ITEXPO

PhoneGnome wonders - Where's the Voice 2.0 developers?

February 1, 2007

David Beckemeyer, CEO and Founder of TelEvolution has an excellent rant wondering where the Voice 2.0 developeres are. David's company productes a very cool ATA-type device called the PhoneGnome that he has allowed developers to write apps for.

David rants, "PhoneGnome has offered a free API for almost a year now. But where are the innovators?" He does mention that Iotum, one of the leading Voice 2.0 companies, has developed for the PhoneGnome, but opines "where are the rest?".

While David obviously has a vested/conflict interest in sparking some controversy about why developers haven't been breaking down his door to develop for the PhoneGnome product, he has a valid point. Where are the Voice 2.0 developers?

Well, if I may suggest David (with a vested/conflict of interest of my own), TMC's 4th Annual Communications Developer Conference (formerly VoIP Developer Conference) is just a few months away.

Posted in ITEXPO, VoIP

Skype Pro launches

January 28, 2007

Last week at ITEXPO I pointed to Rich's rumor about a possible new Skype product called Skype Pro..News and rumors abound at ITEXPO, a leading VoIP tradeshow, so it doesn't surprise me that Rich does indeed have the scoop on Skype Pro., which he culled from his sources while attending ITEXPO.

Nicely done, Rich!

Skype Pro won't charge by the minute for its SkypeOut service, but will instead charge users a €2-per-month subscription fee and €3.9 cents-per-call connection fee. You also get free voicemail - where previously it was $20/year.

Posted in ITEXPO, Skype

Toyota FJ Cruiser and Dodge Viper are the Collectibles of Tomorrow

January 26, 2007

I was reading a CNN/Money.com article the other day that listed the "hypothetical" top 10 future collectible cars in the year 2027. The list included the Dodge Viper, of which I'm a proud owner, but also a Toyoya FJ Cruiser, which was won by an attendee at the end of ITEXPO. Yet another great reason to attend ITEXPO - the chance to win a car. Wish I was eligible. The funny thing is that Rich Tehrani ran into the Toyota FJ Cruiser raffle winner while he was driving to the airport.

Posted in ITEXPO, VoIP

ITEXPO Recap

January 26, 2007

Greg Galitzine has an excellent recap of ITEXPO worth checking out.

Posted in ITEXPO, VoIP

Rich Tehrani - the man who breathes IP Communications

January 26, 2007

Rich is a man who eats, sleeps, breaths IP communications. In fact, he barely slept this week at ITEXPO since he was so busy meeting with VoIP service providers and VoIP vendors, as well as speaking at the show and walking the show floor. I'm at the show myself, but I always keep one eye on Rich's blog to see what he's writing about. This morning, Rich woke up at an ungodly hour of 3:30am and then at 5:29am Rich posted an excellent recap of all the happenings at ITEXPO.

Posted in ITEXPO, VoIP

Digium vs. Fonality Round 2

January 25, 2007

Back In October of last year, I figured out that something was up between Asterisk@Home (now Trixbox) and Fonality. Chris Lyman, the CEO of Fonality told me, "I don't know how you figured out on June 6th that we were getting involved with trixbox, but my hat goes off to you." Chris gave me the scoop that Fonality was acquiring Asterisk@Home, which sent shockwaves through the Asterisk community since Asterisk@Home was an open source GPL "free" software product and Fonality is a business looking to make money off of Asterisk.

Asterisk@Home, a turnkey, bootable CD that easily installs Asterisk in minutes quickly became a popular Asterisk distro and so there was iniitally some concern that Asterisk@Home/Trixbox would no longer be free and under GPL due to the Fonality acquisition. Fortunately, Chris has chosen to keep Trixbox under GPL, but the Asterisk@Home acquisition was the first major salvo fired in the battle between Asterisk/Digium and Trixbox/Fonality. Perhaps the second salvo was when it appeared that Digium was redirecting the old Asterisk@Home domain website to their AsteriskNOW website.

Make no mistake, Digium and Fonality are competitors.

Posted in Asterisk, ITEXPO, Polycom

ITEXPO opens and Dialogic makes their comeback

January 25, 2007

ITEXPO opened yesterday and there was even a ribbon-cutting ceremony in front of the Dialogic booth. Seeing Dialogic is a bit nostalgic for me since Dialogic was one of the first products I ever reviewed for TMC. Back in 1996 I reviewed some of Dialogic's telephony boards for CTI Magazine, including the Dialogic VFX/40 and Dialogic D/41D, a four-port analog card.

Dialogic was the leader in the telephony board space, was later acquired by Intel where they languished, then recently sold to Eicon Networks. Dialogic is now poised to make a comeback and they've chosen the premiere IP communications tradeshow, TMC's ITEXPO to make their comeback.

Posted in ITEXPO, VoIP

Actiontec VoSKY Skype Gateway adds FXS ports

January 25, 2007

Actiontec announced a new version of their VoSKY Skype gateway at ITEXPO, adding FXS functionality (previous model has FXO support). FXS support allows you to connects directly to PBX's FXS station posts, which enables you to to have global numbering plan. With the new model you can connect multiple PBXs together in various locations and have seemless dialing. Less developed countried where public IP addresses are hard to come by like Skype because of its NAT traversal.

Thus, they can use ActionTec's Skype gateway to bridge multiple PBXs with a single numbering plan.

Posted in ITEXPO, VoIP

AsteriskNow Now Has 1-Click Features

January 24, 2007

As I reported a few weeks ago when AsteriskNOW was first released, Digium planned on adding auto-provisioning for Polycom IP phones as well as a BuyNOW link for buying Polycom phones directly from the admin interface. Bill Miller, the VP of Product Management of Digium told me they were working on adding VoIP service providers to the admin interface as well, so you can have a 1-click experience. Specifically, I stated:

One of the things you will see that we're in the process of doing is adding a series of service providers that are partners of ours and add it to the GUI. The user can select their own service provider if they already have a VoIP service provider or they can get one directly from our GUI and it will be preconfigured.

Posted in Asterisk, ITEXPO, Polycom

XO Communications reaches 100,000 VoIP users benchmark

January 24, 2007

Today, XO Communications marks 100,000 business VoIP Users in over 7,500 small-to-medium businesses in the U.S. that are using their XOptions Flex service. Essentially Xoptions Flex is a SIP trunking service bundled with a broadband connection. Features include more than twenty standard voice features including voice mail, caller ID, call waiting, call forward, three-way calling, and one toll free number.

Posted in ITEXPO, VoIP

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