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Hmmm… VoIP News’ "Hacking PBX: 20 Tips" is really "15 Tips and 5 Advertisements"
Continue Reading: Hmmm… VoIP News’ "Hacking PBX: 20 Tips" is really "15 Tips and 5 Advertisements"First, let me state that I like the VoIP News website. They’ve been producing a lot of great articles that we pretty regularly talk about over on Blue Box. Their “50 Most Influential People in VoIP” was a great catalog of the people really moving VOIP forward. Heck, one of their writers even interviewed me and I was quite pleased with the resulting article (something that definitely is not always true).
However, I was rather annoyed to read their “Hacking PBX: 20 Tips and Tricks to Optimize your Business Phone System” article that came out yesterday. Not because of the content, which was (mostly) actually quite good, but more because the title didn’t at all line up with the reality. Here’s the reality:
It’s not 20 tips and tricks… it’s 15 tips/tricks and 5 advertisements.
Which is too bad, really. I was really enjoying reading down through the article because these are all good things to have as part of a PBX system (and pretty much all are available through solutions from my employer, Mitel, although we haven’t integrated GPS as mentioned in #9 :-). Everything was cool and useful up through #15…
… and then suddenly with #16…
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Light blogging this week during Cairo trip…
Continue Reading: Light blogging this week during Cairo trip…This week, March 19-23, I will be in Cairo, Egypt, to present at a regional conference for Mitel resellers. I expect that I will not be writing much here or on my other blogs during this week. Of course, if I wind up being stuck in airports that also have WiFi access… or decide that 12-hour airplane flights might be a good place to write… I might wind up posting. But my expectation is that you won’t see much here until next week. If I post anywhere, I may do what I’ve done in the past and post a bit of a travelogue to my personal blog and/or my Twitter account.
If any of you reading this happen to be in Cairo this week, do drop me an email as I’m always interested in meeting people in different parts of the world.
Back at you in a week… I’m off to go sit in planes…
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Is OpenID really secure? Can you trust it? A Security Round Table podcast explores the issue… and provides a ton of links
Continue Reading: Is OpenID really secure? Can you trust it? A Security Round Table podcast explores the issue… and provides a ton of linksWhat is OpenID? What are the security issues around it? Should you trust using it? What do you have to be worried about? What are the main security threats to it?
While I’ve written about OpenID here, I really wanted to understand more about the security issues around OpenID, so I got together with two other members of the Security Round Table, Michael Santarcangelo and Martin McKeay, to explore the issues around OpenID and security to a far greater degree.
We have shared the resulting conversation as a SRT podcast, and have also published as the show notes the large body of links that we accumulated during our preparation for the show. I’d encourage you to check out the SRT site purely for the links alone, as I think we pulled together one of the more comprehensive lists of links I’ve seen related to OpenID.
In the end, the three of us came aware quite impressed with the possibilities of OpenID with regard to the specific piece of the identity puzzle that it is aiming to solve. We hope this podcast helps people understand both the potential benefits as well as a few potential challenges with regard to security and OpenID. Comments…
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Pulver 100 List showcases new and emerging VoIP companies… (and "MICE" companies…)
Continue Reading: Pulver 100 List showcases new and emerging VoIP companies… (and "MICE" companies…)As he has done for the past several years, Jeff Pulver today announced the “2007 pulver 100 list” – 100 businesses to watch in 2007. As usual, his list includes many of the names that you see in the news related to VoIP, IP telephony, etc., but there are also some related to video and others of which I honestly had no clue about until Jeff published the list. (And still don’t because Jeff didn’t yet include URLs and I haven’t had the time to hunt them down.) You’ll note that Jeff is now calling this entire area “MICE” – “Media, Internet, Communications and Entertainment” which does reflect both Jeff’s own evolution of focus but also the way all these industries are colliding together. (He wrote more here.)
The Pulver 100 list generates a good amount of publicity, so congrats to all those companies who are listed on this year’s list.
Technorati tags: pulver100, jeff pulver, voip -
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Skype Journal digs into the rates, process and response (mostly bad) to Skype Prime
Continue Reading: Skype Journal digs into the rates, process and response (mostly bad) to Skype PrimePhil Wolff over at Skype Journal’s been posting some good pieces about Skype Prime:
- Walking through Skype Prime Beta – takes you step-by-step through the process of setting yourself up with Skype Prime, including screenshots (for all the Mac and Linux users out there!)
- The Skype Prime Rates – digs into the reality of the rates Skype is charging… along with the 120-day waiting period to be paid… nice graphics, Phil!
- Skype Prime blog roundup 1 – recounts the blog coverage that’s been going on about Skype Prime
Thanks, Phil, for taking the time to pull all this coverage together… excellent thing for “Skype Journal” to do, so thanks!
Technorati tags: skype, skype prime, skypeprime -
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SkypePrime – for a 30% cut to Skype, you can charge people to call you and offer fee-based services to the Skype community… (and will it all turn into porn calls?)
Continue Reading: SkypePrime – for a 30% cut to Skype, you can charge people to call you and offer fee-based services to the Skype community… (and will it all turn into porn calls?)UPDATE: Phil Wolff over at Skype Journal has had some great detailed coverage of Skype Prime over at Skype Journal.
News out of Skype today is that a new 3.1 beta includes a new service called SkypePrime, where you can charge someone to call you for either a one-time fee or a per-minute fee. It also marks the beginning of the frequently-discussed integration of Skype and PayPal, because the payments go into your PayPal account. However, the payment is deducted from the payer’s SkypeCredit (so you are paying in SkypeCredit and the receiver is getting it in PayPal). Here’s the relevant part of the blog entry:
When you call someone who is a Skype Prime call provider, and you both have the new version of Skype, the provider can initiate what we call a “payment request”. That is, all calls start as free, but you can then switch to the paid calling, charging either by the minute or a one-off fixed fee. The call then proceeds as a paid Skype Prime call and your Skype Credit is deducted by the appropriate amount that then goes to the receiver’s account. The provider does not get the call fees directly as Skype…
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Alec Saunders has videos and summary of ETel "LaunchPad" presentations (new VoIP startups)
Continue Reading: Alec Saunders has videos and summary of ETel "LaunchPad" presentations (new VoIP startups)Two of the cool “events” at the Emerging Telephony conference last week were the “Mashup Contest” and the “LaunchPad” (sponsored by GigaOm). In both cases new companies or developers were able to show off their products. I was going to write up my thoughts and summary, but it turns out that Alec Saunders posted about all the companies and included video of their presentations. Definitely worth a look to see what companies are doing around emerging telephony apps and services. Thanks to Alec for recording them all.
Technorati tags: voip, etel2007, etel, oreilly -
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ETEL pictures from O’Reilly now online via Flickr…
Continue Reading: ETEL pictures from O’Reilly now online via Flickr…I mentioned it previously, but James Duncan Davidson has now put the set of photos he took for O’Reilly up on Flickr. So if you would like to vicariously experience the conference, check out the set. I particularly liked this one to the right (click for the larger image). Just a great use of focus and depth of field. The person in focus is actually Jay Phillips, developer of Adhearsion, a Ruby framework for building applications on top of Asterisk.
Technorati tags: etel2007, etel, oreilly, flickr -
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Ranting about how very wrong ComputerWorld.au is about enterprises avoiding IP telephony for teleworkers
Continue Reading: Ranting about how very wrong ComputerWorld.au is about enterprises avoiding IP telephony for teleworkersComputerWorld in Australia came out with an article today headlined “Enterprises must avoid IP telephony for teleworkers or face attack“. Given that I use a secure teleworker phone on a daily basis, I was immediately struck by the headline and felt compelled to write a response over on Voice of VOIPSA: “Why Computerworld.au is dead wrong about… “. I think you can gather my opinion from the title. It will be interesting to see if there is any response from ComputerWorld (I’ve emailed them the link).
The sad thing is that outside of the headline, the rest of the article was more or less okay. Just a bad headline…
Technorati tags: Voip security, voip, ip telephony, teleworker, security, computerworld
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…
