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Using Twitterfall to watch the eComm twitter stream…
Continue Reading: Using Twitterfall to watch the eComm twitter stream…This week is eComm America 2010, probably my favorite conference to attend because it truly is the premiere gathering of all the thought leaders and alpha-geeks in the communication space. The schedule is full of friends of mine and it’s all around a great place to be. Voxeo (my employer) is a Platinum sponsor and we have a team and series of activities going on out there.However, due to some personal schedule conflicts, I’m not there this year… the first time I’ve missed an eComm in North America.
I have, though, been watching the Twitter stream… and doing so using a site I found a while back called… Twitterfall. What’s cool about Twitterfall is that if you have a second computer or screen, you can just set up Twitterfall to run on that computer/screen … and it just sits there constantly updating based on the real-time flow of tweets coming out on whatever searchterm(s) you set up. So you can get your own little “kiosk” going that you can just glance over at from time to time. It automatically refreshes so you aren’t ever having to manually trigger it.
Here is Twitterfall searching on “#eComm”: http://twitterfall.com/?trend=%23eComm!%231F3547
The image below…
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Dave Michels – “The Many Voices of VoiceCon”
Continue Reading: Dave Michels – “The Many Voices of VoiceCon”The very last VoiceCon show – ever[1] – occurred two weeks ago and while I spoke in 3 sessions, including a 3-hour SIP tutorial, I haven’t had a chance to do much more than post my slides from my VoiceCon sessions. I’ve had all sorts of posts I wanted to write… just haven’t had the cycles.There have, though, been lots of other people writing about VoiceCon and Dave Michels nicely pulled together a summary of many of the major posts in his piece titled appropriately “The Many Voices of VoiceCon“.
So head over to the UC Strategies site, read Dave’s post and follow the links to all the various posts… some good ones there.
Thanks, Dave, for curating all the news and creating a summary post.
[1] If you haven’t heard, this show was the last VoiceCon “ever” because VoiceCon is changing its name to “Enterprise Connect”.
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Another Hotel Fails To Support Skype – Here’s Why Skype’s P2P Connection Model Breaks Their System
Continue Reading: Another Hotel Fails To Support Skype – Here’s Why Skype’s P2P Connection Model Breaks Their SystemUPDATE: When I stayed at this same hotel in August 2010, I no longer had the issue with Skype being blocked. Presumably they got a smarter network monitoring system. While this specific hotel now works with Skype, the same issue will undoubtedly be out there for many other hotels and locations.
Summary: Hotels restricting the number of simultaneous network connections per user may wind up blocking legitimate usage of Skype. Skype’s peer-to-peer network model uses a high number of network connections to synchronize multi-party group chats.
Read on for the full story, network diagrams, etc….
Two weeks ago on a visit to Voxeo’s corporate headquarters in Orlando, FL, I stayed at the Grand Bohemian Hotel, conveniently located only a block or so away. Arriving in the early evening, I checked in, got to my room and immediately plugged my laptop into the Ethernet port to catch up on what had happened while I’d been offline traveling. As is the case in many hotels, I was asked to login and pay through a system from “Nomadix”. I did so… and very quickly started to see Skype coming online, my other IM client (Adium) coming online, email starting to flow in and…
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The Skype and Verizon partnership – explained by animated video
Continue Reading: The Skype and Verizon partnership – explained by animated videoBack in February, Skype and Verizon announced a partnership that will be bringing Skype to various Verizon smartphones apparently this month. Last week more details emerged, including the fact that Skype would not be sold in Nokia’s US app store because of the Verizon partnership.Skype and Verizon also released this animated video explaining their partnership:
While I am an iPhone user who left Verizon behind (but would love to return to their network with an iPhone!), I applaud both Skype and Verizon for both their partnership as well as their creative way of explaining it.
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Video interview from ITEXPO about Voxeo, cloud, security…
Continue Reading: Video interview from ITEXPO about Voxeo, cloud, security…As I mentioned on a Voxeo blog yesterday, the good folks at TMC recently posted a video interview I did with them at ITEXPO back in January in Florida. In the interview, I discussed:- the Cloud Communications Summit and pushing communications out into “the cloud”
- security issues related to cloud communications
- what’s next in communications, including multi-channel communications (a component of what we refer to at Voxeo as Unified Self-Service)
Anyway, for folks who wonder what it is I do, part of it is telling stories in forms like this…
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Brief interview in 101st Telecom Junkies podcast episode to update VoIP Fraud/Hacker case
Continue Reading: Brief interview in 101st Telecom Junkies podcast episode to update VoIP Fraud/Hacker caseEarlier this week I had a fun moment joining a cast of characters to help the Telecom Junkies podcast celebrate crossing over 100 episodes. In the 101st episode, now available for listening, host Jessica Gdowski invited 7 of her previous guests back to give brief updates. So I joined Martha Buyer, Mark Fletcher, Hank Levine, John Lyon, Dave Spofford, and Allan Sulkin for the ~20 minute show.In my case, I’ve been a guest on the show three times previously, most notably in August 2007 with “Interview with a VoIP Hacker” where we interviewed Robert Moore shortly before he was heading to prison.
Moore was part of the VoIP fraud case masterminded by Edwin Pena and discussed on another Telecom Junkies episode back in July 2006. I was also on another Junkies episode in November 2007 about VLAN Hopping.
In this 101st episode recorded this week I gave a brief update on the Pena/Moore case (Pena recently pled guilty) and then talked about VoIP and Unified Communication security issues. It was literally just a few minutes, but I was glad to join briefly and help Telecom Junkies celebrate. 100 podcast episodes is indeed a milestone to celebrate! Congrats!…
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VoiceOnTheWeb: A video interview with Skype CEO Josh Silverman
Continue Reading: VoiceOnTheWeb: A video interview with Skype CEO Josh SilvermanOver on his Voice On The Web blog, Jim Courtney posted this morning a two-part video interview with Skype CEO Josh Silverman that is interesting to watch. Jim summarizes the interview indicating that we should expect to see from Skype in 2010 the following:- a revitalized developer program built around a more comprehensive platform from which developers can, amongst other features, embed Skype into their applications
- Skype access on many more mobile platforms as well as taking advantage of wireless carriers’ recognition of Skype as a mainstream telecommunications environment
- expansion of video calling services, including a strong role in the introduction of Internet services as a feature on a new generation of television sets;
- launch of a formal comprehensive Skype for Business program targeted at small-to-medium businesses
- many more Skype video interviews on broadcast media – for example, Skype video (and voice) calling has been used quite extensively by several networks to facilitate communications with Haiti following the earthquake
And while Josh Silverman did cover all of those points, I personally found it interesting just to watch and listen to how he covers the points and where he is focusing his attention (through what he talks about). Skype’s at a…
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Using voice for security and biometrics – all out in the Voxeo cloud
Continue Reading: Using voice for security and biometrics – all out in the Voxeo cloudWhy shouldn’t we be able to use our “voice” as a way to securely authenticate into systems? After all, it’s one of the few “biometrics” that are unique to each of us… along with fingerprints, retina scans, etc. What about accuracy and “replay” attacks? After all, some of us remember “My voice is my password” from back in the movie Sneakers…“Aren’t voice biometrics hard to implement?” … “Are they really secure?”
Today, over on Voxeo’s blogs, we announced a new voice biometrics initiative with four partners designed to answer these questions and show developers exactly how easy it is to add voice biometrics to voice applications. (also called “voice verification” or “voice authentication”, although those are both subsets of the larger “voice biometrics”)
The idea is simple. Build a VoiceXML application in Voxeo’s hosted cloud and then follow the instructions on the “How To” docs linked off of www.voxeo.com/biometrics to add voice biometrics to your application. You can use an existing VoiceXML application or you can create a new one. Code samples are available. (and it’s free to create an account if you don’t already have one.)
The beauty of it is that all of the services are out…
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The ubiquity of Skype…
Continue Reading: The ubiquity of Skype…In preparation for a Voxeo announcement next week, I’ve been recording video interviews with several different companies participating in the announcement. Since they are scattered around the world, I asked about doing the video recording over Skype. My reason was primarily that I am personally a huge Skype user and so I’ve got the recording method down well… and perhaps more importantly because we can get wideband audio as part of the video recording. Anyone who has worked with video knows that having high quality audio is actually a large part of having a successful video… so I like Skype for that.
The interesting part to me was… using Skype was perfectly fine for all of the companies.
I had expected some pushback or the need to find some alternatives, but there was none. So far two of the interviews are recorded and two more are being recorded today.
Having been a Skype user for… what? … maybe 5 or 6 years now… that’s an interesting testament to me to the acceptance of Skype. It also speaks to the ubiquity of webcams and the ease with which we can now include video as one of our communication modes.
Cool stuff!…
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…