Tom Keating : VoIP & Gadgets Blog
Tom Keating
CTO
| VoIP & Gadgets blog - Latest news in VoIP & gadgets, wireless, mobile phones, reviews, & opinions

Longview IoT Boosts Energy and Wireless Efficiency

Some of the biggest challenges slowing down the adoption of IoT are security, efficient battery usage and optimized wireless communications.One company has...

Full Story »

Hallmark's Simple, Inexpensive Way to Boost Customer Satisfaction

In an effort to boost margins, companies often push more users to automated solutions such as FAQs, chatbots, voice bots and anything...

Full Story »

Huawei Places the World's First 5G VoNR Video Call

Huawei recently completed the world's first voice over NR (VoNR) call. The voice and video call service was made using two Huawei...

Full Story »

IGEL Advances Future of Work

IGEL is a provider of a next-gen edge OS for cloud workspaces. The company’s software products include IGEL OS, IGEL UD Pocket (UDP) and Universal...

Full Story »

Tata Communications and Cisco Collaborate on SD-WAN

Tata Communications and Cisco have extended their partnership to enable enterprises to transform their legacy network to a customized and secure multi-cloud...

Full Story »

How to Win the 50-Year-Old China Trade War

Today and this week in-fact is historic - the left and right in the U.S. agree that we have a major trade...

Full Story »

Extreme Elements Enables The Autonomous Enterprise

Extreme Networks just announced Extreme Elements which in-turn enables the autonomous network and subsequently the autonomous enterprise. In a dynamic webinar, Dan...

Full Story »

HTC Unveils HTC TITAN 4.7" and 3.8" Radar Smartphones

September 6, 2011


HTC has unveiled HTC TITAN (image above), its largest screen smartphone featuring a 4.7 inch WVGA 480x800 pixel display and the smaller 3.8 inch HTC Radar, both of which run on Windows Phone 7.5 Mango operating system. The HTC TITAN sports a slim 9.9 mm (0.39 inch) aluminum shell and a whopping 8 megapixel camera with a f/2.2 aperture lens, dual LED flash, BSI sensor (for better low-light captures) and 720p video recording.

The HTC TITAN, previously codenamed HTC Eternity, is powered by a 1.5GHz Scorpion processor, Adreno 205 GPU, Qualcomm MSM8255 chipset  with 512MB of RAM and integrated GPS. The internal storage memory of the device is only 16GB. I'm really surprised such a high-end smartphone sporting a large screen and a high-end 8MP camera doesn't sport 32GB of internal storage for storing lots of photos and other media (music, videos).


PowerView Offers Powerful Microsoft Lync Reporting

September 2, 2011

Unify2 PowerView is a reporting and billing solution for Microsoft Lync Server 2010 and Office Communications Server 2007 R2. It comes with pre-canned reports including a report to track ROI so you see exactly how Lync's unified communications feature-set is saving your business money.

PowerView 3.0 aggregates data collected from Call Detail Records, Active Directory, carrier billing rate tables and other data sources. According to Unify2, "PowerView effectively complements the raw transactional data contained in the Lync CDR databases and provides a rich view of the data that's correlated with the enterprise's organizational and geographical topologies, enabling enterprises to leverage a comprehensive set of PowerView reports or easily develop custom views of business data related to Lync."

NextUC Offering Limited-time free beta trial of hosted Microsoft Lync

September 1, 2011

I spoke with NextUC back in June to learn about their hosted Microsoft Lync offering but got swamped with other projects, so never wrote about them. However, I wanted to share the news that they are now offering a limited-time (2-month) free beta trial of hosted Microsoft Lync so you can try it out with no obligation.

Customers can sign up by accessing the NextUC self-provisioning trial portal and you can be provisioned within an hour after signing up. The  2-month free trial includes NextUC Enterprise and NextUC Messenger. According to NextUC, NextUC Enterprise is a cloud-based, all-inclusive voice, collaboration and conferencing platform designed for companies that want to streamline their enterprise-class telephony, instant messaging, Presence, audio, video and web conferencing and collaboration tools into one interface.

Cisco Senior Vice President Ian Pennell Keynoting ITEXPO

September 1, 2011

In addition to magicJack Vocaltec keynoting and Internet legend Bob Metcalfe at ITEXPO in two weeks, we also have Cisco Senior Vice President Ian Pennell keynoting as well. TMC has really lined up some major IP communications players at this next ITEXPO, which will be out biggest show ever!

Check out the news:

Cisco's Ian Pennell to Deliver An Opening Keynote Address at ITEXPO West in Austin

Senior Vice President of Cisco’s Small Business Technology Group to Kick-Off ‘The Communications and Technology Conference’




Michael Tribolet magicJack VocalTec CBO to Keynote ITEXPO

September 1, 2011




Rich Tehrani wrote about some important ITEXPO news worth sharing:
Two months back I told you that IP communications veteran Michael Tribolet, someone involved in the founding and growth of the VoIP space joined magicJack Vocaltec and would be at ITEXPO West in Austin Texas, September 13-15, 2011.I have great news to share and that is that Michael will be keynoting at the show at 8:45 am on Sept 13. He kicks off what is perhaps the best keynote line-up ITEXPO has ever seen - he will be followed up by representatives from Cisco, IBM, DHL, Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe and many more.
magicJack is one of my Top 20 VoIP Innovators of All Time. I recently reviewed the magicJack Plus, which still isn't officially launched (still beta). I wonder if magicJack will be launching this product at TMC's ITEXPO?



Vlync Pilot - Hosted Microsoft Lync Launches

August 31, 2011

VCOMM, a subsidiary of internet telephony provider Coms Plc, a UK-based company, has launched Vlync Pilot, a hosted version of Microsoft’s Lync. Vlync Pilot is a fully managed and hosted Microsoft Lync service that comes bundled with 5 user licences and 5 Polycom handsets (per bundle) enabing businesseses to pilot Microsoft Lync.

Vlync Pilot brings full unified communications functions to the desktop in a hosted setup. Another similar offering is from Workflow Communications who told me back in February to be the only hosted Lync provider offering direct SIP trunking. Features in this hosted offering include:  Instant Message conferencing, peer-to-peer voice and video, AV and web conferencing, Federation, desktop sharing, Exchange UM, Outlook Web App, Enterprise Voice and integration into Microsoft Office applications.

Skype From Your Home Phone - FINALLY!

August 31, 2011


Skype has finally built a standalone analog telephony adapter (ATA) (via their FREETALK brand) that you can hook up with your home phone line. Called the FREETALK Connect•Me Home Phone Adapter it is a PC-less standalone Skype device. It's a relatively small device that can be plugged directly into a wall outlet. It's sort of an oversized AC adapter with connectors on the bottom, as seen here:


In the picture above you can see the two-prong electric plug and then a white phone wire (to landline), black phone wire (to phone), and a blue network wire.



Windows 8 Explorer Sports Ribbon Interface

August 29, 2011


Microsoft has redesigned the venerable Windows Explorer based on opt-in data they collected. The new UI (image above) to be featured in Windows 8 will sport the "ribbon interface" made famous in Microsoft Office. The Microsoft ribbon is loved or hated with no luke warm fans, so it'll be interesting how Windows fan will react to this. The Windows 8 team explains the new Explorer:

This data is pretty interesting.


Steve Jobs the Man, the Myth, the Legend: How it began.

August 26, 2011


I grew up as a computer geek in the late 70s through the 80s into the 90s admiring Bill Gates much more than Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was just "that other computer guy" whose computers were used by less than 8% of the computing world. Microsoft was #1 and Apple was #2 and I liked a winner. Steve Jobs was an also ran to Bill Gates and Microsoft, especially after Windows 95, which arguably copied much of the Macintosh ideas. Microsoft took over the desktop PC world and Apple was relegated to Apple enthusiasts.

Then a funny thing happened.


China's telecom patent boom - Is China Ready to Enforce IP?

August 25, 2011

China has a reputation for not enforcing other countries' patents and copyrights, including bootleg DVDs that can be found in just about any major Chinese city street corner. It was even alleged that China's telecom giant Huawei stole Cisco's routing software. According to one article:
Bootleg DVDs in China are very slickly produced and packaged. In fact, many have extra features that make them better than those found on legitimate discs.
Featured Events