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Microsoft: When simply having an IM conversation becomes a tool to raise money for nonprofits… is this for real?
Continue Reading: Microsoft: When simply having an IM conversation becomes a tool to raise money for nonprofits… is this for real?We’ve all undoubtedly seen the chain-letter email messages that circulate around telling you that by forwarding the email you will make money or receive gifts and most people with half a clue understand that this kind of thing is pretty much impossible. So it was with a whole lot of skepticism that I first greeted Microsoft’s “i’m” campaign because the premise is: for every IM conversation you have with Windows Live Messenger, we’ll donate some money to the nonprofit of your choice (from among nine choices). To me, it sounded just a wee bit fishy. In reading the “About” page you do learn a bit more. First:
Every time you start a conversation using i’m, Microsoft shares a portion of the program’s advertising revenue with some of the world’s most effective organizations dedicated to social causes. We’ve set no cap on the amount we’ll donate to each organization. The sky’s the limit. There’s no charge, so join now and put our money where your mouth is.
and then this:
Once you’ve signed up, every ad you see in your message window contributes to the grand total we send to the causes.
So it’s all about a portion of…
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Telephony disrupted: It’s darn hard to be a remote teleworker without Net access!
Continue Reading: Telephony disrupted: It’s darn hard to be a remote teleworker without Net access!About 1:30pm today, I lost internet connectivity. It was quite comical, really, how I noticed. For some reason, I did something I almost never do and hit the “Music On Hold” button on my teleworker sets hanging off of Mitel’s switch up in Ottawa. So there, in a wonderful use of bandwidth, radio station CHEZ-106 out of Ottawa was streaming into my home office down here in Vermont. (That’s what the trial guys are using as the MOH music source for the trial switch to which I am connected.)
All of a sudden, the phone started playing the same audio packet again and again and again… I felt like I was transported back about 25 years to the era of skipping records! I wondered what was up but then I noticed a browser window on my computer not being able to find a link I had just opened to a popular web site. I quickly looked at my other teleworker phones and they, too, were going into a resiliency mode attempting to failover to their secondary IP-PBX. A glimpse at my laptop showed that Skype, MSN, Jabber were all starting their contortions of trying to reconnect.
Uh-oh.
Being a network geek,…
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Asterisk running on a Roomba – "Press one to start sucking"
Continue Reading: Asterisk running on a Roomba – "Press one to start sucking"Here’s something for a Friday afternoon… yes, indeed, out at Emerging Telephony 2007 back in February, someone (David Troy) did indeed have Asterisk running on a Roomba. And yes, it was “Press one to start sucking. Press two to stop sucking.”
Pictures are now available on Flickr.
More precisely, Asterisk is running on a hacked Linksys WRT54G access point (which is Linux-based) and the controller is using a Nokia WiFi/GSM phone to connect to the Asterisk install. You could also control the direction of the Roomba using the other keys on the phone keypad.
Why would anyone do this? Well… why not?
As I mentioned in a recent post, the beautiful thing about VoIP is that it now enables people to “play” with telephony… and do wacky things like hook it up to a Roomba! 🙂
Enjoy the weekend! Perhaps next week I’ll actually get some time to upload the rest of the pictures I took out at ETel. (Hey, it was only 6 weeks ago… )
Technorati tags: asterisk, roomba, voip, play, open source, telephony -
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IETF approves RFC standard for adding dialstrings to SIP
Continue Reading: IETF approves RFC standard for adding dialstrings to SIPIn the usual (and ongoing) flurry of IETF announcements, there was one notice that caught my attention. It announces that an Internet Draft document about “dialstrings” has been approved to become a standards-track RFC. So what, you say? Well here’s a bit more info:
This document provides a way of incorporating a dial string into the SIP or SIPS URI scheme. A dial string is a cousin of a telephone number, but rather than taking the form of a fully-qualified E.164 or national-specific telephone number, it is a description of a literal set of dialed digits that would be delivered over a POTS line. As such, it may include pauses, omit prefixes like area codes, and its applicability is necessarily restricted to a particular context (an enterprise, a LATA, etc). Support for dialstrings was formerly a feature of the tel: URI scheme specification (back in RFC2806); since that functionality did not make it into the revision (RFC3966), it is provided here specifically for the SIP and SIPS case.
Think of it as extra digits you have to type when making a call… or extra keys you have to press to start a service. The challenge is that SIP proxies and…
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VoIP Now confirms that the cool kids hack telephony with their list of 74 open source VoIP / IP telephony projects
Continue Reading: VoIP Now confirms that the cool kids hack telephony with their list of 74 open source VoIP / IP telephony projectsAs I travel around giving presentations about the technologies that are disrupting telephony, one of the themes I discuss is that one of the most severe disruptions brought about by VoIP is that people now have the ability to “play” with telephony in ways that were never possible before. Pre-VoIP, you needed special (and typically costly) equipment. Yes, there have been any range of CTI cards that let you play to a degree, but buying the real equipment was just not possible for most folks who might want to “hack” in the original meaning of the word. Enter VoIP. Now all you need is an old PC and some open source software and… ta da… you’re playing with telephony.
What I also see out there is that this ability to hack on telephony is happening at the same time that hacking on networks or operating systems seems to be getting less exciting and interesting. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there’s still amazing things happening out there… but for people who want to “play” with technology, those areas aren’t as exciting or novel as they once were. So many of those early adopters have moved on to hack on other things……
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Issues with viewing this blog site with Microsoft IE6
Continue Reading: Issues with viewing this blog site with Microsoft IE6If you are viewing this site in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (IE6)
there are problems with my new design that cause it not to render
correctly. Until I can get time to fix it, your only choices are unfortunately to
either: 1) upgrade to IE7; 2) use Firefox; or 3) read the RSS feed.My apologies… when I was testing the site design and navigation bar on top,
I tested the site with IE7, Firefox 1.5 and 2, and MacOSX Safari., but neglected
to test with IE6.P.S. And if there are any CSS experts out there who know why my design
is messing up IE6, any such advice would be greatly appreciated. -
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Native (and UNofficial) Blackberry clients for AIM, MSN/WLM and ICQ available (for some networks)
Continue Reading: Native (and UNofficial) Blackberry clients for AIM, MSN/WLM and ICQ available (for some networks)(Continuing my effort to flush my “queue of things I want to blog about”…)
Last week, per Rich Lafferty, I learned that there are now “unofficial” versions of native Blackberry clients available for AIM, MSN/WLM and ICQ. I used WebMessenger a bit in the past and found it useful, but stopped using it for some reason I can’t exactly recall… in any event, I’ll be curious to try out native Blackberry versions. Of course, I can’t right now. I naturally tried to download the MSN/WLM client and was told that “this messaging service is not supported by your service provider” (Verizon). Ah, well, I’ll just have to wait a while. I don’t really need IM on my blackberry, but every once in a great while there’s a time when I’m travelling and IM would be great to have.
Technorati tags: blackberry, rim, aim, msn, icq, im -
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Telephony… *disrupted*: "Dudes in suits looking down at their hands and getting increasingly frantic"
Continue Reading: Telephony… *disrupted*: "Dudes in suits looking down at their hands and getting increasingly frantic"If you are a Blackberry user (I am), you probably discovered sometime early this morning that you were not receiving email messages… and then you no doubt learned that pretty much all Blackberries in the entire Western hemisphere were offline since last night. For email, that is… they still worked as a phone, but I mean, you don’t really get a Blackberry for the phone aspect. At this point, basically every major news outlet is covering the story, and I’m sure we can expect the stories to continue for quite some time. The service seems to be back up now (mine is, anyway), but I’m sure it will take a bit for it to be restored everywhere.
Working in my home office today, I actually didn’t notice the outage until I did one of my very occasional scans of Twitter and saw Chris Brogan complaining being stuck on a train without email access. Knowing Chris, I figured I’d give him a quick call and was rewarded with this great quote about his trip around New York:
“Yeah, I was just in Penn Station and there were all these dudes in suits looking down at their hands and getting increasingly frantic!” (Chris Brogan)
Indeed! …
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Rich Tehrani on DiamondWare, "3-D audio conferencing" and how the sound of telephony is changing
Continue Reading: Rich Tehrani on DiamondWare, "3-D audio conferencing" and how the sound of telephony is changingThose who know me well are aware that one of my hot buttons is my belief that one of the greatest disruptive potentials of VoIP is to fundamentally change the sound of telephony. With VoIP, we are no longer constrained to the 3.5kHz frequency range of the PSTN… I’ll save my wideband rant for another day, but tonight I’ll just point you over to Rich Tehrani’s post “DiamondWare in HD“, which talks about the power of DiamondWare‘s “3-D” stereo technology. As Rich describes in his blog entry:
Once on the call I was able to easily position the three callers all around me. One could be directly ahead of me and one on either side. The computer can automatically position participants as well if you so choose.
When everyone was in place, Keith had one coworker start counting from 1 and another reciting the alphabet from letter “A.” While these two participants spoke, Keith proceeded to speak with me and the strangest thing happened. I could focus on anyone I wanted and was able to absorb what all three participants were uttering.
It was an amazing experience and the sound quality was beyond compare. I could hear everything in…
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…