Will there soon be a native SIP client on the iPhone and iPod Touch? Dameon Welch-Abernathy writes on his VoIP weblog that some developers have gotten a basic SIP stack working on the iPhone and iPod Touch. The limited details available are over on The Unofficial Apple Weblog:
iPhone hacker eok writes to let me know that he and Samuel have gotten SIP registration and signalization working. They took a few mobile terminal shots, but the real work is being done via ssh. Samuel is working on connecting the audio in/out to the pjSIP. If you have iPhone or iPod touch coding skills and want to get involved in the project, connect to #touchmods on irc.undernet.org. It looks like most of the work will be done on European time.
As you can see in the screenshots, this is still very early in the development. Still, it’s great to see this kind of development taking place.
By way of a ZDNet blog, I learned of “Tryphone” a site that lets you “try out” various new mobile phones online. It currently just has the Apple iPhone, LG Muziq, Blackberry Pearl and Samsung Juke… but of course lets you buy the phone immediately after trying it if you wish. I don’t know that something like this can ever replace the experience of actually holding the phone in your hand, but it’s an interesting idea nonetheless.
Skype Journal had this post today that was short enough to be captured in a graphic:
Indeed. How many other startups have ditched landlines, IP PBXs, etc.? Tools like Skype make that rather trivial to do, especially when voice no longer matters as much in everyday business communication.
When I think of “disruptive” actions in our industry, I personally don’t ever tend to think of Verizon (well, I do think of them in terms of disrupting GSM service in Vermont, but that’s a different post I need to write). But yesterday, Verizon issued a news release that I think bears reading: “Verizon Business Adds New Option to Simplify Move to IP“. Essentially it amounts to the fact that Verizon will be offering “large-business” and government customers the option of having their IP-PBX hosted in Verizon’s cloud. From a technical point of view, it’s basically a hosted offering of Nortel’s recent products:
The Nortel-based offerings, leveraging the Nortel Communication Server 1000 IP-PBX, Business Communications Manager and CallPilot platforms, enable advanced voice applications such as “find me, follow me,” and integrated communications that allow for multimedia collaboration. They also help companies move to a unified communications platform to simplify and integrate a variety of business communications functions such as voice mail, e-mail and instant messaging. For example, end-users can see who is online, or they can prompt the system to prioritize incoming messages and send alerts to end-user devices.
Verizon Business’ support for the offering includes full implementation, as well as management of fault, configuration, accounting, performance and security functions.
The release also indicates that Verizon Business has set up close to 5,000 Nortel IP telephony platforms, which is certainly not a number to sneeze at.
Now on one level, this isn’t a terribly big deal. Verizon already provides all sorts of hosted/managed services to those large and government businesses, but this does mark Verizon’s endorsement of hosted VoIP and their expansion into the support of the technology. Interesting move… and a nice win for Nortel as well.
The world is a bit darker tonight. Oliver Starr relayed the tragic news that Marc Orchant passed away earlier today. I’ve sat here tonight saddened… with my thoughts very definitely going out to his family… especially at this time of year.
And then, as a writer, I feel compelled to write. It seems really the only way to honor Marc’s passing.
By most measures, I did not know Marc well. We never met face-to-face. I did not work directly with him. He had not ever interviewed me, nor I him. We had not participated in any joint projects. But in this crazy world of interconnected social media, it sure felt like I knew him. I’d been reading his ZDNet “Office Evolution” blog all along up until August when he left to join Oliver Starr in starting up us.blognation.com. There on blognation I enjoyed his writing and followed along as wrote about the latest Apple happenings, talked about how he liked his Kindle reader and ultimately how he removed himself from Facebook. Since he occasionally wrote about Skype, something I cover here as well, I did pay attention especially to those posts.
Marc and I did “meet” virtually through Robert Sanzalone’s “Pacific IT” Skype groupchat, where Marc participated for a few months this fall. He pointed me to what he considered the best mobile VoIP handset around. We chatted about the new MacBookPro’s. He sent me a Jaiku invite when I was looking for one… the kind of ordinary things that happens in such group chat rooms. He was helpful, kind, courteous… a consummate professional.
Perhaps why his death strikes me so hard is because he was one of us… a “tech blogger”… a writer… a storyteller.
He used words to help try to make sense out of the insanity that surrounds us on any given day. He tried to educate… enlighten… de-mystify. He wrote well and with an enjoyable style. He told stories.
And now he is gone.
What remains is his family (donations are being collected by Oliver Starr) and, of course, in this era of Google and seemingly infinite disk farms… his words:
And undoubtedly many more places than those I’ve listed here. Technorati also pulled up this video of Marc in 2005 explaining what a blog is:
There are perhaps more of those out there as well… and undoubtedly pictures in Flickr and other such sites.
Now, for the rest of us, all we can really do (outside of donating to Marc’s family) is to remember him. Consider this my entry in building that collective memory… in helping in some small way to tell Marc’s story. I’ve seen posts already from Alec Saunders, Aaron Brazell, Tris Hussey (on blognation),Robert Scoble… and I’m sure we’ll see many more in the hours and days ahead.
No mere words can ever replace a loved one, but perhaps in some small way they can offer some degree of solace to Marc’s family to know that he was valued by others… that what he did mattered… and that the world is a better place for him having been here.
Rest in peace, Marc… thank you for all you shared.
I’ve not yet had a chance to do more with it than install it and play a bit with the configuration options:
but I’m very much looking forward to giving it a try. There are several interesting aspects to this app for me:
It is an embedded softphone (Java-based). No extra software you need. Just click the button and you can call the person who has it on their Facebook profile. To my knowledge this is the first time we’ve seen this in a Facebook app.
From the user side, you can link that button to any of the following:
Your Truphone number.
Any regular landline or mobile phones in the US or Canada.
The Facebook app uses the IAX protocol used primarily by Asterisk. This gets around all of the firewall/NAT traversal issues that plague SIP.
All of that makes for an interesting new app inside of Facebook. Now, there are already a number of “click-to-call” Facebook apps out there (some of which I’ve covered here) but in his announcement of moving to Truphone, Dean talks about what is different:
There are several click to call/callback/speak type applications already on Facebook. The differentiator here, and the interesting part about this application (and also the hardest part) is that we’ve embedded a JAVA based softphone right into the heart of Facebook. This makes the experience from a user point of view seamless with the Facebook environment. The user never leaves Facebook, they speak into Facebook. Additionally, the “call me” button for this application is not restricted to your own profile page – it functions as a Facebook attachment, which means it can be dropped onto a friends Wall, or added to a Facebook mail message or any other attachment-accepting application which exists on Facebook now or might do in the future.
So now Facebook users can put this “Call Me For Free” button in other locations within Facebook… and Facebook users can use this as a way to stay inside of Facebook but yet new mix in voice communication to people outside of Facebook. Now I can look up someone in Facebook and then simply click the call button to reach them by voice directly.
I look forward to experimenting with the application in the next week or two. Those of you who are Facebook users and want to try it out can simply install the application.
What do you think? Do you think people will use this app? Does voice have a role mixed into a social network like Facebook?
One interesting development in the world of Skype last week which I’ve seen little mention of is the fact that the folks at Highspeedconferencing.com have rolled out a Skype Extra that lets Skype users have large-scale conference calls. Like most such large conference bridges, they have moderation/”hand-raising”, call recording, email invites, etc.
However, the key point to me is that their conferencing bridge uses the wideband audio supported by Skype!
That is the key. You now have conference calling with audio quality that is far better than the PSTN! This is where we start to get into the space where VoIP can offer a truly different – and better – user experience than traditional telephony. The Skype blog touches on this:
HighSpeed Conferencing is the only audio conferencing service available to Skype users that offers high-definition (HD) voice quality. There’s no degradation of audio quality, no matter how many Skype users participate in a conference call. And with unlimited usage during a conference call, you can talk as much as you want. Some people stay on the conference bridge all day.
I’ve not yet used the service as right now I’m not involved with large conference calls, but at the point that I do I will very definitely check it out. (On a tangent, I wonder if Polycom has a trademark on “HD Voice”?)
A large part of why I have NOT been writing here all that much in the past few weeks is that I’ve been busy in my new role with Voxeo working on a corporate blog portal. I’ve been covering a bit of that odyssey over on my Disruptive Conversations blog as well as in my weekly reports into the For Immediate Release podcast. It’s been a great amount of work but also a lot of fun – I’ve been very lucky to have a colleague who does amazing things with CSS and graphics, and so the sites look a whole lot better than they would if I were left to my own devices.
I’m very pleased to say, now, that we’ve reached the point where I’m willing to link to our work and talk a bit about what we are doing. The main blog portal is the predictable “blogs.voxeo.com” but the weblog that we’re really starting to use and could be of interest to readers of this blog is our “Speaking of Standards” blog found at:
I’ve obviously been very occasionally writing here about standards and some of that may continue, but I expect most of my writing on the subject will now occur over on this new Voxeo weblog – and I’ll naturally be writing more on the subject. We’ll be writing about the IETF and SIP standards, but also the W3C and standards such as VoiceXML and CCXML that I’ve never covered at all here. We’ll be linking to events and tutorials we find and generally providing whatever information we can about standards affecting our industry, as well as Voxeo’s views and implementations of those standards.
Why would Voxeo sponsor a weblog about standards? Primarily because the company and our products are all about open standards – which was one of the things that attracted me to the company after they first approached me. I’ve since learned that they’ve been leading the IVR industry in adopting open standards. As the products page says in the “Fast Facts” sidebar:
100% Standards based IVR
Supports W3C VoiceXML 2.0
Supports W3C CCXML 1.0
Supports W3C SRGS 1.0
Supports W3C SSML 1.0
Supports CallXML 3.0
First platform with XML call control
First platform with XML conferencing
First shipping CCXML implementation
First SIP/VOIP IVR platform
Not bad, eh? Add to that the fact that our CTO (my manager), RJ Auburn, chairs the W3C’s Working Group on CCXML and we’ve hired other folks involved with standards efforts… all of that is why we added a weblog on standards.
So if you would like to see our view on industry standards, find tutorials about various standards or learn about standards-related events we may be attending, I would invite you to come on over and check out “Speaking with Standards” – or subscribe to the RSS feed. While I (and others) will still be working on improving the site, it’s mostly done and I’m delighted to be able to return to writing more. Let us know what you think!
Congratulations to Dean Elwood for joining Truphone as their Director of Platform Operations! I’ve known Dean for a couple of years now through Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast where he’s commented from time to time and also provided us the SIP-based comment line (sip:bluebox@voipuser.org) through his involvement with the VoIPuser.org web site. We had a chance to meet a year or so ago at the first Blue Box dinner we had in London and Dean also hosted a dinner at VON Fall Boston a few weeks ago. He’s a great guy with tremendous talent and I’m sure he’ll be a great resource for Truphone. Speaking of Truphone, they are also a fascinating company to watch and I’ve come to know a good number of folks involved over time. I’m looking forward very much to seeing what comes out of their work and I wish Dean all the best in his new role.
Will there soon be a native SIP client on the iPhone and iPod Touch? Dameon Welch-Abernathy writes on his VoIP weblog that some developers have gotten a basic SIP stack working on the iPhone and iPod Touch. The limited details available are over on The Unofficial Apple Weblog:
By way of 
The world is a bit darker tonight. Oliver Starr relayed 
The major product Dean Elwood has been working on
One interesting development in the world of Skype last week which I’ve seen little mention of is the fact that the folks at Highspeedconferencing.com have 
Congratulations to