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Round phones and other glimpses of the ITU fair in Hong Kong from Jan in Malaysia…
Continue Reading: Round phones and other glimpses of the ITU fair in Hong Kong from Jan in Malaysia…If you don’t follow Jan Geirnaert’s weblog, which he is now branding as www.skype-gadgets.com, it’s worth checking out. He’s a Belgian living in Malaysia and he mixes in commentary on Skype and VoIP hardware along with interesting notes about Malaysia, Hong Kong and that whole part of the world. Living on almost the other side of the globe from him, I find many of those posts quite interesting.
And he’s often finding interesting news out about Skype… and pointing us to interesting gadgets. Take today’s post on the “Cat-iq” phone from the ITU fair/trade show he’s attending in Hong Kong. He has this picture and another, both of which you can click to see larger views. He doesn’t yet provide more details or links… but it’s interesting to see a glimpse into some of what people are coming up with over there. (And I’m guessing from the fact that it says “Wahlen” that this is perhaps from a German manufacturer.)
Anyway, do check out Jan’s blog as he’s often got interesting information.
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Blue Box Podcast #47 is now live… VoIP security hype, governments blocking Skype, SANS and VoIP training, more…
Continue Reading: Blue Box Podcast #47 is now live… VoIP security hype, governments blocking Skype, SANS and VoIP training, more…Blue Box Podcast #47 is now available for download. In this show, Jonathan and I talk about some of the recent articles and reports hyping VoIP security, recent comments from SANS about the need for better VoIP security training, moves by the Indian government to block Skype and other VoIP services and much, much more. Tons of listener comments in this show… probably the most we’ve ever had. See the show notes for all the links and info.
Technorati Tags: skype, voipsecurity, voip, voip security, voipsa
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Kishkish and the lie detector for Skype
Continue Reading: Kishkish and the lie detector for SkypeBack on Sunday, Dustin Trammell wrote about the “lie detector for Skype” over on the Voice of VOIPSA blog, and I have to say that this certainly is a curious use of the Skype API. Real Geek has another writeup along with the picture to the right. Blogs, of course, have been writing about it. Naturally, Gizmodo and Engadget weighed in. However, even though it is theoretically available from the Skype Extras Gallery, I’m not seeing people actually writing about using it. In the comments area of that page on Skype’s site, I mostly see people expressing their frustration with trying to install it. It’s strange, I was able to get to the kishkish website the other day, but not today. Perhaps they are a victim of their own success. I did notice that they had cute marketing with their use of a snippet of video of former US President Bill Clinton talking about Monica Lewinsky. It’s unclear about pricing, though… it seems to be free from the Skype Extras page but the Gizmodo article references a $49.95 annual fee. Hmmmm….
Call me skeptical… voice stress analysis has been around for a long time and, well, just consider me skeptical.…
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Alec Saunders: “New Presence and the Voice 2.0 Manifesto” – how do we move to the next level of presence awareness?
Continue Reading: Alec Saunders: “New Presence and the Voice 2.0 Manifesto” – how do we move to the next level of presence awareness?Given that I view “presence” as one of the more potentially disruptive elements of IP telephony, I was pleased to see that over on his blog Alec wrote a very lengthy and insightful piece entitled “‘New Presence’ and the Voice 2.0 Manifesto“. I always enjoy Alec’s writing and this time it’s no different… it’s great when someone can make the time to write a thoughtful piece like this. Since the piece came out, I’ve wanted to write more about it, but I have to suck it up and admit that with everything else I’m trying to close off before the end-of-year tomorrow, a lengthy reply is just not going to happen.
However, some others have offered replies and they, too, are well worth a read:
- Ken Camp: The Absence of Presence (also a lengthy thoughtful piece)
- Brough Turner: Why not call “new presence” availability?
- PhoneBoy: Presence and Identity
All are well worth a read. Thanks again, Alec, for starting a worthy conversation…. hopefully I’ll find the time to chime in soon.
UPDATE: Andy Abramson has also joined in… The Doctor is In: New Presence 2.0 by Alec
Technorati Tags: alec saunders, presence, voice 2.0
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The “iPhone” is out this week…. from Cisco?
Continue Reading: The “iPhone” is out this week…. from Cisco?So the news floating around the VoIP part of the blogosphere is that the long-awaited and long-debated “iPhone” was released yesterday… but it turns out NOT to be from Apple! Instead, as noted by Gizmodo, the trademark for “iPhone” belongs to, of all people, Cisco! ( Tip of the hat to Tom Keating, where I first read it and saw this graphic.)
On one level, the Linksys press release seems to be mostly a re-branding exercise for their existing “CIT” Cordless Internet Telephone series but as noted over on the Skype Gear blog, there actually is some real product news mixed in with all the fixation on the name.
The CIT400 is a DECT-based cordless phone that does not require a PC to run Skype. That apparently is the function of the grey box “base station” in the picture. You plug it into your network and your phone is off and running. It can apparently also plug into your landline to give you true “dual-mode” operation. Very much like the Dualphone 3088 and other similar products.
On the other hand, the WIP320 is a true WiFi handset that again does not require a PC. So it joins the other phones…
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Welcome to Disruptive Telephony!
Continue Reading: Welcome to Disruptive Telephony!Welcome to Disruptive Telephony! For a number of years, I have been blogging about VoIP as part of my personal blog, "Blog.DanYork.com". However, I’m now in the process of splitting out some parts of my writing into separate blogs. This is one of those blogs. Right now… I’m just setting it up, so don’t expect to see much here. Stay tuned, though… much will be happening soon.
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Note to Siemens: Need better fact-checking: your OpenStage phones are NOT the first IP phones w/WLAN
Continue Reading: Note to Siemens: Need better fact-checking: your OpenStage phones are NOT the first IP phones w/WLAN(Originally posted to http://dyork.livejournal.com/258085.html)
Now I realize that often in sales and marketing, some folks tend to exaggerate claims… or split hairs to make various claims… or (more often) don’t do enough fact-checking to verify their claims… but it rather annoys me when I see someone making claims that are just wrong – especially when the claims overlook products made by my own employer! As readers know, I don’t really tout Mitel products here all that much, but in this case, I feel compelled to write a bit about one. In the recent announcements by Siemens of their new OpenStage SIP phones, which Ken Camp covered so well here, Siemens makes the claim in their PowerPoint presentation (available from Ken’s post):
The first time an enterprise desktop phone has been able to connect to both wired and wireless infrastructures.
Um… no. You see, Mitel has been shipping this little product called the “Mitel WLAN Stand” since July of this year (2006) which just clips onto the back of any of our enterprise desk phones and allows that phone to connect to a 802.11 network. I’ve got one here in my home office… I’d be glad to show anyone if… -
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Ken Camp: “I’ve been Blueboxed”
Continue Reading: Ken Camp: “I’ve been Blueboxed”(Originally posted at http://dyork.livejournal.com/257414.html)
Finally getting caught up on content recorded for Blue Box, I finished up on Monday night the interview I did with Ken Camp out at Internet Telephony in San Diego and posted the interview today. Ken responded with his post: “I’ve been Blueboxed“, which gave me a laugh because I don’t think I’ve ever seen the show name used as a verb before!
Technorati Tags: blue box, bluebox, security, ken camp, voip, voip security, voipsa, voipsecurity
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Techtionary.com provides animated “SIP Essentials” tutorial…
Continue Reading: Techtionary.com provides animated “SIP Essentials” tutorial…(Originally posted at http://dyork.livejournal.com/256998.html)
Tom Cross over at Techtionary.com dropped a note to let me know that his team had released a ‘fastcast’ on the topic of “SIP Essentials”. Not having a clue what a “fastcast” was, I found the answer in Tom’s news release:
Fastcasts are fast-track audio/video animated 10-60 second advertorials for web, webseminar, PC and iPod formats.
Not sure how much traction the word will really get, but there you have it. Tom’s SIP tutorial looked quite interesting in the bit that I explored, with sections on:- SIP Basics
- SIP Trunking
- SIP QoS
- SIP Firewalls and Security
- SIP Applications
- SIP TCO-Total Cost of Ownership
- Integrated/Converged Access
- Key VoIP Options – IAS, Hosted, Managed
- SIP Total Tutorial with Future Outlook
Tom’s making it available at no cost right now so I’d recommend people check it out.
Just one note of caution… once… -
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Skype 3.0 officially released this morning… and I learn about it from the public chatroom…
Continue Reading: Skype 3.0 officially released this morning… and I learn about it from the public chatroom…(Originally posted at http://dyork.livejournal.com/256267.html)
I have to say that it’s been rather fascinating to lurk in the “Skype English Blog Chat” public chatroom that was created as part of the beta of Skype 3.0. Many of the Skype employees familiar from the Skype blog pages have been in there, such as Jaanus Kase, and they are taking comments and questions from other Skype 3.0 beta users who have been trying out the beta and then giving the feedback directly in the chat room. Because it’s a “persistent” chat room that you always stay in (regardless of whether you are online, offline, or even whether you have the Skype client running at all) until you actually press the “Leave” button, you can always go back in and read the chat history to see what’s been going on and what people are saying. I’ll give credit to Skype for showing how public chats can be part of an effective beta process. And it’s been quite interesting to see the issues that have gone on, as well as the links that people have provided to different things as they have tried them out. I’ve really only checked into it maybe once a day,…
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…