Archive for August 25th, 2008
fring touchtone DTMF support - uh hello?
I’ve been playing around with fring for awhile now. I like fring which I like to call “the Swiss army knife of mobile VoIP and IM”, since it works with Skype, SIP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, and AIM. Because it supports SIP, I’m able to configure fring to work on Asterisk-based systems to be able to make and receive phone calls. Receiving calls to my ‘149′ SIP extension (see screenshot) works great on my Windows Mobile 6.1 Verizon ...
5 Questions About Comcast’s New Bandwidth Throttling Plan
After the FCC last week told Comcast it had 30 days to file its new network management plan that involves cutting back speeds for users who are using too much bandwidth, the mainstream media is learning more about the slowdown plan Comcast CTO Tony Werner explained to Om back in March. Last week we heard that Comcast plans to throttle people back to DSL-like speeds for 10 to 20 minutes if they use too much bandwidth. Here are the things we don’t know that could have far more impact on sub...
Ben Metcalfe: What Skype means to me
On the occasion of Skype’s fifth birthday, Skype Journal will publish a series on "What Skype Means To Me". You are invited to email your essay or short thoughts to editor@SkypeJournal.com. Skype is the text book example of the mixed fortune that can come from using ‘closed source’ software. By building their own proprietary VoIP protocol, Skype have been able to create a product with practically zero configuration that almost always works, even within the toug...
Bill Vick: What Skype means to me
On the occasion of Skype’s fifth birthday, Skype Journal will publish a series on "What Skype Means To Me". You are invited to email your essay or short thoughts to editor@SkypeJournal.com. Bill Vick is an authority on finding talent for employers. Bill is a co-author of LinkedIn for Recruiting, wrote Big Billers, and is a sought after speaker in human capital circles. Skype changed my business and opened up new worlds to me and the many others I network with. A few...
Why they spy on us
“Forcibly private . . . brazenly sleazy.” AT&T threw a lavish, secret party near the Denver Democratic Convention for the Blue Dog Democrats and their hench-lobbyists that voted them the gift of retroactive immunity for drift-net spying. Glenn Greenwald, Matt Stoller, Jane Hamsher and others tried to get in, only to discover how aggressively private the party was. Greenwald writes: ” . . . [so] we stood in front of the entrance and began videotaping and trying to interview...
For Qwest, FTTN Not An Option, Necessity
Larry Dignan, who writes at the Between The lines blog, talked to Qwest CTO Pieter Poll about company’s future plans including fiber-based broadband. Unlike Verizon, Qwest has opted for fiber-to-the-node strategy. The company is pushing fiber to a point where it can feed 350 homes using VDSL2 over copper. Some highlights from the conversation and my take on why faster broadband isn’t just an option but a necessity for the company below the fold. Qwest can offer 12 Mbps and 20 Mbps...
Digium Asterisk Appliance AA1080 or AA1060?
Bill Miller commented I may have seen some yet-unreleased products during my tour. During my tour of Digium’s headquarters, I snapped some photos, so I thought perhaps one of my photos might contain some top secret Digium product, so I planned to give them a closer look. Sure enough two of my photos caught my eye. I zoomed in on the photos and noticed a Digium Asterisk Appliance with a model number printed that says “AA1080″ or “AA1060″. I can’t be sure which...
Digium AsteriskNOW News and more…
As I hinted last week, I would have some “interesting” news to tell after my visit to Digium’s brand new headquarters along with colleagues Greg Galitzine and Dave Rodriguez. Before I get into the MAJOR news being made by Digium, let me cover what else I learned on my trip. It had been 3 years since I last visited Digium down in Huntville, Alabama. After getting a grand tour of the new Digium building we sat down in a state-of-art boardroom complete with a high-end Polycom I...
Nvidia Pushes the 3-D Internet
Nvidia’s Nvision conference and celebration of all-things-graphics-processor starts today. As part of the brouhaha, the chipmaker is showcasing about 60 startups building businesses on the back of its GPU, and it’s interesting to see how many of these firms have nothing to do with gaming. As we’ve noted before, visual computing is becoming more important for everyday consumers on their desktops, and GPUs are making inroads into scientific and data intensive computing tasks. We...
Andrew Y Ng: What Skype means to me
On the occasion of Skype’s fifth birthday, Skype Journal will publish a series on "What Skype Means To Me". You are invited to email your essay or short thoughts to editor@SkypeJournal.com. Andrew Y Ng writes: I started using Skype when my girlfriend was living in London for a summer, I tried various ways to call her and Skype offered high voice quality, ease of use, and was cost effective. After that I kept using Skype mostly as an IM client as it provides encryption unde...
Want to learn more about Voxeo? Join Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor appearing on Squawk Box conf call tomorrow
Are you are available tomorrow, Tuesday, August 26th, at 11am US Eastern time? If so, you are invited to join in to Alec Saunders’ daily “Squawk Box” conference call / podcast where Alec will be interviewing Voxeo CEO Jonathan Taylor about all the recent news about Voxeo, including: Voxeo announced record growth and global expansion Voxeo announced a new product release with new SIP APIs, Mac OS X and Linux support Voxeo acquired Micromethod Technologies Voxeo named 2008 Marke...
GigaNET AM: Joe Biden, Conviva & Outside Lands
Earth2Tech: 10 things to know about Joe Biden & clean energy. NewTeeVee: Yes Virginia there are good web series. NewTeeVee: Outsidelands rocked SF this weekend. We go behinds the scene. jkOnTheRun: The State of Palm: Turn out the lights. OStatic: Why free isn’t enough. NewTeeVee Station: Barely Political: Not just Obama Girl anymore. ...
AMD and Freescale Fire Sales Won’t Burn Austin
AMD finally announced that it has unloaded its digital television chip division to Broadcom for the low, low price of $192.8 million cash, which it should have done ages ago. The news should cheer investors who have been repeatedly disappointed by AMD’s earnings, and should also elate Broadcom which walked away with a steal on which it can base its DTV efforts. Meanwhile, just a few miles up the road from AMD’s Austin campus, Freescale may be entertaining buyers as well. An article ...
Privacy: Your Cable Box Knows You So Well
The Internet has given us plenty of something for nothing, and we’ve comfortably allowed advertising to support that free content. After all, its a model we’re familiar with from TV, magazines and newspapers. But on the Internet, the advertising-supported-content model is changing. You’re not just watching the ads — the advertisers are watching you back. Last year, advertisers spent $21.2 billion advertising online, according to data from eMarketer, and the research firm...
An extraordinary week for Voxeo…
Last week was a truly extraordinary week for my employer, Voxeo. Here’s a bit of what went on: Voxeo announced record growth and global expansion - In these economic times, it’s incredible to be part of a company putting out information like this. Voxeo announced a new product release with new SIP APIs, Mac OS X and Linux support - To our knowledge, this is first commercial telephony voice application platform to be available on Mac OS X (as well as Linux and Windows). While our...
Creative leader leaves Skype
Malthe Sigurdsson was the design force behind Skype’s playful, cute, and colorful visual identity. It’s rare when the emotions, the times, the technology, and the user experience meet well. Skype’s form and function, and visual iconography surrounding it, defined Skype. Before Skype’s message of "it just works" could be accepted, people had to trust Skype. At a glance, people believed it was possible. One look and they believed turning their PC into a magic In...
The iPod Touch is Sublime But…
After pining for an iPhone Touch for months, I finally pulled the trigger recently - and now wonder why I waited so longer. In short, the Touch is sublime. A wonderfully designed and multi-functional product that probably doesn’t get the attention it deserves because of the obsession with the iPhone. Sure, it doesn’t have a phone or camera but Wi-Fi connectivity and ever-growing bounty of applications makes the Touch such an interesting and useful device. Since getting the Touch a c...
Buffalo Linkstation Mini: Almost Perfect
The fast-increasing number of storage drives on my desk jump-started a quest for a networked storage device that could: replace three drives (in other words, have 1 terabyte of disk storage), be quiet, be fast for easy backups and recovery, act as a repository for my iTunes library and of course be setup easily. Oh, and it had to work out of the box with both Mac and Windows machines. There are many drives that would fit the bill. Apple’s Time Capsule or Drobo, using the excellent Drobo S...
Embarq Cuts Jobs. More Trouble Ahead For Telcos
Embarq, the wireline division spun off by Sprint, today announced that it would cut between 500 and 700 jobs and eliminate 300 contractors. The company lost about 170,000 landlines in the most recent quarter. According to an AP report, in June Embarq handed over some service centers to Nokia Siemens Networks and off-loaded 256 Embarq workers to NSN. It has plans to cut some call centers — another 210 jobs. Embarq currently has about 17,000 employees. This is the latest pointer to the cont...
What Obama’s Text Message Campaign Reveals
Barack Obama’s now-famous text-message announcement of his VP pick reveals something about the candidate that should really worry the Republicans. What it reveals is not that he’s a smart technologist. If he was, he would have known that sending 10 million SMS messages at the same time is pretty much guaranteed not to work; it’s not designed for that. What it does reveal is that this is probably the smartest marketing campaign we’ve seen in decades. It’s well know...
We???re Madder Than Hell And???
We did it because we were mad. We did it ourselves with precious little help from our leaders. The average US price of regular gasoline is down 11% to $3.70 since the Independence Day peak of $4.14. That’s still a lot higher than $2.76 a year ago; but we’re also still mad. By coincidence, BTW, the price of gas has come down by just about the full amount of the 45.8 cents/gallon federal gas tax that didn’t get suspended (good). The price of crude oil has fallen even further fro...
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News, opinions and announcements about fast changing communication tools and technologies, from various blogs and ezine.