August 2008 Archives

Saw this news on http://www.freeworlddialup.com/ stating that Free World Dialup, often referred to as FWD is now no longer "free" but now has a $30 annual "fee". Well, at least they get to keep the FWD acronym since both have the letter 'f', but the domain name is no longer accurate.

Anyway, FWD was one of the first free SIP-to-SIP calling services using their SIP registrar (fwd.pulver.com:5060). It seems to me that FWD has had its loyal but small fanbase, but honestly I think it's outlived its usefulness. I can setup a FREE account here on FreeCall.com and not only get SIP-to-SIP calls for free, I can also get free calls to many PSTN destinations around the world! FreeCall.com is a relative unknown in the VoIP world, but their service is something I've been meaning to blog about. Well, I guess I just did.

Point being, who is going to continue with the FWD service if they switch from "free" to "fee"? My guess is that the vast majority of FWD users are technically savvy folks that know how to configure SIP settings and signed up because they were looking for free SIP-to-SIP calling. So converting them to paying customers isn't going to happen. They will look elsewhere for free SIP services. FreeCall.com just being one example.

According to their website, "Look for changes to FWD in the coming months. We started an effort to spin FWD off as a standalone enterprise after 12 years of incubation within pulver.com. You will find increased emphasis on hardware IP phones. Softphones and interconnecting with the PSTN represent mere half measures. The full potential of VoIP arrives when we have 4 billion IP phones in circulation.

Also check out this announcement on voip-info.org.

Fee Announcement from Free World Dialup

Dear FWD'er:

Free World Dialup is implementing a $30 USD annual membership fee during the month of August after 12 years as a free service.

A startup taking over a decade to reach conviction about a business model likely sets a record, but we believe $30 USD per year is the magic number. It is 10% of the cost for Vonage's unlimited usage plan. FWD provided the inspiration for the founding of Vonage in 2001, and Vonage's hybrid Internet-PSTN offer now generates nearly $1 billion in annual revenue. FWD's voluntary paid membership experiment last summer demonstrated the demand for a complete break from telephone network. FWD's future as a Communication ISP will include only those services that do not have a per minute charge. Rather than competing directly with the telco's or even Vonage, the mission of a Communication ISP is creating new opportunities and modes of communication. FWD will relaunch the website during August to focus on services, applications, and content available to people with VoIP SIP devices connected directly to the Internet.

See FWD CEO, Daniel Berninger's Communication ISP Manifesto.

If you wish to retain SIP registration and support FWD, please click through the paid membership banner at the top of the home page which links to the Acteva registration service.

Make sure you use the email associated with your FWD account (the one on which this message arrived.)

If you lost your FWD account info, you can use the password retrieval process or simply create a new account.

The first 1000 paid members get "founder" status, but FWD will retain existing free accounts through August 31, 2008. The new paid membership requirement allows for associating any number of accounts with the email address used for payment, so you can keep the free ride alive by finding a friend with paid membership.

I hope you will join in transforming FWD's nearly one million free accounts into paid memberships as we work to make the Communication ISP the next big thing in VoIP.

Best regards,

Jeff

According to their website, FWD will soon be offering FWDout which will allow users to call out to regular phones with their FWD service for a monthly fee. FWD will also soon be offering a seperate FWDin service which allows users to buy a regular phone number and connect it with their FWD service, so that people can call from their regular phones to an IP phone.

So what are your thoughts? Does FWD have a prayer as a pay-based model? Or have free SIP-to-SIP services plus the plethora of inexpensive SIP-to-PSTN services (Vonage, Packet8, BroadVoice) -- not to mention Skype -- make FWD pointless? Of course, magicJack charges $20/year for unlimited calling and is quite successful, so maybe Jeff Pulver is onto something here. Though it looks like FWD with be more expensive than magicJack since its $30 for the base package plus a monthly fee for FWDout and/or FWDin. Still, I'm not one to count Pulver out, especially now that VON is gone and Jeff can focus on new opportunities. I wish him luck.

Blockbuster to roll out DVD rental kiosks!  Yes, in another tactical shift, Blockbuster will begin testing 50 DVD rental kiosks to compete with Redbox, which rents DVDs for $1 per night.

According to The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, Blockbuster plans to roll out 10,000 kiosks over the next 18 months. The kiosks are designed for DVD rentals, but could include digital downloads and sales of movies in the future.

In related news, Netflix is reportedly testing charging a premium for Blu-ray movies. This service would allow users to order Hi-Def movies from its Blu-ray library for a premium.

Blu-ray discs cost 25% more than standard DVD titles, but offer superior definition. Netflix has not announced how much more a subscription including Blu-ray would cost, but Netflix subscribers report paying an additional $1 to $2 per month for the HD, according to InformationWeek.

Nintendo, the maker of the market-leading Wii videogame console, has reportedly co-signed for a patent on holographic storage and may be gearing up for development of this ultra high-capacity storage concept.

Nintendo signed the patent with Inphase Technologies, but bringing holographic storage to market won't be easy. (Inphase has been at this a looong time.)

Nintendo, one of the world's top three videogame console and handheld device makers, apparently is preparing to invest some big money into developing holographic storage.

A patent for holographic storage was recently co-signed by the Japanese entertainment hardware and software company, which is a clear indication that the console manufacturer is investigating new methods of data storage for future projects. (And that a leap in storage capacity!)

Holographic storage is a sector of the solid-state disk market with interesting potential, but development appears to have come to a plateau; only a couple of companies have been working on trying to bring it to market.

Inphase Technologies is by far the largest single developer of holographic storage, but it has recently suffered some setbacks and had been laying off staff, according to industry insiders.

Inphase and Nintendo filed jointly for the patent in March 2007. The patent describes the use of "miniature flexure-based scanners for angle multiplexing" as the key component in developing holographic storage. The patent was issued in February by the U.S. Patent Office.

Get more at eWeek.

Very interesting post comparing cheap broadband to cheap oil on Mashable.

Here's the lead of the piece:

Oil and broadband Internet access are the twin fuels of both brick and mortar businesses and Internet based businesses. When oil prices are low, economies can zoom at light speed. When prices are high, many businesses can barely put one foot in front of another. A look at the history of oil might serve to help us understand the importance of ubiquitous, low cost Internet access, which is currently growing at a snail's pace in North America. 

Quite good from there, too, but couldn't we just have a greener headline in this fuel-challenged age that we live in today?

Ever wonder how much data fring consumes when making a VoIP call or even when idle? Personally, I really 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.

Well, I found the answer to this question on fring's blog which was posted today.



When idle, fring also consumes an additional 10kb per hour of connectivity to communicate with fring's servers. This is needed to get/push presence and other info.

Hey hey hey -- what's wrong with lower prices as Microsoft is reportedly considering dropping the price of Xbox to $200 to appeal to the mass gaming market.

According to one report on CNET, an Xbox console with no hard drive could retail for $199 as soon as next month.

Nintendo's Wii is currently the lowest-priced console on the market at $249.

In related news, Xbox Live avatars are reportedly coming soon to new version of EA Games.  

The avatars can don football gear and other accessories, but there is no word on whether the avatars can be inserted into the new versions of Madden or NCAA Football.

This from GameDaily BIZ.

Lenovo today announced it is entering the "netbook" PC market with the new IdeaPad S10 netbook PC.

Lenovo designed the super-slim, super-small IdeaPad S10 to complement a customer's primary PC or as a first-time, introductory PC purchase.

The IdeaPad S10 allows users to perform simple activities such as surf the Internet, check and write emails, listen to music and run basic applications. Lenovo also plans to introduce netbook models designed specifically for students and educators. Now is this too simple an appliance like the computer in every kitchen from a few years back?

Approximately one-inch thin with models weighing just over two pounds, the IdeaPad S10 netbook typifies thin and light design.

Maybe too light? And in this day and age, pricing is even more important than ever.

MSRP: Starting at $399 (available in early October).

Hard to image (but many have thought about it, I'm sure), but Microsoft has kicked off a research project to create software that will take over when it retires Windows.

Called Midori, the cut-down operating system is radically different from Microsoft's older programs, being Internet-centric rather than depending on being tied to a single PC.

Although Midori has been heard about before now, more details have now been published by Software Development Times after viewing internal Microsoft documents describing the technology.

Midori is believed to be under development because Windows is unlikely to be able to cope with the pace of change in future technology and the way people use it.

Windows worked well in an age when most people used one machine to do all their work. The operating system acted as the holder for the common elements Windows programs needed to call on. It's lot different now!

When asked about Midori by BBC News, Microsoft issued a statement that said: "Midori is one of many incubation projects underway at Microsoft. It's simply a matter of being too early in the incubation to talk about it."

Check out this alert on the University of Buffalo's website:

UBIT Alert
Campus Wide Services Impacted
VoIP System Maintenance

Effective: 8/6/2008 Expires: 8/6/2008 Posted: 2008-08-04

On Wednesday, 8/6, between 6:00 - 7:00 AM system maintenance will be performed on the VoIP server infrastructure. Technical staff will be updating web security certificates.

During the system maintenance window, users will experience a momentary interruption of approximately 5 minutes during which user configurable features will not be available for modification.

Should a situation exist where this might seriously restrict your ability to conduct business, please contact us so that we can reschedule this work.

For more information contact oss-unix (oss-unix@buffalo.edu), 645-5367

I just hope there isn't a campus shooting or something like that. How would campus personnel be able to broadcast emergency messages to your VoIP phone in your dorm room? There's a lawsuit waiting to happen. Or what if some other major emergency happens on campus, like you know, you've got the major munchies or you want to order a pizza? Now that's really a lawsuit waiting to happen! Don't believe lawsuits can happen over not being able to order pizza using VoIP? Just go take a gander at Vonage IPO Lawsuit and my Lawsuit over my Cold Pizza.

Came across an announcement that OpenSIPS is forking from the popular open source OpenSER solution. OpenSIPS (Open SIP Server) became active today, with its first release (OpenSIPS 1.4.0). I found it a bit surprising that someone is forking OpenSER, since it's a very powerful SIP routing platform. I recently mentioned how OpenSER can be used to bridge Asterisk with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.

So what is OpenSIPS about? Well, let me include some snippets from the announcement made today:

OpenSER History:
----------------
Voice System started the OpenSER project with a vision of running an
open project that will deliver a professional software. Along the years
Voice System was the main contributor and sustainer of the OpenSER
project, organizing conferences, events and tutorials, all aiming to
consolidate OpenSER as a top solution for industry VoIP.

OpenSER Issues:
---------------
In the past time, several critical problems related to OpenSER project
were identified by us:
- the need for a new reliable release - delayed or low-quality releases
are affecting the credibility of the project
- degradation of the project quality - testing, performance measurements
and code quality control are overlooked
- lack of the control, management and coordination of the project -
critical project issues could not be handled or solved

OpenSIPS Solutions:
--------------------
OpenSIPS is a continuation of the OpenSER project - we have a moral
obligation to develop and deliver the high quality and reliable software
we envisioned when starting OpenSER.

1) a 6 months release cycle, but with no compromise for the technical
issues
2) extensive testing and performance measurements before each major release
3) contributions are guaranteed to be answered and integrated (if
accepted) in less than 1 month
4) code review, architecture control and integrated design for software
quality
5) technical management with a strict developer hierarchy and developer
cooperation to prevent deadlocks or un-availabilities
6) intellectual honesty by having decisions taken on value-based
criteria and arguments.
_________________

Ok, I get that they're frustrated with how slow the OpenSER releases are, but is forking OpenSER the solution? I like the 6 month release cycle, code review, and architecture control. Just who is behind this effort? Is it simply VoIP enthusiasts, or is there some corporate backing going on here? And if so, what is the agenda?

Well, whoever is running OpenSIPS, it seems like someone was frustrated not only with the slow releases, but also the slow feature additions. They added these new features that are absent from OpenSER:

• dialog profiling extension
• local route for internally generated requests
• dial plan / translation module
• general NAT traversal module (for non-invite signalling)
• peering and rate limit (traffic shaping) modules
  
  Enhancements like:

• SRV load balancing (based on weights)
• nonce re-usage verification (safer authentication)
• and bug fixing - code, specs and functionality bugs.

I'm just digesting this news myself and I have another deadline I'm working on, so let me know your thoughts on this or if you have more info on OpenSIPS by posting a comment.

Received a news tip that fraudsters are using Asterisk as a "collection tool" for their credit card scam. While that's nothing new by itself, since there are plenty of scammers leveraging Asterisk, I found it fascinating to be able to actually call into the scammer's system.

Asterisk has become hacker's tool of choice because it's free, flexible, and feature-rich. Just install Asterisk on an inexpensive PC and you have yourslf a powerful PBX that can war dial hundreds of phone numbers while forging the outbound CallerID. Often referred to as "vhishing" or voice phishing, a vishing attack is easy to do using Asterisk.

You can war dial and leave a recorded message to hundreds of people, telling them that their credit card number has been stolen and that they need to call a specific phone number to resolve the issue.

Anyway, a reader told me today he just received an email "from" Capital One asking to call (866) 473-0719 for fraud verification. He believes that this number is routed to an Asterisk box since he recognized that the scammer is using Festival text-to-speech (TTS) to ask the questions. It certainly sounds like Festival to me as well. Yeah, like a credit card company would 100% TTS for their credit card verification system. Well, a sucker is born every minute, so some people might fall for it.

here's the email he received:

We detected irregular activity on your debit card on 08/03/2008.
We have attempted to contact you to verify your account information, and unfortunately all methods of contact have been unsuccessful.

For your protection, your account has been disabled until we are able to verify your information to prevent any misuse of your account.

Please call customer service at (866) 473-0719 to activate your account.

Interestingly, the scammer is not checking if the credit number entered is valid or not - you can enter 16x 0 and the system will accept it.

What's odd is that the autoattendant is saying stuff about "credit card activation" not credit card fraud verification. So who is going to call this number and activate a CapitalOne card that they've owned (& already activated)? I guess we need to see P.T. Barnum's "there's a sucker born every minute" again to answer that question.

Also, the VoIP or TTS quality on their line stinks. Very choppy. Some of the TTS words were garbled or completely cut off. Maybe the mass blast spam they're sending out is using all their VoIP bandwidth?

Well, nothing like having some fun with dumb criminals. So go have some fun and pester the scammer with invalid credit card numbers.

So today I get a new report from the Tolly Group stating that the ShoreTel Unified Communications system is significantly more energy efficient than the Cisco Unified Communications Manager. ShoreTel apparently topped Cisco in using less energy to drive VoIP communications in specific large, medium and small enterprise-class scenarios.

This energy usage comparison reminded me of Nortel's "The 'Nortel' Tax Relief Plan", which aims to "stop paying the 'Cisco Energy Tax' and save up to 40%". Tony Rybczynski who works for Nortel and writes a TMCNet blog called The HyperConnected Enterprise sparked some controversy with some of his blog posts promoting the fact that Nortel is more efficient than Cisco. He even cites one customer that put a stop order on a $2 million dollar Cisco order once they did the energy efficiency calculations.

Is that what it's come down to? Instead of feature-to-feature comparisons where going to have to start comparing energy consumption? I'm not against the idea, I just find it kind of humorous that everyone is jumping on the enviro-green bandwagon.

I have to wonder if an IT manager, CTO, etc. might purchase a more efficient IP-PBX over a less efficient one that has many more features? Well, certainly in San Francisco and other uber-green areas that might be the case. Green trumps everything when you're a greenie - not that there's anything wrong with that.

I should point out that the IT Manager or CTO often not held accountable to what the electricity costs are. Many businesses see their electricity bills just as one of the costs of running their businesses. Other than instructing their users to turn off their radios, monitors, and computers at night, most businesses don't delve into purchasing energy efficient computer or phone equipment. That is changing due to high energy costs - albeit slowly.

What's missing from this ShoreTel energy comparison report is a comparison with Nortel, Avaya, and other IP-PBX players. Just who is the "king" of energy efficiency? Inquiring minds want to know.

So what are your thoughts on the IP-PBX Energy Wars? Do you care about efficiency or are features for important to you? Post a comment.

Lastly, the press release is included after the jump for your perusal...

Software publisher Activision and peripheral maker Logitech have announced a joint venture to make premium controllers shaped like instruments for Guitar Hero World Tour.

The game is expected to debut this fall, and will be available for the all the popular gaming consoles, including Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, PlaytStaion 3 and Nintendo Wii.

The new game will use new controllers, including a more responsive and freshly designed guitar along with a new microphone. The major difference from the current controllers uses will be an all-new electronic drum set, which will include three drum pads, two raised cymbals and a bass kick pedal.

Apart from the new controllers, the game will feature a Music Studio function, where players can compose, record and share their own music, as well an eight-player "Battle of the Bands" mode. Online Band Career options will also be available.

Electonista has more.

Ever since Amazon launched the Kindle last November, TechCrunch has been wondering about just how successful it's been. (Me, too!)

The electronic book initially sold out and supplies have been tight. The Kindle is such a small part of Amazon's overall business that the company does not break out how many it's sold. But we found out anyway: 240,000 Kindles have been shipped since November, according to a source close to Amazon with direct knowledge of the numbers.

Not bad, but could we make the price even more attractive to really rocket sales.

Here's how the numbers look.

According to USA Today, AT&T and Apple have agreed to extend their exclusivity relationship through 2009, meaning the next iPhone will be made specifically for AT&T service.

The report claims that Apple originally signed the deal with AT&T through 2008 and next year would start selling iPhones on other carrier services. But after AT&T offered a $300 subsidy on each iPhone instead of the revenue-sharing model that became such a hot issue last year, Apple decided it was in its best interests to stay on with AT&T for one more year and take the subsidy.

Undoubtedly some will say that AT&T may have made the best deal in quite some time and I tend to agree. But still others will say that Apple did the right thing in taking the money and although it's forced to sign up for another year with AT&T, it's still the right move.

Those people are dead wrong. 

And The Digital Home got that right -- read on!