Category: Open Source
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I’ll be down at VoiceCon Orlando in March 2008…
Continue Reading: I’ll be down at VoiceCon Orlando in March 2008…FYI, I will be down at VoiceCon Orlando on March 17-20, 2008. I’m moderating two panel sessions (see the schedule). First, up, bright and early at 8am on Tuesday, March 18th, I’ll be moderating a panel on “Top VoIP Security Threats“. This should be a fun one as it has VOIPSA Chair Dave Endler, Mark Collier of SecureLogix and Sachin Joglekar of Sipera Systems. I know all three of the guys, particularly Dave and Mark who have both worked on VOIPSA matters, and this session should be a good bit of fun. I’m planning on making it a rather interactive session. 🙂At the other end of the show, on Thursday, March 20th, at 11:45am, I’ll be moderating a panel “Open Source for Enterprise Voice: How Much, How Soon?“. This would should be interesting because it has Bill Miller from Digium (makers of Asterisk), who I know well, and M Raza from 3Com… and then Tony Pereira from Nortel! 3Com’s presence on the panel isn’t particularly surprising given their relationship with Digium, but it will be interesting to see Nortel’s view on the matter.
All in all it should be quite an interesting show. Lots of good sessions and, I’m…
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TAUG – “Asterisk and Open Telephony Conference” – Toronto, April 7-9
Continue Reading: TAUG – “Asterisk and Open Telephony Conference” – Toronto, April 7-9Those of you interested in Asterisk and open source telephony may be interested in the “Asterisk & Open Telephony Conference” in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on April 7-9, 2008. Part of the larger IT360 conference, this Asterisk conference is being organized by members of the Toronto Asterisk User Group which is one of the largest Asterisk user groups in the world. Because of the TAUG influence, I expect it to be a solid show from a technical point of view with lots of practical information. I’m not currently planning to be there, but it looks to be a good one if you can get there.Technorati Tags: asterisk, conferences, open source, voip, ip telephony, taug, toronto, it360
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Digium launches the “Digium Asterisk Marketplace” to promote members of the Asterisk ecosystem
Continue Reading: Digium launches the “Digium Asterisk Marketplace” to promote members of the Asterisk ecosystemDigium recently announced that they have launched the “Digium Asterisk Marketplace” as a way to help connect users of Asterisk to partners in the “Asterisk ecosystem” who make products that work with Asterisk. Many of the folks listed there have been parters with Digium for some time and are often in Digium booths at various trade conferences but there were a few names new to me. At the time I am writing this, there are 30 members listed in the Marketplace but with the application form readily available, we’ll see how much this grows. The Asterisk blog entry lays out the terms:The price is right – a listing starts at $395 per quarter. In return, your company gets exposure to the thousands of unique visitors that cross the Digium site daily. Or you can get a more prominent “premium” listing for a few extra bucks. For a limited time, you can get a listing for a full year starting at $795 – about half the regular rate.
Later, we plan to add more cool features, such as the ability for users to provide feedback, more categories for listings, and the ability to buy selected partner products directly from…
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Asterisk crosses 1 million downloads in 2007
Continue Reading: Asterisk crosses 1 million downloads in 2007News out of Digium yesterday morning that there have now been over one million downloads of Asterisk in 2007:Digium®, Inc., the Asterisk® Company, today announced the one millionth download of Asterisk in 2007, capping off a record year for the leading open source telephony company. Digium, which will complete its 24th consecutive quarter of growth and profitability this year, created headlines with new executive appointments, industry awards, strategic partnerships and acquisitions aimed at further advancing the company’s presence in the small-to-medium-sized (SMB) VoIP market.
Now, granted, we have to remember that this is one million downloads and has no real indication of: a) how many of those downloads were actually installed; b) how many of those installations were simply tests and are not in actual production use; c) how many of those downloads were duplicate downloads by the same user; and d) how many of those downloads were updates as people installed new versions.
All that aside, it is a significant milestone for any project. Congrats to the Digium team!
P.S. I’m still waiting for an answer from Digium PR about how many downloads there are total for Asterisk. This is one million in 2007, but how does that…
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It’s about the platform – Google finally answers the “Gphone” speculation… with an Android!
Continue Reading: It’s about the platform – Google finally answers the “Gphone” speculation… with an Android!“It’s about an open platform, stupid!” While I didn’t include Google when I first wrote my post about how voice is really all about application platforms, I did note in the comments that I had intended to do so… and today’s announcement really shows that they should be in anyone’s list of telephony application platforms. As announced on the Google blog with “Where’s my Gphone?“, Google today announced the Open Handset Alliance and the associated set of forthcoming software called Android. The front page of the Open Handset Alliance provides a rather compelling (to me) statement:
What would it take to build a better mobile phone?
A commitment to openness, a shared vision for the future, and concrete plans to make the vision a reality.
Welcome to the Open Handset Alliance™, a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies who have come together to accelerate innovation in mobile and offer consumers a richer, less expensive, and better mobile experience. Together we have developed Android™, the first complete, open, and free mobile platform.
We are committed to commercially deploy handsets and services using the Android Platform in the second half of 2008. An early… -
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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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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.
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Astricon… way too much to write about…
Continue Reading: Astricon… way too much to write about…Great sessions out here at AstriCon… way too much to write about – my head is exploding a good bit! It’s been a bit frustrating to try to blog from the conference rooms, though. The hotel WiFi is struggling a good bit under the strain of all the people here with laptops.
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AstriCon kicks off with “Developer 101” and “Asterisk 101” pre-conference sessions
Continue Reading: AstriCon kicks off with “Developer 101” and “Asterisk 101” pre-conference sessionsHere in Phoenix, Arizona, AstriCon has kicked off with two pre-conference sessions that run all day. “Asterisk 101” is running next door and providing a basic introduction to Asterisk. I’m sitting in the “Developer 101” session (pictured) where there are about 100 people gathered in the room. It turns out that this is about developing with the Asterisk code base, i.e. “how to become an Asterisk developer” versus what I was personally thinking it was, which was “how to develop apps that work with Asterisk”… although that is really just an extension of the first. So far, an hour into the session, lead developer Kevin Fleming has been discussing the various tools you need to use in order to work with the Asterisk code base (ex. subversion, makefiles, etc.). Right now he’s been dealing with the fun subject of licensing code, the GPL, and the requirement of developers to sign a disclaimer over to Digium that: a) asserts that the developer can contribute the code (i.e. it is original), that it is not patent-encumbered, etc. and b) gives Digium the right to redistribute the developer’s code under a different license.
One interesting note – Kevin stated very definitively that Digium…