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AOL launches OpenView API and gives us half a phone connection…
Continue Reading: AOL launches OpenView API and gives us half a phone connection…Does accepting SIP connections at your SIP proxy constitute an “API”? Does providing SIP termination services to the PSTN constitute an “API”?Those were the questions I found myself asking after AOL announced yesterday their “Open Voice API” (also see CNET article). Since I work with voice application platforms, I’m always interested in new voice APIs and naturally had to check it out.
WHAT IT IS
I have to admit it took some time to figure out what the “Open Voice Program” really is, even after reading the program page and the accompanying blog post. Largely I think the issue was that I was looking for something more.
So here’s what is going on. As part of their “AOL Voice Services“, AOL has a service called “AIM Call Out“. This allows a user of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) to make outbound calls from their AIM client to the regular phone numbers on the PSTN for competitive rates (under 2 cents a minute here in the US).
From a network topology point-of-view, what happens with the call is that the call goes from your AIM client to the SIP gateway on the edge of AOL’s network across some SIP…
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Squawk Box on April 29 discussed Jajah…
Continue Reading: Squawk Box on April 29 discussed Jajah…As an update to my previous post, the Squawk Box recording is now available of our call with Jajah co-founder Roman Scharf. It was an interesting discussion of what they are doing. On a programming note, it was one of the larger calls we’ve done on Squawk Box and we encountered some technical issues that Alec Saunders had to deal with (hence my jumping in as lead interviewer at one point). All in all both a fun and interesting session. Do give it a listen if you are interested in voice platforms!Technorati Tags: alec saunders, jajah, squawk box, voip, platforms
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Jajah to provide PSTN connectivity for Yahoo!Voice!
Continue Reading: Jajah to provide PSTN connectivity for Yahoo!Voice!Yahoo! announced today that they are outsourcing all PSTN connectivity services for Yahoo!Messenger over to the startup Jajah. This is a huge win for Jajah who also announced today that it has hit over 10 million users in two years. Congrats to the Jajah team for the win!Two parts of the release explain a bit about what is going on:
The “Phone In” and “Phone Out” service will enable consumers to make high-quality, low-cost PC-to-phone and phone-to-PC voice calls over the JAJAH network to more than 200 countries using Yahoo! Messenger, the leading instant messenger application in the United States with nearly 97 million users worldwide (comScore, February 2008).
and:
Since 2006, Yahoo! Messenger users have been able to use “Phone In” and “Phone Out” to make and receive voice calls on their PC to and from landline and mobile phones. With low rates and premium voice quality, users can talk for hours and save on their phone bill. This deal means JAJAH will take over the provision of the telephony infrastructure, payment processing, and customer care for Yahoo!’s premium voice users who make and receive voice calls through Yahoo! Messenger.
So essentially Yahoo is centralizing all the PSTN interconnection for Yahoo!Voice…
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Tracking iSkoot’s security issue exposing Skype usernames and passwords
Continue Reading: Tracking iSkoot’s security issue exposing Skype usernames and passwordsOver on the Voice of VOIPSA weblog, I have been tracking a security issue in the iSkoot program that was transmitting your Skype username and password in the clear. The post, its comments, and the corresponding links off of it make for some interesting reading.It also shows the speed at which the blogosphere can react and potentially help sort things out. In the space of about 48 hours, a problem was found, confirmed, identified by the vendor and apparently will be fixed shortly. I’ll be writing more about this later today over on the Voice of VOIPSA weblog, but for now I’ll just say that it’s great to see that the problem is being dealt with.
Technorati Tags: voip, voip security, voipsecurity, security, skype, iskoot, symbian, phoneboy
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Jeff Pulver’s resignation and the apparent demise of Pulvermedia and VON
Continue Reading: Jeff Pulver’s resignation and the apparent demise of Pulvermedia and VONIn a short and direct statement yesterday, Jeff Pulver yesterday confirmed the fears many of us have had for some time:
A little while later, notes like this were showing up in his Twitter stream:
(Note: I am not PhoneBoy – that’s Dameon Welch-Abernathy.)Jeff’s resignation was not unexpected, given the rumors swirling around since the end of March (chronicled here: Marc Robins blog, GigaOm) when Pulvermedia’s primary investor, TICC, apparently shut all operations down. Regardless, it was sad to see the finality of this action. While Jeff had turned most of the Pulvermedia operations over to others and was no longer as directly involved with the company, I know given Jeff’s passion for the company and this industry – as well as the fact that the company (Pulvermedia) includes his name – this was obviously a hard personal decision.
So what does this mean for Pulvermedia’s various events and conferences, most importantly VON?
Good question… and one that we perhaps don’t know the answers to yet. I’d held off writing about this whole saga in part because I hoped that Jeff and crew would be able to figure things out behind the scenes to continue operations. Perhaps they…
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Six months with Voxeo…
Continue Reading: Six months with Voxeo…I find it rather astounding to me that it was six months ago today that I announced that I had joined Voxeo. Where did the time go?It’s been a really amazing six months that has so greatly expanded my knowledge into new areas I hadn’t played with before. This picture from our “VoIP Platform Overview” page perhaps best shows what I find so interesting about Voxeo’s platform:
On the one hand, it’s an XML-driven SIP application server… yet it’s also a media server… and then there’s all the speech stuff – Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text-To-Speech, etc…. VoiceXML, CCXML, CallXML… and then it’s a conferencing server… all based on SIP and using things like ENUM and so much more.
Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects for me is that on one level we are customer-focused working with individual developers to help them learn to build voice applications. But then on the back-end we have this massively-scalable, redundant hosting infrastructure and we are among the largest consumers of SIP trunks in North America. (And constantly in need of more – a colleague of mine is tasked nearly full-time with working with carriers to find more SIP trunk…
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Equals’ “Party Line” app uses Voxeo’s platform to bring voice to Facebook
Continue Reading: Equals’ “Party Line” app uses Voxeo’s platform to bring voice to FacebookHave you ever wanted to quickly get into a conference call with a group of people? What if you could just call a number and initiate a conference call that automatically dialled out to bring in the other participants? Would you see yourself using this for a group (or groups) of your friends? Could you see this being useful for a group of coworkers? Over on Voxeo’s blog today, I wrote about a new Facebook application called “Party Line” that does exactly this.As I outline in the blog post, Party Line, available (to Facebook users) at www.equals.com/partyline lets you create an unlimited number of “party lines”, each of which can have up to five participants. To initiate a group call, you either dial in to 1-877-4-BUZZ-ME or you initiate the call from within the Facebook page. The application calls all the other participants and brings you all into a group conference call. You can talk for as long as you want. No bridge numbers to remember. No passcodes. Very simple to use.
For Equals, the company who developed this Facebook application, this is their first product and platform. They’ve indicated that in the end they want this app to…
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Skype further commoditizes voice with their “unlimited” subscription plans…
Continue Reading: Skype further commoditizes voice with their “unlimited” subscription plans…Today’s buzz in the VoIP space is certainly Skype’s announcement of new “unlimited” subscription plans. No contracts. No connection fees. No per-minute fees. Just a single flat, monthly fee.The Global Difference
Now on the one hand, this isn’t really new to those of us here in North America. We had an “unlimited” plan for all of NA that was good up until several months back when Skype dropped the plan and required everyone to move onto “Skype Pro”. However, the big difference this time around is simple:
The unlimited plan is global!
Well, at least “global” in the sense that the 34 countries to which the plan pertains are indeed spread out all around the globe:
Regardless, it’s an impressive list and, as Skype’s news release reminds us, means you have “unlimited” calling to about a third of the world’s population. (This statistic is, of course, hugely helped by the fact that the plan includes China!) So now with your PC, or 3 Skypephone over in Europe, you can now make an “unlimited” number of calls to regular old PSTN phone numbers in those countries.
Goodbye international calling plans!
Given that here in the USA, we’ve seen most all…
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Squawk Box: Is the Mobile Web Dead?
Continue Reading: Squawk Box: Is the Mobile Web Dead?Yesterday we had a fascinating conversation on Alec Saunders’ Squawk Box podcast/conf call about “Is the Mobile Web Dead?” This all came about because of Russell Beattie’s piece (and the resulting conversation) about shutting down Mowser and declaring that “the mobile web” is dead in light of new phones like the iPhone that allow users to see the web through a “regular” browser. Mowser was a company that existed to help companies make their websites work better on mobile devices/phones and he ultimately found that the market never really appeared.The discussion was a good one although I think the truth is that we are all violently in agreement that at the end of the day there is just “the Web” these days and there is no need for a separate “mobile” web as the devices we use continue to evolve. We also spent a chunk of time talking about the iPhone SDK, fring and the long-term prospects for apps that use the Jailbreak installer.
All in all I think you’ll find it an enjoyable conversation – give it a listen! And note that you are always welcome to join into the calls that happen most weekday mornings at…
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If you missed eComm 2008, the presentations are now online…
Continue Reading: If you missed eComm 2008, the presentations are now online…If, like me, you missed out on eComm 2008 last month you can at least now view (or download) almost all of the eComm 2008 presentations via SlideShare. You can view all the different presentations and download them as well.eComm organizer Lee Dryburgh also said that he’s working on getting the audio recordings of the presentations up online as podcasts which will be great to have, too. (As I wrote about on a Voxeo blog, you really need audio to understand many of the slide decks (which I actually view as a good thing!).)
Kudos to Lee for getting all the presentations up there – there’s 58 right now and it’s good to see the range of presentations given. As a longtime fan of SlideShare, it’s also nice to see it being used for a conference like this.
Technorati Tags: eComm, eComm2008, presentations, slideshare, voip, telephony, telecommunications, communication
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…