Disruptive Telephony

If any of you are heading out to ITEXPO tomorrow through Thursday in Los Angeles, I'll be there on Wednesday. As I note on a Voxeo events page, I'll be speaking twice, pretty much back to back:

9:30 – 10:15am, Exploring Applications in the Cloud

11:00 – 11:45am, SIP Trunking and Security

The first is a panel discussion that should be quite interesting. The second is another version of the VOIP / SIP Security talk that I've been giving at Ingate's SIP Trunking Seminars for the past few years (and that always seems to be popular). More details and session abstracts on the events page I set up.

I'm looking forward to catching up with many friends at the show, including Andy Abramson, who I haven't seen for a while.

If you will be out there, please do say hello.

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After pretty much giving the public view that the Linux version of Skype was basically dead for the last two years, Skype announced yesterday the first beta of a Linux version 2.1 client. The blog post notes that the Linux 2.1 client includes a number of features found in the clients on other operating systems, such as the SILK codec:

• Skype's SILK codec for outstanding quality with negligible bandwidth usage,
• HQ video support,
• PulseAudio support,
• SMS send support (*Sending SMS requires available Skype Credit),
• Contact groups,
• Contact labels, or tags, for easier contact organization,
• Chat window improvements (typing notification, message editing, s/geeky text/replacement/, new emoticons),
• Nicer contact list with mood messages and video capability icons,
• Nicer tray icon.

It's good to see movement on the Linux client front, although it continues to be frustrating as a user of Skype to see Skype's continued fragmented product strategy (which I've ranted about previously here and here). Still, at least this brings the Linux client closer to the others, and that is a good thing.

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Technorati Tags: skype, linux, voip

As I mentioned over on one of Voxeo's blogs, Rich Tehrani pulled out his iPhone 3GS down at SpeechTEK last week in New York and shot a quick video of me talking about Voxeo's booth and the 20 Acer netbooks we had there running a 2,000+ node telephony cluster. Rich blogged about the interview and posted it in a way that I can embed:

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, danyork, speechtek, prophecy, itexpo

Over on their Skype for Business blog, Skype announced this week the winners of their "Skype for Business Competition". They announced three winners each for EMEA, the Americas and Asia. Not much in the way of details, yet, but some of the abstracts sound interesting. I'm looking forward to seeing the case studies that come out of this. Overall it's just good to see Skype looking at pulling out the innovative ways companies are using Skype. ... let's see what the detailed stories show.

Congrats to all the winners!

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Fascinating chart out of Silicon Alley Insider today showing the incredible growth Comcast has had in terms of IP phone subscribers versus that of Vonage:

I doubt the chart is a huge surprise for anyone following the industry, but it still does make for an interesting graphic. Despite all the advertising money that Vonage can throw out there, Comcast and the other cable providers have the inherent advantage that they can easily offer powerful "triple-play bundles" of cable TV, Internet access and phone service.

Comcast is no longer my provider (Time-Warner services Keene, NH, where I live.), but when I lived in Burlington, VT, we had Comcast for Internet access and Verizon for phone (and we didn't have anyone for TV, since we don't watch it). The offers that Comcast kept sending us, though, encouraging us to switch, were quite compelling. The amount I paid for Internet access would have been lower if I had either phone or TV with Comcast, and even lower if I had all three.

If we actually watched TV and therefore wanted cable TV, the economics of the "triple-play" would be very hard to beat... so it's no surprise at all to me to see this chart. I would expect we'll continue to see the growth of one and the continued stagnation of the other.

What would be more interesting to me would be to see the subscriber growth of Comcast versus the other MVNOs and the DSL providers. Fascinating times we live in...

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Technorati Tags: comcast, vonage, voip, consumervoip, ip telephony, telephony, telecommunications