Category: VoIP
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Telephony – It’s the API’s, stupid!
Continue Reading: Telephony – It’s the API’s, stupid!After already publishing my last post about mashups, I came across Jim Courtney’s Skype Journal post about the Skype mashup competition, which in turn led me to Thomas Howe’s excellent “API of the week” post (got all that?) which had these wonderfully-written words (so much so that I feel compelled to excerpt them here, something I seldom do to this extent):
If you were to ask me, I would say the twenty year old software engineer has a distinct advantage over the older telephone guys (such as me) in the realm of innovation. Since the barriers to entry to deploying a service provider have fallen through the floor, the larger challenge is not in complex engineering, but is instead in innovation. The younger engineers are free of the legacy of the PSTN, and many things would occur to an experienced engineer won’t to them, and it’s not a bad thing.
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What does this have to do with telephony? Nothing. What does this have to do with next generation applications? Everything. Applications that use the Internet as the platform use APIs from a large number of sources, and by and large, these APIs are not telephony. However, nearly every…
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ProgrammableWeb.com launches "telephony mashup" category
Continue Reading: ProgrammableWeb.com launches "telephony mashup" categoryIt’s very cool to see that one of the leading web sites about “mashups”, ProgrammableWeb.com, has announced the launch of a new section focused on “Mobile/Telephony” mashups. They actually call it a “Market”, and there are two others launched today: Mapping and Shopping.
The obvious focus for this blog, though, is the “Mobile/Telephony” market. The announcement notes that there are currently over 25 different APIs under “Telephony” or “Messaging” and in the actual lists of mashups, 104 are tagged “mobile” and 113 tagged “messaging”. The announcement also notes that Thomas Howe will be assisting with the content of this new section. (Congrats to Thomas!)
The list of telephony APIs (only 11, the other 14+ must be “messaging) is available and several names are probably quite familiar. Thomas Howe also wrote a piece to explain the different types of APIs and provide a bit of background: “Telephony & Mobile APIs and Mashups, the Big Picture“.
I did find it a bit puzzling that the list of telephony APIs didn’t include Skype, given that Skype has a whole developer website set up to support its APIs. Likewise no mention of Asterisk even though the entire thing is really one big set of APIs. …
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UC Strategies podcasts with Mitel executives about unified communications, Microsoft, Sun, HP and more…
Continue Reading: UC Strategies podcasts with Mitel executives about unified communications, Microsoft, Sun, HP and more…Back at our Mitel Forum event in late June, analyst Blair Pleasant from Unified Communications Strategies recorded a couple of podcasts[1] with Mitel executives and I’ve been meaning to write about them here. (Full Disclosure: While Mitel has no direct connection to this blog, I do work for Mitel.)
First up, Blair interviewed Mitel CEO Don Smith. They discussed Mitel’s view of unified communications, business process improvement, the use of SIP and XML interfaces and much more. Don discussed the importance of presence and availability, the need for “in the moment” communication and the importance of “presence everywhere”. He also offers his view of the greatest challenges facing Mitel and the industry in the time ahead and his view of where Mitel is heading.
Second, Blair interviewed Stephen Beamish, Mitel VP of Business Development and Strategic Alliances about the partnerships Mitel has with Microsoft, HP and Sun. Given the announcement before Mitel Forum of the partnership with Sun, this interview gives one of the first views into the Mitel-Sun relationship. Blair and Stephen also, of course, discuss Mitel’s relationship with Microsoft, especially in light of the Microsoft-Nortel relationship as well as Microsoft’s other partners. Stephen also talks about the…
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Heading out to VoiceCon, Aug 20-23 in San Francisco. Will you be there?
Continue Reading: Heading out to VoiceCon, Aug 20-23 in San Francisco. Will you be there?If any of you reading this will be attending VoiceCon out in San Francisco, August 20-23, please do drop me a note. I’ll be there from August 20-22 and am looking forward to connecting with a range of people from around the industry.
FYI, if you are a Facebook user and are attending, there is a Facebook event for VoiceCon to which you can add yourself to facilitate networking with other FB users at the show.
Technorati tags: voicecon, voip -
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CRN: "The Coming VoIP War" (between Microsoft and Cisco)
Continue Reading: CRN: "The Coming VoIP War" (between Microsoft and Cisco)Is “the coming VoIP war” to be fought out between Microsoft and Cisco? So asks a column “The Coming VoIP War” by Larry Hooper in today’s issue of CRN. On one level, the debate isn’t as interesting to me as the venue… “CRN” is “Computer Reseller News” and has been around the industry for many years.[1] At various times I’ve personally had a subscription to the print version or at least had it around the office to read.[2] Supported by advertising and theoretically sent to a targeted profile of subscribers, I’ve always seen it as one of the more “established’ newsmagazines of the information technology space… and one obviously targeted at resellers of such technology. So to me it is interesting that the question is being discussed within CRN’s print and web pages.
As to the larger question of whether “the coming VoIP war” will be between Microsoft and Cisco, one can’t ignore that these two companies are giants in the overall IT industry with extremely significant resources and yes, the point is valid that as the interests of the two companies have converged in this merger of communication that many call “unified communications”, they are now definitely going to be competing…
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TMC.net interviews me: "Security and Disaster Recovery for IP Telephony Systems"
Continue Reading: TMC.net interviews me: "Security and Disaster Recovery for IP Telephony Systems"Just out yesterday, TMC.Net published an interview with me titled, “Security and Disaster Recovery for IP Telephony Systems“, by Mae Kowalke, where I talk about general VoIP security issues and then get into specifics about Mitel solutions. Given that the author nicely gave me the chance to review the text and offer feedback before she published it, I have to say I’m pleased with how it came out. 🙂
(And yes, I normally blog about VoIP security over on the Voice of VOIPSA weblog, but I just field weird about posting something like this over on that site.)
Technorati tags: mitel, security, voip security, voipsecurity, dan york -
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Ooma, ooma, ooma… a collection of links about the buzz
Continue Reading: Ooma, ooma, ooma… a collection of links about the buzzLate last week there was quite the buzz in the VoIP part of the blogosphere about “Ooma” a new company with $27 million in funding that claims to “transform telecom services” and let you “make local and long-distance calls anywhere in the US for free” (provided, of course, that you live in the US). I saw all the coverage and thought about writing something here, but I just couldn’t get overly excited to do so. My first reaction was, well, “how is this different from PhoneGnome or other similar systems?” (And I enjoyed the fact that PhoneGnome promptly came out with a “Build Your Own Ooma” Challenge!)
My second reaction was that with their peer-to-peer architecture (letting others share your phoneline) there are bound to be security concerns (opinions here and here) and that it looks like it involves changing out your existing firewall/router and that simply isn’t something I see people wanting to do.
Anyway, there’s been a whole lot of words written on this issue and so I thought I’d point to some of the pieces out there. First, some nice summaries:
- ComputerWorld’s IT Blog Watch: “Ooma selling free phone service”
- Jon Arnold: “Ooma – a Triumph…
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Remote VoIP teleworker sets serve as an Internet connectivity warning device…
Continue Reading: Remote VoIP teleworker sets serve as an Internet connectivity warning device…Here’s a great side benefit of having an IP phone in teleworker mode hanging off of a system somewhere out there on the Internet – you have a close-to-instant warning system about Internet connectivity issues.
Take this morning… I walk into my home office and see that one of my phones has come out of its sleep status and the backlight is on and showing "CONNECTION PENDING…" with these black square boxes next to it. I glance at another IP phone: "PLEASE WAIT"
Oh, %#$#?!. It’s going to be that kind of Monday morning!
Yes, indeed, as I woke up the PCs, I did indeed have no connectivity. Couldn’t get to any websites and all the IM clients were cycling waiting to get connected. After doing the usual power-cycling of the cable modem and verifying that I could get an address but couldn’t ping beyond the next hop router, a relatively-quick call to Comcast brought the word that there was a "partial outage" in my area and that connectivity might be going up and down for the next two hours.
Great. Wonderful way for a home office worker to start a Monday.
But it did remind me of one great…
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iSkoot – cool idea for a Skype client for Blackberry, but I don’t see me using it much because…
Continue Reading: iSkoot – cool idea for a Skype client for Blackberry, but I don’t see me using it much because…Last week I wrote some first impressions of iSkoot, a new Skype client for Blackberry, and while I still think it’s a very cool idea, I don’t see myself using it all that much. Why not? Very simply…
Battery life!
Or the lack thereof. Yes, indeed, it all does seem to come down to batteries, and iSkoot seems to certainly consume its share of power. Now granted, my Blackberry 7290 is an older model and for all I know could probably use a new battery, but in “normal” operation, I can charge it up and then have it run for a good 3 or 4 days before it needs a recharge. However, start up iSkoot and I found I suddenly needed a recharge by the end of the day!
In fairness, iSkoot is not alone in this… the other Blackberry IM clients I’ve used, both the Windows Messenger client and also most recently the IM+ client for Skype also have this same problem. I’m assuming it has something to do with the need to regularly use the data connection for updates to status and to update chat messages.
I can see this actually being most useful to me when I’m traveling and…
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iSkoot provides another Skype client for Blackberry devices… review – and my first reaction is that it has a challenge with the "instant" part of "instant messaging"
Continue Reading: iSkoot provides another Skype client for Blackberry devices… review – and my first reaction is that it has a challenge with the "instant" part of "instant messaging"NOTE: Please see the updates at the bottom of this post.
Back on Monday, Jim Courtney over at Skype Journal IM’d me (on Skype naturally) asking if he could do a test call to me on "another Skype client for the Blackberry". Naturally, I said yes and in a moment or so we were speaking. It turned out that he was using a new beta application from iSkoot. From the news release:
The new iSkoot v1.1 delivers a comprehensive mobile Skype experience on BlackBerry: With the click of a button, users can instantly chat with their Skype contacts, make and receive Skype calls, and use SkypeOut™ to inexpensively call regular phone numbers nearly anywhere in the world. iSkoot v1.1 also displays complete Skype contact status information, so BlackBerry users can see which friends, family members and business colleagues are available, as well as manage their own online presence. This latest release features a next generation, easy-to-use interface especially designed for BlackBerry users and will offer additional features soon. iSkoot works without any need for PCs, special hardware, custom phones or Wi-Fi hot spots, and utilizes the existing mobile network infrastructure to route Skype calls through the voice channel.
It…