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Mozilla Blocks the Skype Toolbar in Firefox Because of Crashes (UPDATED: Skype Response)
Continue Reading: Mozilla Blocks the Skype Toolbar in Firefox Because of Crashes (UPDATED: Skype Response)Yesterday, the Mozilla team took the rather drastic step of adding the Skype Toolbar to their “Firefox Blocklist” so that the toolbar is disabled by default (with the user being notified and having the option to re-enable it). Mozilla’s reasoning is rather straightforward:
The current shipping version of the Skype Toolbar is one of the top crashers of Mozilla Firefox 3.6.13, and was involved in almost 40,000 crashes of Firefox last week. Additionally, depending on the version of the Skype Toolbar you’re using, the methods it uses to detect and re-render phone numbers can make DOM manipulation up to 300 times slower, which drastically affects the page rendering times of a large percentage of web content served today
Yikes! If it’s causing that many crashes, I completely understand their rationale.
What’s interesting about this, of course, is that it shows the linkages beyond simply VoIP and communication into the larger ecosystem of applications. Here you have a web browser add-on for a communication product which is then slowing down or crashing the web browser product.
In this brave new world of Unified Communications, or whatever we want to call it, the apps are all linked together… which creates both benefits…
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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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Skype to boost headcount by 50% this year and offer SLAs
Continue Reading: Skype to boost headcount by 50% this year and offer SLAsThe Financial Times is out this morning with an article about Skype CEO Tony Bates and his plan to hire around 400 more people this year. The article offers some insight into his thinking, and included this piece related to encouraging more business usage:
Mr Bates said he is considering offering the so-called Service Level Agreements that most companies require from their suppliers to assure a guaranteed quality of service, and adding new services for businesses.
The creation of SLAs would be interesting to see, given Skype’s P2P nature, which I’ve explained previously particularly with regard to their recent outage. Not quite sure how they’d do it, unless they perhaps create a part of the P2P cloud that has Skype-operated supernodes and a version of the Skype client software that defaults to connecting to that part of the larger Skype cloud.
In any event, the FT article makes for interesting reading to get a bit of glimpse into the thoughts of Skype’s new CEO.
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Video: Jon Stewart gets excited about the Verizon iPhone!
Continue Reading: Video: Jon Stewart gets excited about the Verizon iPhone!Yes, I admit to laughing along with this one, found via Engadget. Enjoy: The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon – Thurs 11p / 10cThe Daily Show on Facebook
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Why Verizon’s iPhone 4 is Worse for Google Than For AT&T
Continue Reading: Why Verizon’s iPhone 4 is Worse for Google Than For AT&TOnce upon a time, I firmly believed that the day the iPhone launched on Verizon would be the day you could pretty much count AT&T out. I expected that would be a huge migration of users… and it would be the end…
Usually those thoughts came on days when I was having serious issues with AT&T’s network and could only wish for the end of the AT&T monopoly to come… I live in southwestern New Hampshire and AT&T’s network is merely “okay” in Keene, NH, and gets pretty abysmal – and nonexistent – when you travel not too far out of town. Driving the hour-plus over to the Manchester airport there are 2 or 3 pockets where I literally have no coverage for a few minutes with my iPhone 4 on AT&T’s network.
Meanwhile, of course, Verizon has rock solid coverage throughout our area.
Unless you have been hiding in a cave, you know that today is the day Verizon announced the iPhone, with the actual phone being available on February 11th. There are a zillion news articles in every imaginable media out… the ginormous media feeding frenzy is something to behold. A huge amount of publicity for Apple… for…
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Skype just crossed over 27 million simultaneous users online!
Continue Reading: Skype just crossed over 27 million simultaneous users online!Right now I looked at the bottom of my Skype window and saw that the count read 27,257,659 users online:Not bad considering that the company just crossed over 25,000,000 back in late November and then had the massive outage at the end of December! In fact, I don’t remember seeing Skype cross over the 26 million mark…
Congrats to Skype for hitting this milestone!
UPDATE: After Hudson Barton mentioned that the previous high number for online users was under 26 million, Neil Lindsey pointed me to the online chart of Skype users over the past 7 days, which shows that the count flirted with 26 million but did not cross it yesterday:
The 40-hour chart shows the climb in greater detail:
So Skype crossed over the 26 million mark AND the 27 million mark today! Not a bad day for Skype!
P.S. And yes, since Skype is the only source for these numbers, they could be completely making them up. However, I know (and trust) enough folks there to assume the numbers are accurate.
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Video: Understanding the basics of IPv6
Continue Reading: Video: Understanding the basics of IPv6In 2011, I expect to be writing a good bit more about IPv6, in part because the reality is that we are getting closer to being out of IPv4 addresses, in part because I am doing more personal experimentation with IPv6, and in part because Voxeo is going to be releasing some new product versions that will work with IPv6… and yes, in part because the network geek in me just finds IPv6 interesting.Anyway, to kick off my 2011 coverage of IPv6, here is a video of a tutorial given by a Voxeo engineer about the basics of IPv6… enjoy!
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Calling All Asterisk Users! Can you help proofread Asterisk:The Definitive Guide?
Continue Reading: Calling All Asterisk Users! Can you help proofread Asterisk:The Definitive Guide?Do you use Asterisk as a PBX? Are you an administrator of an Asterisk system? Do you have a product based on Asterisk? Or that connects to Asterisk?If so, the authors of the forthcoming book “Asterisk: The Definitive Guide” are looking for your help as they enter into the final production stage of the book. Now, the cool part about the book is that, like the first two versions, it will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States license and made available online for free usage and download. You also can naturally purchase it from O’Reilly… but the key item is that the content of the book will become part of the available body of online Asterisk documentation.
So it’s in all of our interest that it is as accurate as possible!
If you have even just a few minutes to browse a section or two and provide feedback, the book is up in O’Reilly’s “Open Feedback Publishing System” at:
http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9780596517342/index.html
You need to have a account on O’Reilly’s system in order to comment… but those accounts are free and if you have ever bought anything from O’Reilly odds are that you already have…
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Do Cisco’s Cius and HP’s WebOS tablets stand a chance against the iPad?
Continue Reading: Do Cisco’s Cius and HP’s WebOS tablets stand a chance against the iPad?In light of the phenomenal success of the iPad, do “enterprise tablets” from Cisco and HP even remotely stand a chance? Particularly when: 1) Apple is targeting enterprises now; and 2) all signs are that Apple will soon be releasing a version 2 of the iPad with even more capabilities. Yesterday Greg Ferro took this question on in a post comparing the Cisco Cius versus HP WebOS tablets versus the iPad.His post is definitely worth a read for his comparisons… I’ll zoom in on what was for me the key point (my emphasis added at the end):
The problem with this lovely story is the Apple iPad. No doubt Cisco and HP have been working on their tablet stories for the last two or three years. I also have no doubt that the unexpected success of the iPad selling twenty or thirty million units in the first year has seriously upset their plans. But the thing really bothering them would be rise of the articles in the press about the iPad moving into the enterprise. Cisco and HP think that they own the enterprise, and it’s their right to make money out it. The idea that Apple can crossover…
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Skype Buys Qik To Add Real-Time Video Recording, Sharing
Continue Reading: Skype Buys Qik To Add Real-Time Video Recording, SharingThe rumors started flying this morning… and continued for quite some time… and then were finally confirmed by a Skype blog post:Skype to acquire Qik
Qik has been around since 2006 and first came on my radar a few years back when Robert Scoble was using it heavily (he hasn’t recently). At the time, though, I still had an iPhone 3G and wasn’t able to use the streaming video (it worked only with the 3GS and now of course the 4) so I didn’t do much myself with Qik. I was, however, very impressed with what Steve Garfield was doing with it. In particular, I remember him bringing it to some Obama events in the Boston area in the run-up to the last US Presidential election and streaming them live from his phone.
The power of live streaming from a mobile device struck me then (and still does now) as quite a powerful content creation tool.
The acquisition of Qik by Skype is somewhat curious because of course Skype already has its own video technology, but the key seems to be in this part of their blog post:
… the acquisition of Qik will help to accelerate our leadership…
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…