-
/
Skype announces “Skype for Business Competition” winners
Continue Reading: Skype announces “Skype for Business Competition” winnersOver on their Skype for Business blog, Skype announced this week the winners of their “Skype for Business Competition”. They announced three winners each for EMEA, the Americas and Asia. Not much in the way of details, yet, but some of the abstracts sound interesting. I’m looking forward to seeing the case studies that come out of this. Overall it’s just good to see Skype looking at pulling out the innovative ways companies are using Skype. … let’s see what the detailed stories show.Congrats to all the winners!
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.
-
/
Silicon Alley Insider: How Comcast Ate Vonage’s Lunch
Continue Reading: Silicon Alley Insider: How Comcast Ate Vonage’s LunchFascinating chart out of Silicon Alley Insider today showing the incredible growth Comcast has had in terms of IP phone subscribers versus that of Vonage:I doubt the chart is a huge surprise for anyone following the industry, but it still does make for an interesting graphic. Despite all the advertising money that Vonage can throw out there, Comcast and the other cable providers have the inherent advantage that they can easily offer powerful “triple-play bundles” of cable TV, Internet access and phone service.
Comcast is no longer my provider (Time-Warner services Keene, NH, where I live.), but when I lived in Burlington, VT, we had Comcast for Internet access and Verizon for phone (and we didn’t have anyone for TV, since we don’t watch it). The offers that Comcast kept sending us, though, encouraging us to switch, were quite compelling. The amount I paid for Internet access would have been lower if I had either phone or TV with Comcast, and even lower if I had all three.
If we actually watched TV and therefore wanted cable TV, the economics of the “triple-play” would be very hard to beat… so it’s no surprise at all to me to…
-
/
Skype launches version 4.1… (yawn)… still only Windows… still a fragmented product strategy
Continue Reading: Skype launches version 4.1… (yawn)… still only Windows… still a fragmented product strategySkype today announced Skype 4.1 for Windows. As Raul Liive outlined in a post about the 4.1 beta (see also Jim Courtney’s take), this version brings to Windows users the “screen sharing” feature that we’ve had in the Mac version of Skype for a bit. It also restores several of the features that were in the previous Skype 3.8 for Windows but that got left behind when Skype rushed 4.0 for Windows out the door. And it adds the SILK codec and some other odds and ends.Per Raul’s Skype blog post today, the final 4.1 version fixes a whack-load of bugs as well.
If I were on Windows, I’d definitely head over and download 4.1. The bug fixes alone are probably worth it.
Of course, I’m not on Windows (I’m a Mac user) and so today’s announcement is pretty much irrelevant to me. Just as whenever Skype comes out with a new Mac version or beta, it’s irrelevant to Windows users. And if by some miracle Skype should actually come out with a new Linux version (no update to their blog in 6 months), that would be irrelevant to both Mac and Windows users.
It’s hard to get excited…
-
/
For a brief bit – Skype video calls from 30,000+ feet on Southwest Air WiFi!
Continue Reading: For a brief bit – Skype video calls from 30,000+ feet on Southwest Air WiFi!Upon entering the Southwest Airlines plane this morning on my flight to Orlando to visit Voxeo’s headquarters, I immediately noticed a “WiFi zone” sign on a column by the entry door. Naturally, I had to pull out my Macbook Pro and give it a whirl… and, given the issue of Skype-blocking last summer… try out Skype.To my great surprise and pleasure, it worked great. (For a little while – see below.) Here’s Bruce Lowekamp:
As you may or may not be able to see in the graphic, our call had been up for 3 minutes and 33 seconds when I snapped the picture.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have easy access to my headset, so I couldn’t really have a great conversation. The ambient background noise in the plane was really too much for my voice to be heard unless I bent down toward the microphone… and likewise even with the MacBook Pro volume up all the way it was a bit hard to hear Bruce unless I bent down toward the laptop.
And, of course, I didn’t really want to annoy my fellow passengers. 🙂
You can see on the right the technical stats for the call. Packet loss was…
-
/
Video: Sir Terry Matthews on startups, Canada, what’s exciting…
Continue Reading: Video: Sir Terry Matthews on startups, Canada, what’s exciting…By way of a tweet from Matt Roberts, a friend from my Mitel days, I learned of this video interview with Sir Terry Matthews on Canada’s Business News Network:Sir Terry Matthews speaks to BNN about the state of the industry in Canada, why he loves home-grown startups and what he sees as the next big thing in technology.
If you’ve not heard him before, the interview is a good view into the passion, enthusiasm and charisma that keeps him starting up companies all over the place. The report says he’s now up to 80 companies or so that he’s started up… and I’m not surprised.
His overall message, though, is what he has been consistent saying for many years now… we are in an age where incredible broadband capacity is coming online – as that happens, what will we do to make use of all that bandwidth?
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.
Technorati Tags: terry matthews, canada
-
/
Returning from a blogging hiatus…
Continue Reading: Returning from a blogging hiatus…As you have no doubt noticed, my last post here was April 20th… what happened? Well, our second child was born April 24th, and as any parent of a newborn can tell you, you enter this wonderful yet challenging vortex where your time is entirely in the service of the wee one… 😉I’m slowly getting back up to speed now, though, and so you’ll see more posts appearing here and across all the other blogs where I write…
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.
-
/
Speaking about Voxeo Prophecy 9 in webinar tomorrow (Apr 21, 2009)…
Continue Reading: Speaking about Voxeo Prophecy 9 in webinar tomorrow (Apr 21, 2009)…If you are free tomorrow at 11am US Eastern / 8am US Pacific / 5pm CET, and want a glimpse into what we all are doing over at Voxeo, we are offering a free webinar about what is new in the upcoming Prophecy 9 and VoiceObjects 9 product releases. I am speaking in the first part about Prophecy 9 and then will be followed by Stefan Besling from our VoiceObjects team to talk about what is new in VO9.As I put together the slide deck, I realized that the engineering team has filled this release with some great features:
- our voice application platform now works across all three major operating systems: Windows, Linux and MacOS X
- the new management console has some graphical features to aid in managing large premise installations that simply have to be seen to be believed (think… three dimensional walls…)
- the new “virtual platforms” feature makes adding new capacity as drop-dead simple as installing a new server and adding it in
- the new log analyzer tool lets you dive deep into logs to find what’s going on – and to generate pretty pictures out of the activity as well
I’m definitely looking forward to talking…
-
/
Digium takes on the “fax issue” with Fax For Asterisk…
Continue Reading: Digium takes on the “fax issue” with Fax For Asterisk…I can’t stand fax. I can’t. It’s a technology that I just wish would go away. It kills me that fax is one of the main reasons I didn’t drop my landline in my move. Yet the reality is that fax usage is everywhere… and probably will be for quite some time if for no other reason than the complete and utter simplicity of fax usage. Print out your message, or write your message (you know… that thing we all used to do… take a writing tool (pen, pencil, crayon, charcoal, etc.), grasp it in your hand and make marks on some writing surface…), just stick that message in your fax machine, punch in the number and press Send. It’s hard to get much simpler than that.But the lack of fax has been a barrier to many a premise-based IP-PBX deployment. Everything’s going great… people are looking at all the great things they can do with VoIP and Unified Communications, etc. They are figuring out distributed architectures that are all IP-based. It’s all looking really cool technically and will save money, too. All is going well and then someone asks “What about the fax machines?” And so people wind…
-
/
Skype on the iPhone: Some initial thoughts…
Continue Reading: Skype on the iPhone: Some initial thoughts…Unless you remained under a rock last week, you know that Skype was released for the iPhone, somewhat predictably rocketed to the #1 downloaded iPhone app, shot past 1 million downloads in two days and then just today went past two million downloads. As Skype’s Peter Parkes’ writes:I’m back with an update – and it’s no surprise that we’ve stormed past the 2 million download milestone. This means an average rate of 2-3 downloads per second since the app first appeared on the 31st March.
2-3 downloads per second! You have to think Skype’s got to be rather happy about those numbers. Jim Courtney had a good post rounding up some of the Skype for iPhone coverage.
The good news, for me, was that Skype for the iPhone did include support for persistent group chats, which I noted was my one big desire for the iPhone client.
I’ve been using the client now off and on for the past week, and thought I’d write down a few initial impressions:
- Audio quality – I’ve not actually used it for too many calls, but when I have the audio quality (over WiFi) has been great. I’m looking forward to trying it…
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…