Category: Google
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Did Google Hang Up On Calling Google Voice Via SIP?
Continue Reading: Did Google Hang Up On Calling Google Voice Via SIP?Has Google killed the ability to call a Google Voice number via SIP that we just learned about in the past few days? My post yesterday seems to have resonated with many folks who rushed to try it… only to find that it didn’t work!Or perhaps did work for a bit and then stopped working. Even Todd Vierling, the person who first wrote about this back on Saturday, now updated his post with this text:
[Update March 8: It seems this service is no longer working, starting yesterday evening. sigh. I was hoping to see the security bugs patched up, not for the service to be pulled down again like it was in early 2009. Please, Google Voice people, throw us a bone here and let us know what’s really going on for once!]
The folks over at OnSIP published a blog post saying that sip.voice.google.com was now silent and also engaged with a whole number of us on Twitter on the topic. Ward Mundy over at NerdVittles initially came out with a post detailing how to make this work with FreePBX and then updated that post to indicate that it is no longer working.
Comments to my original…
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Google Voice Now Offers SIP Addresses For Calling Directly Over IP
Continue Reading: Google Voice Now Offers SIP Addresses For Calling Directly Over IPWouldn't it be great if you could call a Google Voice number directly via SIP? So that you could bypass the PSTN when calling a GV number and go directly over IP? With potentially all the advanced capabilities that could give? (wideband audio, video, etc.) It turns out that you now can! UPDATE – Nov 13, 2012: Over a series of subsequent posts about Google Voice and SIP, it first seemed like this service was working… then it stopped… then it started… and then it stopped for some people and still worked for others. As of November 2012 the service is not working for me.By way of a tweet from Aswath Rao (crediting @truvoip) today I learned that you could simply take your Google Voice number and append "@sip.voice.google.com" to get a perfectly working SIP URI that you could use with any SIP phone. I naturally tried it out with my own GV number using the SJphone SIP phone:
The call worked great. I answered it on one of my other phones and the conversation was fine – both audio streams intact, etc.
YATE?
What's interesting to me here is that SJphone reports that the remote client is YATE, a.k.a.…
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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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Why Verizon’s iPhone 4 is Worse for Google Than For AT&T
Continue Reading: Why Verizon’s iPhone 4 is Worse for Google Than For AT&TOnce upon a time, I firmly believed that the day the iPhone launched on Verizon would be the day you could pretty much count AT&T out. I expected that would be a huge migration of users… and it would be the end…
Usually those thoughts came on days when I was having serious issues with AT&T’s network and could only wish for the end of the AT&T monopoly to come… I live in southwestern New Hampshire and AT&T’s network is merely “okay” in Keene, NH, and gets pretty abysmal – and nonexistent – when you travel not too far out of town. Driving the hour-plus over to the Manchester airport there are 2 or 3 pockets where I literally have no coverage for a few minutes with my iPhone 4 on AT&T’s network.
Meanwhile, of course, Verizon has rock solid coverage throughout our area.
Unless you have been hiding in a cave, you know that today is the day Verizon announced the iPhone, with the actual phone being available on February 11th. There are a zillion news articles in every imaginable media out… the ginormous media feeding frenzy is something to behold. A huge amount of publicity for Apple… for…
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Android 2.3 Includes SIP Stack, Near Field Communications, More
Continue Reading: Android 2.3 Includes SIP Stack, Near Field Communications, MoreVery cool to see that the Android 2.3 release includes a SIP stack:The platform now includes a SIP protocol stack and framework API that lets developers build internet telephony applications. Using the API, applications can offer voice calling features without having to manage sessions, transport-level communication, or audio — these are handled transparently by the platform’s SIP API and services.
The SIP API is available in the android.net.sip package. The key class is SipManager, which applications use to set up and manage SIP profiles, then initiate audio calls and receive audio calls. Once an audio call is established, applications can mute calls, turn on speaker mode, send DTMF tones, and more. Applications can also use the SipManager to create generic SIP connections.
Naturally this SIP stack is only available if the carrier and manufacturer allow it:
The platform’s underlying SIP stack and services are available on devices at the discretion of the manufacturer and associated carrier. For this reason, applications should use the isApiSupported() method to check whether SIP support is available, before exposing calling functionality to users.
Call me cynical, but I could see a number of carriers NOT allowing the SIP stack.
The Android team has also…
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Paul Thurrott believes Android will conquer iPhones…
Continue Reading: Paul Thurrott believes Android will conquer iPhones…I own an iPhone. We have two, in fact… one that is my corporate phone provided by Voxeo and one that we bought for my wife as her personal phone. In the couple years I have been using it I have come to truly enjoy the user interface, the AppStore, the ecosystem, etc. It truly has changed how we as a society think of mobile devices.
But though I may be a Apple “fanboy” in many ways, I do have some grave concerns… such as the lock-in to the closed system controlled by Apple, which I wrote about at length related to the iPad. As a believer in open standards and an advocate for the open Internet, I’m glad to see Android out there… even as I read about it on my iPhone.
So naturally I was intrigued to read Paul Thurrott’s piece titled “Droid Attack Spells Doom for iPhone“. I’ve been reading Paul’s writing for years related to various Microsoft and Windows topics… so when one of the chief Windows evangelists I know writes about Android… well, I pay attention to it a bit. Paul relays the story of his wife’s move to a Droid phone and his…
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Mashable Faceoff Poll: Skype vs Google Voice – care to vote?
Continue Reading: Mashable Faceoff Poll: Skype vs Google Voice – care to vote?The folks over at Mashable.com are running one of their “faceoff” polls between Skype and Google Voice – right now it’s neck-and-neck between Skype and Google Voice. Care to share your opinion? Click on the image to go to Mashable’s page:
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Tracking Tropo.com calls with Google Analytics
Continue Reading: Tracking Tropo.com calls with Google AnalyticsIt’s no big secret that I’m a huge fan of the Tropo cloud communications service[1] and also a huge fan of Google Analytics. Put them together, as Adam Kalsey did in this blog post today (‘Tracking calls with Google Analytics‘), and I’m excited!I admittedly had not followed the availability of client libraries for “Google Analytics Mobile”, but it makes sense given the diminished capabilities of mobile devices to execute JavaScript (which GA relies upon for tracking). Adam does a great job explaining that and walking through the source code he supplies.
Now I just have to make some time to try it out with my Tropo apps…
[1] In full disclosure, Tropo is a service created by my employer, Voxeo, as part of Voxeo Labs.
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Google buys GIPS for $68 million – to take on Skype? Apple? Microsoft?
Continue Reading: Google buys GIPS for $68 million – to take on Skype? Apple? Microsoft?The big news out this morning was that Google is acquiring Global IP Solutions (GIPS) for $68 million USD. GIPS may not be a familiar name to many folks, but for us in the communications / telephony space, they are widely known as the supplier of audio codecs (and increasingly video) to companies creating real-time communication products, including Yahoo, AOL, IBM and many others. Many of us, though, knew them best as the initial provider of the wideband iSAC codec to Skype.To put this in more normal language, if you know how good a Skype conversation can sound… how rich the audio can be… how it can sound like the person on the other end is right there in the room with you? The quality of that audio connection is because Skype uses a “wideband codec” to send the audio from one end to the other. Up until 2007, GIPS provided the primary wideband codec that Skype used.
At some point in there, Skype realized that, particularly giving away a free product, it needed to control more of its technology stack and stop paying licensing fees to GIPS and so it bought a company, Camino Networks, that had its…
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Google enters the hosted voicemail game – Google Voice now lets you keep your existing phone number
Continue Reading: Google enters the hosted voicemail game – Google Voice now lets you keep your existing phone numberYesterday Google made another fascinating move in the telephony space… letting people use Google Voice with their existing phone number. This is key because previously if you wanted to try out Google Voice you had to get a new phone number that was different from any of your existing numbers.
Now a business or individual can move their existing number over to Google Voice… and Google can try to convert users over to their service from other services.
[UPDATE: Note that Google states that you can use Google Voice “with your existing mobile phone number“, i.e. not a landline phone number. Others have pointed out that essentially all you are doing is forwarding your unanswered calls to Google’s voicemail service instead of your mobile carrier’s voicemail service. In this way, Google Voice is basically just like Jott or any of the many other similar services out there. Except, of course, it is from Google.]
When you use an existing number, Google Voice gives you these services:
- Online, searchable voicemail
- Free automated voicemail transcription
- Custom voicemail greetings for different callers
- Email and SMS notifications
- Low-priced international calling
With a new phone number under Google’s control, you get additional services like conferencing,…