Category: Unified Communications
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The EComm 2008 Interview with Skype’s Jonathan Christensen should be required reading…
Continue Reading: The EComm 2008 Interview with Skype’s Jonathan Christensen should be required reading…As we enter into the final month before eComm 2008, I would suggest that the interview with Jonathan Christensen, Skype’s general manager of audio and video, should be required reading for anyone seriously interested in this space. Why? Well, in part because Jonathan Christensen does provide some good information about what Skype has done and is doing but also because it provides some good insight into what one of the people driving Skype’s agenda is thinking about this space. Take one of the final paragraphs where he answered Lee Dryburgh’s question about what he saw as the the future of communications (bold emphasis added by me):Well, a big question I guess and, having worked on the space for quite a while, I think that it’s only going to get more interesting over the coming years since, well, like this open spectrum for example. You know, I just have to reiterate, I think that anybody who has not figured out that the Internet is the platform and that there isn’t any such thing as walled gardens that will survive, or sub-networks [such as AOL tried] that are going to survive, those people are doomed. The intersection of these worlds is going…
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Another print pub bites the dust… say goodbye to “Business Communications Review” / BCR
Continue Reading: Another print pub bites the dust… say goodbye to “Business Communications Review” / BCRIn learning about the new “NoJitter.com” blog recently, I also learned from Eric Krapf that Business Communications Review, commonly known simply as “BCR”, was joining the ongoing exodus from the print publication business. Effective January 1, it will no longer be published in print form and, in fact, the name will retired for publishing purposes. They will continue to use the name for their training business, which is apparently going very well. The publishing focus for the BCR team will apparently be this new NoJitter blog, which I mentioned in my last post.
Personally, I’m sorry to see them go. I definitely do understand that the economics of print publishing today are quite difficult, but I did value the work that BCR did, particularly in their comparisons of products and services. It will be interesting to see, too, how well their current readership makes the switch with them. I know personally that once InfoWorld folded its print edition, I know longer paid as much attention to their writing as I once did… except when it randomly came up in searches. I’m not currently a BCR subscriber, so if anything this move may mean that I see more of their writing.…
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Welcome to “NoJitter.com”, a new VoIP blog by the editors of Business Communications Review…
Continue Reading: Welcome to “NoJitter.com”, a new VoIP blog by the editors of Business Communications Review…Back in mid December when I received the latest copy of the “VoiceCon ENews” email newsletter, I noticed that Eric Krapf had a new signature to his post:
Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program ChairNaturally, I had to see what NoJitter.com was about…
It turns out that NoJitter.com is a new site launched by CMP to provide a focus on IP Communications/IP Telephony/Unified Communications/VoIP/whatever-we-are-calling-this-space-today. Eric, will, in fact, be the “lead blogger”. I’ve had the opportunity to work with Eric in a few small ways (such as a VoIP security panel at Interop/VoiceCon New York in October) and look forward to seeing what he and the others there will be doing with this new site. (Hey, he already gets a “+1” from me for having “VoIP Security” as one of the navigation categories in his navbar!)
Welcome, Eric and the NoJitter team, to the VoIP part of the blogosphere!
Technorati Tags: blogs, IP communications, puppy, puppy, puppy, unifiedcommunications, voip
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A simple answer to why I’ve done more videoconferencing in the past 3 weeks than I have in the past 3 *years*…
Continue Reading: A simple answer to why I’ve done more videoconferencing in the past 3 weeks than I have in the past 3 *years*…In the past three weeks I have done more videoconferencing than I have in the past three years…including my year or so as the product manager for Mitel’s video collaboration products.
Why?
There’s a simple answer, really. And it speaks to the heart of why I think it has taken so long for videoconferencing to take off… I mean, we’ve have been talking about videophones for what? 40 years or so?
The answer is… duh!… I have a camera always available!
It is always there, sitting at the top of my MacBook Pro screen, just waiting to be used. Whenever I am in a Skype call, or using Sightspeed or iChat… or any other communication program that supports video… moving into video is as simple as pressing a button in the GUI and… ta da… we’re in a video conversation.
Contrast that to the situation a few years back where moving into video involved making sure your camera was connected first. In fact, some of the various programs required a restart after you connected a camera, which meant that you couldn’t just escalate into video while you were in the midst of a call. Back when I was…
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It’s the (app) platform, stupid!
Continue Reading: It’s the (app) platform, stupid!“Phone systems” are dead. PBXs are dead. IP-PBXs are dead.
Well, okay, not really… people will still be buying “PBXs” for quite some time. Just as there are certain communities out there who still buy horse-drawn wagons. But the reality is this:
“Phone systems”, PBXs and IP-PBXs without easy application programming interfaces (APIs) are a dead branch on the evolutionary tree.
The future of communication belongs to mashups. To quick and easy ways to interconnect disparate systems. To integration of communication systems with business processes and other applications. In a world where voice is no longer always the primary mode of communication, we have to stop thinking about “phone systems” and take a larger look at how “communication” in general fits into our infrastructure. More than just how we use the system, we have to look at how we can get data in and out of the communication system. To borrow from the 1992 Clinton campaign:
It’s the platform, stupid!
As you look at communication choices, the question is really about who has the “best” APIs… whose system is easiest to integrate with…. who lets you get data out of their system easily – and also lets… -
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A heck of week to choose to go dark! (Microsoft, MySpace/Skype, iPhone… )
Continue Reading: A heck of week to choose to go dark! (Microsoft, MySpace/Skype, iPhone… )Boy, did I choose the wrong week to go dark! Way too many amazing things going on out there this week… here is a quick view of some of the disruptions with relevant links:
- Microsoft formally announces release of Office Communication Server – tons of coverage out there but I recommend the analysis by the UC Strategies team.
- Skype will be providing voice to MySpace IM – again tons of coverage – Skype Journal has more info and a screenshot. See also the Skype blog.
- Per Business Week this morning, Skype will be rolling out its own mobile phone, starting in Europe.
- MySpace
- Apple, meanwhile, announces an upcoming developer kit for the iPhone via a note from Steve Jobs (some reactions here and here).
- And finally MySpace says it will open up to application developers in a similar manner to Facebook.
All in all a rather busy week! (And it’s not over yet…)
Technorati Tags: apple, applications, facebook, iphone, myspace, microsoft, ocs, unifiedcommunications, skype, voip
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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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Telephony is disrupted because voice no longer matters… (as much)
Continue Reading: Telephony is disrupted because voice no longer matters… (as much)Does “voice” communication really matter as much today in business communications?
Think about it. When you need to reach someone today, what do you do? Do you call them on the phone? Or do you send them email? Or a text message? or IM?
I know personally that my normal communication flow usually goes something like this:
- Instant Messaging – I check first to see if I can reach the person on some form of IM. For me, I usually use Skype, GoogleTalk or WLM/MSN, although I do have accounts on other services as well. I use IM because I can see the presence of the other person. If they are online and available, I’ll shoot them a message. Sometimes the question may be dealt with entirely within an IM exchange. Other times I use the IM chat as the precursor to initiating a voice call, i.e. “Ping… do you have time for a call?”
- SMS – If the matter is relatively important and I want to talk to someone, I might send an SMS next to their cell phone, again often to see
- E-mail/Facebook/Twitter/other – Unless the matter is really urgent, the next mode I’ll use is some…
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Skype Journal: "The Dawn of the Mashup World"
Continue Reading: Skype Journal: "The Dawn of the Mashup World"For a couple of months now, a post has been swirling around in my brain that I was tentatively titling “The Dawn of the Mashup Culture” in which I wanted to talk about “mashups” and why they are so incredibly important. Unfortunately I just haven’t had the time to put all those thoughts into the written word.
Well, in the meantime, Jim Courtney went off and wrote something very close to what I was intending to do: “The Dawn of the Mashup World – Part 1: Challenges, Why and Expectations” followed by “Part 1a: What is a Mashup?“
Read them. (And the follow-on posts that Jim indicates he’s writing.)
Mashups are fundamentally changing the way we can use and control services. It’s the remix culture.
You need to understand it… because if you don’t, your products and services will be left behind.
Open APIs win. Mashups win.
Technorati tags: mashups, apis, skype, skype journal, jim courtney -
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A not-very-publicized change with the Blackberry 8830 unleashes the real power of unified messaging!
Continue Reading: A not-very-publicized change with the Blackberry 8830 unleashes the real power of unified messaging!There’s one little feature in my Blackberry 8830 that I just discovered today that I didn’t see anywhere in any of the promotional materials about it. Put simply:
Unified messaging works!
Here’s the thing… given that I work for Mitel, I of course have “unified messaging” set up so that whenever someone leaves me a voicemail message, I get an email with the WAV file attached to it. It’s truly a wonderful thing because I never dial in to check to see if I have messages. I get an email that clues me in to that fact – and generally when I am on my desktop PC, I just play the attached WAV file and listen to the message through my email program. I don’t dial into voicemail to listen.
Before, with my Blackberry 7290 or any of the other earlier models, having this unified messaging feature enabled was really only a “half solution”. Receiving the email clued you in to the fact that you now had a voicemail message… BUT…
you couldn’t listen to the WAV file!
The Blackberry operating system couldn’t play the WAV file, so you had to dial into the voicemail system to listen to the…
