Category: VoIP
-
/
Skype changes “Fair Usage Policy” to stop businesses from being too cheap…
Continue Reading: Skype changes “Fair Usage Policy” to stop businesses from being too cheap…Over on his new “Voice on the Web” blog, Jim Courtney outlines some changes Skype has recently made to their Fair Usage Policy. This subject came up on the “Skype 4.x” public Skype chat hosted by Skype Journal and in the discussion it appeared to most of us that what Skype is really trying to do is to:eliminate businesses making tons of calls on cheap monthly subscriptions.
The idea for the business is simple really… get Skype… get one of the cheap monthly plans and start dialling a zillion numbers for your business. Made even easier if you use one of the various appliances these days that let you do “Skype trunks” from an existing PBX or other call server.
The new “Fair Usage Policy” makes these changes:
- calling to a maximum of 50 numbers per day
- maximum six (6) hours of SkypeOut calling per day
- each subscription is to be used by one person only and not to be shared with any other user (whether by a PBX, call center, computer or any other means).
As Jim’s post discusses, there are a number of caveats and other points to this (for instance, you can call the same number repeatedly…
-
/
Voxilla Tutorial – Running Asterisk in a EC2 Cloud
Continue Reading: Voxilla Tutorial – Running Asterisk in a EC2 CloudLong-time readers will know that I have been intrigued for a long time with what we now call “cloud computing” (and have written about it and spoken about it) and also continue to find the world of open source telephony interesting.So naturally when I’m pointed to a step-by-step tutorial about running Asterisk in Amazon’s EC2 cloud, I’m interested. 🙂 It’s a nicely done tutorial and I look forward to seeing what people will do with it. (Unlike Mark Headd, who pointed to the tutorial in a tweet, I won’t be trying it out this weekend, but I will be doing so at some point soon.)
Cool stuff…
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.
Technorati Tags: amazon, ec2, asterisk, opensource, cloud, cloudcomputing
-
/
FWD launches “SIP to SIP” directory of apps that work with SIP…
Continue Reading: FWD launches “SIP to SIP” directory of apps that work with SIP…If you have a new SIP service or application, how can you find other services to which you can directly connect via SIP? That’s the idea behind the new “SIP to SIP” directory launched by the folks at FWD and now available at www.siptosip.net. From the main page:Why SIP to SIP VoIP?
SIPtoSIP lists applications and content that require SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) enabled devices on both ends of the connection. Realizing the promise of VoIP requires expanding real-time communication options beyond the functions already available with traditional telephones or cell phones. The ability of SIP based VoIP to support HDVoice, video, and click-to-connect requires SIP devices on both ends of the connection. Send suggestions for corrections and additional listings to Daniel Berninger at dan at danielberninger.com.
The directory is very obviously new and only has a few entries on the various pages:
As is noted, Daniel Berninger is looking for people to email him suggestions.
I do applaud the FWD folks for looking at another way to promote the further building of SIP interconnections and so I wish them well with this directory. I’d note, though, that the VoIP-Info.org wiki does already contain a great amount…
-
/
Skype used for voiceover work in an animated film shown at Sundance…
Continue Reading: Skype used for voiceover work in an animated film shown at Sundance…Having now been in the podcasting space for most of four years, I at one point looked into how “voiceover” work was done with traditional studios. To get the highest audio quality, the traditional route has been to use actual ISDN lines here in North America. This seemed to me an area that could be ideal for VoIP to disrupt… and it appears that in at least one case it’s done exactly that.News out of the Sundance Film Festival is this:
PARK CITY, Utah – Philip Seymour Hoffman literally phoned in his voice performance for tonight’s opener at the Sundance Film Festival, the animated feature “Mary and Max.”
“The cost of flying any big-name actor to Australia would be extreme,” explained director Adam Elliot, who is making his feature debut after his Oscar-winning animated short “Harvie Krumpet.”
“We didn’t have a lot of money, and it’s not like we could have flown him in on economy. So we piped him in for two sessions, in New York and London, with high-quality sound that makes him sound like he was in the studio with us in Australia. I was quite surprised at how good the technology is.”
And at the…
-
/
eComm Podcast: Matt Ranney on Thinking Beyond VoIP and A. Bell Telephony
Continue Reading: eComm Podcast: Matt Ranney on Thinking Beyond VoIP and A. Bell TelephonyOver on the eComm blog, Lee Dryburgh put up an interesting podcast on “Matt Ranney on Thinking Beyond VoIP and A. Bell Telephony“. It’s well worth a listen for those of you interested in the larger picture of what we are building for a communications infrastructure…P.S. And if you are interested in that topic, you really should consider attending eComm March 3-5…
Technorati Tags: ecomm, communication, telephony, rebelvox, voip
-
/
Define “VoIP” – and then we can debate whether it is dead!
Continue Reading: Define “VoIP” – and then we can debate whether it is dead!There is a fundamental problem with the “VoIP is dead” debate continuing to rage across the VoIP/communications part of the blogosphere (see Alec Saunders part 1 and part 2, Jon Arnold, Andy Abramson, Ken Camp, Jeff Pulver part 1 and part 2, Om Malik, Shidan Gouran, Ted Wallingford, Dameon Welch-Abernathy (PhoneBoy), Rich Tehrani and a zillion others…)Aswath Rao and Luca Filigheddu came closest to the mark in their posts. The fundamental problem with this entire debate is simply this:
Define “VoIP”?
As I discussed in an Emerging Tech Talk video podcast I put up this morning, there are a range of definitions you could give to “VoIP”, including, but not limited to, the following:
- The underlying infrastructure, a.k.a. the “plumbing” – the mechanisms, protocols, etc. that are used for the transport of voice/video/etc. over IP. Things like SIP, H.323, RTP, various codecs, etc.
- Consumer “PSTN line replacement” services – Offerings like those of Vonage and so many others where the basic idea is that you can get cheaper telephone charges by going over the Internet and getting rid of your local landline. Also called “pure play” VoIP by some or “VoIP arbitrage” by others.
- Computer-to-computer/softphone offerings, often coming from the…
- The underlying infrastructure, a.k.a. the “plumbing” – the mechanisms, protocols, etc. that are used for the transport of voice/video/etc. over IP. Things like SIP, H.323, RTP, various codecs, etc.
-
/
Ken Camp no longer blogging at Realtime Unified Communications Community…
Continue Reading: Ken Camp no longer blogging at Realtime Unified Communications Community…It seems this month is a month for VoIP/Communications-related bloggers to move around… Beyond Jon Arnold, Ken Camp has announced that his regular blogging relationship with Realtime has come to an end and that he will no longer be blogging at the Realtime Unified Communications Community that has been his blogging home for the past three years. Ken’s a great guy and a friend and I do wish him all the best in whatever comes next. For now his writing can be found at the Stardust Global Ventures site that he and his wife Sheryl Breuker maintain. He promises to let us know of some of his new ventures in the next little while.
P.S. You don’t need to worry about me joining this trend… I own this domain and it’s hosted on TypePad, so as long as I keep paying that annual fee…. 😉
If you enjoyed this post, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.
-
/
Can the new VON recapture the energy/enthusiasm of the old VON?
Continue Reading: Can the new VON recapture the energy/enthusiasm of the old VON?As has been widely reported within the VoIP corner of the blogosphere, the VON brand has now been reborn under the new ownership of Virgo Publishing. After the demise of Pulvermedia and the VON tradeshow in the spring of 2008, many of us wondered if new owners would be found to bring back the show – or was its demise just a sign of the times and the fact that the conference / tradeshow space related to VoIP is already quite crowded. We watched both Jeff Pulver and Carl Ford move on with their lives and new endeavors… and it seemed that maybe VON would just be consigned to the annals of IT trade show history. Or would it?
The answer came earlier this month when Virgo announced the launch of www.von.com as a portal for VoIP news and also announced a new VON Conference and Expo for September 2009 in Miami.The rebirth is intriguing on a couple of levels. First, with Pulvermedia, "VON" was the conference/tradeshow and magazine brand, but the web portal was Pulvermedia.com. Now, it's all "von.com". The portal, newsletters, tradeshow and everything else. The tag line is also no longer "Voice On the Net" (or later "Voice/Video…