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Join Live Today at 9:00 CDT – Internet Video Codec BOF at IETF92
Continue Reading: Join Live Today at 9:00 CDT – Internet Video Codec BOF at IETF92Can we create a royalty-free (RF) video codec that can be deployed ubiquitously and become the new open standard for video communication across the Internet?THAT is the fundamental question of the Internet Video Codec (NETVC) Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) happening at IETF 92 in Dallas today, March 24, 2015, from 9:00-11:30 CDT (UTC-5). You can listen and participate live using the following links:
You also may want to view the presentation that will be used during the session.
The goal of the overall effort is defined as this:
- Development of a video codec that is:
- Optimized for real-time communications over the public Internet
- Competitive with or superior to existing modern codecs
- Viewed as having IPR licensing terms that allow for wide implementation and deployment
- Developed under the IPR rules in BCP 78 (RFC 5378) and BCP 79 (RFCs 3979 and 4879)
- Replicate the success of the CODEC WG in producing the Opus audio codec.
The BOF proposal contains more of a narrative:
The Internet needs a royalty-free (RF) video codec that can become the backbone for universal deployment of video related technologies. Royalty-bearing codecs put constraints on implementors that are…
- Development of a video codec that is:
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Goodbye, Gigaom – So Long And Thanks For All The News!
Continue Reading: Goodbye, Gigaom – So Long And Thanks For All The News!This one hurts. There have been many failures in the tech media industry, but the death of Gigaom is one that hurts. The word started filtering out early last week from people such as Mathew Ingram:
This hurts more than I can say: I was just told Gigaom is shutting down — it has run out of money. We tried our best, but it wasn't enough.
— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) March 10, 2015And then there were the confirmations from people such as Om himself:
Just walked out of Gigaom for the last time. Thank you everyone. I will miss you all for rest of my life! http://t.co/IBOhRuZ4DZ
— Om Malik (@om) March 10, 2015And the starkly worded message on the main page of Gigaom that said in part:
Gigaom recently became unable to pay its creditors in full at this time. As a result, the company is working with its creditors that have rights to all of the company’s assets as their collateral. All operations have ceased.
“All operations have ceased.”
And there it was… the end of this particular dream of Om’s. He followed with his own post, ending simply “Goodnight sweetheart, I still love you!”
MUCH…
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Net Neutrality: Did We “Win” A Battle, Only To Possibly Lose The War?
Continue Reading: Net Neutrality: Did We “Win” A Battle, Only To Possibly Lose The War?Friends don’t understand why I’m not jumping for joy after the FCC’s “Network Neutrality” decision yesterday. After all, they’ve been hearing me passionately argue for years about how we need to wake up and pay attention to the choices we have to make for the future of the Internet. They’ve heard me rail against the Internet access providers here in the US who seek to be the new gatekeepers and require people to ask permission or pay to get new services online. They’ve heard me strongly say that “The Internet Way” is for services to be “decentralized and distributed”. They’ve seen me write about “permissionless innovation” and the dangers we could face. In fact, I’ll be in Austin, TX, next week speaking at the NTEN conference about “Our Choice of Internet Futures”.
They know that I joined the Internet Society in 2011 specifically to fight for the open Internet – and that a large goal in my life is to be one of the voices helping advocate for the open Internet and ensuring that my children have the same “Internet of opportunity” that I’ve been able to have. Friends could hear in the closing words of FCC Chairman Tom… -
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Google Finally Kills Off GoogleTalk and XMPP (Jabber) Integration
Continue Reading: Google Finally Kills Off GoogleTalk and XMPP (Jabber) IntegrationGoogleTalk is dead, Jim!
By way of a comment to a post I wrote back in May 2013 about Google seeming to kill off XMPP/Jabber support in Google+ Hangouts (spoiler: They did!), I learned from a friend that the GoogleTalk API was officially deprecated as of February 23, 2015. I confirmed this by finding a Google+ post from Google’s Mayur Kamat.
Now, this is not a surprise. Google has been clear that Hangouts was the replacement and also that Hangouts does not support XMPP:
Still, I’m sad to see the XMPP integration die off. It is just a continuation of the descent of messaging services into walled gardens … a topic I’ve been writing about for many years. UPDATE: Please see the post “No, it’s not the end of XMPP for Google Talk” on the XMPP Standards Foundation site. The XSF notes that XMPP is still used inside of Google and that XMPP federation can still occur with a third-part XMPP client. However, because Google does not support the secure use of XMPP via TLS, many public XMPP servers will not connect to its server. I join the XSF in wishing that Google would embrace secure messaging and better…
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Wire 1.4 on iOS Tweaks The Display And Adds Avatars To Chats
Continue Reading: Wire 1.4 on iOS Tweaks The Display And Adds Avatars To ChatsToday the team at Wire rolled out a new version 1.4 of their iOS app. As they say in the release notes visible in the AppStore, the changes are:- Added avatars and blurred background in conversations for improved readability.
- Added colored background images in the conversation list
- Improved tutorial hints
- 1Password support
- Bug fixes and improvements
More to the point, the Wire team outlined the thinking behind these changes in a blog post on February 2, 2015. At the time they indicated the changes were available right then on Android and it apparently took this long for Apple to approve the new version for iOS (depending upon when Wire did in fact submit the new version to Apple).
I’m admittedly in a bit of a mixed mind with regard to the evolution of the chat interface. Here is what a Wire chat looked like on my iPhone 5s before (left) and after (right) the upgrade to Wire 1.4 (click/tap the image for a larger view):
On the plus side, I do find the avatars helpful as visual identifiers that help you easily see who is writing what in the chat window. Particularly if people use the same avatar image as…
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Video: VUC 528 Provides An Update On Matrix.org And Wire
Continue Reading: Video: VUC 528 Provides An Update On Matrix.org And WireLast Friday’s VUC conference call / podcast / hangout provided some interesting updates about the ongoing work at Matrix.org to build services for scalable, distributed and federated collaboration systems as well as some discussion of Wire, the app I’ve written about here. Guests included Matthew Hodgson and Amandine Le Pape from Matrix.org, as well as the usual cast of characters and a couple of live demonstrations, too.
You can view the episode web page and listen to the show here:
I joined the show about mid-way through and naturally wound up talking about IPv6, the Internet of Things (IoT), ICANN, DNS and other topics.
FYI, some good info about Matrix.org can be found in their FAQ. Back in November 2014, there was also another VUC episode focused around Matrix.org.
It was an enjoyable show and I’d encourage you to give it a listen.
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
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Congratulations To Alec Saunders On His Move To Microsoft
Continue Reading: Congratulations To Alec Saunders On His Move To MicrosoftCongratulations to Alec Saunders on his new role working with Microsoft Ventures in Canada! Alec’s been a long-time friend and fellow blogger dating way back to the mid-2000’s when he was proposing his “Voice 2.0 Manifesto”. When he was leading Iotum a group of us were doing the daily “Squawk Box” podcast that was a lot of fun. Alec and I used to see each other all the time on the VoIP / Unified Communications conference circuit (which is where I took the photo that he now uses on his blog). Back in September 2011 I wrote about his joining Blackberry and then a year later when he made rock music videos with Blackberry.And now he’s returning to his roots! He was one of the first product managers for Internet Explorer at Microsoft… and now he’s back at Microsoft again! As he says in his post:
As of last Monday, I’ve rejoined Microsoft in the role of Principal Technical Evangelist. My beat is Canada – not just Kitchener-Waterloo. My boss is Microsoft Chief Evangelist and Corporate Vice President for Developer Experience, Steven “Guggs” Guggenheimer. I’m part of the global Microsoft Ventures team. And we run programs, like the Microsoft…
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Seeing IP Phones In Hotels, Banks, Offices…
Continue Reading: Seeing IP Phones In Hotels, Banks, Offices…“Hey, that’s a Mitel IP phone… I remember when that handset was introduced. It was very different from the previous one but had better ‘shoulderability’ … it created a bit of a stir among customers, though. Hmmm… I wonder what model IP phone that is……”
All of this was running through my head during a routine visit to my bank this morning while waiting at a counter talking to someone. He had to call another office so there I was looking at his desk phone.
It happens to me all the time!
Even though I left Mitel way back in 2007… and really left IP telephony when I left Voxeo in 2011… IP telephony hasn’t left me!
I’ll be at a hotel… and I am checking out their phone system. A bank… an office… Wherever! There’s a Cisco IP phone… there’s an Avaya… there’s a Mitel… a snow… a I-have-no-clue…
I guess it’s just an occupational hazard of having been a product manager for IP phones during my time at Mitel… or maybe just the 6 years I spent there learning about IP telephony… but I just always see the IP phones. 🙂
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Aswath Rao Says I’m Wrong About VoIP In India
Continue Reading: Aswath Rao Says I’m Wrong About VoIP In IndiaAs a follow-up to my post yesterday about how Indian telcos are complaining to the the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) about WhatsApp’s plans to launch VoIP, long-time VoIP blogger Aswath Rao took issue on Twitter with one particular sentence in my article:India has NOT been a very friendly place for VoIP historically, and so we’ll have to see what happens here…
In a series of tweets Aswath pointed out that the TRAI has in fact been very supportive of IP-to-IP VoIP services and has left them unregulated. The regulation has all been around VoIP services interconnecting to the Indian PSTN. Aswath’s tweets: https://twitter.com/aswath/status/548681349344034818
You are mistaken when you say “India has NOT been a very friendly place for VoIP historically”. And I have pted it out many times.
https://twitter.com/aswath/status/548681697227980800From the get go, TRAI has regulated only IP to Indian PSTN. IP/IP & IP to foreign PSTN have been unregulated
https://twitter.com/aswath/status/548687939862290432My point is that TRAI has been very enlightened in its ruling. Even after 11/26 attack & pressure it has not reg IP/IP
Given that Aswath has been very involved in VoIP in India for many years, I’ll defer to his opinion on this one.
Thanks,…
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To No Surprise, Indian Telcos Want to Block WhatsApp OTT VoIP
Continue Reading: To No Surprise, Indian Telcos Want to Block WhatsApp OTT VoIPTo the surprise of absolutely no one, telcos in India are objecting to plans for WhatsApp to launch VoIP and complaining about it to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). So reports The Hindu Business Line that includes this glorious quote from a representative of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI):“Allowing the use of VoIP/ Internet telephony at such massive scale without licensing regime would lead to a significant disruption in the existing business of TSPs and can substantially derail their investment capability”
Gee… allowing a new innovative entrant into the market would lead to “significant disruption in the existing business” of the existing telcos.
Yes. Exactly.
And the representative further pointed out that this could lead to a “significant loss of revenues” for the government in the form of taxes.
Yes. Exactly.
This is the nature of Over-The-Top (OTT) applications and services. In providing better services for customers they very often DO cause “significant disruption” to existing businesses.
This is the nature of innovation.
This is the value of the “permissionless innovation” that has made the Internet the amazing tool for communication, collaboration and creation that it is today.
The folks at WhatsApp don’t need to…
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…
