Category: VoIP
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Travelling to/speaking at ACUTA conference in Hollywood, Florida, July 29-Aug 2
Continue Reading: Travelling to/speaking at ACUTA conference in Hollywood, Florida, July 29-Aug 2FYI, on the week of July 29th – August 2nd, I’ll be down in Hollywood, Florida, at the annual conference of the Association for Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education (ACUTA). I will be speaking on… surprise!… VoIP security! There look to be a great number of interesting talks on the schedule, and so I’m looking forward to wearing my CTO Office hat (versus my pure “VoIP security” hat) and listening to and learning from what many of the folks involved with deploying leading-edge IP communications technologies in the education space are doing. There will, of course, also be some security talks of interest.
If any of you reading this weblog will be down there at the ACUTA conference, please do feel free to drop me a note, as I definitely do enjoy meeting with others who connect through the social media space.
P.S. And yes, Florida in late July/early August is definitely not my idea of a fun place to be… good news is that we’ll be indoors!
Technorati tags: acuta, voip security, voip, education, mitel -
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TMC.net launches "Open Source PBX community"
Continue Reading: TMC.net launches "Open Source PBX community"Recognizing the growth in open source telephony, Rich Tehrani and his team over at TMC.net today rolled out their “Open Source PBX community” at http://opensourcepbx.tmcnet.com/ . Sponsored by long-time open source supporter Sangoma, Rich says in his video that they aim for their site to be the place to go for news, commentary and documents about open source telephony. Right now it seems primarily to have some white papers, a list of resources (which seem to mostly come from Sangoma) and open source-related news and articles. Given that this just launched, it will be interesting to see what they do with it.
Rich asked for feedback about the site and my #1 point would be – could we please get some RSS feeds? Unless I missed them, I can’t see anyway to subscribe… and that’s really how I personally like to read my updates these days.
Anyway, it’s good to see TMC.net expanding their open source coverage and I’ll be watching how it evolves.
Technorati tags: voip, open source, asterisk, sangoma, rich tehrani, tmc.net -
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Skype releases new 3.5 beta that adds video into chats and mood messages
Continue Reading: Skype releases new 3.5 beta that adds video into chats and mood messagesAs announced yesterday on the Share Skype blog and in more detail on the Skype Garage blog (and also in the Windows Release Notes), Skype has released an updated 3.5 beta for Windows. Skype 3.5 beta came out earlier this month, but this new update includes several new features, most notably the ability to add video into a chat or mood message, and per the release notes it also fixes a range of bugs. Jim Courtney has more info over at Skype Journal, but I found this piece of interest with regard to the new video snapshot capability (which now allows you to take a snapshot of the remote video, i.e. the person you are speaking with):
Providing your video also implies that your provide your remote participant with permission to make snapshots. Video snapshots inherits existing privacy mechanisms associated with turning on your video.
So basically if you use Skype video, you should be aware that the person with whom you are chatting could easily capture images of you. (Obviously this has always been possible with screen capture programs, but this is now built into Skype.)
On the “adding videos to chat or mood message” feature, my initial reaction…
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YouTube video from Sun blogger sets shots of Sun/Mitel gear to hip-hop…
Continue Reading: YouTube video from Sun blogger sets shots of Sun/Mitel gear to hip-hop…Following on my previous post about Sun blogger Craig Bender, I should note that he also posted a video to YouTube that is the first time I can honestly say that I’ve ever seen shots of Mitel and/or Sun gear set to hip-hop music! Enjoy…
Technorati tags: mitel forum, mitel, sun, sun microsystems, sun ray -
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YouTube video shows the Sun / Mitel collaboration – voice/data hot desking via card…
Continue Reading: YouTube video shows the Sun / Mitel collaboration – voice/data hot desking via card…One of the many cool things I’ve been hoping to find the cycles to write about coming out of Mitel Forum last week is the collaboration occurring between Mitel and Sun Microsystems. First announced June 19th, there are really two components to the collaboration: 1) the Multi-Instance Call Server (MICS) that can have up to 200 instances of our 3300 ICP call control software running on a Sun server; and 2) a very cool integration of a SunRay thin client computer into the base of one of our phones. With the phones, a user can simply insert their “Java card” into the base of the phone and the user is automagically signed onto the computer and to the phone. Pull the card out, the user is logged out. Insert another user’s card and the computer and the phone are logged in as that user. It takes the “hot desking” we’ve had for years and extends that to now also include the PC. As I said, it’s very cool!
The good news is that I can actually share a bit of the experience with you courtesy of Sun blogger Craig Bender, a.k.a. the “Thin Guy”, who writes the Sun Ray Blog. I…
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Google acquires GrandCentral… and enters further into the PSTN side of telecommunications
Continue Reading: Google acquires GrandCentral… and enters further into the PSTN side of telecommunicationsNews breaking out today is that Google has acquired GrandCentral for something around $50 million. GrandCentral is a service that gives you one phone number that can ring multiple numbers, provide one common voicemail – and all sorts of the other features (see “howitworks” for a list of features). As the GrandCentral blog entry says:
We started GrandCentral because we wanted to create a service that puts users in control of their voice communications and not the other way around. As you have discovered, with GrandCentral you get all of your phone calls through just one number that never changes and you can link and ring up to six phones to ring when somebody calls you. But that’s just the start. You can set different rules for each caller (some ring all your phones, other can go straight to voicemail), create personal voicemail greetings for each of your callers, and even check your voicemail on the web with all of your messages in just one inbox. We’ll even save your messages for as long as you want.
I first learned of GrandCentral quite some time ago from Andy’s blog and subsequently heard GrandCentral CEO Craig Walker talk out…
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Heading out to Mitel Forum June 25-27 in Las Vegas…
Continue Reading: Heading out to Mitel Forum June 25-27 in Las Vegas…FYI, while I don’t usually write a whole lot about Mitel here, I do in fact work for Mitel and after I return from a week of vacation I’ll be heading down to Las Vegas on Monday, June 25th, to speak at our Mitel Forum event for resellers, consultants and analysts. If any of you who read this weblog will be down there, I’ll look forward to seeing you there (and please say hello). You’ll find me giving presentations on… gee…. “VoIP Security” and “Business Continuity”! (Surprise, surprise…) Should be a very good event.
Technorati tags: mitel, mitel forum -
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Why did I wind up in Burlington, VT? Martyn Davies interviews me for his "Bending The Needle" podcasts
Continue Reading: Why did I wind up in Burlington, VT? Martyn Davies interviews me for his "Bending The Needle" podcastsEver wonder why I wound up in Burlington, VT, after living in Ottawa, Ontario, for most of 5 years? Well, maybe you haven’t… but that and other items about me are now available in an interview that Martyn Davies has posted as part of his new “Bending the Needle” podcast series. When Martyn was over here and visited me back in the winter, he recorded this brief interview sitting in my home studio. He just recorded it on his handy little Zoom H4 portable recorder which worked quite well. He also took this picture to the right, which remains among my favorite as far as pictures of me go.
Martyn had told me that he was teaming up with Dean Elwood from VoIPuser.org to do a podcast series and this “Bending the Needle” seems to be their work. The subtitle is “Interviews with the Leading Edge Personalities in the VoIP Space” and so it’s an honor to be among the first interviewees he has up there. I’ll subscribe and will be interested to see their other interviews.
Technorati tags: dan york, martyn davies, podcasting, voip, voipsa -
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Have Skype and Global IP Solutions (GIPS) parted ways?
Continue Reading: Have Skype and Global IP Solutions (GIPS) parted ways?Ever since Skype first launched, they have really been one of the showcases for Global IP Solutions‘ (GIPS – formerly “Global IP Sound”) codecs, particularly the wideband iSAC codec which you could argue is largely what has accounted for the great audio quality you can often get on Skype calls. Now, of course GIPS has many other customers – in fact their customer/partner list reads like a veritable “Who’s Who” of companies within the VoIP industry. Skype, though, has always been one of the great examples to point to.
It would seem, though, that Skype and GIPS have had a parting of the ways. Back in March, there was discussion of new codecs in the Skype 3.2 beta and the possibility that this was as a result of an acquisition Skype had made. Yesterday, though, there was a post to the main Skype blog that included this (my emphasis in bold):
And because we’ve replaced our audio engine in our most recent releases — it’s now fully built in-house — it’s worth bearing in mind that you may run into some bumps when a call is placed from an older version of Skype to newer versions.
So “it’s now fully built…
