Disruptive Telephony

You may have noticed that I haven't been blogging much lately... or podcasting..... I've certainly been twittering since it's fast to do... but I haven't been writing much here or across any of my blogs and podcasts lately.

Several good reasons... mostly that today is the last day of two weeks of travel, broken only by about a 40-hour visit home over the weekend. Last week I was down at ITEXPO in Miami and then spent the end of the week with one of my periodic check-ins at Voxeo's corporate office in Orlando, FL.

This week I've again been at Voxeo's office in Orlando, although not for meetings but instead to participate in a week of in-depth training in the VoiceObjects service creation environment for creating voice applications. You may recall that Voxeo acquired VoiceObjects back in December and so we've had a series of training sessions in Orlando for our development and support staff to learn all about the product.

It's the first time in a while that I've spent a week in a training session where my time is focused on a topic (or at least is supposed to be). I've come away from it very impressed by what the VO tool can do to help people very easily and quickly build very complex voice applications. It's also been a great way for me to learn more and more about the Eclipse tool, which continues to impress me with the plugins that are available for it. (Probably the most common way to use VoiceObjects is as an Eclipse plugin, although it can also be used through a web interface.)

I'll be writing more about VoiceObjects and what it can do - although probably over on the Voxeo Developer's Corner blog - but I'll mention here that if you'd like to try it out yourself, you can download a free copy of the VoiceObjects "Developer Edition" from the VoiceObjects Developer Portal.

Of course, during this week of training, all the other normal work tasks don't stop... so the nights and mornings have been long... and much of my blogging and podcasting has had to be put on hold.

Next week I'll be back up in my home office in New Hampshire and would like to hope that the pace might be a tad bit better... but... well... the Emerging Communications (eComm) conference is only 2.5 weeks away, and there's a lot to be done before that! :-)

Somewhere in here I should be able to start posting more again...

Technorati Tags: voxeo, personal, voiceobjects

Long-time readers will know that I have been intrigued for a long time with what we now call "cloud computing" (and have written about it and spoken about it) and also continue to find the world of open source telephony interesting.

So naturally when I'm pointed to a step-by-step tutorial about running Asterisk in Amazon's EC2 cloud, I'm interested. :-) It's a nicely done tutorial and I look forward to seeing what people will do with it. (Unlike Mark Headd, who pointed to the tutorial in a tweet, I won't be trying it out this weekend, but I will be doing so at some point soon.)

Cool stuff...

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Technorati Tags: amazon, ec2, asterisk, opensource, cloud, cloudcomputing

If you have a new SIP service or application, how can you find other services to which you can directly connect via SIP? That's the idea behind the new "SIP to SIP" directory launched by the folks at FWD and now available at www.siptosip.net. From the main page:

Why SIP to SIP VoIP?

SIPtoSIP lists applications and content that require SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) enabled devices on both ends of the connection. Realizing the promise of VoIP requires expanding real-time communication options beyond the functions already available with traditional telephones or cell phones. The ability of SIP based VoIP to support HDVoice, video, and click-to-connect requires SIP devices on both ends of the connection. Send suggestions for corrections and additional listings to Daniel Berninger at dan at danielberninger.com.

The directory is very obviously new and only has a few entries on the various pages:

• Devices
• Applications
• Content

As is noted, Daniel Berninger is looking for people to email him suggestions.

I do applaud the FWD folks for looking at another way to promote the further building of SIP interconnections and so I wish them well with this directory. I'd note, though, that the VoIP-Info.org wiki does already contain a great amount of this information. For instance, the site has a very lengthy page on VoIP phones. Now, granted, the phones listed there are for "IP" in general and not just SIP. Some use H.323, IAX or other protocols. There is perhaps a role for someone to curate a list like this into just SIP-specific information, but whether that needs to be a separate site or perhaps another page within a wiki like the VoIP-Info.org one is a question to consider.

Regardless, the FWD folks have now made this siptosip.net site available and it will be interesting to see how it evolves.

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Technorati Tags: fwd, sip, siptosip, directories, voip

Will you be down in Miami at ITEXPO February 2-4? If so, please feel free to drop me a note and perhaps we can connect somewhere there.

I'll be arriving Monday afternoon and then on Tuesday, February 3rd, I'll be donning my VOIPSA VoIP Security hat to participate in a SIP Trunking Workshop sponsored by Ingate Systems on "SIP Trunking And Security". These workshops are always fun to do and as they are free to anyone attending ITEXPO (even just with an exhibit pass), they are usually well-attended. I'll be bringing my recording gear, too, and the talk will eventually go out in my Blue Box Podcast feed so you will be able to hear it later.

Speaking of recording... I'll have my video gear, too, and so if you have some new product or service in the "emerging communications" space that you think I might be interested in recording for my "Emerging Tech Talk" video podcast... well... pitch me. :-) I know I'll be recording a number of videos down there and I would certainly consider doing some more.

Wednesday evening I'll be driving back to Orlando and in Voxeo's office on Thursday and Friday so if you're in the Orlando area, please feel free to let me know as well.

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Technorati Tags: danyork, itexpo, miami, orlando, voxeo

With a simple "I've changed jobs" blog post (way shorter than any blog post I've ever written), Martin Geddes let us all know that he was now joining BT. The post over on Telco 2.0 goes into more about Martin's move and his reasons why he sees BT's future as bright...

Besides having one of the coolest blog names ("Telepocalypse"), Martin's a great writer and thinking in our space. We've only met a couple of times, but I've always respected the work he's done and enjoyed his writing. I wish him all the best at BT and look forward to what may evolve there!

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Technorati Tags: martingeddes, bt

Having now been in the podcasting space for most of four years, I at one point looked into how "voiceover" work was done with traditional studios. To get the highest audio quality, the traditional route has been to use actual ISDN lines here in North America. This seemed to me an area that could be ideal for VoIP to disrupt... and it appears that in at least one case it's done exactly that.

News out of the Sundance Film Festival is this:

PARK CITY, Utah - Philip Seymour Hoffman literally phoned in his voice performance for tonight's opener at the Sundance Film Festival, the animated feature "Mary and Max."

"The cost of flying any big-name actor to Australia would be extreme," explained director Adam Elliot, who is making his feature debut after his Oscar-winning animated short "Harvie Krumpet."

"We didn't have a lot of money, and it's not like we could have flown him in on economy. So we piped him in for two sessions, in New York and London, with high-quality sound that makes him sound like he was in the studio with us in Australia. I was quite surprised at how good the technology is."

And at the end we learn what the technology was:

"It sounds weird, but I've never met him in the flesh," says Elliot. "We could see him on Skype when he was recording his part all by himself. He was so professional."

Pretty cool to see...

P.S. And yes, there are probably many other examples of this out there, but this is the first one that I've personally learned of.

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Technorati Tags: skype, voip, voiceover, movies

As Alec says, he "missed from the microphone" and so he's brought back the Squawk Box podcast with a show today (also via Facebook) about the new Windows 7 beta and a show next Tuesday (also via Facebook) that will be an interview with Lee Dryburgh, coordinator of the eComm conference.

The Squawk Box calls have been a great amount of fun over the past year or two. We've learned a lot together and shared some great discussions. I enjoyed guest-hosting and wrote here on this site about a number of the calls. I'm glad Alec is bringing them back in at least a limited form.

The conference call today (and most Squawk Box days) is at 11am US Eastern time and is open to anyone who wants to participate. They are made available later as a podcast from Alec's blog at www.saunderslog.com. Being a "Mac"-guy these days, I don't expect to have a whole lot to add to the Windows 7 conversation, but I'll be interested to hear the experiences of those like Alec who are already playing with Windows 7. Next Tuesday, I do expect to be on the call with Lee...

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Technorati Tags: squawkbox, podcasts, windows7, windows, microsoft

Are you interested in learning more about VoiceObjects (recently acquired by my employer, Voxeo) and how you can use VO to rapidly develop complex voice applications? If so, you can join VoiceObjects VP Stefan Besling tomorrow for a "Developer Jam Session" webinar where we will go through the new features of the recently announced VoiceObjects 7.4:

Date: January 14, 2009
Time: 8am PDT, 11am EDT, 5pm CET
Topic: Introducing VoiceObjects 7.4
Speaker: Stefan Besling, Vice President of Engineering, VoiceObjects Germany GmbH

Abstract: This session will give you an overview of the enhancements and new capabilities provided with VoiceObjects 7.4. Learn about 2-way SMS and Instant Messaging, security and user management enhancements, object extensions, and a lot more. Join us to stay up-to-date with the newest release of the VoiceObjects platform.

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Technorati Tags: voiceobjects, voxeo, voiceapplications, applications, voice, development, developers

Over on the eComm blog, Lee Dryburgh put up an interesting podcast on "Matt Ranney on Thinking Beyond VoIP and A. Bell Telephony". It's well worth a listen for those of you interested in the larger picture of what we are building for a communications infrastructure...

P.S. And if you are interested in that topic, you really should consider attending eComm March 3-5...

Technorati Tags: ecomm, communication, telephony, rebelvox, voip

News out of CES in Las Vegas is that Skype is launching on the Android Platform:

Skype today announced the release of a lite version of Skype™, a ‘thin’ client for Skype that can be downloaded on Android-powered devices, as well as more than 100 other Java-enabled mobile phones.

With more details here about the models and where to get it:

It also works on more than 100 of the most popular Java-enabled phones from the world’s top five handset manufacturers – LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. For instructions on downloading the lite version of Skype to LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson phones, users can visit www.skype.com/m using the mobile browser on their phone or www.skype.com/go/mobiledownload from a computer. The web page includes a directory of the mobile phones currently supported.

The news release has more details about costs, etc.

Definitely a great move on Skype's part.... now they just need that iPhone client! ;-)

P.S. And yes, I know (and applaud) that TruPhone came out with an iPhone client that includes Skype support... but it's still not the full range of Skype functionality that I'd like to see.

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Technorati Tags: skype, android, java