Sunday, February 27, 2005

VoIP News Roundup. VTech Skype cordless phone unveiled, Illinois Telephone goes NuvioCentrex, Net2Phone, ETB co-brand VoIP services, Adelphia, Rogers opt for Nortel, TW Telecom launches new voice service [Article ID: 1447-6668] By Pike and Fischer. [VoIP Monitor] 8:09:41 PM

eurovoip: VoIP carriers launch peering network. eurovoip: VoIP carriers launch peering network To me it sounds a lot like what Arbinet was supposed to do or is still setting out to do.... [VoIP Watch] 8:09:03 PM

New Social Networking Tool will Debut at Spring 2005 VON!. Next week we will be introducing a new software application to help facilitate the transition from being part of a virtual community to being part of a physical community. My hope is that with the advent of our new social networking tool, members of the Spring 2005 VON Conference Community will be able to accelerate their own face-to-face, business-to-business networking. [The Jeff Pulver Blog] 8:08:12 PM

GSM - watch VoIP. GSM - watch VoIP--James Seng in Singapore has a post about GSM, WiFi and VoIP. He quotes Mike Mulica CEO of Bridgeport Networks. If you are not familiar with Bridgeport they have some of the smartest guys in the crossover... [VoIP Watch] 8:06:59 PM

Ebay and PayPal (continued). I just got an email from eBay asking me to click thru and verify some information. It says that if I don't do this my account will be deactiviated as of March 15th. How do I know this is a... [A VC] 8:05:02 PM

P2P VoIP & Open Standards. We are starting to see some progress with a few proposed P2P VoIP drafts in the IETF. It will probably take several months but there will be a standard here and that is good news! With Skype's seemingly immense popularity the business case for P2P VoIP has been already been introduced, albeit nothing new. When we take that model and apply it using Open Standards like SIP [Session Initiation Protocol] the doors fling wide open. Imagine all of the islands of communication you are used to, e.g. IM, Voice, Video.. all coming together under one roof and a great deal of it is what some would call free! It's coming, sooner than you think and some of those solutions will be using the Xten eyeBeam SDK to do it! Keep your ears to the rails, the trains'a comin :) [SIPthat.com] 7:57:48 PM

Voice over WiFi on the Highway. It looks like VoWiFi is making inroads into mobility, this is great news for the IP communications industry. Excerpt from eWeek... I-19, the Canamex Interstate Highway, is the home of the "world's first highway Wi-Fi mobile voice and high speed data network," from Rio Rico to South of Green Valley, Arizona according to New Zealand based RoamAD, which supplied the Wi-Fi mesh software used in the network's infrastructure. more.. [SIPthat.com] 7:56:41 PM

iPods and MRIs. David Pescovitz: UCLA radiologists Osman Ratib and Antoine Rosset developed an open source iPod app to manage and move medical imaging data. Around 6,000 radiologists, surgeons, and cardiologists are now using OsiriX. From Technology Review: It automatically recognizes and lists the medical images stored on the iPod. Now, iin much the same manner that people scroll through a playlist, radiologists can scroll through a list of patients or view their records through iPod's iPhoto application.... But it's not just a novelty, a one-time joyride for medical hackers. Thirty-seven percent of the respondents say they use it every day, and 24 percent say they are likely to develop plug-ins or other upgrades to better serve their needs. While critics have leveled criticism about the iPod application, Ratib says that the patient's personal data is stripped out and assigned an anonymous identification during transport. Link [Boing Boing] 7:55:56 PM

iPodderSP is "the podcasting client for SmartPhones." [Scripting News] 7:53:43 PM

GlobalNet's Turn Key Consumer VoIP Solution Launches. Interesting news from a Latin America-based VoIP company which is launching a new service at the Miami-based VoIP show I am covering. I find it fascinating how many Latin American companies come to the Miami-based Internet Telephony Expo to launch... [VoIP Blog - VoIP News, Gadgets] 7:52:25 PM

Voxeo Launches Turnkey VoIP Platform Including IVR, Conferencing, and more. Voxeo Corporation today announced its new line of standards-based turnkey communication servers today. The new VoiceCenter Fusion Server product consolidates seven previously separate platforms into a single, integrated communications solution. Voxeo claims that it's VoiceCenter Fusion Servers are the first... [VoIP Blog - VoIP News, Gadgets] 7:51:17 PM

e.164.info interconnects 100 million phone numbers through VoIP. Interesting release to share, especially since I believe ENUM will continue to play a more and more important role in VoIP...According to an email they sent me, they state, "today marks the world's first massive deployment of a carrier... [VoIP Blog - VoIP News, Gadgets] 7:50:16 PM

ChangeThis covers "what is open source marketing?". I love the "ChangeThis" site. They have a ton of "manifestos" in Adobe PDF format (the design is beautiful). Here's one that caught my eye: "What is Open Source marketing?" [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger] 7:47:30 PM

Skype to SMS. The trickier part was getting it so a cellphone could send an SMS text message to a Skype user, but Connectotel has also worked it out so you can do the reverse, too (yeah, it’s already fairly easy to send an SMS from a PC). Basically you just add “smsgateway” to your user list, type in the number of the person you want to bother, and then enter you message and you’re good to go. [Engadget] 7:43:16 PM

Samsung to intro the i730 next month. Can we say how excited we were when we first peeped the i730, Samsung’s new EV-DO capable Pocket PC Phone? We thought we’d finally found what we were looking for—the i730 is only slightly larger than the Treo 650 and sports a 2.8-inch QVGA (240x320) 65,000 color touch screen, 64MB RAM, a 1.3 megapixel digital camera, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard—but then we played around with it. Yeah, the screen is nice, and the prospect of having EV-DO on a phone like this really, really, really appeals to us, but that slide-out keyboard (which is one of the big selling points) just wasn’t cutting it for us (typing on it wasn’t pleasant). Anyway, not that we care as much as we used to, but apparently the i730 is going to be launched at the big CTIA wireless trade show in March, with Verizon all but guaranteed to be the carrier (it really couldn’t be anybody else now, could it?). [Engadget] 7:29:32 PM

Broadband @ 70 MPH!. Last night after a very long wait at the Jacksonville Airport, I finally found a taxi to take to Amelia Island. Given the distance I had to travel, I took out my PC, launched the Verizon EVDO service and used the time to catch up on email and afterwards play a little poker. During the time I was in transit, I thought it was pretty cool that while the taxi was going at least 70 MPH, the connectivity did not miss a beat while I was playing. Broadband in the back of a Jacksonville taxi...it just works! [The Jeff Pulver Blog] 7:27:57 PM

Telecoms Fight to Curb Public Competition (AP). AP - Cities and towns from San Francisco to Philadelphia, viewing access to advanced telecommunications as pivotal to prosperity, are aggressively seeking ways to provide high-speed Internet connections, wired or wireless, for citizens and local businesses. [Yahoo! News: Technology] 7:23:20 PM

HOWTO get a CD, DVD or book listed on Amazon. Cory Doctorow: Kevin Kelly has posted a detailed explanation of the process by which you can get your self-published DVD, CD or book listed on Amazon. It's a great idea for those evangelical, get-the-message-out micro-publishing projects that have more than 10 or 20 potential customers -- you can print a couple hundred media objects at your local print-shop for a fraction of what a vanity press will charge, and then turn over all the post-office and payment crap to Amazon. 1 Get an ISBN (for a book), or a UPC (for a CD or DVD). For one book it costs $125, for one CD, $55, for one DVD, $89. 2 Get a bar code based on the ISBN or UPC. Costs $10, or may be included in UPC. 3 Sign up with Amazon, $30 per year. 4 Duplicate your stuff; include the bar code on the outside. 5 Ship two copies to Amazon 6 Send cover scan 7 Track sales 8 Resgister it (optional) Link (via Paul Boutin) Update: Jim Cowling sez, "Canadian publishers, including self-publishers, can get ISBNs for free by going to the Library and Archives Canada website." [Boing Boing] 7:20:30 PM

The latest Daily Podcast feed is up.  It contains a poem, discussion on jumping the shark, information about NY Hotel Bars, Podcast safe music from Jersey and more.  So go over to my new audioblog experiment, "The Daily Podcast Feed" and listen to some of the podcasts in it! All of the tools (GigaDial, Blogger, FeedBurner, WebJay, Smoothouse Webjay wizard, Fabricio's XSPF MusicPlayer ) I am using in my latest audioblog experiment are free and available right now on the web.  That fact opens the potential for a group of pioneer podcast feed producers to evolve using a set of open free tools.  Below is a list of descriptions of some of the tools I use to create "The Daily Podcast Feed": GigaDial  GigaDial.net is a new approach to radio programming. You can use it to create and subscribe to podcast-powered stations composed of individual episodes from your favorite podcasters. Outputs RSS 2.0 XML feeds. Blogger  Free blogging authoring software.  Enables  the distribution of Podcast feeds through the embeding of audio players and links to RSS 2.0 feeds using the weblog platformy.  Outputs an ATOM XML feed that can be inputted to other services such as FeedBurner. FeedBurner  Can converts a ATOM feed to RSS 2.0 XML file.  Using it's SmartCast feature, FeedBurner will take the first anchor (<a>) tag that it finds in your posting content and convert the linked URL into an RSS 2.0 <enclosure>.  Is the case of Audioblogging 2.0, the RSS 2.0 enclosure file type is also a RSS 2.0 file.  Feedburner turns the feed item into content that future audioblogging 2.0/podcasting clients can potentially use to produce "show channels". WebJay  Mother of all music playlist generators.  It allows you to take a RSS 2.0 file with mp3 enclosures and convert it to a XSPF playlist to feed into Fabricio's XSPF MusicPlayer. Smoothouse Webjay wizard  Assists in the generation of the correct HTML for linking/embedding a Webjay playlist in Fabricio's XSPF MusicPlayer. Fabricio's XSPF MusicPlayer XSPF Web Music Player is a flash-based web application that uses xspf playlist format to play mp3 songs. XSPF is the XML Shareable Playlist Format. The software is written in Actionscript 2. Player can be embedded into a weblog post using weblog authoring software like Blogger. Many of the tools above contain other features that do a lot more then the features I described.  My explanations  focus on the features used for creating "The Daily Podcast Feed" and what I call Audioblogging 2.0. 1:16:41 AM