Category Archives: Uncategorized

Today At Noon EST: Matrix.Org Distributed Communications On The VUC Call

Matrix 300What 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 listen/watch later.

Given that I’ve long focused on the need for “distributed and decentralized” communication systems, I’m intrigued to learn more about what the Matrix.org team is intending to do. More links for background information can be found at:

I’m not going to be able to join live today due to the holiday here in the USA and some plans with our family… but I’m definitely looking forward to listening to/watching the archive of today’s show and giving it a test myself!

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Live In 2 Hours – Today’s VUC Call About The Future of Video With Bernard Aboba and Emil Ivov

VucIn 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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Heading to Beijing For ICANN 46

Icann46-beijingTomorrow 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 probably won’t have much time to look around, but I’m hoping to squeeze in a few hours during the week to look around (probably during some morning runs, if the weather and pollution levels will allow me to do so).

If you are going to be at ICANN 46, please feel free to contact me.  I’ll also of course be posting some live updates from there as well.

Here’s a quick audio commentary on my trip:

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Deutsche Telekom Partners With Tropo To Expose Developer APIs for Voice and SMS

Telekom tropo apiIntriguing 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 is quite large throughout Europe at around 93 million subscribers.

In reading the Telekom Tropo API Q & A, too, I found an interesting note:

Telekom Tropo is hosted in Telekom data centes in Germany and therefore fulfills the highest European security and privacy standards..

Which means to me that the Voxeo Labs team made it possible for the Tropo server-side software to run directly within a mobile operator’s network. This could lead to very interesting business models more where mobile operators could easily deploy Tropo capabilities to their developers as the Deutsche Telekom team has done.

Congrats to the Tropo and Deutsche Telekom teams on this news and I look forward to learning about what developers build now that this capability has been brought into DT’s “developer garden”!

UPDATE: BusinessWeek is reporting today that Deutsche Telekom announced a partnership with MasterCard and is in talks with Google – both about adding partners to its mobile payment system.

[Full Disclosure: I was employed by Voxeo from October 2007 to September 2011 and participated in the launch of Tropo.com several years ago. However, I wouldn’t write about it if I didn’t think what they are doing is cool!]

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IPv6

WORLD IPV6 LAUNCH is 6 June 2012 – The Future is ForeverTo 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

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 dive into links, there are several pieces to the WebRTC / RTCWEB initiative.  

Standards

First, there are two complementary standardization efforts underway:

Source Code

Second, Google released an amazing amount of open source code coming out of their purchase of GIPS that is enabling developers to work on WebRTC implementations. The code and other info is available at:

It runs in recent releases of the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox browsers and is now being used by a wide range of developers to create demo applications using just JavaScript, HTML, etc.. One example is Voxeo’s Phono and other examples are being posted to the WebRTC Google+ page all the time.

Communities

There are a number of places beyond the mailing lists above where WebRTC is being discussed in social networks and other sites, including:

Other Resources

WebRTC is a popular topic right now and is being written about in many places.  I’ve written a number of my own posts about WebRTC/RTCWEB and I’ve been particularly impressed by the regular posts by Tsahi Levent-Levi on the topic of WebRTC.  He’s been writing a great series of posts and also recording interviews with a number of people and companies in the field.

My friends Alan Johnston and Dan Burnett have published a book/ebook, “WebRTC: APIs and RTCWEB Protocols of the HTML5 Real-Time Web“, that provides excellent information for developers.

Skype 5.x Beta For Mac OS X Includes Hidden “Push To Talk” Feature

Skypelogo-shadowIt 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 actually is included in the Skype for Mac 5.x Beta releases, albeit as a hidden feature.  To use “Push To Talk” during a Skype call, you need to press (ready for this?):

Control + Option + Command + Up Arrow

Yep… three keys with your left hand and then the up-arrow with your right hand. (or yes, you could press the command and option keys on the right side, but you still need the control key on the left side.)

It does work.  I tried it on a call and found that once I pressed the key combination the call was in “Push To Talk” mode and I had to hold down that key combination to speak.  I was also able to just click on the icon of the muted microphone in my Skype window to leave this “PTT” mode and go back to regular microphone usage.

Unfortunately, unlike the Windows version, there does not seem to be any way, yet, to configure the key combination. I don’t regularly play multiplayer online games so I don’t know whether this particular key combination is a problem. It just seems to me to be inefficient in that it requires both hands.  It would be great if Skype would allow the configuration of this key combo as the 5.x release for Mac OS X leaves beta.

Anyway… for those of you using the Skype 5 Beta for Mac OS X, you, too, can now use “Push To Talk”…

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Want a Great Weekend Project? Consider Applying for an Internet Society Job

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 Is Back For Me – But Only 2 Million Users Are Online (versus normal 25+ million)

skypelogo-shadow.pngSkype 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:

Skype 2million 1

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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Dave Michels – “The Many Voices of VoiceCon”

voicecon2010logo.jpgThe 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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