Tom Keating : VoIP & Gadgets Blog
Tom Keating
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Free snom Flexor CTI for Outlook Application offers Advanced Telephony Features

December 11, 2008

snom and Camrivox today announced free VoIP telephony integration with Microsoft Outlook with snom Flexor CTI software for Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft Outlook is the most widely used contact manager with a market share of over 60% of email users. A free CTI app for snom's VoIP phones? I remember the days where you had to pay thousands of dollara for a CTI server.

Asterisk-based VPN in a Flash Mobile Telephony Appliance

December 8, 2008


Nerd Vittles (Ward Mundy) is the man! He just combined the popular Acer Aspire One NetBook featuring the powerful Intel Atom N270(1.60GHz) processor along with Fedora 10 and his Asterisk-based distro. Nerd just may have cooked up the perfect low-cost, powerful, GUI-rich (low overhead KDE), and portable Asterisk-based appliance! Now you can take your phone system on the road while driving, on the plane, etc.

CounterPath Launches Bria for Microsoft Outlook integrating VoIP with Outlook Contacts

December 5, 2008

CounterPath Corporation announced the launch of Bria for Microsoft Outlook, which integrates CounterPath's softphone technology directly into Microsoft Outlook. CounterPath also makes the popular (& free) SIP client called X-Lite.



The toolbar gives users easy access to VoIP call control aling with personal information manager (PIM) info stored within Outlook Contacts. On an inbound or outbound call, it will automatically perform a lookup of your Contacts to find a match so you can see exactly who you are calling or who is calling you. With a minimally invasive GUI that fits right into Outlook, an application that many users "live in" as party of their daily work, Bria for Microsoft Outlook will certainly have some interest.

According to Counterpath, "Appearing as part of Outlook's toolbar, the Bria plug-in provides a non-intrusive VoIP interface that does not infringe on the PIM's traditional three-pane design or workspace real estate - preserving the productivity benefits of Outlook while integrating value-added VoIP services."

"CounterPath is committed to enabling unified communications in a way that employs a user's favored application tools, preferred operating systems and devices, and existing telephone infrastructures," said Donovan Jones, President and CEO for CounterPath. "As Microsoft Outlook is one of the most utilized PC applications in the business market today, integrating our softphone into Outlook was a logical move and positions us to fulfill the strong demand that we are seeing from our existing channel partners as well as the overall market for this type of solution.







Sangoma Launches B600 Series of Analog Voice Cards

December 4, 2008

Rich has a great interview with Sangoma's VP Sales and Marketing, Doug Vilim about their new B600 Series of Analog voice cards, which can be used in Asterisk-based systems. Apparently, Sangoma's über customizable & modular cards can be a slight cost detriment for those that don't need such modularity.

                        B600D PCI model.

Here's a teaser from Rich's blog:

What is the reason for these new cards to be introduced?

Some of our OEM customers;  those who are building IP PBX appliances Empowered by Sangoma, often do not require the modularity, port customization and single slot expandability that our A-Series analog cards provide.  Also, four PSTN lines and one fax connection is a common configuration that creates economies of scale, which can lead to a substantial cost savings for these customers when purchasing in larger volumes.

Read full story

Also, here are the specs:
  • 4 ports of FXO and 1 Port of FXS.
  • Support for Asterisk®, FreeSWITCH™, Yate™, trixbox™, and PBX/IVR projects, as well as other Open Source and proprietary PBX, Switch, IVR, and VoIP gateway applications.
  • Single synchronous PCI interface for all ports.
  • Dimensions: 2U Form factor: 140 mm x 55 mm for use in restricted chassis.
  • Includes both standard and short half-height compatible mounting clips for installation in 2U rack-mount servers.
  • 32 bit bus master DMA data exchanges across PCI interface at 132 Mbytes/sec for minimum host processor intervention.
  • Autosense compatibility with 5 V and 3.3 V PCI busses.
  • Fully PCI 2.2 compliant, compatible with all commercially available motherboards, and shares PCI interrupts.
  • Power: 3.6 W (0.3A @ 12 V) and 1.65 W (0.5A @ 3.3 V).
  • Temperature range: 0 - 50°C.
  • Cables are included.
  • Suports Fax: Single FXS Port designed for optimum fax support.
  • Sangoma B600 cards synchronize perfectly with Sangoma's T1/E1 cards and the PSTN clock for error-free fax and modem passthrough over T1 lines.
  • Optional: DSP Echo Canceller
  • G.168-2002 echo cancellation in the hardware.
  • 1024 taps/128 ms tail per channel on all channel densities.
  • DTMF decoding and tone recognition.
  • Voice quality enhancement: music protection, acoustic echo control and adaptive noise reduction.
  • No CPU load as a result of echo cancellation.
  • No additional slot is required.









Office Communicator clients cannot communicate with AOL Contacts Problem Solved

December 2, 2008

Bittorrent Kills VoIP - Game Over Man!

December 1, 2008

An interesting article at the Register claims that a recent uTorrent decision to use UDP for P2P file transfers (instead of TCP) to get around ISP "traffic management" restrictions will cause a meltdown of the Internet. Poppycock you say?

It's worth pointing out that traditionally P2P sharing apps such as Bittorrent,  use TCP not UDP. So why would UDP cause VoIP apps to fail? Well for one huge reason, TCP allows for congestion control.

Nimbuzz VoIP app on Apple App Store

November 30, 2008

Nimbuzz is a free app that lets you call (VoIP), chat, message, and send photos, music and video on your iPhone, which was recently made available on the Apple App Store. Using a centralized contact list you can connect with all your buddies on Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ, GoogleTalk, AIM, Gadu-Gadu, StudiVZ, Hyves, Jabber and Twitter, plus popular social networks including Facebook and MySpace. It features presence (who's online and where), group calling, chatrooms, and more.

PIKA WARP Appliance Adds FreePBX Support

November 18, 2008


When I met with PIKA Technologies  at ITEXPO they told me support for FreePBX was coming. Well today, PIKA Technologies announced that PIKA WARP the Appliance is now compatible with the Asterisk-based FreePBX GUI (Graphical User Interface) application. I reviewed the PIKA Appliance recently and was pretty impressed with it. Having FreePBX support is a huge milestone for the PIKA Appliance. FreePBX is a popular user-friendly web application  that makes it easy to setup and configure Asterisk.

According to PIKA, "While customers often develop their own GUIs, many have told PIKA that if WARP were compatible with industry-standard GUIs like FreePBX, they would be much more inclined to adopt the portfolio.


Bandwidth.com invests in FreePBX

November 14, 2008

Bandwidth.com has just made an investment in FreePBX, the popular front-end interface to Asterisk-based distros. I discussed this news with Philippe Lindheimer just a couple hours ago. One of the questions I asked was if Bandwidth.com would get "preferred treatment" within the FreePBX interface, since Bandwidth.com offers SIP trunking. Obviously, if FreePBX gives Bandwidth.com a prominent position in the GUI or they make it "easier" to configure FreePBX (i.e.

Calling All Bloggers! Free Blogging on TMCnet.com

November 14, 2008

This is a call out to all bloggers out there - Rich Tehrani, my boss has extended an open invitation to bloggers interested in blogging for TMCnet.com, a leading communications/telecom site according to Alexa, Quantcast, and others.

Today, TMC launches its Blog Aid program to help people out of work stay in the public eye - in order to improve their hiring prospects in a tough economy. In the last few months, many good marketers, PR people, engineers and others who have been laid off. These potential Blog Aid bloggers have a good deal of quality commentary and information to share which could be very useful to the TMC community of online readers.

TMC is offering these new bloggers - especially those working in the communications and technology industries, a venue to voice their thoughts on the spaces where they have expertise so as to allow them access to the 2-3 million global visitors who come to TMCnet on a monthly basis.
So if you enjoy writing about communications, telecom, VoIP, wireless, unified communications, mobile, etc.
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