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VoiceOnTheWeb Reviews Skype 5.2 For Windows
Continue Reading: VoiceOnTheWeb Reviews Skype 5.2 For WindowsOver on his VoiceOnTheWeb site, Jim Courtney wrote up a good review of Skype 5.2 for Windows that was recently released. Jim’s summary: subtle window dressings.It’s interesting to read… consider the subtle shift of moving the “Video call” button over to the left so that is the first button:
No longer having any Windows systems in my home office, I’m not running Skype 5.2 so I appreciate Jim’s review. Do check it out!
UPDATE: – Shortly after I published this, Jim Courtney came out with a second post about Skype 5.2 explaining some changes to dialing PSTN numbers.
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The Media Frenzy About The AT&T Acquisition of T-Mobile USA – Is There Anything More To Be Said Right Now?
Continue Reading: The Media Frenzy About The AT&T Acquisition of T-Mobile USA – Is There Anything More To Be Said Right Now?Multiple people have pinged me asking if I was going to weigh in on the news last night that AT&T is acquiring T-Mobile USA.Seriously?
It’s been ages since I’ve seen this kind of online and offline media feeding frenzy[1] … I mean, look at Techmeme this morning:
Pretty much everybody and anybody who writes online with anything remotely to do with communications has generated posts on the topic.
I think at this point all we can really do is watch what the regulators say… and realize that this will take a year or more to actually happen. I’ll perhaps have more to say at some future time, but right now I’m just reading Om and all the many other comments out there…
[1] Well, okay, maybe we haven’t seen this kind of media feeding frency since, oh, the iPad2 launch 😉
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How To Set A Skype Chat So That New Arrivals See (Some) Chat History
Continue Reading: How To Set A Skype Chat So That New Arrivals See (Some) Chat HistoryWould you like to make it so that when you add someone to a Skype chat they automagically see some of the recent history of the chat? So that people joining a team or a project can rapidly come up to speed on what has been discussed?This turns out to be ridiculously easy to do in a Skype group chat. An administrator for the chat simply has to type in the chat window:
/set options +HISTORY_DISCLOSED
After this, anyone joining the chat will see recent history. Per Skype’s FAQ on chat commands:
Joiners can see the conversation that took place before they joined. The limit that they can see is either 400 messages or two weeks of time, depending on which is reached first.
I’ve enabled this setting on a number of chats for which I am an admin, and it’s definitely helped newcomers come up to speed on what is being discussed in the chat. (Of course, some of those chats are very busy and so 400 messages may only take you back a very short period of time.)
Note, again, that you must be an administrator of a Skype chat for this command to actually execute. You…
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How To Use IRC-style Commands In A Skype Chat
Continue Reading: How To Use IRC-style Commands In A Skype ChatMany folks who are new to using Skype for group chat may not be aware that Skype brings along some of the commands that are popular in IRC chat systems – and the general “/” style of commands used in IRC. To see the list of commands, simply go into any Skype chat (it could even be a chat with only one other person) and type the following command:/help
This will work on old and new versions of Skype and will give you a list of what commands are available:
Available commands: /add [skypename] /help /topic [new topic] /me /history /leave /goadmin /get creator /get role /whois [skypename] /setrole [skypename] MASTER|HELPER|USER|LISTENER /kick [skypename] /kickban [skypename] /get guidelines /set guidelines [text] /get options [text] /set options [[+|-]flag] ... /setpassword [password] [password hint] /clearpassword /get password_hint /set password_hint [text] /set password [text] /get banlist /get allowlist /set banlist [[+|-]mask] ... /set allowlist [[+|-]mask] ... /alertson [text to match] /alertsoff /call [skypename[,skypename,...]]
You simply type any of these commands into a chat and, assuming you have permission to run the command, the action will occur. The full list of commands and options is available at this URL:
http://www.skype.com/go/help.chathelp
If you are the…
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Google Voice Via SIP – Not Dead Yet… (The Saga Continues)
Continue Reading: Google Voice Via SIP – Not Dead Yet… (The Saga Continues)So maybe calling into Google Voice via SIP isn’t as dead as I thought it was… multiple people have now left comments to my original posts indicating that they could call into their Google Voice number via SIP. And sure enough… I can do so now, too.Yet to be seen, of course, is how long this actually continues to work this time. Will it be an actual ongoing service? Or is this just another burst of connectivity that will fade again?
We’ll see, eh?
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New Phono “Callme Button” Demo Shows Use of Calling Directly from Web Browser
Continue Reading: New Phono “Callme Button” Demo Shows Use of Calling Directly from Web BrowserHot on the heels of the new release of the PhonoSDK I wrote about last week, Dave Hoff over in Voxeo Labs came out with a new “Callme Button” demo that’s very cool. As he describes in his blog post on the Phono blog, adding a “call me” button to a website is now as simple as adding this snippet of JavaScript to your web page:$("body").append( $("<div/>") .css("width","210px") .callme({ apiKey: "C17D167F-09C6-4E4C-A3DD-2025D48BA243", numberToDial: "8007773456", buttonTextReady: "1-800-777-FILM", slideOpen:true }) )There is a Callme “demo page” online at:
http://s.phono.com/releases/0.2/samples/callme/index.htm
That shows how you could create a button with or without a dialpad and in various themes:
The source code is naturally there for you to play with if you want to do so.
Cool stuff!
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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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Ah, the Apple Fan Dilemma – iPad2 Day, And No Apple Stores Nearby…
Continue Reading: Ah, the Apple Fan Dilemma – iPad2 Day, And No Apple Stores Nearby…UPDATE: I posted this as a tongue-in-cheek post before I had any idea about the massive earthquake that hit Japan in the last hours. Given that incredibly tragic event, things like getting the latest toytool pale tremendously in comparison. My thoughts are definitely with all of those affected in Japan… the footage coming out is incredibly surreal.Ah, the dilemma of the Apple fan who does not live close to an Apple store. Unless you’ve been under a rock, you know that today is the day that the iPad 2 arrives… you know, it’s the day that cancer will be cured, world hunger will be eliminated, all the wars will just stop, and….
… well, okay, it’s really just a day when another expensive gadget comes out. Er, excuse me, a “magical and wonderful” gadget, that is. 🙂
I am thinking seriously of buying one because the content creation capabilities seem vastly superior with the built-in camera… and since I won the current iPad I’m using at a conference, I’m okay buying one today.
Well, it most likely won’t be today.
You see, Keene, NH, where I live, is a beautiful place to live. But it’s about a 1.5 hour…
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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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Did Google Hang Up On Calling Google Voice Via SIP?
Continue Reading: Did Google Hang Up On Calling Google Voice Via SIP?Has Google killed the ability to call a Google Voice number via SIP that we just learned about in the past few days? My post yesterday seems to have resonated with many folks who rushed to try it… only to find that it didn’t work!Or perhaps did work for a bit and then stopped working. Even Todd Vierling, the person who first wrote about this back on Saturday, now updated his post with this text:
[Update March 8: It seems this service is no longer working, starting yesterday evening. sigh. I was hoping to see the security bugs patched up, not for the service to be pulled down again like it was in early 2009. Please, Google Voice people, throw us a bone here and let us know what’s really going on for once!]
The folks over at OnSIP published a blog post saying that sip.voice.google.com was now silent and also engaged with a whole number of us on Twitter on the topic. Ward Mundy over at NerdVittles initially came out with a post detailing how to make this work with FreePBX and then updated that post to indicate that it is no longer working.
Comments to my original…
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…