I've just arrived at Emerging Telephony. Today various workshops and discussions are happening, tomorrow the conference formally starts. I've ducked in to an Asterisk hacks session. Not sure what I'll find. What I'm seeking is a sense of how adventuous the Asterisk community is and where they are going. There is a good crowd already here. I'd guess O'Reilly will be very happy with 1st show attendance. In the end I'm not sure how much I really learned from this session.

The session moderator is introducing this session on Asterisk, VoIP, and other great hacks. He says telecom has been an adjunct to the systems in the company. Stop thinking about it like a telephone. Let's take a look at what is possible. [Ed: spelling correction. The soft PBX is spelled Asterisk, whereas Asterix refers to the pint sized Gaul of comic book fame.]

This is introduced by Steven Mueller (Sun Labs), who begins talking about the idea of auto provisioning. He descibes it as an easy method to get a new telephones / handsets online and into the Sun network. I'd expect that auto provisioning is automatic. Unfortunately his story shows things are not as simple as this. In this system it is important to be able to update the phone from the center. I can't help but thinking this method is obsolete. The validation system used is likely to be confusing to users. It's obvious that a find me follow me solution would be preferred by users. Summary he's done a neat hack that adds flexibility to his traditional VoIP system and simplifies provisioning. Still I can't help thinking that "softphone" based systems have to end up cheaper.

Christian AstLinux embedded distribution for running Asterix. Allows you to experiment with Asterisk and Linux without leaving your current operating system. Looking on the site it appear this provides a very small footprint and could be run off a USB stick. Still he's talking another language for me. I've had a few pointers recently pointing me to Asterisk options. I'm certainly considering a little "learning by doing" project.

Simon Ditner from Toronto has taken the game Zork and added speech recognition to it. It's been done with Asterisk. It's a fun demo, still complete with bugs. He's using Sphinx2 for the voice recognition portion. There's a good debate on whether there is a commercial application for this. It looks like a wonderful way to me to create a new type of game genre. The mobile operators would love the minutes used online --- talking to a game! Nice.

Raph is taking about Clicktodial, something that I've integrated into my Firefox browser. It just adds a hyperlink to phone numbers on any page and then your skype client or another phone can be set to dial. In this case he has hooked it to SunRocket. He also demonstrates how to do it to any phone number on your desktop. For Skypers using Skylook or the Skype Outlook plug-in this functionality is already common place. It's certainly convenient and it helps the user understanding in merging the computer and telephony.

Ted Wallingford was going to do a presenation on Skype as an attempt. He is not online. Interestingly the moderator has only just today downloaded Skype. That tells me something. I wonder how many more in the audience are like this? Apparently no one from Skype is presenting here. I don't know if anyone from Skype is attending. I think Skype missed an opportunity. They should be here.

Tag : etel

Ebay

First off, Ebay finished buying Skype last week. Skype Technologies, S.A., is still a stand alone company, but Ebay owns all the stock. Just over a month from the announcement; speedy, neh?

Steve Dzemidzenka tips us to an ISP-Planet interview with a company that offers pay-per-call advertising on Ebay (vs. pay-per-click); a great read and with one or two insights into models Skype may enable. A related AP story: Online ads urge surfers to pick up the telephone.

Some folks don't like Skype

Skype is still banned on university campuses in France. (Thanks, Alain.) Verso is still selling a filter to block Skype traffic. (Thanks, Mr. Harvey.) Qatar is still blocking Skype software downloads and Skype purchases. (Thanks, Jeff) Can you suggest a reliable way to tell if my Skype traffic is blocked?

From the Skype Ecology

Ipevo launched a family of Skype Certified phones last week, shortly after Linksys and Skype announced a co-branded Skype-only mobile handset and base station. While Skype says the Linksys is certified (via SparkPR), you wouldn't know it by reading the Linksys product literature, the Skype news release, or the product page on Amazon. Everyone else pays dearly for the Skype Certification and brags about it mercilessly; why not Linksys?

Look2Skype, the Outlook plug-in, is upgraded.

Maintaining the key benefit of Look2Skype which is the minimal inteference with Outlook, whereby it doesn't cause it to crash, or slow it down. Some of the new features are:

1. Instant access to all skype contacts from Outlook.
2. Extract callto:// signatures from e-mail.
3. Auto-recognise of skype contacts from e-mails.
4. Free text entry of phone numbers or skype names for contacting. Stewart Bissett

Recovery 2.0

This disaster is in a war zone.

• Families in Kashmir prevailed upon Indian authorities' better natures to open up cross-border phone service, normally carefully scheduled and monitored for security reasons.
• Volunteers are setting up a QuakeHelp Relief Hotline using SMS. Skype was unable to help with a voice line this time (they helped in Katrina relief) because they don't have SkypeIn services in India. Good sources: QuakeHelp and the QuakeHelp blog.
• Pakistan banned public access to satellite imagery of the disaster zone. Security. In a fight-or-flight, clench or relax, response, one or the other response is better. Restricting geo information breaks the decentralized operation of the Internet. You want to open up resources and remove obstacles for the many thousands of online volunteers who can put that data to work. Fortunately, relief workers voices persuaded the UN to re-publish much of the imagery and data. A win for emergent organization.
• The term "Recovery 2.0" is a flexible set of online tools and behaviors that can help invidividuals and groups organize themselves around any crisis. I've proposed a few possible projects on the wiki (feel free to register and add your own):
  • Phone Bank Network; the telephone remains the dominant way people communicate. We need tools to deploy volunteer phone banks that scale rapidly and cheaply.
  • Emergent Relay Service; provide a framework for live interpretation for cross-language and cross-mode communications.
  • Wish I could take credit: Mesh-Networking Cellphones; Why aren't there ad-hoc battery-powered "cell towers in a barrel" that could be "bombed" or floated into disaster zones to turn the thousands of useless cell phones in people's pockets into a crisis mesh network?

Skype at Work

Enterprise Skype isn't even vaporware, but the need is real. For example:

I was wondering if there exists a Skype Proxy server for enterprise use? Essentially, all Skype traffic would flow through this edge device, but would also allow for Skype-to-Skype traffic to stay internal to an organization without having to contact SuperNodes. HTTPS Proxies don't really provide any control of Skype traffic since they blindly pass all traffic since it's so volitile.

Also, is there a product that will allow multiple Skype clients to connect to a PBX simultaneously? Thus, be able to make calls from a Skype client to any phone on the PBX. I've seen some hardware solutions, but they seem primitive and only allow 1:1 communication. I'm looking for large scale many:many.

Thanks, Joe Schwendt

Another case:

Hi guys, I run a 450 person company's IT department. Yesterday Verizon had a man-hole fire and cut our lines completely, so we were phone-less for the whole day. We're a financial services company so you can imagine how freaked out everyone was.

What I was thinking last night is, what if Skype had a great enterprise version, that we could purchase 50 accounts for, and get them set up, distribute mics to our top 50 offices and have a back-up plan immediately in effect

Help Wanted:

We're always glad to post job listings of interest to the Skype Journal community.

Hi. We are currently looking for an Asterisk developer who has experience in integrating Skype to an Asterisk-powered IVR.

Skype me and I'll pass along your interest.

How would you like a multi-line 800 number? Just about for free. Maybe multiple 800 numbers placed in strategic geographical places around the globe for your customers to call you for free and you pay all most nothing.

If you have a SkypeIn account and the latest Skype 4 Windows beta with Call Forwarding then you already have that 800 number! 1.4.0.56 (get it here)
Yes, you read correctly... one SkypeIn number handles multiple concurrent callers!

And since you can now use Skype’s Call Forward function, these additional calls (up to three) can be handed off to other Skype Clients or devices: mobile phones, landlines or to your businesses PBX .

You will pay SkypeOut rates for calls forwarded to non-Skype IDs. Tomorrow I will show how these 4 to 8 of these calls can be passed for free to your company’s PBX.

This has some neat possibilities! Once connected to your PBX you can handle unlimited calls at no cost per call.