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Sadly, The Big “C” Curtails My Participation Next Week At IETF 85
Continue Reading: Sadly, The Big “C” Curtails My Participation Next Week At IETF 85Sadly, the Big “C”, the current unwelcome guest in our family, has claimed another activity that I enjoy. Next week is the 85th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Some 1,200+ engineers will gather in Atlanta, Georgia, to discuss/debate/argue/evolve the open standards that make up the Internet. Things like TCP, HTTP, DNS, SIP, IPv6… all those protocols and their many, many offspring.For people who enjoy the process that creates these standards – and who enjoy the people that make up the IETF – these three-times-yearly face-to-face meetings are amazing places to be. One of the many aspects I enjoy of my work with the Internet Society is that I get to go to the IETF meetings and be part of all that is going on.
Unfortunately, I won’t be in Atlanta.
As I’ve mentioned in the past and written about publicly, my wife is in the second year of treatment for breast cancer. Every three weeks she goes in for an infusion of a drug called Herceptin, which is an antibody that goes after the HER2 protein. She has the treatment on a Monday and then is usually extremely fatigued for the next few days. Generally by…
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Ameche Lets Telcos Add Apps Into Regular Phone Calls To Add Value And Services
Continue Reading: Ameche Lets Telcos Add Apps Into Regular Phone Calls To Add Value And ServicesImagine you are driving fast along a major highway in traffic and you receive a call from a critical customer. She wants to know immediately when you can meet tomorrow with her team to go over the final proposal and sign the deal. There’s no way for you to pull over and look at your calendar on your phone or computer… and it’s really not safe in the high-speed traffic for you to be flipping through your calendar while you talk. What do you do?Do you tell her you’ll give her a call back when you get to a safe place? Or do you do the unsafe action of looking at your calendar on your phone?
What if there was a different way?
What if you could say something like “Let me check my calendar for tomorrow at 3pm” and then suddenly have a voice whisper back to you – on your call, but only heard by you – “your calendar is free at 3pm. You have meetings at 2 and 5.”
You could then reply to your customer after just this brief pause letting her know that you could meet with her.
Sound like science fiction?
Perhaps… but…
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Hypervoice – The Fundamental Flaw In The Proposal
Continue Reading: Hypervoice – The Fundamental Flaw In The ProposalI am a huge fan of Martin Geddes, but he and I disagree fundamentally on one key part of what he is now calling “hypervoice”. NOTE: Today’s VUC call at 12noon US Eastern will be with Martin discussing his ideas. If you’d like to weigh in on the issue, please join the call. (Unfortunately, I’ll be waiting to board a plane home from Mumbai and can’t make it… hence this blog post.)To back up a bit, Martin has always been one of the “big thinkers” in realm of VoIP and telephony/telecom. Way back in mid-2000s when a number of us all started writing about VoIP, Martin’s Telepocalypse blog was brilliant. He was always thinking about the “big picture” and drawing connections where they were not already apparent. His work with “Telco 2.0” was excellent and it was no surprise when he went to work for BT looking at their strategy. Now that he is back out on his own as a consultant, I’m a subscriber to his “Future of Communications” email newsletter (subscribe on the sidebar to his site) and enjoy reading his frequent issues.
Recently he gave a closing keynote presentation at the Metaswitch Forum titled “A presentation…
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Today’s VUC Call – Setting Up A Cellular Network In The Desert For Burning Man
Continue Reading: Today’s VUC Call – Setting Up A Cellular Network In The Desert For Burning ManToday’s VoIP Users Conference (VUC) call at 12:00 noon US Eastern should be quite an interesting one. Tim Panton from Voxeo Labs and Tropo will be joining the call to talk about his experience setting up a mobile network in the middle of the desert for this year’s Burning Man event.Tim recently described the experience in a guest post at TechCrunch: “What We Learned Running A Mobile Network At Burning Man” and on the VUC call will talk more about what he did. The FAQ from the Papa Legba camp at Burning Man makes for quite an interesting read. I’m looking forward to hearing more from Tim… and the call is open for anyone to join in.
You can join the live call via SIP, Skype or the regular old PSTN. There is also an IRC backchannel that gets heavy usage during the call. It will be recorded so you can always listen later.
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
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Slides: How The Hidden Secret of TCP/IP Affects Real-time Communications
Continue Reading: Slides: How The Hidden Secret of TCP/IP Affects Real-time CommunicationsRecently at Voip2day + ElastixWorld in Madrid 2012, Olle E Johansson gave a great presentation outlining where we are at with telecom and VoIP in 2012 – and where we need to go! Olle is a long-time, passionate and tireless advocate for the open Internet, IPv6, SIP and standards and interoperability. I’ve known Olle for years via Asterisk-related issues, via the VUC calls and via work on SIP over IPv6.This presentation (slides available) really hits a number of key points about where we are at now:
The secret of TCP/IP and how it affects your PBX from Olle E Johansson
In particular I was struck by his slides 24-28 that strike the same theme I’ve been writing about across multiple blogs, namely the way we are reversing the “open Internet” trend and retreating back inside walled gardens of messaging:
He goes on to walk through what happened with SIP and how the protocol evolved – and evolved away from interoperability. His conclusion is that we as customers need to take back control, avoid vendor lock-in and demand interoperability.
He also points people over to his “SIP…
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Alec Saunders Is A Rock Star In RIM’s Strange New Blackberry 10 Video
Continue Reading: Alec Saunders Is A Rock Star In RIM’s Strange New Blackberry 10 VideoOh… my. As anyone who knows me can attest, it’s extremely hard to render me speechless… but I admit to sitting here this morning staring at the screen with a rather uncomprehending expression on my face and with my mouth hanging open…Sometime after my friend Alec Saunders joined RIM last year as their VP of Developer Relations, I said to someone that while I admittedly did view his new mission as somewhat akin to tilting at windmills, he was perhaps just the kind of “rock star” that RIM needed. A very passionate and dynamic presenter… a very charismatic leader who could rally people… a creative guy with a theatre background… someone who thinks differently…
… never in my wildest ideas did I expect that we would be seeing Alec AS an actual “rock star” in a music video! But yes indeed, here he is with two other VPs from RIM in a remake of the famous REO Speedwagon song. (Alec is the main singer.)
Unbelievable.
My speechlessness soon gave way to laughter … and appreciation for them for doing something rather different. If they were looking for a way to be “remarkable” and memorable, they found it.
Now, somewhat…
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Video: What Is WebRTC/RTCWeb All About? How Does WebRTC Work?
Continue Reading: Video: What Is WebRTC/RTCWeb All About? How Does WebRTC Work?Do you want to understand what WebRTC / RTCWEB is all about and why so many people are passionate about its potential for extending real-time communications (voice, video, chat, data-sharing, etc.) into web browsers?I recently wrote about some of the larger issues of how WebRTC will disrupt telecom, but in this video, “RTCWeb Explained“, Cullen Jennings, one of the co-chairs of the IETF’s RTCWEB working group, dives down into the technical details to explain how it all works and what the various different components of of the solution are. I particularly like how Cullen covered some areas like “identity” that I haven’t seen stressed as much in other pieces about WebRTC. The video comes in at about 39 minutes and is well worth viewing:
For more information, I’ve put together a page about the broader WebRTC / RTCWEB initiative with links to relevant resources.
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
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How WebRTC Will Fundamentally Disrupt Telecom (And Change The Internet)
Continue Reading: How WebRTC Will Fundamentally Disrupt Telecom (And Change The Internet)If we step back to before 1993, publishing and finding content on the Internet was a somewhat obscure, geeky thing that a very few people cared about and very few knew how to do. It involved gopher servers, ftp sites, archie, veronica, WAIS, USENET newsgroups, etc., and this "World-Wide Web" service primarily demonstrated via the server at info.cern.ch. It was an amazing period of time for those of us who were there, but the number of users was quite small.
Then NCSA released Mosaic in 1993 … and suddenly everything changed.
Anyone could create a web page that "regular" people could see on their computers. Anyone could download Mosaic and use it. Anyone could share their sites with the installation of server software.
The Web was truly born into public consciousness… the creation of Web-based content was democratized so that anyone could do it… the creativity of developers was unleashed… a zillion new business models were thought of… and the Internet fundamentally changed.
Fast-forward to today…
… and the "Web" is still predominantly a document-based system. You make HTTP queries to retrieve pages and send HTML and XML documents back and forth between web…
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AdhearsionConf 2012 Call For Speakers Ends Tomorrow (Sept 8)
Continue Reading: AdhearsionConf 2012 Call For Speakers Ends Tomorrow (Sept 8)Do you like building telephony apps with Adhearsion? Have you built a really cool app that is worth sharing? Or used Adhearsion in an unusual way? Are you planning to attend AdhearsionConf 2012 in Palo Alto on October 20-21? Or would you attend if you could speak?If you answered yes to any of the above questions, why not consider applying to be a speaker? The call for speakers is at:
http://adhearsionconf.com/call-for-speakers/
The only catch is … the deadline is TOMORROW, Saturday, September 8th!
Ever since I first saw Jay Phillips present about Adhearsion back at one of the early ETel conferences in maybe 2006 or so I’ve been intrigued by how easy Adhearsion made it to develop telecom apps. It’s just incredibly simple to make powerful apps.
If you are a Ruby developer (or want to be) and you are interested in building telephony apps, Adhearsion is definitely worth a look… and if you do use Adhearsion, why not consider signing up as a speaker?
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Skype Celebrates 9 Years of Disrupting Telecom, But What Comes Next?
Continue Reading: Skype Celebrates 9 Years of Disrupting Telecom, But What Comes Next?Nine years ago today, August 29, 2003, the first version of Skype was made publicly available. Now in 2012 Skype celebrates it’s 9th birthday – and first birthday as part of Microsoft… and it’s still disrupting telecommunications.
Four years ago on Skype’s 5th birthday I wrote at great length about how Skype has changed telecommunications and last year I wrote a retrospective as well – both of those posts still stand… Skype has only added more capabilities over the time. Skype is still one of the only applications that I can say I personally use each and every day. It’s critical to what I do.
As I look back on my last year of writing about Skype, I’d note that they’ve finally gotten the app to work more similarly across operating systems, introduced amazing video quality, crossed over 40 million simultaneous users, made yet another attempt at a developer program and continually improved the Skype-on-mobile-device experience. Skype has also added a deeper Facebook integration, embedded Skype into more TV and other consumer devices, rolled out Skype on Windows Phone and continued to improve their video offerings.
But what comes next?
What will we be writing about on Skype’s 10th birthday…
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…