice and SIP.On Saturday, March 5, 2011, Todd Vierling pointed out that you could call Google Voice Numbers via a SIP URI:
Unaware of Todd’s post, but seeing mention of this SIP calling in tweets from Aswath Rao and Alok Saboo, I started what became a series of posts on Monday, March 7:
- Google Voice Now Offers SIP Addresses For Calling Directly Over IP
- Did Google Hang Up On Calling Google Voice Via SIP?
- Google Voice Via SIP – It’s Dead, Jim
- Google Voice Via SIP – Not Dead Yet… (The Saga Continues)
wherein the service was working… then it wasn’t… then it was… etc.
At this precise moment in time, the service IS working for me, although when I just tried it took quite some time for my SIP softphone to actually start getting a ring. But the connection did work.
Also of interest, Todd Vierling put up a great post earlier on March 4 about…
-
/
Join Today’s VUC Call at Noon US Eastern To Talk About Google Voice and SIP
Continue Reading: Join Today’s VUC Call at Noon US Eastern To Talk About Google Voice and SIPWant to join a discussion about the whole issue with Google Voice and SIP? And what we might want to really have in terms of SIP interconnect with Google Voice? And, while we’re there, want to talk about the latest changes in the mobile carrier space?If so, join the VUC conf call happening in 90 minutes at 12 noon US Eastern. Randy, the host of VUC, asked me if I would come on as the guest and I did agree. Of course, that was before I was hit with a brutal cold this week… but I’m getting better to the point where I should be able to talk fine (if a bit funny-sounding) on the call.
You can join the live call via SIP, Skype or the regular old PSTN. There is also an IRC backchannel that gets heavy usage during the call. It will be recorded so you can always listen later.
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
-
/
Microsoft Infographic on Mobile Market Shows Compelling Numbers
Continue Reading: Microsoft Infographic on Mobile Market Shows Compelling NumbersEverybody loves an infographic, right? Earlier today Mashable ran a Microsoft infographic about the state of the mobile market. The numbers are quite powerful (click the image to see the full version):I had a huge personal disconnect with one of the stats showing that so many people use their mobile phones for games, simply because I almost never use my phone that way…
Yet I know that many people do and I see that when I’m out and about.
All in all some interesting stats, even if they do have the inevitable promotion of Microsoft Tags, since that was the sponsor of the infographic. (Microsoft Tags being their proprietary mobile tag solution versus the QR codes you see in many places.) Not a bad technique for Microsoft really… create a great infographic with lots of compelling data… and then insert a few little tidbits and links that promote your story.. and then…
… people like me will write about it. 🙂
Regardless, there are some good stats there… kudos to the MS team who put it together.
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
-
/
Skype Releases 5.1 for Mac OSX – Mostly Fixes
Continue Reading: Skype Releases 5.1 for Mac OSX – Mostly FixesFor those Mac users brave enough to step into the world of Skype 5.0 (or who inadvertently accepted the upgrade box that popped up), Skype has come out with Skype 5.1 for Mac OS X today. As Beom Soo Park notes on the Skype Garage blog, this release contains:- Focus on active speakers in group calls
- Dial recently called numbers from dial pad
- Contact groups shown in on the right hand side, allowing more space in the side bar
- Call Quality Feedback
- Several minor bug fixes
All of it pretty much pointing it to being the minor “dot release” that it is. The Mac release notes have also been updated with the same information.
I will say that the removal of the Contact groups from the left sidebar is a huge benefit to me. The result is a MUCH more compact sidebar:
The contact groups have now been moved over to the top of the right window area (the “main” section), which works nicely.
Unfortunately once I clicked on a group, I could find no way to return to the full set of contacts (and I’ve raised a bug ticket with Skype on this).
UPDATE – 3/25/11: It turns out…
-
/
Combined Coverage Map: AT&T and T-Mobile – Montana is Still A Blank Spot
Continue Reading: Combined Coverage Map: AT&T and T-Mobile – Montana is Still A Blank SpotWant to know what the combined coverage of AT&T and T-Mobile would look like on a map? By way of a tweet from Todd Carothers I learned of a post at Fierce Mobile Content that uses maps from AmericanRoamer.com to show what the combined coverage map of the United States would look like. Click on the link or image to see all the various comparison maps:Interesting to see the spectrum holdings of the two companies as well.
Alas, my little pocket of southwestern New Hampshire doesn’t stand to gain much out the merger… we’re still stuck with the limited AT&T coverage we have. At least, though, we’re not up in Montana, where it would appear coverage is close to nonexistent… (and yes, I know that population is minimal up there, too).
Interesting charts…
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
-
/
VoiceOnTheWeb Reviews Skype 5.2 For Windows
Continue Reading: VoiceOnTheWeb Reviews Skype 5.2 For WindowsOver on his VoiceOnTheWeb site, Jim Courtney wrote up a good review of Skype 5.2 for Windows that was recently released. Jim’s summary: subtle window dressings.It’s interesting to read… consider the subtle shift of moving the “Video call” button over to the left so that is the first button:
No longer having any Windows systems in my home office, I’m not running Skype 5.2 so I appreciate Jim’s review. Do check it out!
UPDATE: – Shortly after I published this, Jim Courtney came out with a second post about Skype 5.2 explaining some changes to dialing PSTN numbers.
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
-
/
The Media Frenzy About The AT&T Acquisition of T-Mobile USA – Is There Anything More To Be Said Right Now?
Continue Reading: The Media Frenzy About The AT&T Acquisition of T-Mobile USA – Is There Anything More To Be Said Right Now?Multiple people have pinged me asking if I was going to weigh in on the news last night that AT&T is acquiring T-Mobile USA.Seriously?
It’s been ages since I’ve seen this kind of online and offline media feeding frenzy[1] … I mean, look at Techmeme this morning:
Pretty much everybody and anybody who writes online with anything remotely to do with communications has generated posts on the topic.
I think at this point all we can really do is watch what the regulators say… and realize that this will take a year or more to actually happen. I’ll perhaps have more to say at some future time, but right now I’m just reading Om and all the many other comments out there…
[1] Well, okay, maybe we haven’t seen this kind of media feeding frency since, oh, the iPad2 launch 😉
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either: