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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

New Skype for SIP Features Improve Business Functionality

November 9, 2009 11:12 AM |

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In December, Skype will announce some new features for Skype for SIP (beta), which will make it more business-friendly. Skype for SIP, which is now part of Skype's Business Control Panel (BCP). Skype for SIP will support DID routing by supporting the SIP To field. You will be able to add an extension number to a Skype name you used in the Skype for SIP profile. When a call is routed to the SIP PBX the extension number will be in the To field for direct routing of the call to an extension.

One fascinating feature Skype is working on is "silent keyboard", which will automatically silence your keystrokes from being sent to the remote party. As far as I know you can't decrypt the keystroke sounds into the corresponding keys, so really Skype is doing this for a better user listening experience. Kind of a cool feature, especially if you're half listening to the caller and are Tweeting, checking your Facebook page, and sending emails.

Continue reading New Skype for SIP Features Improve Business Functionality.

NimbuzzOut Launches

November 9, 2009 11:09 AM |

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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?

Skype Battle Nears End

November 4, 2009 10:53 AM |

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Gigaom reports that there is a good chance that a resolution of the lawsuit between the Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis and eBay's Skype could be announced as soon as this week.

According to Gigaom, a group of private equity investors led by Silver Lake Partners are close to settling their legal dispute with Niklas and Janus which will allow eBay to sell 65 percent of Skype for around $2 billion. This means that Index Ventures and Michelangelo Volpi, former CEO of Joost are on the "outs" to buy Skype. It's important to note that Joost also uses the proprietary P2P protocol that is the core engine used in Skype. With this knowledge of the core guts of the P2P engine, Volpi attempted to bid for Skype along with Index Ventures.

There is no love lost between Volpi and the founders of Skype who also founded Joltid. JoltId accused, "Volpi has repeatedly failed to comply with Joost's demands that the return his computer and all Confidential Information he obtained in the source of his fiducisary relationship with Joost."

According to Om, "Zennstrom and Friis will have a board seat on the newly independent Skype, which would be allowed to use JoltID's technology."

Skype Announces Open Source - Sort of...

November 3, 2009 2:41 PM |

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Slashdot was abuzz with the news that Skype was going open source. Not so fast my friend. Have you not forgotten Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis who now run JoltId are in a legal fight with Skype?

Surely Skype wouldn't be so bold as to release their P2P 'secret sauce' while still in court litigation with JoltId. Who would want to thumb their nose at the all-powerful judge? In fact, the lawsuit reads: "A source code version of the GI Software (Global Index Software) is licensed by Joltid to Joost, allowing Joost to be the first company to successfully deliver television and other video content in real-time over a peer-to-peer network. An executable-only object code form of the GI Software was licensed by Joltid to Skype, a well-known Internet-based company that providers users throughout the world with free or low-cost telephone services over the Internet. Skype did not obtain a license to the GI Software source code, however, and the license it did obtain was terminated based on Skype's breaches of the license agreement."

Well, it turns out Skype doesn't have balls of steel, but rather they are making the GUI open source on the Linux platform. Whoopdeedoo. So the graphical user interface is going open source. Move along, nothing to see here.

Blabbelon Launches HD VoIP for Video Games

November 3, 2009 9:00 AM |

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Video gamers love VoIP in video games but have often been disappointed with poor voice quality - including jitter, lag, and choppiness, inability to continue to talk via VoIP once you close the game and just an overall poor user experience. Well, Blabblelon aims to change all that with the launch of their browser-based VoIP application which uses a mix of Java and Flash to VoIP-enable any PC, Mac, or Linux computer. The beauty of Blabbelon is that it works at the browser-level, so you can VoIP your friends whether you are inside the video game or not. With Blabbelon, you can blab all you want - even start your own blab-a-thon if you want.

Blabbelon is not to be confused with Babylon where the story goes that God wasn't too pleased with the Tower of Babel the people built, so he took one common language and confounded it into many so they couldn't understand each other. Well, Blabbelon may not be a Star-Trekkian universal translator-- or some anti-Tower-of-Babel gizmo helping you to understand what that French guy who just fragged you said, but it will give you crystal clear wideband HD voice.

Leveraging Skype's wideband SILK codec the audio quality is superb. In fact, as far as I know, this marks the first time anyone has embedded the SILK codec into Java. When I interviewed Blabbelon, I asked them if anyone else had successfully embedded Skype's SILK codec within Java and they confirmed they are the first. They pointed out that it took serious coding and some tricks to get the SILK codec embedded into Java. Dean Elwood, CEO of telecom provider Voxygen Limited and chief technology strategist of Blabbelon explained they are using a LAMP architecture on the back-end and the front-end is a combination of Java and Flash. Dean said, "Because Skype is only releasing binaries and not source code. The naked binaries are not Java, so we had to do a few tricks to get Java to work nicely with binaries for Mac and Windows. It's not an easy thing to do. Getting it into the browser we had to do some work."

The browser-based VoIP chat tool not only leverages Skype's SILK super wideband audio codec, but it can handle thousands of simultaneous users - up to 7,000 in fact. According to Blabbelon, "Blabbelon provides a platform for a wide variety of users such as: gamers securely competing in team-based quests; businesses running 7,000 person global conference calls; or grandparents taunting grandkids over a game of Facebook Scrabble."

I took it for a test drive and it worked pretty well with very good voice quality. I was able to hit a "hot key", by default the right Ctrl-key and then talk to my other test account. Here's a screenshot (click for larger image):

Continue reading Blabbelon Launches HD VoIP for Video Games.

Ring2Skype Enables Free PSTN-to-Skype calls with Local Numbers

November 2, 2009 3:15 PM |

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Ring2Skype, a new startup, brings yet another way to have free calling by leveraging both Skype and the PSTN. Ring2Skype allows you to have a free local number (in NYC, London, Madrid, etc.), forwarded to your Skype (wherever you are) -- once again for FREE.

I should point out that Skype charges you for a PSTN telephone number while Ring2Skype offers you a free number. Also, Ring2Skype provides numbers in more than 100 destinations, while Skype only has about 20. You just need to select the city where you want the number and Ring2Skype emails you the telephone number, which you can share with family and friends. Example: 212-555-1000 x1000. The local phone number assigned is shared amongst other Ring2Skype users, so you have to enter an extension, but hey it's free, so you can't complain!

Skype for Cisco Interoperable with Cisco Unified Communications 500 Series

September 23, 2009 10:08 AM |

1 Comment

Skype for SIP keeps adding more SIP-based IP-PBX solutions to their interoperability list. First they had Shoretel, then SIPfoundry's sipXecs and now today they announced that they are interoperable with Cisco Unified Communications 500 Series for Small Business.

"In today's tough economy, executives of smart small and medium-sized companies realize that effective communications with customers, partners and employees are a key to helping them grow their business," said Stefan Oberg, VP and General Manager of Skype for Business. "By certifying Skype for SIP as interoperable with the Cisco Unified Communications 500 Series, we are providing a single offering that will help many SMBs around the globe save money, save time and stay ahead of the competition."

Full Story

Joost Sues Volpi for Attempting a Web-based Skype network

September 18, 2009 5:37 PM |

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Maybe the end of Skype is not near? The plot thickens as Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, both founders of Joost and Joltid, today announced that they have filed a lawsuit against Mike Volpi, Joost's former president, CEO and chairman. The suit also names his current private equity firm (and Joost investor) Index Ventures. The legal documents say that Volpi obtained confidential information in his role as CEO of Joost about how to circumvent Joltid's intellectual property - the very same intellectual property needed to run Skype.

According to Newteevee.com, "The gist of the lawsuit is that Volpi learned how to modify Joltid's proprietary software to run on the web without the aid of peer-to-peer software when he was transitioning Joost from a peer-to-peer service to a web-based Hulu clone. With this knowledge, he was able to pitch a version of Skype that buyers could take over from eBay while side-stepping ongoing litigation."

The lawsuit reads: "A source code version of the GI Software (Global Index Software) is licensed by Joltid to Joost, allowing Joost to be the first company to successfully deliver television and other video content in real-time over a peer-to-peer network. An executable-only object code form of the GI Software was licensed by Joltid to Skype, a well-known Internet-based company that providers users throughout the world with free or low-cost telephone services over the Internet. Skype did not obtain a license to the GI Software source code, however, and the license it did obtain was terminated based on Skype's breaches of the license agreement."

It goes on to say that "Volpi has repeatedly failed to comply with Joost's demands that the return his computer and all Confidential Information he obtained in the soruce of his fiducisary relationship with Joost." Wow, holding onto a corporate computer with trade secrets? Doesn't look good if this in fact true. Volpe apparently began working with Index Ventures back in May to try and acquire Skype, before stepping down from Joost in July.

So the gist of this allegation is that Volpi worked for Joost, attained the "secret P2P sauce" (source code) used in Skype, then approached Index Ventures with this trade secret, (no doubt in exchange for millions of dollars) and then with this "secret P2P sauce" in hand, Index Ventures purchased Skype for $2.75 billion. I knew there was no way someone would waste $2.75 billion without having an ace up their sleeve! We shall see if Index Ventures has a royal flush to beat Joltid's four aces.

The lawsuit is below (ditto Newteevee's thanks to TechCrunch for posting an embeddable version):

For more read Techcrunch and NewTeevee

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