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There Was Power In What Happened Last Night (At InterCommunity 2015)
Continue Reading: There Was Power In What Happened Last Night (At InterCommunity 2015)There was an amazing power in what happened last night. There was a “magic” … that I can’t quite explain.
I sat in a room in Ottawa, Canada… but yet for 2.5 hours I was connected into a global meeting that brought me together with people all around the world… sitting in their homes, offices… or wherever. And gathered in large groups in New Zealand… Tunisia… El Salvador… Uruguay… New York… DC… the Dominican Republic… more…
The event was the Internet Society’s InterCommunity 2015 … something I wrote about on Circle ID, wrote about here, and talked about twice in my TDYR podcasts: episodes 258 and 259.
For that 2.5 hours we talked about how we are collectively working to bring the opportunities of the Internet to the 50% of the world that doesn’t yet have access… we heard stories about the amazing work people are doing… we heard about our new 2015 Global Internet Report that highlights the rise of the “mobile Internet” and both the awesome potential – and pitfalls – that we are seeing… we talked about “Collaborative Governance” and how we need to work together to address the changes the Internet has brought to governance -…
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InterCommunity 2015 on July 7/8 – Join In To Voice Your Opinion! (And I’ll Be In Ottawa)
Continue Reading: InterCommunity 2015 on July 7/8 – Join In To Voice Your Opinion! (And I’ll Be In Ottawa)How do we as a society address some of the most critical concerns about Internet governance? Internet security? connecting the entire world? (including all the Internet of Things?) This week on July 7 and 8 you have a unique opportunity to get involved with discussions – and actions – related to these questions at the Internet Society’s InterCommunity 2015 event.It is an event happening ON the Internet… not tied to any one physical location but rather bringing together thousands of people around the world in a global conversation.
You can register for free at:
www.internetsociety.org/intercommunity2015/
You can join in from your home, office, or wherever you have connectivity. The meeting will be taking place in two different sessions:
- 7 July 2015 from 20:00 to 22:30 UTC
- 8 July 2015 from 06:00 to 08:30 UTC
(Use this time zone converter to find out what times these are for you!)
As the agenda shows, we’ll have sessions on Internet access, governance and security – and a chance to interact with people on all of these issues.
Now, there are what we call “regional nodes” around the world where larger groups of people will be gathering together to have face-to-face conversations and…
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Updated “Directory Dilemma” Article Now On CircleID…
Continue Reading: Updated “Directory Dilemma” Article Now On CircleID…Back in December, 2014, I published a post here called “The Directory Problem – The Challenge For Wire, Talko And Every Other “Skype-Killer” OTT App“. After receiving a good bit of feedback, I’ve now published a new version over on CircleID:The Directory Dilemma – Why Facebook, Google and Skype May Win the Mobile App War
I incorporated a good bit of the feedback I received and also brought in some newer numbers and statistics. Of note, I now have a section on WebRTC where I didn’t before. You’ll also notice a new emphasis in the title… I’m now talking about the potential winners versus the challengers. I also chose “Directory Dilemma” not only for the alliteration but also because the situation really isn’t as much a “problem” as it is an overall “dilemma”. It may or may not be a “problem”.
I’m not done yet.
I’m still seeking feedback. I intend to do yet another revision of this piece, but in doing so intend to:
- Change it from the informal tone at the beginning to more of a “paper” style;
- Include a bit more about potential solutions.
Comments and feedback are definitely welcome… either as comments here on…
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Will iOS 9 Make My iPad2 Usable Again?
Continue Reading: Will iOS 9 Make My iPad2 Usable Again?I have one very simple question amidst all the media hype about Apple’s WWDC announcements yesterday:
Will iOS 9 make my iPad2 usable again?
Yes, all that other stuff announced yesterday sounds cool… but I have this more basic question.
You see, I made a mistake.
I believed Apple when they said that iOS 8 would run on an iPad2. I mean, the device is from 2011 – it was “only” three years old when iOS 8 came out last year. It was still working very well with iOS 7 and I was excited to try out iOS 8.
To be crystal clear, Apple is correct – iOS 8 does “run” on an iPad2. But…
… it… r…u…n…s… s… o… o… o… o…. o…. o… o… … g… l… a… c… i… a… l… l… y… … s… s… l… l… o… o… o… w… w… w… l… l… l… y… y… y…
… that it’s hardly worth using. It takes a long time to open up applications, to bring up the keyboard, to switch between applications, etc. It is so slow that I’ve really stopped using it for almost everything but…
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WebRTCHacks Publishes Analysis of Facebook and WhatsApp Usage of WebRTC
Continue Reading: WebRTCHacks Publishes Analysis of Facebook and WhatsApp Usage of WebRTCThe team over at webrtcH4cKS (aka “WebRTCHacks”) have been publishing some great articles about WebRTC for a while now, and I thought I’d point to two in particular worth a read. Philipp Hancke has started a series of posts examining how different VoIP services are using WebRTC and he’s started out exploring two of the biggest, Facebook and WhatsApp, in these posts:Those articles are summaries explaining the findings, with much-longer detailed reports also available for download:
Both of these walk through the packet captures and provide a narrative around what is being seen in the discovery process.
A common finding between both reports is that the services are not using the more secure mechanism of DTLS for key exchange to set up encrypted voice channels. Instead they are using the older SDES mechanism that has a number of challenges, but, as noted by the report, is typically faster in enabling a call setup.
All in all the reports make for interesting reading. It’s great to see both Facebook and WhatsApp using WebRTC and I think this will only…
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Wow! Cisco To Acquire Tropo’s Communications Application Platform
Continue Reading: Wow! Cisco To Acquire Tropo’s Communications Application PlatformWOW! In companion blog posts today Cisco and Tropo announced Cisco’s intent to acquire the Tropo team and platform:- Cisco blog: Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Tropo
- Tropo blog: Tropo joins Cisco to Power next-gen collaboration APIs
As someone who was at Voxeo in 2009 and helped launch Tropo (and wrote many of the early blog posts about it[1], as well as some of the python samples), I’m thrilled for the team there now that this is happening.[2]
Congratulations to all involved!
Over the years since leaving Voxeo, I’ve written about Tropo from time to time and continued to watch its progress. I’ve continued to be very impressed by what they’ve done over the years. They’ve truly made it easy for people to create powerful applications using simple programming languages.
It looks like the Tropo website is struggling right now so here is a snippet of their announcement post:
Six years ago we launched Tropo with the idea to make it easy to power phone calls through a simple API. Since then, we’ve empowered thousands of developers to add voice and messaging to their applications.
From our very first sign-up in 2009, to powering thousands of mobile and…
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Wire Launches WebRTC Voice/Chat Web App For Windows, Linux, more – Includes High TLS Security
Continue Reading: Wire Launches WebRTC Voice/Chat Web App For Windows, Linux, more – Includes High TLS SecurityYesterday the team over at Wire launched a new WebRTC-based “Wire for Web” app that lets people on Windows, Linux or any other platform now communicate with people using Wire on iOS, Android or OS X. You can get to it simply at:https://app.wire.com/
If you already have an account you simply sign in with your credentials. If you don’t have an account you can easily create one.I’ve been running both the native Mac OS X client and the web client for a bit now (I was part of web beta program for Wire) and it is truly amazing how well the team has made the web experience to be seamless between the web and native client. Here’s a screenshot showing both side by side (click/tap for a larger image):
In the web view on the right you have the browser bars at the top and one of the images did not go the full width of the column, but otherwise the experience and visual display has been essentially identical between the two platforms. The synchronization between the two is nearly instantaneous and all the features work really, really well.
Notifications in the web browser (if you allow…
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WhatsApp Calling Arrives on iOS – More Telecom Disruption Ahead!
Continue Reading: WhatsApp Calling Arrives on iOS – More Telecom Disruption Ahead!As I checked my AppStore updates on my iPhone this week I was surprised but pleased to see that WhatsApp now includes “WhatsApp Calling”. As it says:“Call your friends and family using WhatsApp for free, even if they’re in another country. WhatsApp calls use your phone’s Internet connection rather than your cellular plan’s voice minutes. Data charges may apply.
How many ways can you spell “disruption”?
(Hint: w – h – a – t – s – a – p – p)Sure, there have been a zillion mobile apps providing Over-The-Top (OTT) voice services, many of which I’ve written about here on this site.
But this is WhatsApp!
This is the application that just passed 800 million monthly active users! (Techmeme link) With projections to hit 1 billion monthly active users by the end of the year.
Oh, and it’s owned by Facebook! 🙂
Now, I personally don’t use WhatsApp that much right now. The people who I want to message are primarily using iMessage, Facebook Messenger or Wire. (And every once in a great while I’ll fire up Skype on my iPhone.)
But obviously there are 800 million people who do use WhatsApp each month… and…
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Congrats to the Jitsi Team On Their Acquistion By Atlassian
Continue Reading: Congrats to the Jitsi Team On Their Acquistion By AtlassianCongratulations to Emil Ivov and the whole team behind Jitsi for their acquisition by Atlassian! As they say on the Jitsi news page:
The Jitsi Community just got a lot stronger! BlueJimp, founder of Jitsi, is now part of Atlasssian! The plan is to keep Jitsi at the cutting edge of innovation by keeping it open and in the hands of those who created it in the first place: the open source community.
The news is outlined in an article on TechCrunch and explained in more detail in a HipChat blog post.
To be clear, Atlassian is acquiring the company BlueJimp that employed the founders of Jitsi, but in the process they are also effectively getting the open source Jitsi project. It’s great to read in their blog post, though, that they intend to continue to support and invest in the project.
I’ve been a big fan of Jitsi for quite some time as it was one of the earliest VoIP clients to support both IPv6 and DNSSEC. I wrote about this support both here and also over on the Deploy360 blog and recorded this video interview with Emil Ivov:
Previously I’d also written about Jitsi’s support for DNSSEC as…
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Jim Courtney Discussing His “Experience Skype To The Max” Book on March 27 on VUC at Noon US EDT
Continue Reading: Jim Courtney Discussing His “Experience Skype To The Max” Book on March 27 on VUC at Noon US EDTWant to learn more about what’s up with Skype right now? Tomorrow, March 27, 2015, at 12 noon US Eastern, my friend Jim Courtney is going to be discussing the new second edition of his “Experience Skype to the Max” on episode 534 of the VoIP Users Conference (VUC) podcast.
As noted on the VUC page, Jim will be talking about:
- New features over the past three years and why they don’t have the “buzz” impact that new features used to have. Are we becoming calloused to anything new?
- The challenge of innovating with a product that has built up a legacy and familiarity
- The challenge of educating users about features beyond free voice and video calling (and it’s also a challenge for smartphones – to make users realize there is value in all those applications available beyond voice calls and SMS messages).
- The feature set to consider when evaluating other alternatives
- The directory issue
- Skype vs Skype for Business
- Asynchronous vs real time comms (migrating to IM backend has allowed more “persistence” with chat messaging, for instance)
- Anytime communications Rooms
It should be a good session. I’ve known Jim for many years through his blogging about VoIP and he…
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…
