Disruptive Telephony

It's nice to see Phil Wolff and Jim Courtney are back online at Skype Journal. Phil explains a bit, and Jim gives a bit more detail, but the good news is that they're back after not having any posts online since December 4th. Good to see them as I've definitely enjoyed reading their research and insight into Skype. Welcome back, guys!

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.

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

Back 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. Oh, sure, I'll give it a try, but I don't hold out any great hope. Of course, right now when I tried to download it I can't seem to get it to run. (Which also seems to be a problem others are having.) However, I may have a larger issue in that the "Do More" link in my Skype 3.0 is greyed out, so perhaps I messed something up in my tinkering with it a couple of weeks ago (although I've since upgraded to the released version of 3.0).

In any event, regardless of whether this works or not, it certainly is a fun little example of what can potentially be done by developers given access to an API...

Technorati Tags: kishkish, skype

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 like Netgear SPH101 (which, interestingly, looks very similar) and the Belkin WiFi phone, both of which also don't need a PC to run Skype.

Now, while the WIP320 seems like it might be something nice for the home office (although I like the ergonomic of the Dualphones better, I have to confess), it doesn't strike me as being as useful (and disruptive) as it could be. Why not? Because you can't use it at hotspots that require authentication!

I took a quick scan at the User Guide, and while you can use it with WPA and WEP encryption, it doesn't have a web browser so you can't take it to a WiFi hotspot and authenticate with the hot spot provider. Obviously, if you take it somewhere where someone can just give you a WPA key, you're okay... but that's not the real world of public hotspots. Per Cisco's product family page, the web browser is only in their SIP handset, the WIP330. Perhaps next go-around they'll give that to Skype users.

All in all I would expect Cisco to get a lot of press out of the name "iPhone", if for no other reason than the fact that Apple can't use that name anymore. Beyond that, unless I'm really missing something, the announcement itself really just shows that Cisco/Linksys is now catching up with its competitors.

Other coverage:

• Engadget
• Greg Galitzine
• Gizmodo on what Apple might call their phone
• Om Malik

Technorati Tags: apple, cisco, iphone, sip, skype, DECT, voip, wifi, wireless, wlan

(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, although I do have an alert notification set so that any time certain terms are mentioned (such as my name or "security") I get an audible notification and can check it then.

One of the benefits of being one of the 100 folks in the chat room is that you do get some nice advance notice... such as when I just checked the chat room this morning and saw this message:

[9:21:20 AM] Raul Liive says: 3.0 went to Gold just. Get it from www.skype.com

So Skype 3.0 is officially out there... (and I have naturally downloaded a copy). Now we'll see if it works better than the beta where I was having some wacky problem with people's presence not actually showing correctly.

Technorati Tags: skype, voip