Tom Keating : VoIP & Gadgets Blog
Tom Keating
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LiveJournal meets VoIP via Gizmo Project

July 27, 2006

Andy had the goods yesterday on Sixapart's Live Journal and Gizmo Project in a deal that would enable one of the largest blogging community to be able to IM & VoIP each other. Well, today, it's official.

The co-branded “Gizmo Project for LJ Talk” software will enable LiveJournal friends to call each other for free, send instant messages and see each other's online presence (available, away or offline). Some nice features include free “Call me” and “IM” buttons on journal pages to initiate calls and instant messages from the web, as well as point and click “voice posts", which allows Gizmo Project for LJ Talk users to post audio recordings (podcasts) on their blog. The partnership also stated that Gizmo Project for LJ Talk users will be able to make low-cost PSTN calls in addition to buddy-to-buddy PC calling.

Google Maps adds Traffic Info to mobile phones

July 25, 2006

Open-source VoIP softswitch speaks GoogleTalk

April 17, 2006

Freeswitch, an open-source softswitch started earlier this year, leverages open-source software libraries and has recently added support for Google Talk. The codebase now includes Jingle (Jabber XMPP Voice) support with the addition of libDingaLing and mod_dingaling libraries. Jingle is an XMPP based protocol used by GoogleTalk. Using FreeSWITCH you can gateway GoogleTalk to SIP, H.323, or even the Asterisk IAX2 protocol. They also support Sangoma PRI cards and they recently announced support for secure RTP communication.

The libDingaLing library is currently considered to be in Alpha stage, but has been compiled and tested on many computer platforms including Windows XP, Solaris, Linux and MacOS X. The new endpoint module appropriately named "mod_dingaling" couples FreeSWITCH to libDingaLing and allows both inbound and outbound communication thus enabling GoogleTalk to gateway to the PSTN or to other VoIP protocols such as SIP or H.323.

Global IP Sound launches Developer Community and free download of their API

March 14, 2006

The GIPS Developer Community was launched today by Global IP Sound to enable developers to build Voice over IP applications. According to GIPS, "The goal of the Community is to easily allow developers to utilize Global IP Sound’s ground-breaking technology to develop exciting applications and innovative ways of communicating. By making its software available to anyone, GIPS is helping to break down boundaries and encourage innovation and expression."

GIPS is making available as a free download, GIPS VoiceEngine Lite, which provides an easy to use, flexible API that includes voice processing capabilities such as GIPS patented jitter buffer/error concealment module NetEQ, GIPS codecs, and the tools to create VoIP applications. GIPS VoiceEngine Lite is a light version of GIPS VoiceEngine Standard.

The GIPS developer community website consists of the needed software libraries and components to develop VoIP applications.



Skype, Google, Microsoft and Cisco all in one panel

February 3, 2006

The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland assembled quite the star-studded team of technology gurus and CEOs from Skype, Google, Microsoft, and Cisco to discuss IP communications. This included Microsoft's Bill Gates, Cisco's John Chambers, Google's Eric Schmidt and Skype/Ebay's Niklas Zennstrom. Now that is some technology panel! I wonder if they were all cordial to one another considering how competitive they are.

I also wonder if Niklas Zennstrom actually flew to Switzerland to participate or if he is concerned about being arrested there as well for his ole' Kazaa P2P file-sharing gig.

Zoep VoIP client with Firefox plugin and Jabber support

January 23, 2006

VoIPSter has announced the formation of The OpenZoep Foundation and the release of OpenZoep communications engine. The OpenZoep communication protocol is based on the XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, an open, XML-based protocol for near-real-time, extensible instant messaging and presence information, which happens to also be supported by Google Talk. It also is the core protocol of the Jabber Instant Messaging and Presence technology used by thousands of Jabber servers.

According to VoIPSter, "OpenZoep will enable the proliferation and rapid development of standards based telephony application throughout the world as VoIP grows and continues to take hold with users and service providers." They added, "OpenZoep wants to become the de facto open source VoIP solution that is embedded in software clients, web browsers, games and other mobile or desktop applications," said founder Sjoerd Hannema, CEO of VoIPSter."With OpenZoep all applications can immediately begin offering free PC-to-PC VoIP calls, instant messaging (IM) and both outbound PSTN and SIP calls to free and premium SIP based telephony providers."

"Building VoIP clients using OpenZoep is very straightforward," said Dirk Griffioen, VoIPSter's Senior VOIP Engineer. "The OpenZoep API offers simple methods to communicate with the OpenZoep client-side VoIP engine and server-side web services."

Further, OpenZoep goal is to create "Open Directories" to help finding others easier.





Tello a near term solution?

January 23, 2006


Tello was launched today by Pulver with some help from Craig McCaw, telecom banker Michael Price and former Apple CEO John Sculley. What is Tello? Tello enables enterprise users to see the presence of the person they are trying to reach - whether the users is on a phone, cellphone, etc., regardless of which IM client service they use, i.e. MSN Messenger, AOL/AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, etc.

Google Talk and VoIP on Sony PSP?

January 18, 2006

SIPThat's popular blogger, Erik Lagerway pondered in a blog post last year if the Sony PSP would one day run a VoIP (Voice over IP) client. In fact, he hinted while working at Xten (now CounterPath) that they could should be able to "hack together" a softphone for VoIP on the PSP handheld gaming console. Erik wrote in May 2005:

Looks like Sony has their crosshairs clearly focused on providing a feature-full portable communications and entertainment system. Since we can browse the web on this thing, and it has a USB port, Wi-Fi and a TCP stack you would think we should be able hack together a softphone for VoIP.

Google Talk now federates

January 18, 2006

As of yesterday, Google Talk now federates with other XMPP services. Google announced "open federation" for the Google Talk service allowing people on different IM/VoIP clients to "talk" to each other. Google Talk currently support open federation with any service provider that supports the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) standard. This includes Chikka, Earthlink, Gizmo, Tiscali, MediaRing, as well as universites, corporations and individual users that setup their own XMPP-compliant servers.

Google Talk's Gary Burd "flipped the switch" to connect the Google Talk service to the public XMPP network and gleefully takes pride in the fact that he got to "throw the switch" (good thing he doesn't work for the prison system! ) Gary Burd writes in the Google Talk blog, "I'm proud to have worked on this, and to be the one that got to turn on something that lets Google Talk users talk to millions of other users out there."

The Google Talk blog writes:



I flipped the switch to connect the Google Talk Service to the public XMPP network this morning.

Mashup of Internet Telephony and Google Maps

January 12, 2006

TMC's Internet Telephony Conference & Expo is in just a couple of weeks and I am anticipating this being the best VoIP show ever with over 200% growth from last year. I'm actually speaking at this show - well technically moderating a session, but I'll probably provide some of my own insights for the "Managing Your Network for High-Quality Voice" session.

TMC has many firsts to its name, including launching the first VoIP magazine and launching the first contact center magazine. Well, TMC now has another "first" to add to its repertoire, namely a mashup of Google Maps with TMC's Internet Telephony Conference & Expo attendees! There are attendees from all over the country attending this VoIP conference. In fact, this map doesn't do ITEXPO justice since we have a huge international audience attending ITEXPO but it was more difficult to figure out latitude/longitude information for our international attendees.

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