Category: VoIP
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Calling all communications startups! StartupCamp2: Comm Edition coming to ITEXPO in L.A. in October
Continue Reading: Calling all communications startups! StartupCamp2: Comm Edition coming to ITEXPO in L.A. in OctoberWhen I was down in Miami speaking at ITEXPO East back in January, one of the interesting parts of the event was the “Startup Camp Telephony” that Larry Lisser produced where a number of startups stood up and gave their pitch on what they are doing. As the pictures on the bottom of the TMC page show, there was great attendance at the event.Larry’s back at it and has plans for “StartupCamp 2: Comm Edition” at the ITEXPO West event in Los Angeles on October 4th:
Five startups will be selected to give brief 5-minute “pitch” presentations following which a panel of industry experts and the audience will ask questions and provide valuable feedback. Early stage telephony companies – voice, mobile, video, network and other – wishing to be included in the pitch roster, should click here to enter their details. Startups will benefit from significant exposure leading up to, at and after the event
I’m slated to speak out there doing my usual security part of Ingate’s SIP Trunking sessions, so while I’m there I’ll be looking forward to seeing what startups show up and what cool things they are doing!
P.S. TMC did put out a…
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Calling all Ruby and Asterisk developers! First Adhearsion Conference in SF Aug 14-15
Continue Reading: Calling all Ruby and Asterisk developers! First Adhearsion Conference in SF Aug 14-15For all of you out there working with the Adhearsion open source telephony framework to easily create communications apps on top of Asterisk using the Ruby programming language…. the first “AdhearsionConf” will be held August 14-15 in San Francisco.Jay Phillips, the creator of Adhearsion, will be in the event and undoubtedly a great amount of hacking on Adhearsion will occur throughout the time.
The exact location and schedule are still being confirmed, but mark the date!
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NetworkWorld interviews SIP pioneer and now Skyper Jonathan Rosenberg
Continue Reading: NetworkWorld interviews SIP pioneer and now Skyper Jonathan RosenbergThis week Network World ran a great interview with Jonathan Rosenberg about his new role at Skype. Jonathan is now the “Chief Technology Strategist” at Skype, but he’s known in the industry as one of the co-authors of the original RFC 3261 that defines the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and also for his many years working at Cisco. He’s been extremely active within the IETF, writing a seriously large quantity of Internet-Drafts. I think, in fact, I first met JDR at an IETF meeting… and subsequently was on at least one panel with him (I think a VoiceCon or Interop in New York).It’s been interesting to watch Skype accumulate more and more people with strong SIP backgrounds, and hiring Jonathan was definitely an interesting – and good – move on Skype’s part.
I don’t know that the Network World interview broke any amazing new ground for those of us who have been watching Skype closely, but if you haven’t been paying attention to Skype, Jonathan gives a great view into what the company has been doing lately and where it is going. It is definitely worth a read.
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Tracking Tropo.com calls with Google Analytics
Continue Reading: Tracking Tropo.com calls with Google AnalyticsIt’s no big secret that I’m a huge fan of the Tropo cloud communications service[1] and also a huge fan of Google Analytics. Put them together, as Adam Kalsey did in this blog post today (‘Tracking calls with Google Analytics‘), and I’m excited!I admittedly had not followed the availability of client libraries for “Google Analytics Mobile”, but it makes sense given the diminished capabilities of mobile devices to execute JavaScript (which GA relies upon for tracking). Adam does a great job explaining that and walking through the source code he supplies.
Now I just have to make some time to try it out with my Tropo apps…
[1] In full disclosure, Tropo is a service created by my employer, Voxeo, as part of Voxeo Labs.
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How to use a USB headset with the Apple iPad
Continue Reading: How to use a USB headset with the Apple iPadAs I note over on the Voxeo web site, I recently posted a video showing how you can use a USB headset with the Apple iPad. The video is available on YouTube and you can see it directly here:WHY might you want to do this? Well, primarily if you want better audio quality when using VoIP on your iPad… and if you are like me and always find Bluetooth headsets sucking up too much battery power, it’s nice to have a wired option.
Next up, figure out what else can be plugged into that USB connector… 😉
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CounterPath launches SIP/VoIP softphone for iPhone/iPad and brings enterprise to mobile
Continue Reading: CounterPath launches SIP/VoIP softphone for iPhone/iPad and brings enterprise to mobileHave you wished you could easily extend your corporate IP-PBX to your iPhone? Or have you wanted a good SIP softphone for your iPhone that you could use for testing systems? Or do you just like new shiny iPhone and iPad apps?This week long-time softphone maker CounterPath Corp. released their “Bria iPhone Edition” and for $3.99 it’s a great app to have! Ever since I learned about it a couple of days ago, I’ve been playing with it and this morning I posted a video review as Emerging Tech Talk #51. I show how I’ve connected the app to Voxeo’s corporate IP-PBX, how I can use it to make calls to both regular phone numbers and also SIP URIs, how it works with the iPhone’s address book and also how I can use it on the iPad. You can view the 7-minute video here:
Now my friend Alec Saunders spoke with someone at CounterPath and published a great post yesterday discussing some of the limitations and the future plans that CounterPath has. Definitely worth a read – and I’m looking forward to some of those plans! (Like wideband codecs and multi-tasking support.)
As he notes, this Bria app…
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Google buys GIPS for $68 million – to take on Skype? Apple? Microsoft?
Continue Reading: Google buys GIPS for $68 million – to take on Skype? Apple? Microsoft?The big news out this morning was that Google is acquiring Global IP Solutions (GIPS) for $68 million USD. GIPS may not be a familiar name to many folks, but for us in the communications / telephony space, they are widely known as the supplier of audio codecs (and increasingly video) to companies creating real-time communication products, including Yahoo, AOL, IBM and many others. Many of us, though, knew them best as the initial provider of the wideband iSAC codec to Skype.To put this in more normal language, if you know how good a Skype conversation can sound… how rich the audio can be… how it can sound like the person on the other end is right there in the room with you? The quality of that audio connection is because Skype uses a “wideband codec” to send the audio from one end to the other. Up until 2007, GIPS provided the primary wideband codec that Skype used.
At some point in there, Skype realized that, particularly giving away a free product, it needed to control more of its technology stack and stop paying licensing fees to GIPS and so it bought a company, Camino Networks, that had its…
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Voyces.com launches as a “Independent voice on voice communications”
Continue Reading: Voyces.com launches as a “Independent voice on voice communications”Congrats are definitely in order to Alec, Andy, Jamie, Larry, Luca and Thomas on the launch of their new portal called “Voyces“. As Andy Abramson writes in his first post on the site:A few months ago a group of us, all of whom will be blogging here, got together and realized that with the declining media environment, less pages in the trade press and the failure of the remaining outlets to be able to provide enough coverage of what is still a very much growing sector, that there was a need to be filled. That need was the Independent voice on voice communications.
Alec Saunders writes in his first post about the changes in the communication space and says this:
The cost of entry to be in the business of delivering communications products is dramatically lower than it has ever been, and continues to fall. As a result we’ve seen an explosion of creativity in this space – a renaissance of sorts in which companies and individuals alike merrily combine communications, web, mobile and desktop technologies into a heady “witches brew” of innovation.
I’m delighted to see this team of six come together. I’ve known several of them…
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The many faces of ITEXPO – a photo set of the people at the show
Continue Reading: The many faces of ITEXPO – a photo set of the people at the showWhile speaking at ITEXPO and the Cloud Communications Summit two weeks ago, I naturally had to bring along my new Nikon D90 DSLR and take a few photos. Following the lead of what I’d watched RJ Auburn do a few times (notably in this set from the Voxeo kickoff meeting), I wound up focusing on people for a change, and the resulting set of photos is now up in Flickr and previewed below (click the image to go to the larger Flickr set):If you’ve been around our industry for any length of time, or been to any of the many events, many of the faces will be familiar to you. Others may be newer folks you’ve not yet come to know. I’ve put their names on the individual Flickr photos and their affiliations in the Flickr tags. Obviously this is just a subset of the many folks who were at the ITEXPO event… just people that I ran into during the course of my time there.
Anyway, the photos are up there… enjoy… and yes, it’s probably something I’ll do again as it was fun to do – and man, I love how a 50mm prime lens can…
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eComm Europe in Amsterdam this week (Oct 28-30) – THE show for communications disruption
Continue Reading: eComm Europe in Amsterdam this week (Oct 28-30) – THE show for communications disruptionFor those out there interested in how telephony – and all communications – is being disrupted, the place to be this week is very definitely eComm Europe in Amsterdam. It’s definitely a gathering of the “tribe” of people who are on out there defining the bleeding edge of the communications space. Great speakers, great schedule… it should be a great event!Sadly, a schedule conflict prevented my attendance, but as I wrote about on the Voxeo Talks blog, Voxeo will have a presence there in the form of multiple speakers as well as a booth. More info can be found on the Voxeo event page at:
http://blogs.voxeo.com/events/ecomm-europe/
If you are at eComm Europe, please do say hello to RJ Auburn or Jay Phillips… or stop by our booth. Also, look for the fun giveaway in the eComm bag. 😉
And if, like me, you can’t get there… you can follow along in the eComm tweet stream and see info posted up on the eComm blog. It should be a great show, so I’m definitely looking forward to hearing and reading more about what goes on there.
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