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VoIP in Google ChromeOS

November 20, 2009 9:24 AM |

Google released their ChromeOS operating system yesterday. So naturally, as a VoIP fan I was curious if ChromeOS could run VoIP. Since Google's ChromeOS has a Flash Player built-in, in theory it can run a Flash-based VoIP client. The first VoIP solution that came to mind was Flaphone (formerly Flashphone), a Flash-based VoIP app which runs in a browser. I first discovered Flaphone back in 2007 and did a review of it.

Well, it appears that Flaphone works in ChromeOS. It's worth noting that Flaphone can make VoIP calls to PSTN numbers using any SIP provider you want. Just enter the SIP credentials and away you go! You can also make calls to Skype and Flaphone's callme button widgets also work in ChromeOS.

Update: Looks like TringMe is jumping on the Goolge ChromeOS news as well. Just got an email from their CEO claiming they are "first" to have VoIP in ChromeOS. Well, not to burst your bubble, but Flaphone supports it as well. Let's just call it a tie for "first" and call it a day.

Google has just released the first version of ChromeOS. Give that it is a browser-based OS, one of the key element - that of Voice & Telephony is missing in it. As of now, there is no native VoIP application on it (at least not in the VmWare image which was released). TringMe's Flash Telephony is the first one to support VoIP calls on ChromeOS seamlessly. TringMe enables true VoIP calls directly from ChromeOS without having to install anything.

Although, TringMe has not done nothing special to support ChromeOS, it is important to note that TringMe's Flash Phone and Widgets work seamlessly in ChromeOS. TringMe enables true VoIP calls directly from ChromeOS without having to install anything. We've tested it and the built-in Flash Player 10 is sufficient for enough for TringMe's Phone and Widgets to work well.

So, we are all excited about ChromeOS and feel extremely happy that our Flash telephony technology is working well for ChromeOS without any special needs.

Best
Yusuf
Founder & CEO, TringMe

Via Flaphone blog

Watch a Microsoft Operating Systems Video Timeline

November 19, 2009 9:48 AM |

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Microsoft's operating system have evolved quite a bit since the 1980s when they launched their first operating system. Ah, who doesn't miss Microsoft DOS? Gimme my DOS command shell, .bat files, QEMM expanded memory manager, Stacker disk compression (a requirement due to small hard drives back then), and all the other MS-DOS goodies any day of the week and I'm a happy man. Ohh the nostalgia!

Watch the Youtube video timelines below showing how Microsoft has developed their operating systems over the last 20+ years. We went from Microsoft DOS with a rudimentary (but beloved) command line GUI, to a visual Microsoft operating system with Microsoft 1.0. This was followed by Windows 3.0 & 3.1 to Windows 95 & 98 to Windows 2000. Next came Windows XP followed by the much-maligned Windows Vista to the the now superior Windows 7.

Continue reading Watch a Microsoft Operating Systems Video Timeline.

fring for Google Android Launches

November 18, 2009 10:10 AM |

2 Comments

fring is finally available for the Google Android. It's about time! One drawback though is that SIP and SkypeOut calls are not yet available on Droid devices. There's always a catch...

In addition to Skype chat and Skype-to-Skype VoIP calling you also get MSN and GoogleTalk support, real-time presence and live chat with ICQ, Yahoo! and AIM buddies as well. fring even has Twitter support. fring on Android works over 3G, GPRS or Wi-Fi connections.

So how do you get it?

Two ways:

1) From Android Market
Start the Market application on your phone
Search for fring and install

2) From WAP on your phone
On your Android phone, go to Settings > Applications and check the box to allow 'unknown sources'
Point your phone browser to fring.com and download fring manually

Check out the video:

Via fring blog

Run Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Virtualized

November 13, 2009 12:49 PM |

1 Comment

According to Microsoft, Office Communications Server 2007 R2 can now be deployed onto Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, or onto any virtualization solution that is a certified partner through the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) certified partners. Running OCS 2007 R2 "virtualized" is a hot topic, so knowing exactly how and which components can be virtualized is crucial so you're not banging your head against the wall wondering why it isn't working.

Well, the good news is that it supports the following workloads virtualized:

Presence
IM (including conferencing, remote access, federation, and Public IM Connectivity)
Group Chat

Today, Microsoft released a whitepaper which identifies which server roles are supported in a virtualized environment and it provides guidance for scaling users and workloads in a virtualized environment. Best to let Microsoft spend the time testing and determining the results rather than you doing all the effort. Well, the good news is that their whitepaper document reveals the results of a series of configurations that were run in a Hyper-V environment to validate that Office Communications Server on Hyper-V provides stable performance and scalability for production use.

So whatcha waitin' for? Go download the whitepaper and then start virtualizing your OCS 2007 R2 topology!

Digium CEO Danny Windham to Deliver Keynote Address at ITEXPO East 2010 in Miami

November 9, 2009 11:25 AM |

1 Comment

Some good internal news at TMC. Technology Marketing Corporation today announced that Digium CEO Danny Windham has accepted its invitation to deliver a Keynote Address at ITEXPO East 2010, taking place Jan. 20-22, 2010 at the Miami Beach Convention Center in Miami, Florida.

Windham's presentation, which takes place Thursday, Jan. 21 9:45 a.m. EST, will address the evolution of Open Source as a mature telephony platform that is experiencing extensive growth in enterprise, government and carrier markets. Open to all ITEXPO attendees, this session will also be a centerpiece of the fourth annual Digium|Asterisk World conference, which is collocated with ITEXPO East 2010.

ITEXPO is the world's largest conference and trade show focused on communications and technology. Launched in 1999, the event is expected to draw as many as 200 exhibiting companies and more than 7,000 attendees to Miami.

"Developers, resellers, IT professionals and executives will benefit from hearing Danny's views on the increasing number of opportunities based on Asterisk, the world's most popular open source telephony software," said Rich Tehrani, CEO and group editor-in-chief of TMC. "ITEXPO and Digium|Asterisk World will expand on this notion, with three days of content, education and training for anyone interested in learning more about open source telephony."

Digium is the creator, sponsor and primary developer of Asterisk. Digium offers Asterisk software free to the open source community and offers Asterisk Business Edition and Switchvox IP PBX software to power a broad family of products for small, medium and large businesses. The company's product line includes a wide range of hardware and software to enable resellers and customers to implement turnkey VoIP systems or to design their own custom telephony solutions.

Windham joined Digium in February 2007 as CEO. He is responsible for setting the company's corporate strategy, and executing its day to day business operations. Prior to joining Digium, Windham served as president and chief operating officer of ADTRAN, a global provider of networking and communications equipment. He joined ADTRAN in 1989, following ADTRAN's successful acquisition of Processing Telecom Technologies, a company Windham co-founded in 1986. Windham holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Mississippi State University, where he was named a Distinguished Engineering Fellow in 2001 and he also holds an MBA from the Florida Institute of Technology.

"Whether building a corporate phone system from the ground up, or extending the functionality of a legacy telephony system, organizations of all sizes are increasingly turning to open source VoIP as a flexible and inexpensive solution," said Windham. "I'm honored to be delivering the keynote at ITEXPO East 2010 and sharing some of the great accomplishments of open source in the enterprise with attendees."

Registration for ITEXPO and Digium|Asterisk World remain open. Vendors interested in participating in ITEXPO or Digium|Asterisk World should contact Joe Fabiano at 203-852-6800 x132.

NimbuzzOut Launches

November 9, 2009 11:09 AM |

2 Comments

Nimbuzz, has entered the PSTN termination business with the announcement today of NimbuzzOut. I use Nimbuzz on my iPhone because it's a great aggregator of various VoIP, IM, and social services, including Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, Google Talk (Orkut), AIM, Facebook, MySpace and more. Nimbuzz had been leveraging other networks such as Skype for voice, but this marks the first time Nimbuzz offers their own termination. Finally, a business revenue-generating model??

NimbuzzOut Credits will be available for purchase at www.nimbuzzout.com, and is available on Symbian, iPhone and iPod Touch handsets and rolling out to others later this year.

Nimbuzz claims, "more than 10 million registrations of the application since launch, a current growth rate of more than a million new registrations each month (that's a new Nimbuzz user every 3 seconds!), a daily active user base of over 30% and an international user footprint covering every corner of the globe."

Nimbuzz founder & CEO, Evert-Jaap Lugt said of the NimbuzzOut launch: "High value, high quality voice calling is positioned at the heart of our value proposition, making NimbuzzOut the most natural commercial extension of our product. This offers fantastic value to our users, especially those who wish to communicate regularly with friends and family abroad at the lowest possible prices. This is all part of our strategy to give Nimbuzz users control of their mobile lives and the freedom they want and deserve."

Mashup Google Wave, Skype, and Asterisk = Ultimate Coolness

November 5, 2009 2:10 PM |

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Skype Journal wrote about one of the coolest mashups I've ever seen. Certainly one of the coolest VoIP mashups. Skype Journal explains PhoneFromHere Tim Panton's demo that he gave at Astricon where Tim mashes up Google Wave, Skype, Asterisk running Skype for Asterisk and Ibook to make Skype calls from within a browser-based Google Wave.

Not only is it sans Skype client, but it has recordings (labeled by person speaking) of individual utterances, so you can quickly playback what a particular person said at a certain point in time.

It's amazing to make a Skype call from a browser without running the Skype client. How do you ask? Well, it uses a browser-based Skype client using a IAX2 Java client to communicate with Asterisk which then communicates with the Skype network cloud. On top of it all you get Google Wave's powerful collaboration capabilities.

Perhaps some IP address geocoding combined with Google Maps to show the speakers' locations might be nice addition to this mashup. Or even pulling down Facebook profile pictures. There is definitely some awesome potential for this.

Maybe Google can even stick your Google Wave/Skype/Asterisk collaboration sessions into their newly released, centralized, Borg/hive, data-collecting, privacy-busting Google Dashboard?

Ribbit Mobile Launches

November 3, 2009 9:59 AM |

3 Comments

Ribbit today announced the release of Ribbit Mobile, a free communication suite designed for mobile professionals who need to be able to easily manage all of their phone numbers, communication devices, and how & when they are contacted.

Ribbit Mobile is a cloud-based service that lets you manage calls, messages and phones. It's hard not to compare this new offering to Google Voice. One advantage of Ribbit Mobile is that it can make calls from within your browser using their Flash-based software client. Ribbit Mobile features include voicemail transcription, smart call routing, and web-based calling. During the introductory (beta) period, Ribbit is making their "Professional" package free.

Since it leverages Ribbit's open VoIP platform, it can even call your Skype, MSN or Google Talk account, as well as SIP devices.

Additionally, when a new voicemail arrives, Ribbit can notify you via email, Google Talk, Skype, or SMS. Ribbit Mobile transcribes voicemail to text and sends it to you via SMS and email. It also provides a web portal inbox where messages can be managed and stored forever. No voicemail retention limit which is nice.

Ribbit Mobile also has something they like to call "Caller ID 2.0" which links your Ribbit contacts address book with your contact's Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Flickr accounts. You can see recent updates made by your contacts to their social networks and pictures of your contacts as seen here:

Microsemi Launches Captain Marvel-proof PoE Midspan

October 21, 2009 12:00 AM |

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Today, Microsemi is launching a new line of midspans which feature integrated lightning protection. This marks the first time a PoE midspan features lightning protection. As more and more PoE devices are used outdoors, including outdoor wireless Access Points (APs), outdoor security cameras, and more, having

lightning protection is critical. One lightning bolt strike and it can wipe out your entire networking and IT infrastructure. While lightning is great & all since it bestows Captain Marvel his super powers, when it comes to networking equipment, not so much.

The new PowerDsine 9001G-40/SP is a single-port, high-power Gigabit solution for remotely powering both current and emerging high-power networking terminals and equipment while also providing surge protection optimized for outdoor devices such as security cameras and wireless LAN access points.

Rear product view

According to Microsemi, "Until now, PoE could only be deployed safely outdoors with a costly surge-protection unit installed alongside it, to prevent direct or nearby lightning strikes from damaging or destroying both the powered devices and their network switch. Surge and lightning protection units can cost from $250 to $400."

"A high percentage of outdoor PoE installations, especially in the enterprise, do not implement surge protection units because of their high cost or a lack of awareness," said Sani Ronen, senior product manager for Microsemi's PowerDsine midspans. "Nearby lightning strikes are much more common than most people think. Strikes as far as a mile away can induce a voltage level that can damage outdoor devices. Without lightning protection, surges also can move quickly along the Ethernet cable to damage expensive indoor network switches. Our new midspan delivers that protection at a cost savings of as much as 50 percent."

Microsemi's newest midspan has been tested successfully to the GR-1089 lightning standard for surges up to 2500V/500A. It can power devices designed for either the IEEE 802.3af standard, or the recently ratified IEEE802.3at standard for high power over Ethernet applications.

The 9001G-40/SP offers up to 40W of power which means it can support power-hungry devices such as 802.11n access points, pan-tilt-zoom cameras and WiMAX customer premises equipment.

"The 9001G-40/SP was designed to deliver the latest benefits of the new high-power 802.3at standard while also offering a cost-effective, single-box solution for powering and simultaneously protecting outdoor PoE systems from lightning damage or destruction," Ronen said.

KEY FEATURES
- Interoperability with IEEE802.3af and IEEE802.3at devices
- Lightning protection up to 2500V/500A
- 10/100/100-BaseT support

Pricing and Availability
The PD-9001G-40/SP Midspan is available in production for a unit list price of $119. Additional information is available at Microsemi's website here: http://www.microsemi/PowerDsine.com.

Don't install KB974571 or You will Break Microsoft OCS 2007!

October 14, 2009 10:25 AM |

3 Comments

If you're running Office Communications Server or LCS whatever you do, don't install KB974571 or you will cause the LCS or OCS server to state you are running the evaluation version and then say it has expired. Poof! - There goes your corporate unified communications (UC) followed by a parade of your coworkers carrying pitchforks & torches looking to find out why their UC isn't working. How widespread this patch is affecting OCS/LCS installs worldwide is unknown.

KB97451 is also known as "MS09-056: Vulnerabilities in CryptoAPI could allow spoofing" and it was released just yesterday on Patch Tuesday. If you use WSUS or Windows Update to automatically download/install patches, you might be surprised this Wednesday morning to find your OCS/LCS server has failed. Didn't we have Patch Tuesday cause another major outage? (See: Skype Outage & Skype Outage caused by Windows Update)

If you apply the patch, the LCS/OCS services fail to start and you see these errors in the event log:

Event Type:        Error
Event Source:    Live Communications Server
Event Category:                (1000)
Event ID:              12290
Description:
The evaluation period for Microsoft Office Live Communication Server 2005 has expired. Obtain the released version of this product and upgrade to the non-evaluation version by running setup.exe

Uninstalling the patch is the only way to fix it. According to the Microsoft OCS blog, "The issue is currently being escalated, but until a fix can be found, delaying the install of KB974571 is recommended."

You can also read more about it here.

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Tom Keating posted VoIP in Google ChromeOS 2009-11-20T16:05:30Z 2009-11-20T14:24:21Z
Tom Keating tweeted, "VoIP in Google ChromeOS: Google released their ChromeOS operating system yesterday. So naturally, as a VoIP fan I w... http://bit.ly/3T68Ox" 2009-11-20T14:23:33Z 2009-11-20T14:23:33Z

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More...

precoz: I am wondering, if the VOIP market is still increasing read more
Dustin: But that's not the point at all. The majority of read more
commangerYEK: Nicely done! read more
bstella: How did you get an email address to write to read more
Paul: Hi Mike, For Cisco (and normal SIP) passive VoIP recording read more
redshirt6: Yes, dying to know if it worked! rs6 read more
bruno.clermont: SkypeOut work only if I added their phone number as read more
bruno.clermont: I just installed it and try to do some call. read more
Kris: Tom, I'm curious. Did you ever get any resolution on read more
dsi r4: This is the age of smart phone.Nimbuzz launches it's phone read more