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Video: How to Communicate at Burning Man using OpenBTS and Tropo
Continue Reading: Video: How to Communicate at Burning Man using OpenBTS and TropoHeading to Burning Man this coming week? Would you like to use your mobile phone to connect up with others on the playa in Black Rock City?If so, check out this video from Chris Pirillo about the work being done by a team of folks to supply local cell phone coverage… the vans with satellite and cell hookups are already enroute… it uses software from OpenBTS and Tropo.com to let burners leave each other voice messages, exchange SMS messages and more. Here’s the video:
And here are some blog posts that provide more information:
- The Long and Winding Road to Burning Man
- Tropo + OpenBTS + Burning man = Awesome
- Voice Board and Group SMS for Burning Man
- Papa Legba FAQ (about the deployment at Burning Man and what you need to do to participate)
I’m not personally going to be at Burning Man, but this does sound very cool!
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
- The Long and Winding Road to Burning Man
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Adhearsion (and AdhearsionConf) On Tomorrow’s VUC Call – Telephony Via Ruby
Continue Reading: Adhearsion (and AdhearsionConf) On Tomorrow’s VUC Call – Telephony Via RubyWant to learn more about the Adhearsion framework that lets you easily create telephony and other communication apps using the Ruby language? On tomorrow’s VoIP Users Conference (VUC) call at 12 noon US Eastern, Ben Klang from the Adhearsion project will be talking about all that’s new in Adhearsion-land, including the upcoming AdhearsionConf 2011 in October in San Francisco.I’ve written about Adhearsion before and while I don’t do much with Ruby myself, the power of Adhearsion to create powerful telephony apps in a few lines of code is pretty amazing.
If you’d like to join the VUC call live tomorrow, the info is:
- SIP: 200901@login.zipdx.com (works with wideband!)
- Skype: vuc.me
- Regular old PSTN phone: +15672522286
There’s also a very active IRC backchannel (#vuc on free node) that provides another way to communicate during the call.
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Google Chrome Rolls Out Web Audio API Support: Audio Processing in JavaScript
Continue Reading: Google Chrome Rolls Out Web Audio API Support: Audio Processing in JavaScriptFascinating news out of the Google Chrome team yesterday: the latest developer build of Google Chrome now supports audio signal processing directly in JavaScript!To say that more simply… right now to do good audio communication on the web, you have to use plugins built in Flash, QuickTime or Java. This Web Audio API aims to let you do much of that audio control via JavaScript and HTML5. From the specification intro:
Audio on the web has been fairly primitive up to this point and until very recently has had to be delivered through plugins such as Flash and QuickTime. The introduction of the audio element in HTML5 is very important, allowing for basic streaming audio playback. But, it is not powerful enough to handle more complex audio applications. For sophisticated web-based games or interactive applications, another solution is required. It is a goal of this specification to include the capabilities found in modern game audio engines as well as some of the mixing, processing, and filtering tasks that are found in modern desktop audio production applications.
The Web Audio API specification, which is a proposal for a standard being discussed in the W3C’s Audio Working Group includes a set…
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13 Great Tips And Tricks for Skype 5.2 for the Mac
Continue Reading: 13 Great Tips And Tricks for Skype 5.2 for the MacAre you a Mac OS X user trying to learn to live with the new Skype 5.x user interface? Would you like to learn some great shortcuts for working faster with Skype 5?While the Skype 5.x interface has certainly come under fire from many folks (including me), the reality is that it is the direction Skype is going forward with and so to a certain degree we who want to continue to use Skype have to either learn to live with the new UI – or revert back to Skype 2.8 while realizing we won’t get any new features.
Recently my corporate laptop was upgraded to a brand new MacBook Pro and in the process I decided to finally make the jump over to Skype 5.2. In doing so, I started hunting around for ways to work even faster with the user interface. Thankfully, the folks at Skype came out with this great list of 12 tips:
Skype 5.2 tricks and tips
It turned out I knew most of them (or other ways to do them), but the one I have found very useful was the three-finger swipe on the trackpad to move up or down between conversations.…
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Google’s “Calling From Gmail” Aims to Disrupt International Calling – 38 countries, 4 currencies
Continue Reading: Google’s “Calling From Gmail” Aims to Disrupt International Calling – 38 countries, 4 currenciesFascinating move by Google… they’ve now expanded “Calling from Gmail” to 38 countries, opened up payment into 4 currencies (US Dollars, Canadian Dollars, Euros or British Pounds), and lowered their calling rates to over 150 “destinations” around the world. If you aren’t familiar with “Calling from GMail”, it’s the green phone icon you may have inside your Gmail inbox:I’m showing the phone “popped out” of the browser window, but normally it just appears inside your browser window and lets you search your contacts or dial new numbers.
Personally, I find that most of my international calling (and actually most of my calling, period) is done via Skype… but for those who want to reach people internationally on regular mobile phones (or (GASP!) landlines) this could offer another cheap option.
Similarly, if you live in Google products (something more people are exploring now that Google+ is here), this provides a great way to stay within Google-land and make your phone calls. While I am a Gmail user, I read all my email offline so I never use the web interface… so I don’t see me using this, but many will, I’m sure.
Sadly, there seems to be no way to…
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Video Interview: What Is The Future of Real-Time Communications?
Continue Reading: Video Interview: What Is The Future of Real-Time Communications?As I posted over on the Voxeo Talks blog recently, über-geek Chris Pirillo recently interviewed VoIP industry veteran Jeff Pulver and Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor on the topic of the future of real-time communications. It was a wide ranging interview talking about the history of communication apps, how VoIP has evolved, the role of standards, issues around bandwidth caps, the role of individuals and so much more. Chris explained a bit more on his site.. The video is now available on YouTube:
As a producer of video interviews, I was personally intrigued by Chris’ use of a Google+ “Hangout” to conduct the interview. I’m going to have to try it at some point.
Enjoy the video!
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
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Skype Opens Its Walls A Bit? Lets You IM Facebook Users Just Like Skype Users
Continue Reading: Skype Opens Its Walls A Bit? Lets You IM Facebook Users Just Like Skype UsersDid Skype just add a XMPP gateway into their network and bring their walls down a bit more? Today’s release of Skype 5.5 for Windows had one VERY cool piece of news:Facebook integration
Now when you connect to Facebook you can see when your Facebook friends are online and IM with them directly from Skype.Now I don’t have Windows to test it out (as you would know from my earlier post), but in working with fellow blogger Jim Courtney who uses Skype on both operating systems, this has some interesting aspects to it.
For starters, in Skype 5.5, the chat with the Facebook user appears in your left-side list of chats just like a chat with a Skype user. You have the same user experience chatting with a FB user as with a Skype user. (Subject to the caveat that Jim found he couldn’t edit a message sent to a FB user, but that makes sense given that the message would leave Skype’s network to go over to Facebook’s network.)
When Jim went into his Facebook contacts he found my name (he and I are friends on FB) that I was currently “offline”:
He noted that he could…
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Skype Rolls Out New Emoticons – But Yet Again ONLY on Windows
Continue Reading: Skype Rolls Out New Emoticons – But Yet Again ONLY on WindowsSkype is very excited about rolling out new emoticons today… but continuing their fragmented product strategy, these new emoticons are Windows-only. So while on a Windows system they may look like (image from Skype’s blog post):What they look like on my Mac is this:
C’mon Skype… would it have killed you to make this available in a simultaneous Mac release?
I don’t personally really care about access to these emoticons… my life will not be any better or worse based on whether or not I can use these emoticons (although I do see places where I could use them).
The point is that Skype once again continues to roll out features that work on one operating system but not on others.
Personally, I’d love to see Skype get to a point where it could be like Mozilla Firefox (or Voxeo’s Prophecy) where a new release comes out across all operating systems.
Let’s break the silos, Skype… and provide a more consistent user experience across ALL platforms!
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
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Video: Why is Sam Censored?
Continue Reading: Video: Why is Sam Censored?In the run-up to our presence at the SpeechTEK conference in New York starting on August 8th, some Voxeo marketing colleagues of mine put together this fun video:
And of course, if you want to find out WHY Sam is censored… well… you’ll just have to wait until SpeechTEK! 😉
P.S. There’s also an outtake video 🙂
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Voxeo Speakers Out at OSCON 2011 This Week… Crisis Comms, Open Source, IPv6
Continue Reading: Voxeo Speakers Out at OSCON 2011 This Week… Crisis Comms, Open Source, IPv6If you are out at O’Reilly’s OSCON this week in Portland, Oregon, two of my colleagues from Voxeo will be out there speaking tomorrow (Thursday) and Friday. Johnny Diggz and Adam Kalsey will be speaking on:- Open Source Tools, Social Media and Crisis Response
- Managing Open Source Releases of a Cloud Platform
- Why Should You Care about IPv6? And What Should You Do about It?
I was supposed to be out there at OSCON giving that last presentation about IPv6, but unfortunately I’m not able to travel this week. Adam is thankfully delivering that presentation on my behalf.
If you are out there at OSCON, I hope you enjoy the event – it looks to yet again be a fantastic event!
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
- Open Source Tools, Social Media and Crisis Response
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…