Category: Applications
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Skype Shuts Down SkypeKit and the Skype Developer Website
Continue Reading: Skype Shuts Down SkypeKit and the Skype Developer WebsiteGoodbye to SkypeKit… and perhaps more importantly to the developer.skype.com website. Prominently featured there now is a banner saying the site will close on July 31, 2014:Leaving aside the bizarre way to end the warning banner (“… to integrate with” and then nothing more), I went to the site because I received an email from Skype in the form of a “SkypeKit License Termination Notice”. The email says in full:
Dear Dan ,
In July 2013, we notified you of our intention to end support for our SkypeKit SDK at the end of July 2014. With this date now approaching, this email serves as 30 days’ official notice of termination of the SkypeKit Licence Agreement (“Agreement”) pursuant to Section 13.2.4 of the Agreement. The Agreement will end on July 31st 2014. Upon termination of the Agreement you must promptly destroy all copies of the SkypeKit SDK in your possession or control, except that if you have already entered into the SkypeKit Distribution Terms and have received a commercialization keypair for your SkypeKit Product(s) then you may continue to distribute these SkypeKit Products(s).
Skype will not be issuing any new keypairs and we remind you that keypairs may only be…
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You Can Now Call Into Google+ From Regular Phones – Google Connects Google Voice To Hangouts
Continue Reading: You Can Now Call Into Google+ From Regular Phones – Google Connects Google Voice To HangoutsWant to hear the sound of Google further disrupting the world of telecom? If you have a Google Voice number and also use Google+ (as I do) with the Hangouts feature enabled, you’ll soon be hearing this new sound if you haven’t already.
UPDATE: I have written a follow-up post responding to several comments and expanding on several points.An Unexpected Ringing
Yesterday a random PR person called the phone number in the sidebar of this blog to pitch me on why I should write about her client. This phone number is through Google Voice and I knew by the fact that my cell phone and Skype both started ringing simultaneously that someone was calling that number.
But as I was deciding whether or not to actually answer the call, I realized that there was another “ringing” sound coming from my computer that I had not heard before. Flipping quickly through my browser windows I found my Google+ window where this box appeared at the top of the “Hangouts” sidebar on the right:
Now, of course, I HAD to answer the call, even though I knew from experience that most calls to that number are PR pitches. I clicked…
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Facebook Rolls Out Free Voice Calls In The US On iOS – A Quick Walkthrough And A Big, Huge Caveat
Continue Reading: Facebook Rolls Out Free Voice Calls In The US On iOS – A Quick Walkthrough And A Big, Huge CaveatFacebook today rolled out it’s free voice calling in the US via its Messenger app for iOS (iPhone/iPad). The Verge was the first I saw with the news and a great number of sites are now following.Voice calling through Facebook has the potential to be hugely disruptive… rather than calling on your phone over your regular phone connection – or even rather than using Skype, you can just call from directly within Facebook. This is the kind of “Over-The-Top (OTT)” app that gives telco operators a fit… goodbye, telco voice minutes!
Plus, it’s using some HD voice codec so the sound quality is outstanding.
And since the folks at Facebook want you to live your life inside of their very pretty walls, this just provides yet one more reason for you to stay within those walls.
BUT… there’s a big huge caveat that I’ll get to in a moment.
A Quick Walkthrough
First, though, let’s look at how it works. When you go into the Messenger app and open a chat with a friend (in this case, Jim Courtney), all you have to do is click the “i” button in the upper right:
After you do that…
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Ameche Lets Telcos Add Apps Into Regular Phone Calls To Add Value And Services
Continue Reading: Ameche Lets Telcos Add Apps Into Regular Phone Calls To Add Value And ServicesImagine you are driving fast along a major highway in traffic and you receive a call from a critical customer. She wants to know immediately when you can meet tomorrow with her team to go over the final proposal and sign the deal. There’s no way for you to pull over and look at your calendar on your phone or computer… and it’s really not safe in the high-speed traffic for you to be flipping through your calendar while you talk. What do you do?Do you tell her you’ll give her a call back when you get to a safe place? Or do you do the unsafe action of looking at your calendar on your phone?
What if there was a different way?
What if you could say something like “Let me check my calendar for tomorrow at 3pm” and then suddenly have a voice whisper back to you – on your call, but only heard by you – “your calendar is free at 3pm. You have meetings at 2 and 5.”
You could then reply to your customer after just this brief pause letting her know that you could meet with her.
Sound like science fiction?
Perhaps… but…
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AdhearsionConf 2012 Call For Speakers Ends Tomorrow (Sept 8)
Continue Reading: AdhearsionConf 2012 Call For Speakers Ends Tomorrow (Sept 8)Do you like building telephony apps with Adhearsion? Have you built a really cool app that is worth sharing? Or used Adhearsion in an unusual way? Are you planning to attend AdhearsionConf 2012 in Palo Alto on October 20-21? Or would you attend if you could speak?If you answered yes to any of the above questions, why not consider applying to be a speaker? The call for speakers is at:
http://adhearsionconf.com/call-for-speakers/
The only catch is … the deadline is TOMORROW, Saturday, September 8th!
Ever since I first saw Jay Phillips present about Adhearsion back at one of the early ETel conferences in maybe 2006 or so I’ve been intrigued by how easy Adhearsion made it to develop telecom apps. It’s just incredibly simple to make powerful apps.
If you are a Ruby developer (or want to be) and you are interested in building telephony apps, Adhearsion is definitely worth a look… and if you do use Adhearsion, why not consider signing up as a speaker?
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
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3 Great Posts to Read About Why Windows Phone 7 Hasn’t Taken Off…
Continue Reading: 3 Great Posts to Read About Why Windows Phone 7 Hasn’t Taken Off…Jumping online this morning I noticed this trio of great posts yesterday about Windows Phone 7 and why it hasn’t taken off. The discussion was started off by Charlie Kindel, a former Microsoft general manager:
MG Siegler weighed in on his blog with:
And Robert Scoble posted a comment on Charlie’s post that led then to his own post:
The comments on both Charlie Kindel’s and Robert Scoble’s posts are also worth reading. There were other articles on this theme, but these were the three I found most useful.
As to my own opinion, I’m definitely in Scoble’s camp (to which Siegler also agrees):
It’s ALL about the apps!
The device formerly known as a “mobile phone” is now a device to access all sorts of services, information, games, Internet sites and to send messages to people… and, oh yeah, it can make phone calls sometimes if you really want it to.
It’s all about the apps… and until Microsoft is able to truly…
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Is Skype Soon To Release New APIs? Skype Renames Public API And Extends “Plugged into Skype” Partner Program
Continue Reading: Is Skype Soon To Release New APIs? Skype Renames Public API And Extends “Plugged into Skype” Partner ProgramToday brings two changes from Skype to their developer programs. First, in an effort to bring some clarity to their existing application programming interfaces (APIs), they have renamed the “Skype Public API” to be called the “Skype Desktop API.” As noted in a Skype blog post:
In Aug 2004, we made the Skype Desktop API available to encourage third-party innovation and integration with Skype. The Skype Desktop API allows Partners to access Skype functionality through the Skype desktop client via a text-based command protocol. The intent is not to duplicate Skype functionality but to complement the Skype desktop client with additional features and/or capabilities (e.g., call recording).
This is the API that pretty much all developers have had to use until recently where you application interacts directly with a Skype client. This also means that you have to have a Skype client running to use the API, which has been an additional annoyance for many developers. Developers have long desired an ability to connect directly into the Skype cloud without needing to run a client. Many of us had hoped that “SkypeKit” would be that client-less connection… but it, too, requires a client. UPDATE: Multiple friends pointed out to…
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The Creepy – And Insecure – Side of iOS and Android Apps
Continue Reading: The Creepy – And Insecure – Side of iOS and Android AppsWant to see the dark side of mobile apps? Just read this great bit of research from Troy Hunt:Secret iOS business; what you don’t know about your apps
As people have noted in the comments, “iOS” (Apple’s operating system for iPhones and iPads) is purely the platform Troy Hunt did his research on… but he’s really talking about issues with mobile applications.
I’m my unfortunately sure that these type of issues will also be there on apps on Android and probably on other mobile operating systems from Microsoft, RIM, WebOS, etc.
These are application design issues.
The article starts off with the incredibly inefficient case of stuffing large images from “regular” websites down the mobile pipe to the phone… and then simply “resizing” them with “width” and “height” attributes. This is just laziness”efficiency” on the app developers part in that they are simply “repurposing their existing content” for a mobile audience, i.e. it’s too much work/effort for them to create and track a separate smaller image for a mobile environment so they will just send you the larger one and eat up your data plan bandwidth.
But Troy Hunt goes on to talk about far worse issues… he calls…
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My Rant: Who Are We Building RTCWEB/WebRTC For? Telephony Developers or Web Developers?
Continue Reading: My Rant: Who Are We Building RTCWEB/WebRTC For? Telephony Developers or Web Developers?Yesterday morning I did something I haven’t done in eons. Many years, probably. (I can’t remember.) I fired off a “rant” on an IETF mailing list.
I’ve been a huge proponent of the “RTCWEB/WebRTC” work going on in the “RTCWEB” Working of the IETF and the “WebRTC” of the W3C. I’ve mentioned it in many of my presentations. I’ve advocated for people to join the mailing lists. I’ve written about it a good bit on Voxeo’s standards blog when I was at Voxeo.
We have an opportunity to make it easy for web developers to add “real-time communications” via voice, video, IM, etc., to web applications. We can make that work from directly within the browser.
Think of it… HTML5 with the ability to quickly add voice, video, chat… and without the need for a browser plugin or extension in Flash, Java, etc. (the limitation of all of today’s proprietary options).
It’s the opportunity to move real-time communications into the very fabric of the Web.
Awesome potential!
The work has been moving along quite rapidly in both the IETF and the W3C. Extremely active (high-volume!) mailing lists. Many Internet-Draft documents being created. Regular conference calls, interim meetings, face-to-face meetings. Some…
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Can Alec Saunder Woo Developers Back to the Blackberry Platform?
Continue Reading: Can Alec Saunder Woo Developers Back to the Blackberry Platform?Can he do it? Can he get developers to actually care enough about the Blackberry / Playbook platform to come and build apps?Today my friend Alec Saunders, RIM’s newly minted “VP of Developer Relations and Ecosystem Development”, took to the stage of the Blackberry “DevCon Americas” event in San Francisco to make the case to the assembled crowd. Jim Courtney passed along to me the link to the livecast of the event and I did take a moment to tune in and check it out. (Apparently a recording will be available at some point.)
Alec has a theatre background and is always fun to watch present… he has a certain dynamic energy that is good to see. In the few minutes I watched he seemed very much in his element:
Now, whether he will actually have any success is another question… despite his stats that the BlackBerry AppStore is more profitable for developers than the Android Marketplace, I don’t know if the broader world of developers will really notice. From what I see the momentum seems to be elsewhere…
I wish him the best, though… and Alec, when you read this, you can know that some of your friends…