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Tom Keating
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Digium podcast of Mark Spencer's new role

January 30, 2007

Mark Spencer, founder of the Asterisk movement, lead off the conference call by saying, "Today is one of the most exciting days in the history of the company." Them's some mighty big words! Mark explained that this came about while searching for a COO and VP of Business Development and they were then approached with something even more exciting.

Mark explained why Digium hired a new CEO and why Mark changed his role within Digium. Mark, "When you start a company and you're just one person, you have to do everything yourself and that is the history of Asterisk got started really - because I needed my own phone system and they were too expensive to go out and buy one. But as you grow, you have to start delegate stuff out. 

Install Asterisk Business Edition on Fedora Core 5 or 6

January 16, 2007

trixbox 2.0 webinar

January 4, 2007

Boy, I'm on a tear writing about Asterisk-based solutions the past couple days. In any event, wanted to point out that SmithOnVoIP mentioned to me that Fonality is offering a free webinar on trixbox 2.0, which covers "the basic aspects and features of trixbox." Installation and troubleshooting are two of the more interesting topics. I should ping Chris Lyman, CEO of Fonality and tell him to work with some of our TMC sales staff in marketing Fonality's trixbox webinar. TMC has the best list rentals in the VoIP industry since we have the most qualified readers due to ITExpo, Internet Telephony Magazine, Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine, etc.

TMC actually partners with vendors to offer webinars hosted by TMC. Not sure how much TMC charges, but I do know we often bring >100 people to some pretty obscure webinars.

Of course, the free publicity I just gave this trixbox webinar will probably give Chris a "bump" in his webinar attendees.



Digium releases AsteriskNOW

January 3, 2007

Digium today released AsteriskNOW, a turnkey easy-to-use version of Asterisk with a web-based GUI that they claim can get a working version of Asterisk up-and-running in 30 minutes. AsteriskNOW is Digium's answer to the

BlueWave Telecom Hosted Asterisk solution

January 3, 2007

I recently met with BlueWave Telecom, a company just coming out of "stealth marketing" to learn about VoIPFlow 2.0, a software platform that enables service providers to provision and manage hundreds of virtual PBXs leveraging a 64-bit version of Asterisk. Basically, VoIPFlow 2.0 enables 100% hosted Asterisk IP-PBXs. It actually runs virtual instances of Asterisk for each customer using open-source virtualization software. Since each Asterisk instance is "virtualized" if one instance crashes or fails, it doesn't bring down all the other Asterisk instances. VoiceFlow also has clustering for redundancy.

One of their key advantages is that they've developed an interface to manage hundreds of virtual Asterisk PBXs making it easy for service providers to manage their customers.

speaQ SIP softphone for Mobile Phones

November 15, 2006

speaQ is a new softphone application designed to make VoIP calls using WiFi or EVDO on mobile devices. Created by QTech, Inc., they claim it was designed from the start for smartphones and PDAs, which have limited processing power. It currently runs on Windows Mobile 5.0 Devices and under Linux on the Sharp Zaurus.

If you have a SIP-based Broadvoice or other SIP-based VoIP phone service account, Alpha Trial speaQ provides a simple phone interface with full call logging, contact integration, and DTMF (touch tones), on any 300Mhz+ Windows Mobile devices, such as the Palm Treo 700w, HP Ipaq 2495, etc. or under Linux on the Sharp Zaurus 5600.

trixbox 2.0 released

October 25, 2006

trixbox 2.0 beta will be available for download on Wednesday. This release will be Fonality's first big contribution to the trixbox/Asterisk community after the recent Fonality acquisition of trixbox. which certainly caused a stir within the Asterisk community. I spoke with Chris Lyman, CEO of Fonality, to find out more about this major new release of trixbox.

First, I should point out that while previous version of trixbox have always been the easiest way to get Asterisk up and running in just minutes, trixbox 2.0 is much more than that. 

Pingtel and Voxbone interoperate

October 13, 2006

Pingtel, a provider of open source, Linux-based enterprise VoIP solutions, and Voxbone, a provider of international VoIP origination services will announce on Monday the completion of interoperability testing between their respective offerings. As a result of this certification, customers can select Pingtel's SIPxchange IP-PBX VoIP software solution in combination with Voxbone's call origination services and thereby benefit from cost-effective calls routed to a SIP-based device (IP-phone, IP-PBX, etc.).

When a customer is in need of an international presence the customer interconnects via VoIP to the closest Voxbone POP. Voxbone then allocates the desired amount of numbers and capacity to the customer. When someone calls to one of these numbers Voxbone forwards the call via VoIP to the customer.

Running into fellow VoIP bloggers and some VoIP news

October 10, 2006

I just arrived in sunny San Diego after a very turbulent JetBlue flight from JFK airport. Although it was a bumpy ride, the 37 channels of DirecTV certainly helped pass the 5hrs and 40 minutes away. After arriving at my hotel, I learned my room wasn't ready, so decided to head on over to the convention center to check out what was happening on the first day of Internet Telephony Conference & Expo. Since I couldn't check in and change into business attire (a suit), I headed over wearing a casual short-sleeve polo shirt, jeans, and sneakers. There should be a rule that VoIP bloggers don't have to wear suits anyway.

Fonality acquires trixbox

October 3, 2006

Fonality will announce tomorrow that they have acquired trixbox, formerly known as Asterisk@Home, and the the world's largest Asterisk-based community. Trixbox is a turn-key, bootable .iso CD image that can turn a PC with no OS into an Asterisk server with a variety of open source tools in just a few minutes. The trixbox application lets someone download a bootable .iso image that then automatically installs Linux, Asterisk, SugarCRM, MySQL, FreePBX, and a whole variety of other applications. Trixbox fully supports the Linux yum command and RPM ecosystem for performing updates and bug fixes.

Essentially, trixbox uses the latest and greatest version of Asterisk.

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