Disruptive Telephony

Over on Skype Journal, Phil Wolf posted about Tim Panton's VERY cool demo which he gave at Astricon and then apparently just yesterday at eComm Europe. Tim from phonefromhere.com mashes up Google Wave, Skype, Asterisk (with Skype for Asterisk) and Ibook to make Skype calls from within a Wave, complete with recordings of utterances and, naturally, the ability to have an annotated collaboration session in Wave:

Phil quotes Jason Goecke (a colleague of mine at Voxeo) describing how it works:

"it is a Google Wave Gadget with his PhoneFromHere.com IAX2 Java softphone as the client. Then, the IAX2 Java phone connects to Asterisk with Skype for Asterisk installed. Then, there is a server-side element, Ibook, that is breaking apart utterances into individual files. So that as each person speaks, it captures it into its own file. Then, as that happens, a text frame is sent from Asterisk to the softphone with the file details. The gadget then uses some Javascript to embed a link. IAX2 supports text frames."

Read Phil's full post for more info and for Phil's views on what this all means.

VERY cool demo!

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It's Friday, so here's a bit of humor... I admit that I had not really paid attention to how incredibly over-used the "my cellphone has no signal" theme has been in recent movies until I saw this video. Keep watching, though, because after the "no signal" theme, it does go into other amusingly over-used themes like dropping mobile phones in water, ripping them apart, burning them, etc....

Kudos to someone named Rich Juzwiak for apparently editing together pieces of 66 movies!

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By way of a tweet from Matt Roberts, a friend from my Mitel days, I learned of this video interview with Sir Terry Matthews on Canada's Business News Network:

Sir Terry Matthews speaks to BNN about the state of the industry in Canada, why he loves home-grown startups and what he sees as the next big thing in technology.

If you've not heard him before, the interview is a good view into the passion, enthusiasm and charisma that keeps him starting up companies all over the place. The report says he's now up to 80 companies or so that he's started up... and I'm not surprised.

His overall message, though, is what he has been consistent saying for many years now... we are in an age where incredible broadband capacity is coming online - as that happens, what will we do to make use of all that bandwidth?

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Technorati Tags: terry matthews, canada

While out at ITEXPO in Los Angeles last month, I had a chance to meet up with Jeb Brilliant (yes, that's his real name), someone who I had come to know through all the various Squawk Box conference calls/podcasts that I had participated in. He joined me as I was walking the show floor and then back at the Voxeo booth he asked if he could record a very brief 30-second video interview with me talking about what Voxeo does. He has now posted that video and you're welcome to check it out.

Technorati Tags: ccxml, commdev, dan york, danyork, itexpo, sip, voicemail, voxeo

I gave in today and installed ooVoo on my Mac. I'd resisted because I'm a wee bit swamped right now, but with friends talking about "My ooVoo Day" starting on Monday I finally succumbed and installed it. I admit to being a skeptic... but I'm also open to being surprised. My skepticism is mainly because I already have a zillion ways for people to contact me and I already run several IM/voice/video clients... so it's really NOT clear to me that I need another one. Still, the interface looks interesting and they've incorporated many of the features you would see in Skype and other clients... presence, status messages, etc. Many of the features are intriguing, such as the ability to do video conferencing with up to six people.

So as the admitted chaser of bright shiny objects that I am, and since they do have a Mac version - and my Mac has a webcam, I've installed it. Of course, given that sites like this don't yet support what DataPortability.org is aiming to do, I have no contacts, so it's rather useless to me right now. Yes, I can use the "Find Friends" feature to import contacts from email programs... but... maybe it's just that I'm a "security guy", but I'm still leery of letting programs I don't really know have access to my email directory.

So if you are a reader of this blog and an ooVoo user (or install it now), feel free to add me as a contact. I'm using the incredibly creative username of "danyork".

Then we can see what this ooVoo thing is all about. :-)

P.S. Kudos to CRAYON for their blogger outreach program and their "My ooVoo Day" initiative... well done!

Technorati Tags: oovoo, video, collaboration

I was up way too early out here in Vancouver, so I wandered over to the show hotel and recorded a little greeting:

Technorati Tags: ietf

In the past three weeks I have done more videoconferencing than I have in the past three years...including my year or so as the product manager for Mitel's video collaboration products.

Why?

There's a simple answer, really. And it speaks to the heart of why I think it has taken so long for videoconferencing to take off... I mean, we've have been talking about videophones for what? 40 years or so?

The answer is... duh!... I have a camera always available!

It is always there, sitting at the top of my MacBook Pro screen, just waiting to be used. Whenever I am in a Skype call, or using Sightspeed or iChat... or any other communication program that supports video... moving into video is as simple as pressing a button in the GUI and... ta da... we're in a video conversation.

Contrast that to the situation a few years back where moving into video involved making sure your camera was connected first. In fact, some of the various programs required a restart after you connected a camera, which meant that you couldn't just escalate into video while you were in the midst of a call. Back when I was the product manager for Mitel's collaboration software, it was often a challenge to find people to test the software with because it required people to have a camera connected... and in the days of laptops and people moving around that required them to carry their camera with them. Once I started working remotely in 2005, there were many times when I wanted to have a video call to see the person or room on the other end. I'd often ask "Can we go to video?" and the answer was almost inevitably "Darn! I left my camera back in the office."

Today the story would be different. We're moving rapidly to an era of ubiquitous cameras embedded in laptops. I don't know if Apple started the trend, but with the MacBook's they certainly propelled the trend along the way. I've seen most other vendors follow suit. A quick tour of the laptop aisle in Best Buy recently showed that most all vendors at this point are including embedded webcams in many if not most of their laptops.

So maybe, just maybe, with ubiquitous cameras we'll finally reach the point where video can truly be just another modality of communication that we can easily move to and from during a call. It's certainly been a great addition to my communication over the past few weeks... and I see myself continuing to use more and more.

How about you? Do you have an embedded webcam? If you do, do you find yourself using video more now that you can do so very easily?

P.S. The captured screenshot at the top of the article is a call yesterday with Dameon Welch-Abernathy, a.k.a. Phone Boy.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, videoconferencing, unifiedcommunications, video

As announced yesterday on the Share Skype blog and in more detail on the Skype Garage blog (and also in the Windows Release Notes), Skype has released an updated 3.5 beta for Windows.  Skype 3.5 beta came out earlier this month, but this new update includes several new features, most notably the ability to add video into a chat or mood message, and per the release notes it also fixes a range of bugs.  Jim Courtney has more info over at Skype Journal, but I found this piece of interest with regard to the new video snapshot capability (which now allows you to take a snapshot of the remote video, i.e. the person you are speaking with):

Providing your video also implies that your provide your remote participant with permission to make snapshots. Video snapshots inherits existing privacy mechanisms associated with turning on your video.

So basically if you use Skype video, you should be aware that the person with whom you are chatting could easily capture images of you. (Obviously this has always been possible with screen capture programs, but this is now built into Skype.)

On the "adding videos to chat or mood message" feature, my initial reaction was that this could be quite cool... but that enthusiasm was a bit tempered when I realized that you can only add video from specific Skype partners (and currently only one, Metacafe).  Alas, you can not just point to a YouTube video... you are restricted to those at Metacafe.  Of course, you can upload your own video there, but you have to go through the whole account creation process, etc.  It strikes me as a bit odd that given the eBay/Google agreement to work together there isn't yet a relationship with YouTube.  We'll see... in the meantime I can imagine Metacafe will see a spike in new accounts from people who want to experiment with Skype 3.5.