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Skype raises public chat limits to 150 – but why do I see 200 in a chat room?
Continue Reading: Skype raises public chat limits to 150 – but why do I see 200 in a chat room?Today Skype announced that you could now have up to 150 people in a public chat session. They had quietly rolled this out a bit ago, but I only noticed then because I monitor and participate in a couple of Skype public chats that focus on new releases/features of Skype and development issues.
There does, though, seem to be a continuing puzzle around discrepancies regarding the actual limits. Ask any 4 people in a Skype public chat to type “/info” on the command line and relay the result… and you’ll probably get four very different answers. I just did that in one public chat (Update: it was the “Skype Developer community public chat“) and, as shown in the graphic, showed a total of 201 people in a chat session… with the limit theoretically being 150! Someone else in the chat did the same command and showed 122 people. At various times in the past, we’ve done similar tests and found that there’s a very wide range of numbers.
One has to wonder… is this something about the peer-to-peer “cloud” that makes up the Skype infrastructure? Is this a convergence issue? i.e. over time the numbers will converge to a…
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Do you prefer a softphone or an IP ("hard") phone? – Jeff Pulver’s Question of the Day
Continue Reading: Do you prefer a softphone or an IP ("hard") phone? – Jeff Pulver’s Question of the DayOver on his blog, Jeff Pulver asks “Do you prefer softphones or IP phones?“, which is a great question to ask. What do you think?
I left a comment there and then started writing a longer blog entry – but I just don’t have the time to complete that particular entry, so I’ll have to stick it in the queue for a future article. In the meantime… do head on over to Jeff’s site and leave any comments you have. It’s definitely an interesting question.
Technorati tags: softphones, voip, jeff pulver, phones -
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BT to enable VoIP (and video) over Sony PSP game consoles
Continue Reading: BT to enable VoIP (and video) over Sony PSP game consolesA colleague pointed me to this Engadget story (which, in turn, points to this BBC article) about the fact that BT will soon be allowing UK owners of Sony PSP game consoles to use their PSP to make voice and video calls to other PSP users and eventually to any other phone number. Per the BBC article (which also includes a nice little video showing this in action)
The software has been developed by BT and will eventually allow PSP users to call PCs, fixed lines and mobiles.
Initially the service will only be available in the UK and will only work on home or BT wireless hotspots.
Currently, there are around 2,000 of these situated in airports, railway stations, hotels and fast food restaurants.
Interesting move by BT. The cameras were apparently to be available from Sony May 25th but this service from BT will not be available until more details are announced at a conference in August. Certainly there’s a strong potential user base there:
More than 24 million PSPs have been sold around the world, with more than eight million of those sold in Europe.
And the article states that BT says that this software…
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FYI – some of my posts are being republished on CircleID… with my permission
Continue Reading: FYI – some of my posts are being republished on CircleID… with my permissionFYI, if you stumble upon some of my posts appearing over on a site called CircleID, that’s okay… they aren’t stealing my content… I have given them explicit permission to republish my entries. One of the folks involved with the site, Ali Farshchian, contacted me originally after I posted the SIP Botnet story to the Voice of VOIPSA weblog asking about permission to republish that story (which he subsequently did). He later re-published another post of mine and in further discussions I granted my permission for him to republish future stories if he notified me after doing so. I’m normally a bit concerned about publication of my content on other sites, but in this case I do like the overall focus of CircleID on issues relating to Internet infrastructure – and I’d definitely suggest you give it a read as many of these issues around domains and just infrastructure issues in general will affect us all. (And some of the stories are just plain interesting because they deal with the “plumbing” of the Internet and the dark clouds that we don’t normally venture into and really only know that “magic happens” somewhere inside them and this thing we call…
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Skype launches "Small Business Pack" in Europe (and for resellers)
Continue Reading: Skype launches "Small Business Pack" in Europe (and for resellers)Yesterday, Skype announced a new “Small Business Pack” available in 12 European countries – and also indicated that you could become a Skype reseller to sell this pack.
Phil Wolff over at Skype Journal has more coverage and raises some good points that are unknown about the reseller program. (And FYI, in the interesting way all this happens, my “tip” to him was in the Skype public group chat that Phil has hosted for months when I asked him if he’d heard of this new pack.)
To me, this represents another new method for Skype to look to get into the business market. It’s not entirely clear to me how many resellers will really pick it up, since the pack really only represents a 50-euro savings, but I suppose on one level it’s something they can at least sell. It’s also not clear to me exactly why a reseller would be needed since you can also order the pack directly from Skype’s online web site, so even with volume discounts, there would not seem to really be a whole lot of margin in it for a reseller. Maybe there are, as Phil writes, enough “Skype-crazy consultants” out there seeking to…
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Come party with Jeff Pulver in Stockholm in June!
Continue Reading: Come party with Jeff Pulver in Stockholm in June!As Jeff Pulver notes today, he’ll be once again hosting a big party at his VON Europe Spring 2007 in June in Stockholm. Jeff’s events are definitely always interesting… and I’m looking forward to being at this one. If you’re going to Stockholm, I’ll see you there!
Technorati tags: jeff pulver, von, voip -
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Skype as a platform for secure VPN tunnels?
Continue Reading: Skype as a platform for secure VPN tunnels?Since Skype has an open client-side API, why not use it as a transport to tunnel VPN traffic and blow through firewalls to connect you to a remote system? That’s the idea raised by Peeter P. Mõtsküla in his Skype Developer Blog entry: “Idea: skypetunnel“. For instance, have a Skype client running on your home machine logged in as one account. Have Skype on your laptop on another account. Initiate a connection between the two of them and wind up with secure, encrypted access through the firewall from wherever you are. Being peer-to-peer, there would be no central servers or infrastructure required (outside the usual Skype p2p cloud.) This would require, of course, a yet-to-be-created “extra” that connected into the Skype client API and was installed on both systems… but that was the point of the article – to suggest that something like this could be done (and perhaps inspire someone to write one).
It’s an interesting idea, although as one commenter noted, it has already been done in a p2p fashion by Hamachi. I don’t know how large Hamachi’s p2p cloud (i.e. userbase) is compared to Skype and whether or not that even makes a difference, but the…
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New site promoting the integration of the Ruby language and telephony…
Continue Reading: New site promoting the integration of the Ruby language and telephony…By way of a Twitter post today, I learned that Dave Troy has unveiled “Talking Ruby“, a new site promoting information about the integration of the Ruby language with telephony, collaboration and messaging. I’ve always been intrigued by Ruby (and also Ruby on Rails, which has been one of the most visible uses of Ruby), but have yet to really have had a reason to plunge in and play with it. Perhaps this will provide an excuse. Dave indicates on his site the following reasons for using Ruby with telephony:
- Ruby’s DSL (Domain Specific Language) Capabilities are ideal for expressively encapsulating diverse telephony and collaboration technologies
- Inherits the momentum of Rails, so web integration is baked-in
- Cross-platform support (Linux, OS X, BSD, Windows ) unifies application development efforts
- Ruby integration libraries can be easily developed and shared
- DRb (Distributed Ruby) allows for persistent state storage and scaling across servers
I wish him all the best with the new site and do look forward to seeing what people come up with. The site is a wiki, so if you’re interested and Ruby-literate, you can easily jump in and participate (there’s also a mailing list).
Technorati tags: voip,…
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…