Month: May 2011
-
/
What is Best? Deploying Communications Apps to the Cloud? On-Premises? Or Hybrid?
Continue Reading: What is Best? Deploying Communications Apps to the Cloud? On-Premises? Or Hybrid?What is the best way to deploy communications applications? In the hosted “cloud”? On your premises behind your firewall? Or some kind of hybrid approach? Back in February I presented in a Voxeo “Best Practices” webinar on just this topic: Best Practices in Deploying Communication Applications: Cloud vs On-Premises vs Hybrid. While a recording and the slides of the hour-long session have been available on the webinar page, it is also now available via Voxeo’s YouTube account:The great part about YouTube is that you can view it on many different devices, including mobile devices like the iPhone or iPad.
It was an enjoyable session to present with lots of great questions. If you have any feedback on the session or would like to know more, please contact me.
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
-
/
China Passes 900 Million Cell Phone Users!
Continue Reading: China Passes 900 Million Cell Phone Users!Fascinating stats out of an article at TheNextWeb this week:China has become the first country to reach the 900 million mobile phone user milestone after amassing about 11 million mobile phone users in April alone, according to a report by the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
The report itself is available in Chinese. Looking at it via Google Translate did back up the numbers quoted in the article (assuming Google Translate was accurate).
By any measurement, 900 million is a staggering number of mobile phone users. TheNextWeb’s article goes on to say that India is second worldwide with 811 million mobile phone users followed distantly by the US with 303 million users.
Said another way… China has almost 3 times as many mobile phone users as the US.
Consider, too, that China’s population is 1.3 billion… and you have to imagine that like folks here in the US some % of people have multiple mobile phones… so there’s obviously plenty of room to grow.
I found this intriguing from the article:
China’s 3G networks, which launched in 2009, are still used only by a small portion of the country’s total mobile phone populace. In April, China had…
-
/
Voxbone To Work with United Nations To Deploy New 888 Country Code For Disaster Relief Efforts
Continue Reading: Voxbone To Work with United Nations To Deploy New 888 Country Code For Disaster Relief EffortsCool news from the good folks at Voxbone yesterday that they have been chosen by the U.N. to implement a new “888” country code for agencies offering disaster relief.It’s not clear from the news release exactly how this would work, but Alec Saunders spoke with Voxbone CEO yesterday and wrote this in a post:
As Ullens explained to me, +888 is a real country code assigned by the ITU to the UN. In cases of humanitarian need, where telephone systems may be inoperable because of natural disaster, the first teams on the ground would deploy a local GSM antenna, connected via satellite to the rest of the world. Then Voxbone would simply forward calls to the +888 country code via satellite to the local GSM station on the ground. The impact is that UN inter-agency, intra-agency, and external users will be able to dial a +888 number assigned to a relief agency from anywhere in the world, and be immediately connected to that relief agency in the field, in whatever country being served. Not only that, the numbers need never change. Relief staff will be reachable on the same numbers in whatever location they are currently assigned.
If this…
-
/
Skype Issues Official Statement About The End Of Skype For Asterisk
Continue Reading: Skype Issues Official Statement About The End Of Skype For AsteriskBefore writing my story yesterday about Skype killing off Skype For Asterisk, I had reached out to Skype’s PR agency to see if there was any statement from Skype. There wasn’t at the time, but today they sent over this statement from Jennifer Caukin, a spokeswoman for Skype:Skype made the decision to retire Skype for Asterisk several months ago, as we have prioritized our focus around implementing the IETF SIP standard in our Skype Connect solution. SIP enjoys the broadest support of any of the available signaling alternatives by business communications equipment vendors, including Digium. By supporting SIP in favor of alternatives, we maximize our resources and continue to reinforce our commitment to delivering Skype on key platforms where we can meet the broadest customer demand.
Being a huge advocate of open standards, I of course applaud Skype’s commitment to supporting SIP. However, as I noted two years ago in my detailed review of what was then “Skype For SIP” (and is now “Skype Connect”) the fundamental difference between Skype For Asterisk and Skype’s SIP offering is this:
Skype For Asterisk is/was two-way – you can make outbound calls TO Skype users.
You can’t do that with Skype Connect.…
-
/
Skype Kills Off “Skype For Asterisk” – A Sign of the New Microsoft Era?
Continue Reading: Skype Kills Off “Skype For Asterisk” – A Sign of the New Microsoft Era?UPDATE: Skype has issued an official statement about the end of Skype For Asterisk. Word breaking out right now from multiple sources is that Skype has killed off the Skype for Asterisk product developed in conjunction with Digium. In an email sent by Digium product management that was subsequently posted on web sites (including Digium’s), the company says (my emphasis added):Skype for Asterisk was developed by Digium in cooperation with Skype. It includes proprietary software from Skype that allows Asterisk to join the Skype network as a native client. Skype has decided not to renew the agreement that permits us to package this proprietary software. Therefore Skype for Asterisk sales and activations will cease on July 26, 2011.
Skype will apparently continue to support the SFA software for an additional two years until July 26, 2013.
The Promise…
Skype For Asterisk was announced with great fanfare back at Astricon in 2008. I wrote about how it might tear down some of the walls of Skype’s proprietary walled garden and posted multiple follow-up posts, including a detailed dive into Asterisk interconnection and how Skype could help with that.
The beautiful part was that Skype For Asterisk allowed two-way communication into…
-
/
Tropo.com Lowers SMS Rate to 1 Cent Per Message – Now Super-Cheap To Build SMS Apps
Continue Reading: Tropo.com Lowers SMS Rate to 1 Cent Per Message – Now Super-Cheap To Build SMS AppsWant to build text messaging (SMS) applications for a very cheap price? My colleagues over in Voxeo Labs recently reduced the price of sending or receiving SMS messages to only 1 cent per message. (As a bonus, they also came up with the cute graphic I’m using on the right.)As Adam Kalsey writes in the Tropo blog post, “Announcing New lower SMS pricing” sending an SMS is a trivial matter in Tropo. His language of choice is PHP, so he shows:
<?php call('+14155551212', array('network' => 'SMS')); say('d00d, Penny SMS? '); ?>But you could obviously do something very similar in Python, Ruby, Groovy or JavaScript in Tropo Scripting… or with any language using the Tropo WebAPI.
Personally, I like seeing what I can do to merge SMS with Twitter… back in December I wrote about how to use Tropo to trigger alerts via SMS based on text in Twitter, which is a variation of an app I do actually use for Twitter monitoring. My colleague Justin Dupree also wrote a cool post about using Node.js to build a Twitter IM/SMS service.
Anyway… all of these SMS apps are now able to be deployed in production for only 1…
-
/
The End of the “Skype as Bandit” Era
Continue Reading: The End of the “Skype as Bandit” EraAnd so it ends… Skype was always always a fun company to write about because they were always a bit of a rogue.The scrappy little startup that took on the megacorps of the telecom industry… and won in so many ways… look at their leading % of international calls… or the fact that per-minute call costs are now very clearly being commoditized down to zero…
… the product that came from the grey areas of P2P file sharing and created some truly revolutionary network technology and created a software client that “just worked” like magic from behind any firewall…
… a company from Estonia of all places, which pre-Skype most of us could only vaguely put on a map but now many of us know more about, including that fact that many Estonians have multiple vowels together in their names in ways we don’t in English (ex. “Jaanus” and “Liive”)…
… a product that was given away for free across multiple operating systems (even if some of us whined about the lack of attention to our chosen platform)…
… a service that just went ahead and implemented SRTP and encrypted call control when all the major telcos were whining…
-
/
Skype Issues 2nd Mac 5.1 Hotfix for “Security Issues” – But What Are Those Issues?
Continue Reading: Skype Issues 2nd Mac 5.1 Hotfix for “Security Issues” – But What Are Those Issues?Today, Skype issued a new Skype 5.1 for Mac “hotfix” for more “security issues”. The problem?We don’t know what those “security issues” are?
We don’t know, for instance:
- Are they related to the remote exploit that was publicly disclosed on Friday? Or to related attacks on the same theme? (as discussed on SecNiche today)
- What is the severity of these “security issues”? Remote compromise? Denial of service? What?
- What is the priority that we should place on getting this update in place? Is it a “UPDATE NOW!” kind of priority? or a “Update when you can”?
- What kind of mitigating circumstances are there for these security fixes?
- Are there any workarounds that could be put in place at a network layer (or any other layer) to prevent attacks on individual systems? (i.e. as a safety measure until the individual clients are all updated?)
We need to know this kind of information.
Particularly as Skype looks to try to move more into the “business” or “enterprise” market space, this level of NON-disclosure is unacceptable.
In comparison, take a look at any of the recent Microsoft security bulletins, like, oh, this one, and you can see the kind of information that…
- Are they related to the remote exploit that was publicly disclosed on Friday? Or to related attacks on the same theme? (as discussed on SecNiche today)
-
/
Fascinating to Watch AT&T and Sprint Duke It Out Over T-Mobile Acquisition
Continue Reading: Fascinating to Watch AT&T and Sprint Duke It Out Over T-Mobile AcquisitionInteresting piece on the “This Is My Next” site last night about Sprint and AT&T taking to print ads to ratchet up their fight over AT&T’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile:
Sprint and AT&T take merger battle to print: ‘Competition is American, Competition plays fair’
The issue is, of course, that there is a U.S. Congressional hearing on the proposed acquisition this coming Wednesday in D.C. Sprint obviously is opposed to the merger and is pulling no punches in saying exactly what it feels about the proposed merger. I do admit to enjoying one line in their ad:
Competition keeps us all from returning to a Ma Bell-like, sorry-but-you-have-no-choice past.
This definitely IS a concern for all of us as the companies in the mobile space continue to consolidate.
AT&T of course counters with how this will be the best for the country, how it will foster innovation, bring about a stronger network, etc.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. For me personally, the proposed merger offers very little. AT&T has poor coverage where I live (Keene, NH) and T-Mobile has even worse coverage of the area… so I don’t expect that we’d see any…
-
/
Skype’s Security Communication FAIL – Why Issue a HotFix If You Don’t Tell Anyone?
Continue Reading: Skype’s Security Communication FAIL – Why Issue a HotFix If You Don’t Tell Anyone?What is the point in issuing a hotfix that addresses a security vulnerability… if you don’t tell anyone that the hotfix is available?Tonight Skype published a blog post saying that back on April 14th they released a “hotfix” for this problem in Skype for Mac version 5.1.0.922. That’s great… it’s good that the fix is out there, but…
how were we Mac users supposed to know about it?
Hmmm… let’s see… Could we find out about the Skype for Mac hotfix…
- … using the “Check for Updates” feature? Nope, doesn’t work for me. Maybe it works for others out there, but not for me.
- … from the Skype for Mac Release Notes page? Nope, that page STILL hasn’t been updated, three weeks later, to indicate that a new version is out. Nothing on there at all about 5.1.0.922.
- … from Skype’s Twitter account? Nope, no mention of a hotfix back on April 15th, although they did talk about the fact that Skype was mentioned twice on 30 Rock and that there was Skype call on the Rachael Ray show.
- … from Skype’s skypesecurity Twitter account? Nope, no mention.
- … on Skype’s Mac blog? Nope. Last post there was April…
- … using the “Check for Updates” feature? Nope, doesn’t work for me. Maybe it works for others out there, but not for me.