What is the Matrix.org distributed communication system all about? What is an “open source federated signaling standard”? In about 30 minutes you’ll be able to find out LIVE on today’s VoIP Users Conference (VUC) where the guest will be Matthew Hodgson, one of the co-founders of Matrix.org. As the site says:

Matrix is a new open standard for interoperable Instant Messaging and VoIP, providing pragmatic HTTP APIs and open source reference implementations for creating and running your own real-time communication infrastructure.

Our hope is to make VoIP/IM as universal and interoperable as email.

You can watch it live on YouTube at:

Or join in on the Google+ event page. As noted in the #VUC show notes, the team is going to try a number of different ways to get people connected today.

It’s probably best to also join the IRC backchannel where links are shared, questions are answered and other comments occur. You also can visit the Google+ event page for the VUC #517 session today where there may be additional links and info.

If you won’t be at your computer, you can also call in via:

• sip:200901@login.zipdx.com
• +1 (646) 475-2098
• Skype:vuc.me

The session will of course be recorded so you can…

In just about 2 hours at 12 noon US Eastern time the VoIP Users Conference (VUC) should have an extremely interesting session about “The Future of Video” featuring Bernard Aboba and Emil Ivov. Bernard works for Microsoft on their Lync products and has also been extremely involved in the IETF, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and other efforts. Emil is the had of the Jitsi project and has been doing amazing things with video conferencing.

You can watch today’s call on the Google+ Page or directly on YouTube:

It’s probably best to also join the IRC backchannel where links are shared, questions are answered and other comments occur.

If you won’t be at your computer, you can also call in via:

• sip:200901@login.zipdx.com
• +1 (646) 475-2098
• Skype:vuc.me

The session will of course be recorded so you can listen/watch later.

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Tomorrow morning I’m starting a trip to Beijing for the 46th meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a.k.a. “ICANN”. ICANN is the organization at the heart of the Domain Name System (DNS) and I’ll be there specifically to take part in several DNSSEC workshops related to how to better secure DNS.  I’ll also attend an IPv6 workshop and some of the many other meetings scheduled for the week-long event. 

These are very good technical meetings in the midst of all the other business-related meetings at an ICANN event. You can participate remotely if you are interested to do so (details are in those links).

Some colleagues of mine prepared the “Internet Society’s Rough Guide to ICANN 46’s Hot Topics” which gives a sense of what those of us from the Internet Society will be doing there at ICANN.

ICANN meetings are always crazy-busy and I’m looking forward to meeting up with people I know from a variety of contexts.  We’ve got an outstanding program lined up for the DNSSEC workshop, so that will be a great event.

I’ve never been to China, so this should be an interesting experience.  I…

Intriguing news out of the folks at Tropo today… Deutsche Telekom has made the Tropo APIs available as part of DT’s “Developer Garden” at:

http://www.developergarden.com/apis/apis-sdks/telekom-tropo-api/

This is part of a broad range of APIs offered by Deutsche Telekom and basically gives developers using the DT network access to the full range of Tropo.com capabilities. As they note on the page, you can:

• Make & receive phone calls from within any web browser or application
• Run Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) applications with speech recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS)
• Send SMS out of CRM applications
• Create conference calls with up to 50 participants

Basically create any kind of “voice mashup” you can think of. I would also note that Tropo supports multiple languages for speech recognition and text-to-speech, a fact that may appeal to European developers.

Now why would a developer want to use “Telekom Tropo” versus just “regular” Tropo? The answer seems to be that DT takes care of all the billing integration and makes it easy for developers to charge for their services. From what I can see, all that billing integration is handled directly by Deutsche Telekom.

Now, obviously, this only works on the DT network, but that network…

To be ready for World IPv6 Launch on June 6, 2012, this Disruptive Telephony site uses the CloudFlare Content Distribution Network (CDN) and their IPv6 Automatic Gateway.  Basically, CloudFlare copies all my content into their CDN and makes it available through their various edge servers.  Given that all of those edge servers are dual-stacked to support both IPv4 and IPv6, my content is available immediately over both IPv4 and IPv6.

For free – without me having to do anything beyond signing up (for free) for CloudFlare and setting the DNS namesevers for my domain to point to CloudFlare.

Simple. Easy. IPv6.

If you’d like to set your website up with IPv6 in the same way, visit CloudFlare’s site and sign up for free.

The “WebRTC / RTCWEB initiative” is an extremely exciting industry initiative that will allow “real-time communications” (ex. voice, video, chat) between web browsers without requiring Flash or Java browser plugins.

Essentially, the initiative is all about baking real-time communications into the fabric of the Web!

Imagine just going to a web browser on a desktop or mobile device and clicking a link in a web browser to start speaking and communicating with people. Using HTML5 and new VoIP technologies being standardized in the W3C and the IETF, this effort has the potential to be extremely disruptive and open up all sorts of innovation from developers and organizations.

To understand more, you may want to start with my article, How WebRTC Will Fundamentally Disrupt Telecom (and Change The Internet).

If you have 48 minutes, this April 2012 interview of Cullen Jennings, chair of the IETF RTCWEB working group, provides an excellent background into what is going on. Erik Lagerway, the interview host, provided a list of the type of questions covered in the interview:

Cullen also prepared a focused presentation that steps through WebRTC/RTCWEB that comes in at 39 minutes:

If you don’t have that time, or just want to…

It turns out that the Skype 5.x Beta releases for Mac OS X have a hidden feature. In my last Skype-related post about the simultaneous release of 5.7 Beta for Windows and 5.4 Beta for Mac OS X, I mentioned that the release notes for the 5.7 Beta for Windows included a “Push To Talk” feature that was not in the Mac OS X version. From those Windows release notes:

Push to Talk

We have introduced a Push to Talk feature in Skype. Many people who are playing multiplayer games have requested this from us.

With this feature you can set a hotkey which will toggle microphone muting on Skype call.

You can set the Push to Talk up on the hotkey’s selection under tools > options > advanced > hotkeys.

In my post, I mentioned that while I personally wasn’t sure I saw the need for this feature, it was an example of the continued missing parity between the two products (Skype for Windows, Skype for Mac OS X).

This morning I received a nice note from Skype’s product manager for the Skype for Mac product letting me know that this “Push To Talk” feature…

The Internet Society is hiring! We’ve got about 10 open positions right now…

17 Nov 2011 Technical Outreach for Identity and Privacy 14 Nov 2011 Regional Bureau Director, North America 09 Nov 2011 Director, Development Strategy 04 Nov 2011 Membership Program Coordinator 27 Oct 2011 Sr. Manager, Next Generation Leaders Programme 18 Oct 2011 Internet Development Manager for Africa 28 Sep 2011 Application Development Specialist 27 Sep 2011 Sr. Director of Business Development and Resource Mobilization 27 Sep 2011 Administrative Assistant 09 Sep 2011 IT System Support Specialist

To apply, just follow the links here or check out the main Internet Society Careers page. I believe strongly in the mission of the Internet Society (as I explained before) and encourage you to consider the openings… we’re looking for some great people to help the organization accomplish even more!

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Skype seems to be coming back up… s..l..o..w..l..y..

My Skype client just started working again, as the Skype Heartbeat blog post indicated, I did not have to login again or do anything else. Once in, though, my Skype client shows only a bit over 2 million users online:

Considering that on a normal day there are usually 25+ million users online during the day (and often closer to 30 million), I would say that more than just “a small number” of users were affected!

As I wrote this post, though, the number of connected users dropped to 1.8 million… let’s see how this recovery goes!

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The very last VoiceCon show – ever[1] – occurred two weeks ago and while I spoke in 3 sessions, including a 3-hour SIP tutorial, I haven’t had a chance to do much more than post my slides from my VoiceCon sessions. I’ve had all sorts of posts I wanted to write… just haven’t had the cycles.

There have, though, been lots of other people writing about VoiceCon and Dave Michels nicely pulled together a summary of many of the major posts in his piece titled appropriately “The Many Voices of VoiceCon“.

So head over to the UC Strategies site, read Dave’s post and follow the links to all the various posts… some good ones there.

Thanks, Dave, for curating all the news and creating a summary post.

[1] If you haven’t heard, this show was the last VoiceCon “ever” because VoiceCon is changing its name to “Enterprise Connect”.

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