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

Internet

Spam Soap - The MSP-Friendly Cloud-based Messaging Service Provider

January 31, 2012


At ITEXPO, I met with Eric Pinto, sales engineer from Spam Soap, a cloud-based messaging service provider. Founded in 2002, back in the early cloud days, Spam Soap pioneered the use of the MX record email filtering model. Today, Spam Soap has thousands of customers worldwide using a range of cloud-based messaging services, including, anti-virus filtering, anti-spam filtering, preserving business continuity, protecting confidential information, and ensuring regulatory compliance.

They currently have 900 channel partners and are very much channel-centric and leverage Managed Service Providers (MSPs). They'll point  direct end-users that come to them to a MSP.


Symantec - Disable pcAnywhere Now! Who the Heck Still uses it?

January 27, 2012

Symantec suspected in 2006 that its network had been breached, but when Anonymous started talking publicly about Symantec source code it confirmed their suspicions. According to Wired:
The company surprised the public last week when it disclosed that hackers had obtained source code for its pcAnywhere software and other products, and that the code had likely been stolen in a six-year-old breach that Symantec had never disclosed.

Symantec said in its announcement that users should disable pcAnywhere until the company had time to update the software to ensure that hackers are unable to exploit holes they might find in the code.

Disable pcAnywhere?

Pumped for StartupCamp5's Fast-paced Startup Pitches

January 24, 2012

I'm headed out to ITEXPO East, taking place next week from January 31 through February 3, at the Miami Beach Convention Center, in Miami, Florida. One of the the items of my must-see list is StartupCamp5 Comm Edition, collocated with ITEXPO East. I'm pretty pumped to see this, especially since at StartupCamp4, Internet / Ethernet legend Bob Metcalfe gave a phenomenal keynote, which was very well received. You can see his keynote here:

During the keynote Bob had some kind words to say about Apple's Steve Jobs, before Steve Jobs passed. It was obvious from Bob's emotions that he knew his friend Steve had limited time left.

Esnatech Releases Office-LinX 8.5, a Cloud-based UC Platform

January 19, 2012


Esnatech, today announced the release of version 8.5 of Office-LinX, a unified communications platform that enables enterprises to integrate UC with cloud-based technologies such as Google Apps, VMware Zimbra , Salesforce.com, and Microsoft BPOS/Office 365. Office-LinX is optimized to work in mixed, distributed environments integrating with multiple on- and off-premise telecommunications technologies and cloud-based applications and infrastructure. It can for instance integrate with solutions from Asterisk, Avaya, NEC, Cisco, Toshiba, Panasonic, Shoretel, and more.

The latest high availability (HA) version of Office-LinX supports full virtualization of its voice clusters with VMware vSphere support. With Office-LinX 8.5, organizations have the ability to distribute the application and resources over multiple virtual servers connected to a single or distributed telephony infrastructure.



Begun the Search War Has! Google+ Social Search Results in Bing Defections

January 13, 2012



Could Google's recent change "Search, Plus Your World" be a "Netflix" faux pas causing a similar mass exodus of users from Google to Microsoft's Bing search engine? Well, at least one high-profile website, Gizmodo has one of its columnists jumping ship.  The new search integrates Google+ (Google's Facebook competitor) content directly into search results. It includes "personal results" which include Google+ status updates, Picasa photos, blog posts, etc.

President Obama Has VoIP Glitch

January 4, 2012


Apparently, President Obama had some VoIP glitches when he attempted to tried to steal some of the Republican Iowa Caucuses' spotlight last night via a live address to his Democratic supporters over the Internet. The video teleconference had sporadic audio issues making him hard to understand. It's bad enough trying to understand some of President Obama's policies when he is speaking clearly never mind when he's encountering VoIP packet loss and jitter!

According to ABC News, Obama's video teleconferences utilized a proprietary software program developed for the Obama campaign by Adobe Systems Inc. It's likely a derivative of the Adobe Connect VoIP, video, and collaboration platform.

In one part of the video, he sounded like Max Headroom "(static) In some ways, I'm actually more optimistic now then I was when I first ran cuz we've already see...




Newfies-Dialer Offers Super-Scalable Cloud-based Auto-Dialer Using FreeSWITCH

December 29, 2011


I discovered a new, powerful, open source auto-dialer called Newfies-Dialer that is offered by Star2Billing S.L, and is distributed free of charge, with no ongoing licensing costs. Star2Billing also wrote CDR-Stats, a replacement for Asterisk Stat used in FreePBX, as well as A2Billing. Star2Billing S.L., based in Barcelona, was formed in 2009 to provide commercial support to their range of free and open source products specialising in telephony, billing, and telecoms software development. Freeswitch is often compared with Asterisk, though Freeswitch is more scalable, especially the number of concurrent SIP registrations.

Jonathan Roper emailed me to tell me about this new auto-dialer, which works in conjunction with FreeSWITCH.


Interactive Intelligence launches Quick Spin, a Cloud-based Unified Communications Trial Program

October 17, 2011



Interactive Intelligence today launched Quick Spin, a trial program that enables organizations to try their communications-as-a-service (CaaS) service for free. Interactive Intelligence gave me a demo of Quick Spin last week and I was pretty impressed. It features unified communications (UC), auto-attendant, presence, conferencing, desktop call control, unified messaging, ACD, skills-based routing, call and screen recording, workforce management, and more.

One really interesting feature included in Quick Spin is negative and positive word/phrase analysis. Using in-house developed real-time word spotting technology, Quick Spin can flag/route a negative call ("Speak to your manager", "Cancel service") to an appropriate agent or manager.



Netflix Abandons Qwikster DVD Name - Goes Back to Unified Netflix Name

October 10, 2011

Quadruple rainbow caught on camera

October 6, 2011

Featured Events