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

ITEXPO

Interesting Tidbits from ITEXPO

January 30, 2014

Cisco quietly let go 50 engineers and other people responsible for their low-cost SPA line of desktop IP phones (SPA300, SPA500, etc.) - I believe back in November. The IP phones targeted the SMB and I'm told it's a $600 million business for Cisco that Cisco just decided to let go to focus on the "enterprise". Must be nice to say no to $600 million! They're still selling the SPA line of products (and may even still be manufacturing them), but there is no more development on the SPA line of IP phones.

Midokura Virtualizes Your Network to the Cloud

January 29, 2014


I met with Midokura, a company founded in Japan, in the press room at ITEXPO to learn about their network virtualization solution. Midokura offers IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) for both public and private cloud. They plug into Openstack / CloudStack / vSphere and can run them in a distributed software environment. midokura's Adam Johnson, General Manage explained how Midokura Midokura came about.

HiperPBX Bridges M2M and PBX Creating "Industrial Unified Communications"

January 29, 2014

HiperPBX's Gustavo Scheveloff, Sales Director gave me an introduction of HiperPBX at ITEXPO Miami 2014. Their solution is unique in that it's a VoIP PBX that not only features Unified Communications (UC), but it also sports some interesting M2M features. They have developed a software industrial module and defined a new concept - "Industrial Unified Communications", which leverages M2M.

It leverages mobile TCP & SNMP for monitoring devices, routers, switches and can send SMS, make a phone call or send an email if a machine has an error. In industrial environments it can be useful to monitor high temperature, humidity, switch not responding, machine under heavy load.

Xorcom Launches CXE4000 CompletePBX

October 8, 2013


At AstriCon, Xorcom today released a new hybrid (VoIP + PSTN) telephony solution called the CXE4000 featuring Xorcom's CompletePBX distro (based on Asterisk and FreePBX). The CXE4000 is a heavy-duty, stand-alone, pre-configured, out-of-the-box IP PBX It is optimized for businesses with extremely high call volumes and / or additional communication applications.

At the last ITEXPO in Las Vegas I spoke with Xorcom's Ruth Bridger who talked about their CompletePBX solution, which is based on Asterisk and FreePBX with Xorcom's secret sauce added in. I recall her mentioning how they use USB to add scalability and redundancy to their product line. Indeed, the new CXE4000 supports various combinations of telephony ports via Astribank units connected via USB2: up to 960 PSTN/analog phones ports, up to 24 E1 R2 / T1 CAS PRI ports, up to 1500 users and up to 750 concurrent calls.



Steve Wozniak Keynote Video

August 29, 2013


Steve Wozniak "the Woz", Steve Job's right-hand man was the featured keynote speaker at ITEXPO. I captured a few videos of him speaking. My plan was to capture just a single video, but my iPhone 4S rang (on vibrate) in the middle of me video recording and it stopped the video recording! Why did Apple put calling priority higher than video recording?

FreePBX World iSymphony Session 360 degree Panoramic View

August 28, 2013

FreePBX World Live Blogging

August 28, 2013

Just stopped in the FreePBX World session located at ITEXPO and it's pretty packed. Check out the photo: {click for larger}


Tony Lewis is now talking about the FreePBX ecosystem. He started off by explaining why the FreePBX tree frog logo. Tony said, "Tree frogs can only go forwards, never backwards." Well, there ya go, mystery solved!

Tony talked about how FreePBX documentation was scattered and is now centralized into a new wiki.





ALICE Receptionist Wins StartupCamp 8 at ITEXPO

August 28, 2013

StartupCamp 8, located at ITEXPO featured startups giving their product pitches, pitting one startup against another until there was one man standing. Or should I say woman, since the winner was ALICE, a cool receptionist designed for visitors to corporations that have trended away from paying for receptionists near the front door just to greet guests.

StartupCamp 8 begin with a keynote address by Jeff Bonforte Communications Platform SVP at Yahoo. Bonforte told a great story about when he previously worked Yahoo! the first time and as one of the lead negotiators, he missed an opportunity to buy Twitter for $25 million, Twitters drop-bottom dollar amount and Yahoo offered $20 million. $5 million separating Yahoo & Twitter and preventing Jeff from becoming a deal-making legend.

Microsoft Lync Session Jam Packed at ITEXPO

August 27, 2013


I just got out of a jam-packed panel discussion on Microsoft Lync - Why You Need to Develop a Migration Strategy Now. I'd share a picture but I was moderating the session, so didn't want to whip out my phone and snap a picture. But I estimated about 36 people attended the session. I even had a surprise panelist, Skip Chilcott from Microsoft making it 5 total panelists that also included Laura Neidel from Sonus, Ramon Felder from Patton Networks, Alan Percy from AudioCodes, and Jeff Dworkin from Sangoma.

As I was leaving the session I ran into a Digium / Asterisk employee who commented that the WebRTC session he attended and this Lync session were the two most well-attended panels.


Special Technology Innovation Panel at ITEXPO [VIDEO]

August 27, 2013

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 ... 29 Next
Featured Events