Category: VoIP
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Voxeo Unleashes PhonoSDK 0.2, a jQuery Module for Voice and Chat In the Browser
Continue Reading: Voxeo Unleashes PhonoSDK 0.2, a jQuery Module for Voice and Chat In the BrowserHow about some echo suppression for voice calls directly from your web browser? That was the big news out of the Voxeo Labs team yesterday with the release of version 0.2 of the PhonoSDK… no more headsets required! Just click the Phono button on your website and start talking!If you aren’t aware of Phono, back in October Voxeo released the Phono SDK, letting you easily add in voice or chat directly into your website. The way to think about is this… traditionally, websites have had a “click-to-call” button that would call you and call a call center and bridge the two calls together. For this to work, you have to typically enter your phone number into the phone.
Phono changes that by running a softphone client directly in your web browser. So instead of entering your phone number, you simply push the button and start talking to your browser. (For those interested, we posted about the architecture, which uses a mixture of XMPP/Jingle and SIP. Phono itself is a jQuery module/library/app/whatever-you-want-to-call-it that you reference in your web page.)
Phono received a good bit of attention and we posted a lot of content about it online, including sample apps, tutorials,…
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Google Voice Via SIP – It’s Dead, Jim
Continue Reading: Google Voice Via SIP – It’s Dead, JimSo there it is… connecting to a Google Voice number via a SIP address no longer works for me, too. After I wrote on Monday about how you could connect to Google Voice numbers via a SIP URI, many folks said that the service wasn’t working for them… or did work and then stopped. So many folks were reporting issues on Twitter or blogs that I asked yesterday if Google was hanging up on SIP connections to GV numbers.Through it all, though, my ability to call Google Voice numbers via SIP kept working perfectly fine, while it stopped working (or never worked) for pretty much everyone else who had tried it. (except for one other person who saved my sanity!) Several people on Twitter thought I must have some kind of “magic”… but all I knew was that it kept on working.
Until this morning.
It’s dead now.
Using SJphone to call the exact same number that has worked fine for the past two days now only gets me a constant ringing.
So whatever “magic” I may have had is gone… gone, gone, gone…
Let’s hope that Google will in fact bring back this capability… and maybe even go…
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Google Voice Now Offers SIP Addresses For Calling Directly Over IP
Continue Reading: Google Voice Now Offers SIP Addresses For Calling Directly Over IPWouldn't it be great if you could call a Google Voice number directly via SIP? So that you could bypass the PSTN when calling a GV number and go directly over IP? With potentially all the advanced capabilities that could give? (wideband audio, video, etc.) It turns out that you now can! UPDATE – Nov 13, 2012: Over a series of subsequent posts about Google Voice and SIP, it first seemed like this service was working… then it stopped… then it started… and then it stopped for some people and still worked for others. As of November 2012 the service is not working for me.By way of a tweet from Aswath Rao (crediting @truvoip) today I learned that you could simply take your Google Voice number and append "@sip.voice.google.com" to get a perfectly working SIP URI that you could use with any SIP phone. I naturally tried it out with my own GV number using the SJphone SIP phone:
The call worked great. I answered it on one of my other phones and the conversation was fine – both audio streams intact, etc.
YATE?
What's interesting to me here is that SJphone reports that the remote client is YATE, a.k.a.…
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Is Facebook Planning an Official Voice Calling Feature? With Skype? And Would Facebook Users Care?
Continue Reading: Is Facebook Planning an Official Voice Calling Feature? With Skype? And Would Facebook Users Care?News today out of ReadWriteWeb and The Daily What is that a “Call” button was spotted briefly inside someone’s Facebook profile:RWW goes on to speculate about whether or not this could be part of the “deep integration” between Facebook and Skype announced last September. Mike Melanson at RWW wrote this:
The move would make a lot of sense for Facebook, which has worked recently to become the center of your online communication experience. Its recent “not email” announcement debuted a form of communication that would supposedly work seamlessly between devices, so that there would be little differentiation between messaging, email and Facebook chat. Voice calling between users, whether from browser to browser, phone to browser, or browser to phone, would just make sense in creating a more seamless communication experience.
Now, there is the obvious question –
is the screenshot real?
Or are we being hoaxed? Having personally been in a situation where I received an inadvertant preview of possible new Facebook features (which sadly have yet to materialize), I’m inclined to believe that the screenshoot could be real.The Skype Connection?
But is it connected to Skype, as RWW wonders? The “deep integration” reported by RWW in September…
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And Thus Dies The “VON” Name…
Continue Reading: And Thus Dies The “VON” Name…For those of us who have been around the “VoIP industry” for some time now, the “VON Conferences” put on by Jeff Pulver were the place to be in the early days of VoIP. We were all mostly early adopters and embraced with enthusiasm this idea of sending voice and later video over the IP networks… there was a real community of both attendees and speakers… all of us chasing that vision of real-time communications over the Internet and other IP networks.
“VON” as a name continued to morph and evolve… it became a series of conferences… the “V” included “video”… it spawned the VON Coalition on public policy issues… Jeff and his Pulvermedia team launched “VON Magazine”, issues of which can still be found online in some places… www.von.com became a media hub around VoIP issues… “VON” became many things…
And then it all ended in early 2008 with Pulvermedia’s investors seizing assets and then with Jeff’s resignation. Fast forward to December 2008 and the VON brand was reborn through Virgo Publishing. I and many others wondered if Virgo could recapture and rebuild the VON community. They tried. They had a VON conference in 2009 (and I was a…
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Today’s VUC call at noon US Eastern: FREETALK Connect – Skype-connected IP-PBX
Continue Reading: Today’s VUC call at noon US Eastern: FREETALK Connect – Skype-connected IP-PBXIn about 40 minutes, this week’s VoiP Users Conference call will start with Jim Courtney talking about the new FREETALK Connect IP-PBX. It includes:- Skype connectivity for all phones.
- Auto-provisioning works with almost all models of desktop and conference IP phones
- Install wizard configures all basic networking, telephony system and user functionality on the FREETALK Connect
- Remote administration capabilities that enable the system to be administered from anywhere Internet access is available.
I’m intrigued by the system because it integrates an Asterisk-based IP-PBX with Skype – and is “certified” by Skype. I’m looking forward to hearing what Jim has to say about it.
If you’d like to listen live, there are regular, SIP and Skype contact phone numbers to dial into the VUC. You can also jump on #vuc on IRC to join in the text backchannel.
If you can’t join live, a recording of the call will be posted to the episode’s web page sometime in the next few days.
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
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Use “Facebook Telephone” to call FB friends – or anyone else!
Continue Reading: Use “Facebook Telephone” to call FB friends – or anyone else!With Voxeo Labs’ launch of the Phono software toolkit last weekend that lets you turn any browser into a phone or IM client, one of the more interesting sample applications released along with it was “Facebook Telephone“, a Facebook application that lets you make phone calls from directly inside of Facebook.
In a post on the Phono blog, Chris Matthieu goes into detail about the application, how you can use it to call your friends… to call regular (PSTN) phone numbers… and also to call SIP addresses.
In using the app, I’ve found a couple of things rather cool:
- The “phone-in-the-browser” has been seamless for me in the sense that after I approved the initial Flash security warning (and told it to remember my setting), it “just worked” and I was able to start speaking to people without any problems.
- I like that you can call a friend on Facebook and if they don’t have Facebook Telephone running in a browser it will automatically connect through to their mobile device.
- It’s cool that it works over WiFi… I’m looking forward to trying it out in various different locations. (like the next plane I’m on with WiFi 😉
On…
- The “phone-in-the-browser” has been seamless for me in the sense that after I approved the initial Flash security warning (and told it to remember my setting), it “just worked” and I was able to start speaking to people without any problems.
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The New Breed of Tablets from Cisco, Avaya and RIM – will they matter?
Continue Reading: The New Breed of Tablets from Cisco, Avaya and RIM – will they matter?Cisco, Avaya and RIM are all rushing out “tablet” devices now for the enterprise market – but will they actually matter? Will enterprises really want to use these high-end and high-priced tablets versus all the new consumer tablets like the iPad and all the various Android and Windows tables in the queue?
Don’t get me wrong … it think it is awesome that Cisco, Avaya and RIM are all coming out with new tablets. Ever since getting an iPad back in early May it has become a constant companion on my travels around and I use it for so many different purposes.
The touch interface is also so incredibly “natural”… I watch my daughters using the iPad and just have to think: “Why shouldn’t computers just work this way?”
Any user interface improvements that improve the communications user experience are very definitely a GOOD thing!
So I commend Cisco, Avaya and RIM for coming out with tablets.
I just still find myself wondering why I might want to pay to buy one of these tablets. I had this exchange yesterday with analyst Brian Riggs on Twitter:
As I said, I already have a SIP client on my iPad (and there…
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TechCrunch interview on Skype’s plan for the enterprise
Continue Reading: TechCrunch interview on Skype’s plan for the enterpriseWhat are Skype’s plans for the enterprise? What do they see as their target market? On Saturday, TechCrunch posted an interview, with David Gurle, Skype’s General Manager and Vice President of Enterprise, focusing on these questions: “Skype’s VP Of Enterprise On Future Strategy, Products And Competitors.
While not deep on details, the interview did offer a few interesting glimpses into their plans. For instance, Skype is looking at industry-specific business-to-consumer apps:
For example, Skype will soon be offering businesses a way to establish Skype-powered virtual video call centers, allowing enterprise customers to talk to their own customers across multiple devices, platforms, geographies, and more.
Such an offering could certainly be interesting. I was also intrigued by this:
When I asked him about Skype’s future, Gule says it is in creating a one-click solution to allow you to reach a partner, friend, manager, employee, or business contact from any platform.
The “directory problem” has always been a challenge, i.e. where does your master directory live… it will be interesting to see what Skype comes up with for their answer.
The interview has more info and is worth a read for those of us continuing to track and monitor what Skype…
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Phono – Your new, free tool for Rewiring the Real-time Web!
Continue Reading: Phono – Your new, free tool for Rewiring the Real-time Web!What if you could have customers call in to your call center from directly within your web browser? No “click to call” that calls them back on their cell phone… but literally just press a button on your web site and start talking? And get connected directly to the team appropriate to the web page rather than a generic inbox?
What if you could do this with more than just voice… but also video? screen sharing? with better audio quality than the legacy telephony network (the PSTN)?
What if you could also add in live chat sessions directly from your website? Giving you true multi-channel interaction with your customers?
And what if you could do this without any downloads by the customer?
Even better… what if this could be done with your branding? and connecting to ANY IP communications system?
Announcing Phono
Today at the JQuery Conference in Boston, the Voxeo Labs team is announcing Phono a new software development kit that lets you create apps just like the ones I mentioned. It’s free, it’s “skinnable” and it works with any systems that use SIP or XMPP (Jabber). More info here:
The Phono…