Author: Dan York
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ETel, disrupted… O’Reilly cancels ETel! (But the ETel Program Committee is looking at what could be done instead…)
Continue Reading: ETel, disrupted… O’Reilly cancels ETel! (But the ETel Program Committee is looking at what could be done instead…)O’Reilly just cancelled ETel for 2008. Yes, indeed, it’s sadly true as shown here:
Due to changed circumstances since ETel 2008 was announced, we have decided not to move forward with the conference this year.
It is somewhat ironic that part of the ETel 2008 graphic was this:
Obviously O’Reilly did.
Those of us on the ETel Program Committee were just informed of the decision yesterday. We are admittedly still in a bit of shock. This year’s program had over 100 submissions and we were very much looking forward to what was shaping up to be an excellent conference this year. Great mixture of technical sessions, thought-provoking sessions and so much more.
We are not privy as to exactly why O’Reilly made the decision and on many levels it doesn’t really matter. As far as O’Reilly is concerned, ETel is now dead for 2008.
Personally, I think it is a loss to our industry. I think it is also, frankly, a loss to O’Reilly. But I’ll get into that perhaps in another post next week.
Right now, we on the ETel Program Committee are starting to look at what’s next. I think for many of us ETel served a…
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Going dark for the calm before the storm… (aka “light blogging ahead”)
Continue Reading: Going dark for the calm before the storm… (aka “light blogging ahead”)Life takes very interesting turns. Yesterday afternoon I faxed off my acceptance of an offer from a company I’d really never heard of that turns out to be doing some extremely fascinating things. They found me through this blog. We’ve talked. I’ve visited. I start on Monday, October 22nd. I’ll be actually in a role very similar to what I was doing before, but with more of a direct focus on social media, at least initially. I will still be working remotely from Vermont and will be traveling to similar conferences as in the past. It’s exciting and I’m very much looking forward to getting started. Great people. Great company. Profitable. Strong developer community. Been around for a while. In the right space, in my opinion.
For now, though, that’s all I’m going to say. More on (or near) the 22nd. 🙂
Until then, I’m expecting to be blogging less here and on my other blogs. I’m traveling to a PR/Communications conference next Monday and Tuesday to do a “Podcasting 101” workshop and so I’ll probably be blogging about that. There’s a hundred things I want to blog about! My queue of articles to write is probably the longest it…
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The audacity of Asterisk – why the 3Com/Digium partnership fundamentally changes the game in SMB telephony
Continue Reading: The audacity of Asterisk – why the 3Com/Digium partnership fundamentally changes the game in SMB telephonyThe SMB VoIP game is changing. Fundamentally. And in a pattern we’ve seen before in other industries. In the news release out today, Digium and 3Com announced that:Under the terms of the agreement, 3Com will offer Digium’s award-winning Asterisk Appliance™ to small businesses that need a reliable, easy-to-deploy voice solution based on open standards. 3Com Asterisk will be available through the company’s proven channel of partners worldwide.
Let’s think about that for a minute. 3Com will make Digium’s Asterisk appliance available through “the company’s proven channel of partner’s worldwide“, which some reports are putting at around 60,000 resellers. Digium just wound up with a large global sales channel. Yet to be seen is whether there will be any channel conflict with existing Digium Partners/VARs, but regardless, Digium just wound up with a way to deploy Asterisk-based solutions globally. It does, however, get one step better (my emphasis added):“3Com is focused on delivering products and solutions for converged secure networks, in which voice is an application that can be readily integrated with many others,” said Bob Dechant, senior vice president and general manager for 3Com Corporation. “We’ve announced a complete voice strategy and new product offerings for small businesses, including…
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eBay pays $530 million to buy out Skype founders – and writes down value of Skype by $900 million
Continue Reading: eBay pays $530 million to buy out Skype founders – and writes down value of Skype by $900 millionNot necessarily a great day over at Skype today – per the eBay news release, Niklas Zennstrom stepped down as CEO, eBay paid $533 million to “settle obligations to certain Skype shareholders” and is also taking a $900 million charge to write down the value of Skype. From a Bloomberg article:“It has not performed as well as we would have hoped in the short term,” EBay spokesman Hani Durzy said in an interview. Skype was profitable the first half of the year, he said.
Many others out there have already offered their analysis and so I’ll point you to them today:- Skype Journal (Jim Courtney): The Metamorphosis Begins: New CEO Sought for Skype
- VoIP Watch (Andy Abramson): Management Shake Up At Skype
- Bloomberg: EBay Takes $1.4 Billion Charge Related to Skype Unit
- Skype co-founder Janus Friis’ blog: (not) just another monday
- Thomas Crampton: Zennstrom defends Skype while stepping down
- Technorati search on ‘skype’
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Oops… challenges of using a new blog editor – I turned Trackbacks OFF by default
Continue Reading: Oops… challenges of using a new blog editor – I turned Trackbacks OFF by defaultAs I finished up my last post with additional thoughts on Skype and hotel networks, I naturally went to look for the TrackBack URI on my first post so that I could have the link show at the bottom of the article. However, when I went to look – there was no TrackBack URI shown! I went into TypePad’s control panel and, sure enough, the checkbox for allowing TrackBacks was unchecked. In further investigation, I found it was unchecked for all my other recent posts! (Now, fixed… they all should accept TrackBacks.)
The reason was relatively easy to find. When I started using my new MacBook Pro about two weeks ago, I started using a new offline blog editor, ecto. Over in the options area, there is a checkbox for TrackBack’s that I apparently had left in the unchecked state. I have now checked it and clicked the “Make Default” button so that it remains in this state. Details, details, details… (and my apologies to anyone who was looking for the trackback URI).
P.S. If any of you are Mac users and have opinions on what is the best offline blog editor to use on a Mac, I’m…
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Additional thoughts on Skype and hotel networks – there’s issues on both sides…
Continue Reading: Additional thoughts on Skype and hotel networks – there’s issues on both sides…To my immense surprise, my article yesterday about my challenges with Skype and my hotel Internet connection just hit TechMeme today, so welcome, anyone who is coming my way from there. But that also prompted me to want to offer up some additional thoughts on the subject.
First, I’m actually quite annoyed at the Best Western here in Ontario, CA, for essentially blocking Skype by virtue of their network security traffic policies. If travel shall bring me to Ontario, CA, again, you can be pretty sure that I will not be staying here. Skype has become an important communication tool for me and <cue violins>was the way I was intending to call home and stay in touch with my family</violins>. Skype has worked great at the hotel I was at earlier in the week in Phoenix and in fact at every other hotel I’ve been at lately. I do intend to contact Best Western to express my dissatisfaction at being unable to use the program.
Having said that, as a security professional I do understand WHY the security team at the Internet provider to this Best Western hotel has the policies in place that they do. As Phil Wolff commented,…
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How using Skype disrupted my hotel Internet connection and locked me out
Continue Reading: How using Skype disrupted my hotel Internet connection and locked me outUPDATE: I have now posted some additional thoughts about this issue.
It’s been a frustrating time here at the hotel in Ontario, CA, where all I’ve been trying to do is use the Internet connection. I’m staying at the Best Western and did so largely because they advertised free high-speed Internet (they were also cheaper than others). First annoyance was discovering that I was too far away from their APs to use wireless, but since I had an ethernet cable I just plugged into the wall jack and expected to get access. The very first time I connected, I did get an IP address and could see an entry in my routing table for the default gateway. However, I couldn’t ping it.
Being rather used to network troubleshooting, I did the usual things… bringing the interface up and down, disconnecting and re-connecting the cable. I even went to the hotel lobby and got a new cable in case the issue was with my portable/retractable cable.
Nothing. No net.
In desperation I did the thing that tech support always tells you to do but I avoid… reboot. Nothing.
So finally this morning I got on the phone to the Best Western…
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My MacBook seems to be stuck in “Borg emulation mode” (red light) with no access to the built-in speakers
Continue Reading: My MacBook seems to be stuck in “Borg emulation mode” (red light) with no access to the built-in speakersSo it seems I’ve done something to mightily mess up my new MacBook Pro. The other night while in my hotel room at AstriCon, I was using my headset for some Skype calls and then had it in when I started to play some music. Wanting to listen on the built-in speakers, I just pulled the headset out and was then surprised to hear no audio. If I plugged the headset back in, I could hear audio fine. Remove it, no audio. It was about then that I noticed the red light coming out of the side of the MacBook Pro. I didn’t know what this was and tried several other things before finally just forgetting about it.
The next day at AstriCon, I was on the IRC backchannel when someone else in the same physical room as I was figured out who I was and then asked why my MacBook had a red light coming out of the side. In further discussions with others on the channel, it turns out that Apple has done something that on one level is rather cool. They’ve overloaded the functionality of the headphone jack so that it is both a regular…
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Digium buys SwitchVox and gets presence, Web 2.0 interface, mashups to Google Maps, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM…
Continue Reading: Digium buys SwitchVox and gets presence, Web 2.0 interface, mashups to Google Maps, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM…Imagine you are a customer service rep (CSR) at a small/medium company and a phone call comes in from a customer. As your phone rings, up on your screen pops all the information about that customer, pulled from your CRM database in Salesforce.com or SugarCRM, plus other information from other databases and finally a nice Google Map showing you where that customer is located and potentially other information like the locations of your nearest offices. During the call, the CSR needs to bring in a subject matter expert so the CSR consults their web panel and looks at the presence information displayed for each of the other people in the business. The CSR can then contact someone showing as available and potentially bring them into the call.
Now imagine that all that is running on top of open source telephony… specifically Asterisk.
You can now stop imagining, because Digium just bought the company that does precisely that. There will undoubtedly be much attention today (at the very least in the VoIP blogosphere) about Digium’s announcement here at AstriCon today that they have acquired SwitchVox. I am going to bet that much of the reporting today will focus on angles…
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Zoiper – a free SIP / IAX softphone for Windows, Linux or Mac
Continue Reading: Zoiper – a free SIP / IAX softphone for Windows, Linux or MacIn watching Jay Phillips do his great presentation here today at AstriCon about Ruby and his Adhearsion package, I found myself wondering what the interesting little softphone was that he was using. It turned out to be “Zoiper“, an IAX or SIP softphone that was previously called “Idefisk”. (I can understand perhaps why they changed the name… “Idefisk” does not exactly roll off your tongue.) There turn out to be two versions (comparison chart here): a free version and a “Zoiper Biz” version which includes more functionality and starts around 30 euros.
Clearly built for Asterisk, it was interesting to note that it supports both SIP and also Asterisk’s own IAX protocol. Anyway, I just thought I’d share that this softphone is out there if you were not aware of it.
