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Skype Shuts Down SkypeKit and the Skype Developer Website
Continue Reading: Skype Shuts Down SkypeKit and the Skype Developer WebsiteGoodbye to SkypeKit… and perhaps more importantly to the developer.skype.com website. Prominently featured there now is a banner saying the site will close on July 31, 2014:Leaving aside the bizarre way to end the warning banner (“… to integrate with” and then nothing more), I went to the site because I received an email from Skype in the form of a “SkypeKit License Termination Notice”. The email says in full:
Dear Dan ,
In July 2013, we notified you of our intention to end support for our SkypeKit SDK at the end of July 2014. With this date now approaching, this email serves as 30 days’ official notice of termination of the SkypeKit Licence Agreement (“Agreement”) pursuant to Section 13.2.4 of the Agreement. The Agreement will end on July 31st 2014. Upon termination of the Agreement you must promptly destroy all copies of the SkypeKit SDK in your possession or control, except that if you have already entered into the SkypeKit Distribution Terms and have received a commercialization keypair for your SkypeKit Product(s) then you may continue to distribute these SkypeKit Products(s).
Skype will not be issuing any new keypairs and we remind you that keypairs may only be…
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SIPNOC 2014 Begins Today In Virginia – I am speaking about TLS and SIP (and DANE)
Continue Reading: SIPNOC 2014 Begins Today In Virginia – I am speaking about TLS and SIP (and DANE)Today I’m back at the Hyatt Dulles in Herndon, Virginia, for the fourth SIP Network Operators Conference (SIPNOC) event. These SIPNOC sessions are great because they bring together the people actually operating the SIP-based networks that make up our telecommunications infrastructure. SIPNOC continues to be THE best place I’ve found to interact with the people actually taking SIP standards and making them happen in the “real world”.
I’ve been to all four SIPNOCs – and I continue to find them outstanding events, not only because of the excellent technical content, but also because of the people.
In many cases, these are the “phone guys” (and gals) who have found their way to IP. The “Bellheads” of the age-old “Bellhead vs Nethead” debate. The “telcos”. The people who have been doing telecom for decades… and are now evolving to IP.
In other cases, the people here are the new contenders. The cable companies are here – and they are strongly challenging the legacy telcos, and they are creating entirely new IP-based infrastructures. The “Internet Telephony Service Providers (ITSPs)” and “SIP Trunking” providers are here, too… companies that are reimagining what telecom can be in an IP space. Newer vendors… newer application…
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R.I.P. Simon Gwatkin
Continue Reading: R.I.P. Simon GwatkinI was greatly saddened to learn today of the death of Simon Gwatkin this past weekend. For those of us in the VoIP / telecom space, the world is a little bit darker now.I came to know Simon when I worked at Mitel Networks in Ottawa from 2001-2007, although it wasn’t really until the later years when I wound up working in Mitel’s Office of the CTO and looking more strategically at what the future might hold for companies like Mitel. A lot of my research and time wound up being spent looking at social media and the changing communication landscape. With Simon’s role as head of strategic marketing at Mitel we wound up having any number of quite lengthy conversations about where things were going. We didn’t always agree, which led to very useful and valuable discussions. Simon also got me engaged with industry analysts and helped set me down a path that was quite useful in many later years.
I also spent a good bit of time interacting with some of the startups that were being nurtured under the umbrella of Wesley Clover, the investment vehicle of Sir Terry Matthews. Simon was involved with Terry’s investments there…
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What Devices And Software Support The Opus Audio Codec? Here Is A List
Continue Reading: What Devices And Software Support The Opus Audio Codec? Here Is A ListWhat devices support the Opus audio codec? What softphones? hardphones? call servers? Obviously given that Opus is the “mandatory to implement” audio codec for WebRTC, it will be in many web browsers… but what other I was asked this question by a colleague recently and when I couldn’t easily find a list on the Opus codec web site, I turned to the VUC community inside of Google+ and posted there. The great folks there naturally were a huge help, and quickly came up with this list: UPDATE: No sooner had I hit “Publish” then I discovered that Wikipedia has a list of devices and software supporting the Opus codec. As that list is much longer than this one below, I’d encourage you to look at that list.
- Web browsers supporting WebRTC:
- Google Chrome
- Mozilla Firefox
- Softphones:
- Blink
- Counterpath Bria
- Jitsi
- Linphone
- Mumble
- (Maybe Skype? They talked about it.)
- “Hard” IP phones:
- Mobile applications:
- Acrobits (iOS)
- Counterpath Bria (iOS)
- csipsimple (Android)
- Switches / Call Servers / IP-PBXs:
What other devices or software supports the Opus codec? (Or what other lists are out there listing devices supporting the Opus codec?) Please do let me know either by comments…
- Web browsers supporting WebRTC:
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Telcos Should Be Worried – Facebook Controls More OTT Messaging With WhatsApp Acquisition
Continue Reading: Telcos Should Be Worried – Facebook Controls More OTT Messaging With WhatsApp AcquisitionTalk about disruption… the telecom part of the media world is buzzing with news of Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp. Techmeme is currently showing MANY posts on the topic and the day is just getting started.The key point here is that WhatsApp is a prime example of what is often called an “Over-The-Top” or “OTT” application. It uses the data channel on a mobile phone to provide services. Here’s another key point from the Facebook news release:
- Messaging volume approaching the entire global telecom SMS volume.
The traditional telecom companies (“telcos”) have already seen their voice revenue seriously eroded by Skype and so many of the other OTT voice applications (such as Viber, which was just acquired) and they’ve been watching SMS traffic and revenue plateau and decline.
WhatsApp was already one of the major players in the mobile messaging space… indeed I have friends in Europe who tell me they can’t remember the last time they sent an actual SMS message because they use WhatsApp for all their messaging. Their usage, too, is not just about the “free” cost of WhatsApp messages – it’s also about the richer messaging experience they can get over WhatsApp versus plain SMS. They…
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Don’t Miss Friday’s Live VUC Call! – Martin Geddes on “Rethinking Broadband and Voice”
Continue Reading: Don’t Miss Friday’s Live VUC Call! – Martin Geddes on “Rethinking Broadband and Voice”What are you doing tomorrow, Friday, December 6, 2013, at 12noon US Eastern (1700 UTC)? Would you like to join in to what should be an excellent conversation about the future of broadband networks, IP communications, telecom, etc.? If so, make plans to join the VoIP Users Conference (VUC) call happening live at 12 noon where the guest will be the ever-interesting Martin Geddes. The topic will be “Rethinking broadband and voice: Network Science and Hypervoice” and should prompt some vigorous discussion!
I’ve known Martin for many years now and have been a great fan of his analysis and writing ever since back in the days of his “Telepocalypse” blog. He’s truly a great thinker in the space and is also quite an enjoyable and fun speaker to listen to. We know each other well from the early days of VoIP blogging as well as the conference circuit, and I regularly read his email newsletter and other great content he puts out. He’s very active on Twitter as well.
Having said all that, I do have some fundamental disagreements with some of what he is advocating these days. I wrote about some of this disagreement last year and he and…
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Telefonica Shuts Down Jajah
Continue Reading: Telefonica Shuts Down JajahTheNextWeb reported yesterday that Telefonica is shutting down the Jajah VoIP service that they acquired back in 2009 for a reported $207 million. While certainly disappointing for the users and presumably for some staff, it’s not entirely unexpected. In the early pre-acquistion days, Jajah was doing some very cool things (ex. powering Yahoo!Voice, although that service has since faded) and was quite interesting to watch. Back when Alec Saunders was doing his daily “Squawk Box” podcast, we interviewed Jajah co-founder Roman Scharf on April 29, 2008 (you can still listen to the episode).However, ever since the Telefonica acquisition you didn’t hear a whole lot about them… although they did come out with an Android app in 2011 for calling Facebook contacts.
Telefonica isn’t saying anything yet publicly about why they are shutting down Jajah. Pretty much the entire Jajah website points to a single “shut down” page and the blog now only has an entry about the shutdown. Matt Marshall over on VentureBeat speculates that Jajah simply didn’t have any substantial revenue after voice traffic has been so commoditized – and that’s as good a suggestion as any.
So… goodbye to Jajah… best wishes to all the customers and…
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Linphone On iOS Now Supports The Opus Codec
Continue Reading: Linphone On iOS Now Supports The Opus CodecWhen updating my iPhone this week, I was extremely pleased to see the message in the attached screenshot that Linphone now supports the Opus audio codec. Somewhat strangely, I don’t see any mention of this Opus support (or even the 2.1 release for iOS) on the Linphone news page or even on the Linphone features page, but the mention of a “Linphone Web” release does also mention Opus, so I’ll assume this is real.I’ve written before about why the Opus code is so incredibly important if we want to truly deliver a richer and better communications experience than we’ve had with the traditional PSTN and so it is great to see this support coming in to Linphone. Linphone is certainly not the first SIP softphone to support Opus – there are a number of others out there, including Jitsi and Counterpath’s Bria (and X-Lite) – but it’s definitely great to see another softphone added to the mix. Hopefully we’ll also see this Opus support move to the desktop versions of Linphone (for Windows, OS X and Linux) as well.
Congrats to the Linphone team on making this happen!
P.S. Linphone also supports IPv6, ensuring that it will continue to…
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Lesson Learned The Hard Way – Google+ Hangouts On Air …
Continue Reading: Lesson Learned The Hard Way – Google+ Hangouts On Air …I learned a hard lesson today that Google+ Hangouts On Air (HOA) are limited to 4 hours in length…. and to read the rest of the story, visit Disruptive Conversations…(Good lesson that I shouldn’t be posting articles at 1:00am! But leaving this post up here for a bit because there are now social media links out there pointing to this URL…)
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Two Years At The Internet Society
Continue Reading: Two Years At The Internet SocietyIt rather staggers my mind that it was two years ago today, on September 19, 2011, that I began work for the Internet Society (a.k.a. “ISOC”). Longtime readers and friends may remember my impassioned (and naturally long) post at the time, “Ch-changes – Taking A New Job At The Internet Society To Join The Fight For The Open Internet“.
Two years later that passion has only grown stronger! The events of recent months with the massive Internet surveillance disclosures have only reinforced the need for organizations like the Internet Society to be out there doing what they can to preserve the open character of the Internet.
Whether it is the excellent work on leading Internet technologies – and support for the IETF… the incredible work of our public policy team … or the great work going on to to expand access to the Internet in regions where there is limited connectivity… or the global work of our chapters helping at a local and regional level… or the programs to develop the next generation of Internet leaders… or the many, many other activities going on around the globe… it’s been an absolute pleasure to be a staff member for the…
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…