12/31/08

Mobile VoIP going Mainstream

Business week has come up with an article about Mobile VoIP and some of the players that are ruling the roost in this arena. What this mean is that Mobile VoIP is gaining momentum and mainstream is recognizing the potential in this technology. From a technology standpoint, this has been there for a long time. What wasn't available was a good wireless data network bandwidth to carry voice packets. Earlier it was GPRS and with the evolution of EDGE, HSDPA, 3G, CDMA rev-a, data bandwidth has gained a big boost. I guess what matters to the users trying out these mobile apps is the QOS and with the right bandwidth, you can get a very good voice quality. Check out my earlier article on different Mobile VoIP calling options


Business week sites how users could save lot of money using applications like Gorilla Mobile that relies on Internet-based technology. Some of the applications like truphone, fring, mig33 support free calling if both the originator and the recipient have their clients installed. Basically this bypasses operator's circuit switch network completely. ( Truphone as a MVNO 2.0 ) Off course this is worrisome to the operator. For those consumers who make lot of international calls and national calls with limited voice calling plans, Mobile VoIP is a blessing and big time money saver. What this means is- u could just get a unlimited data plan and basic voice plan and use one of these clients to make voice calls.

Acoording to the article:

Wireless carriers are expected to generate $700.7 billion in sales of voice services this year, according to consulting firm Ovum. Still, carriers in the fiercely competitive mobile-phone industry will be none too pleased with newcomers snapping up a portion of the almost one-quarter of all wireless minutes now devoted to long-distance and international calls. Insight Research estimates that together, international and long distance will make up 24% of the 1.2 billion wireless minutes used this year.


From a business standpoint, Telco operators are not gone sit and watch some third-party apps use their wireless data network and eat away their voice revenue, which is already taking a beating. I have mentioned this earlier many a times in my earlier articles about why operators would do anything to block Mobile VoIP calls. The recent dogfight between truphone and T-Mobile, Nokia dropping VoIP capability and Apple no iPhone SDK support for VoIP calls over wireless data network clearly proves the point. T-Mobile supports WIFI based calling via their own hotspots, caveat is, u need to pay $10 dollars for additional calling plan. Another point to mention here is that with unlimited voice calling minutes becoming cheaper day by day, using these apps makes more sense when u make more international calls. Also, Mobile VoIP would make perfect sense for corporate users who make lot of voice calls. We have seen lot of innovation in this arena FMC, UC, Femtocel. Not sure if any of these technology made big headways.

End of the day, all these apps are at the mercy of Operators. They have the potential to block any app that threatens their revenue.


View article...

Talibans abusing VoIP Skype client

This doesn't sound like good news to skype. They were able to get away with their encrypted signaling and media protocol for so long. However, with the latest news of Taliban's using skype to coordinate attacks against British and American troops will force them to work with the law enforcement officials

So what does it mean to support LI (Lawful Intercept) - Current mobile and landline calls can be wiretapped by a LI officers and listen to the conversation. The voice sample here is not packetized. It's a normal TDM(Time Division Multiplez) PCM sample. Off course this requires that the suspect in voice conversation is the target and an approval is procured for wiretapping. In case of VoIP calls, and especially skype calls, the media or voice packets are encrypted and packetized. In order to listen to the conversation, you need to be able to decrypt the packet, which requires the understanding of the protocol. This is one of the big problems with the proprietary protocols. I'm surprised that FCC has not forced skype to support CALEA. Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act

Some tidbits from the news:

'The trouble with this technology is that it is easily available but devilishly hard to crack,' the source said. 'The technology can now be accessed on mobile internet devices and the country's mobile phone network is expanding rapidly.'

Sir David Pepper, the head of GCHQ, the British Government's top-secret listening post, has told MPs that internet calls are 'seriously undermining' his organization's ability to intercept communications.


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High-Def conference startup Vapps acquired




Citrix systems gobbled Vapps, a startup that provides audio and video conference for 26.6 million dollar cash. In the troubled times where we hear only about layoffs and company closures, these kind of news is soothing. High definition voice is nothing but good voice quality, which is achieved by recording the voice at a higher sampling rate (16KHZ). Also, "wideband" codec's are used to for the voice calls to support high quality voice. Check out the website for more information on High Def conference

Here are some of the features supported by Vapps hi-def conferencing:
• Max 25 participants in a conference
• Free Web Controls, Recording & Hand-raising
• No Reservations needed
• Skype Call Duration – Unlimited
Skype participants have no additional charges and can call in for an unlimited amount of time

Azure which is one of the biggest investor in Vapps, said that it got a 3.6 times return on its investment over 18 months. So this turned out to be a good investment for azure.

Hope we get to hear more M&A news such as this. In the troubled times, keeping ourselves positive is very important. Though the acquisition amount may not be bigger, but it does convey the message that there is still lot of money with big companies.

 

Web telephony platform arena gaining momentum












Looks like web telephony platform startups are doing great in these troubled times. Earlier BT acquired ribbit , the – "Silicon Valley's First Phone Company" startup. Last week another platform player intelepeer raised $18 million dollars to expand their business across different regions. This week, ifbyphone announced series B funding of $4.6 million. Existing investors Origin Ventures and Apex Ventures led this round as well. These platforms expose API's using which developers can build web apps enabled with voice/sms/messaging. The good thing about these API's are, they enable developing complex apps very quickly without the need to understand the core telecom technology. This, by itself, is a big game changer. Another web telephony platform startup jajah has been quite for sometime now. Either jajah is up to something big or they are lost in the economy turmoil.

This week Ribbit launched their web phone platform . The platform was in beta for over a year now. The company claims to have more than 7,500 developers signed up for their service. They will be presenting the platform at Adobe MAX. In addition, they announced a killer app challenge with prize money of $100, 00. This should definitely boost their developer numbers. I like what they call "Bring Your Own Network". What this means is- The Ribbit platform can connect to the network in two ways: via MPLS links or a SIP interconnection. So even operators can partner with ribbit and offer platform-development-as-a-service to their customers over their networks.

Intelepeer AppworX open communication platform and voice peering grid network gives application developers the ability to create high-quality interactive voice, video, SMS, data and other rich media services that boost productivity while reducing telecommunications and operational expenses through the hosted business model. A communications-as-a-service (CaaS) offering, IntelePeer AppworX is ideal for increasing collaboration among business application users, fostering closer connections with customers and introducing communications-enabled business processes that drive efficiency and deliver cost savings.

Compared to ribbit, Intelepeer claims to have partnership with more than 50 customers leading global carriers and service providers – letting those carriers complete calls more cheaply internationally. Also, software companies (MS, WebEx), carriers (BT, AT&T, Verizon) and online businesses (Facebook, TMCnet) are already using its service to integrate phone services within their applications. WebEx uses their platform to assist in an emergency response system.

Another hosted web telephony platform company to mention is IfByPhone. Ifbyphone also provides hosted platform to build telephony applications. They support bunch of features like Call Routing, Smart Conference call, Smart Click-to-Call, Phone-Me-now etc. Worthy of note is that Fierce Voip voted them as Fierce 15 VoIP companies . Check out their developer site for more information

For more Telco 2.0 platform companies, read my earlier article


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Finally back from India after a long break

Wow! This was one of my very hectic and awesome India trip. I had good family moments to relish. The memory will linger for a longtime. We had two marriages in our family. I sometime wonder why we spend so much money and time on Indian marriages. I guess we could cut down spending lavishly on these marriages and instead use some of the money to help people in need. I know I didn't do that. Maybe, I will, in future.

Another incident that hurt me the most is the Mumbai terrorist attack. The attack was very catastrophic and brutal. I don't have words to express the horror. I was glued to the TV for almost 3 days. The pictures and videos still linger in my mind. I'm angry and helpless, so are most of the Indian citizens. I'm not an expert on terror, so will refrain from making any comments on the topic. However, killing innocent people and justifying the act should be condemned by every religion. People who justify such ACTS are fanatics and don't deserve to be called human being. My thoughts and prayers are with all those families who lost innocent lives.

One thing I missed the most is blogging. With all these activities, was not very active with my blog. Hope to catch up with all that I missed. Stay tuned! .

 

Does free voice calling still work?

Free is word that will attract hordes of user. Most of the folks are spoiled by freebies. When I read about Jaxtr new feature that allows free voice calls, it just occurred to me that they are still struggling to find the revenue making business model. The management shake up has not done much to their business strategy. What we are seeing from jaxtr is the "me too" play, which many other competitors are already providing.



Jaxtr announced a new service called FreeConnect.Using this service, members can make unlimited free mobile or landline calls to other jaxtr members worldwide. This is achieved by providing local numbers to both jaxtr members. This is not something new that has been invented by jaxtr. Rebtel, another mobile and landline VoIP startup has been supporting this model for a long time now. They started selling this feature for $1 unlimited weekly. Not many countries were supported when I checked them long time back. Jaxtr claims to have more than 10 million users in 220 countries.


I'm not sure how jaxtr is going to support this free calling. The international calls could be routed via a VoIP backhaul network. However, there is money involved in connecting a mobile or landline via local PSTN network. Other clients like Skype use P2P, and between skype users it's free because the call is carried all the way via internet. There are lots of other companies like mig33, jajah, fring, mobivox etc that also support similar service with some variation.

The fundamental business model behind free service is weak. The users who like free service will always look for free service. These are like spoilt kids who will not change their habits. Free doesn't generate revenue for the company. Free model is adopted by companies that look for registering tones of users and look for some bigger player to acquire them. With the economy going south, I'm skeptical this will be a viable option. Though freemium model has some credibility and is a proven model, iam not sure if that can be applied successfully in the case of jaxtr. Om has an excellent article on this topic. Some of the companies like jangl, talkplus, eqo that treaded this path either closed or they are struggling. Oh yeah, forgot to mention, social voice apps are as good as dead.

For international calling cost comparison, check out the following website LowCostMob. Good job guys!

 

Skype brings in new CxO management team...

skype_logo.pngAs long-time readers know, I have written a good bit about Skype on this blog in part because while I started out perhaps 4 years ago as a bit of a skeptic, I've become quite a fan of Skype's over the years... they also were one of the more interesting and definitely disruptive companies in the communications/telecom space. In the past year or two, though, they haven't quite had the same buzz as they once did, even while they have continued to grow.

This may perhaps be changing... and as per usual the Skype Journal has the best writeup with Jim Courtney's piece on Skype's restructuring and hiring of a CTO and Chief Strategy Officer as well as a head of HR. I look forward to seeing what this new team will do to help Skype's direction. I agree with Jim, too, that one other major appointment would be good:

There's still one more major executive move I am expecting - a Chief Marketing Officer who bring the badly needed messaging and market communications strategies and disciplines required for a business that's expected to attract sufficient usage to generate those multi-billion dollar sales.

Skype's messaging and communication has seemed disjointed over the past while... it would be good to see that addressed as well. Welcome to all the new folks joining Skype and I look forward to seeing what they'll do!

 

Is the new ".tel" domain more than just a pretty face on top of DNS?

dottellogo.jpgIs the new ".tel" domain launching today more than just a pretty web interface to DNS? Is it something really unique? Is it a new service that couldn't be easily replicated elsewhere?

In case you haven't been following the subject, a company called Telnic has launched a new top-level DNS domain ".tel" today. Today, December 3rd, is the launch of the "Sunrise" period where companies can (for a high price) obtain the ".tel" domain associated with their trademark.

The point of ".tel", though, is to not just be "yet-another-top-level-domain" but rather to be a global directory of information - with users/companies having control of their own information.

With the first part of the launch happening today there has been predictably been a good bit of coverage in the blogosphere. Danielle Belopotosky had a great piece up on the NY Times Bits blog, Techmeme has a flow of links to stories and I am sure more will be appearing.

I would, though, suggest people wanting to understand the goals of the service go back and listen to our Squawk Box conversation on September 9th with Telnic's Justin Hayward (www.justin.tel). The part about .tel starts at about the 17:50 minute mark of the podcast and literally did go on for about forty minutes. We put poor Justin through a bit of a wringer as he may not have realized he was walking into a conference call that included a bunch of DNS geeks. He presented his vision of how .tel would work and answered the many questions we threw at him. You can also watch the video of Telnic's DEMO Presentation where Justin is obviously pitching the .tel domain to the DEMO audience. (And yes, the Justin in the video is the same one who was on Squawk Box.)

While my friend Jonathan Jensen is quite enthusiastic about the .tel domain, I remain a bit troubled by a few aspects of it. First, though, let's talk about how it works...


HOW .TEL WORKS

One of the admittedly cool aspects of the ".tel" domain is it uses the Domain Name System (DNS) to store all of your contact information. I've been working with DNS for probably 15+ years now and have always viewed it as a rather remarkable creation. Ultimately, DNS is simply a massively distributed database system that allows for the easy querying of information on a global scale. I could go on at length about it and always enjoyed the DNS sections of the TCP/IP classes I used to teach because there is so much that you can do with tools like "dig" (or the previous "nslookup" tool) that are interesting (and fun).

But anyway... the reality is that today in general we pretty much only use DNS as a storage mechanism for mapping hostnames to IP addresses. When you entered "www.disruptivetelephony.com" in your browser window or clicked on a link to a URL that had that hostname in it, your local DNS resolver went off and queried DNS servers to find out the IP address for the web server hosting this site. Your browser then sent a HTTP request to that IP address asking for the appropriate page. That's what we primarily use DNS for.

But why not stick other information in the DNS database?

That's the central premise of ".tel". Why not put contact information, favorite URLs, etc. in there?

danyork.vip.tel.jpgNow you have always been able to do this (a point I made in the Squawk Box call). There are "TXT" records that you can insert related to your domain. There are "NAPTR" records that are used in ENUM systems to do lookups on phone numbers (they have other uses as well). On one level, there is nothing the Telnic folks are doing that you cannot do already for your own domain (as long as you can edit the DNS records).

Except that Telnic has put up a pretty web interface that lets you easily edit all of these records. No special knowledge required.

I joined Telnic's "beta" program and you can see in the image to the right what my danyork.vip.tel page looks like from the public point-of-view. You can see that I have a telephone number, email addresses, Skype address, and other pieces of information. There's really no limit to the type of information I can put in here. All just various types of numbers, URLs, keywords and other pointers.

Now let's take a look at how this looks in DNS. Here is part of the output of the 'dig' command run against 'danyork.vip.tel':

dyork$ dig @a.dns.vip.tel danyork.vip.tel any ;; ANSWER SECTION: danyork.vip.tel.        86400   IN      A       195.253.3.235 danyork.vip.tel.        60      IN      TXT     ".tkw" "1" "pa" "" "a1" "52 Probate Street" "tc" "Keene" "sp" "NH" "pc" "03431" "c" "USA" danyork.vip.tel.        60      IN      TXT     ".tsm" "1" "pddx" "1" danyork.vip.tel.        60      IN      TXT     "Dan York,  " danyork.vip.tel.        60      IN      TXT     ".tkw" "1" "bi" "" "o" "Voxeo" "d" "Office of the CTO" "jt" "Director of Emerging Communication Technology" danyork.vip.tel.        60      IN      LOC     51 31 12.000 N 0 7 48.000 W 0.00m 10m 2m 2m danyork.vip.tel.        60      IN      NAPTR   100 103 "u" "E2U+x-voice:skype" "!^.*$!skype:danyork!" . danyork.vip.tel.        60      IN      NAPTR   100 104 "u" "E2U+web:http+x-lbl:Blog" "!^.*$!http://www.disruptivetelephony.com/!" . danyork.vip.tel.        60      IN      NAPTR   100 105 "u" "E2U+web:http+x-lbl:Employer" "!^.*$!http://www.voxeo.com/!" . danyork.vip.tel.        60      IN      NAPTR   100 106 "u" "E2U+web:http+x-lbl:Blogs" "!^.*$!http://blogs.voxeo.com/!" . danyork.vip.tel.        60      IN      NAPTR   100 100 "u" "E2U+voice:tel+x-lbl:Mobile" "!^.*$!tel:+1-407-967-8424!" . danyork.vip.tel.        60      IN      NAPTR   100 101 "u" "E2U+email:mailto" "!^.*$!mailto:dyork@voxeo.com!" . danyork.vip.tel.        60      IN      NAPTR   100 102 "u" "E2U+email:mailto" "!^.*$!mailto:dyork@lodestar2.com!" . danyork.vip.tel.        3600    IN      NS      c.dns.vip.tel. danyork.vip.tel.        3600    IN      NS      d.dns.vip.tel. danyork.vip.tel.        3600    IN      NS      d.dns.vip.tel. danyork.vip.tel.        3600    IN      NS      a.dns.vip.tel. danyork.vip.tel.        3600    IN      NS      a.dns.vip.tel. danyork.vip.tel.        3600    IN      NS      b.dns.vip.tel. danyork.vip.tel.        3600    IN      NS      c.dns.vip.tel. danyork.vip.tel.        3600    IN      NS      b.dns.vip.tel. danyork.vip.tel.        3600    IN      SOA     stealth.nic.tel. hostmaster.nic.tel. 14 10800 3600 2592000 600 

You can see in here various TXT records corresponding to information I entered, a LOC record corresponding to where I was listed as being and NAPTR records pointing to various URLs, email addresses and phone numbers.

Now here's a key point - I entered all this information and in theory I control who sees all that information.

All of this information is publicly available because I chose that it would be publicly available. As Justin stated in our Squawk Box episode, users will have the ability to make some information private and available only to "friends" in some sort of social networking way. I say "in theory" only because in the administrative interface they made available to beta participants, I see no way of actually restricting the visibility of the data. Perhaps I missed something, but I'll take them on their word that they will deliver this functionality.

[UPDATE: Telnic has a page on their developer site about privacy and their friending mechanism.]

danyork.vip.tel-admin.jpgThe admin interface itself is pretty straightforward. You simply add different records for contact information. You can re-order the pieces of information if you want them to appear in a different order. You can enable/disable pieces of information... delete them, etc.

You can also create "folders", which are effectively DNS subdomains. This, to me, is perhaps one of the more intriguing aspects because now I can create domains like "blogs.danyork.vip.tel" and "podcasts.danyork.vip.tel" that show a subset of my overall contact data. I did have to enter it twice if I wanted it to appear in both places, but still... it's a nice feature to have.

All done very simply and easily through Telnic's web interface.

I would note, too, that because .tel is a "sponsored top-level-domain" (see Telnic's contract with ICANN), Telnic has more control over it than there is over a typical TLD. For instance, even though you purchase a .tel domain, you are NOT able to change the "A" record which points a domain to an IP address. What this means is that a ".tel" domain can never point to a website directly. It will always point to Telnic's web interface (where you could, if you wished, simply have one entry that pointed to your web interface). This type of restriction is not true of general TLDs.


THE ADVANTAGE OF USING DNS

The beautiful thing about using DNS is that it is fast and that it can be queried from basically any kind of client in any kind of programming language. DNS libraries exist out there for every language ever used in network-connected applications. In the video I referenced earlier, Justin shows an iPhone app that is able to get information from the DNS system far quicker than it probably ever would from standard web queries. This is what DNS was created for.

To help in that, the Telnic folks have created a Developer area and provided some sample applications (including the iPhone one).


BUT COULDN'T ANYONE ELSE DO THIS?

In a word...

Yes

There is absolutely nothing stopping me, you, or anyone else from creating a service based on one of our domains that provided a pretty web interface that allowed users to populate DNS with such contact information. I could set up "dir.disruptivetelephony.com", build a web UI, write some code to update DNS and start selling subdomains off of that domain. Justin could have "justin.dir.disruptivetelephony.com"... he could control it, update it, etc.

In fact, there are very few of the arguments I've heard from the Telnic folks that couldn't be equally addressed by someone else on their own domain. However, the Telnic folks do have a couple of advantages going for them:

SIMPLICITY - It's hard to argue with the simplicity of "yourname.tel". Easy to give out. Easy to type in. Easy to use. Beats by a mile the subdomain system I mentioned above.

EXISTING TLD INFRASTRUCTURE - Because they are a top-level-domain, they can make use of all the existing registrar infrastructure that exists to sell domain names. GoDaddy, DomainDirect, DomainPeople and every other domain registrar under the planet can sell these domain names. There's an existing and at this point very well understood process for registering names, paying for them, etc. If I were to set up my own directory system, I'd have to get people to sell the domains for me or sell them myself. I don't have an entire layer of domain sales companies ready to get out there and sell my domains.

THE SPONSORED-TLD RESTRICTIONS - As I mentioned earlier, by virtue of being a "sponsored TLD" the .tel domain has some additional restrictions set up by Telnic specifically around the inability of a domain owner to change the A record and redirect the .tel domain to a website. If you want a ".tel" domain, you have to agree to the terms of use - it's that simple. Proponents of any other TLD could enter into this directory game and aim to compete with Telnic, but they would have to deal with the fact that their TLDs are not locked into pointing to one location for the website.

So the answer is ultimately - anyone could really do this, but the Telnic folks have set themselves up nicely with some advantages.


MY PROBLEMS WITH .TEL

So what are my problems with the .tel domain? Well, I guess I have two more technical issues and then some more fundamental issues. First, the technical issues:

BEAUTIFUL TARGET FOR SPAMMERS - The wonderful advantage of DNS is that it is simple and easy for anyone to query. That includes, of course, spammers. So if .tel is successful and people load up the .tel DNS servers with tons of public contact information, what in the world will stop spammers from harvesting all that public information out of the DNS trees? You can see above that it was trivial for me to get all the information associated with "danyork.vip.tel" out of DNS. It's equally trivial for me to write a little script that iterates through potential .tel DNS names, grabs all the info, finds all records that include "mailto" and then emails those people. Or searches on "voice" and calls them....

Unfortunately there's nothing Telnic can really do about this.

Sure, they can throttle requests from certain sources when those sources launch a zillion requests... and then the spammers will just move to using distributed botnets. There's an inherent challenge in putting contact information out in publicly available systems like DNS - anyone can get it.

This is a large part of what has effectively killed any kind of public ENUM systems. ENUM had the same basic idea. Store phone numbers in DNS so that they and their corresponding SIP addresses could be retrieved. Wonderful way to map phone numbers to SIP addresses so that you can bypass the PSTN. However, spammers can do the same thing. One of the tools on the VOIPSA VoIP Security tools list (I forget which one) will do exactly this - issue ENUM queries into DNS and then make SIP calls to any SIP addresses found. Public ENUM is probably irrevocably dead because of this. (ENUM, however, is thriving inside of service provider/carrier networks, though.)

I've seen responses from folks at Telnic about the spam question (such as this one) focusing on the fact that you can choose who sees what and that the private information is protected by encryption. Which is great... but misses the point. The largest reason I can see to use a .tel domain is to get your information out publicly... so why would I then want to hide it?

SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE - The same strength that Telnic has in not being able to modify the DNS A record is also a weakness. Everything goes back to Telnic. I am sure they have spent a huge amount of time on making their system scalable, reliable, etc. But still... if someone out there mounts a large Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack from some botnet... the site and service could be taken offline. Now this is true of most all other emerging services today, so Telnic is not alone in this. But it does cause me some concern. (I guess the one counter argument to this is that presumably local registrars would be able to provide authoritative DNS servers for a given .tel domain. In that case it is not all dependent upon Telnic's servers - although you still would be for authority for the root of the .tel domain.)

Those are my technical concerns.

On a more fundamental level, I have some other concerns:

DIRECTORY INFO IN THE HANDS OF A SINGLE COMPANY - It does admittedly bother me to have a single company behind this .tel domain. Yes, I know, everyone enters their own information and it's all stored in the distributed DNS database. I also realize that for someone to build out their website and infrastructure, etc., it takes money... and the expectation that there will be money coming in at the end... that there will be a return on investment.

Don't get me wrong... the folks at Telnic seem to be great and decent folks. They may be. But I just have fundamental issues when a service that would like to be part of our core Internet infrastructure (as our global directory) is owned by a single company.

Those of us who remember the early days of the Internet remember how much we all chafed against Network Solutions' monopoly on domain name registrations (and their ability to charge more and more). We remember the walled gardens of CompuServe, AOL, GENIE, Prodigy, etc. I am still concerned about the new walled gardens of Facebook, MySpace and even Twitter. I am concerned about Skype's walled garden as it becomes increasingly central.

I'm a security guy. I understand the value in distributed systems and diverse environments (while understanding there are also corresponding risks) in ensuring reliability and availability.

The folks at Telnic may be great people... today. But if the service takes off and then they are acquired by someone else who isn't so friendly... what then?

I guess I'd be far more excited and enthusiastic if the global ".tel directory" was being promoted by some nonprofit consortium or academic-led group... (But then again, would they have been as incented to create it in the first place?)

telniclaunchinfo.jpgDID IT NEED TO BE SUCH A BLATANT MONEY-GRAB? - Maybe I am just a bit put off, too, by the rather blatant language the Telnic folks use around their launch information. Today is the "Sunrise" period (no real problem with that term) where trademark owners can apply for their name and pay a very high fee to do so. February 3 marks the "Landrush" period (yes, I don't like this one) when anyone can register a .tel domain for a "premium" price and then finally March 24, 2009, represents the general availability when anyone can register a domain at "regular" prices.

On the one hand, I applaud Telnic on their transparency - it undoubtedly will be a "landrush" on February 3 as everyone who doesn't have a trademark but wants in on a new TLD will rush to do so. And there will be X number of domain squatters who will be looking to register any and all domains that were not grabbed by their prominent owners in .com/.net/.org in an attempt to then try to get those folks to buy the domain names from the squatters. It probably will generate a good bit of revenue for the domain registrars... for Telnic... and for their investors. I just guess I wish it weren't so blatant - I guess the whole "landrush" thing bothers me most... just make the domain available at a price for all of us. Ah, well - I can see why they did it.

DO WE REALLY NEED ANOTHER DIRECTORY? - This is not so much of a problem as a general question... I think it's clear to me that we are still trying to sort out how people best find our contact information on the Internet. We've been trying this since we first started moving online and there have been any number of attempts before. (Recall that Yahoo got its start as a directory of web sites in the then very tiny World Wide Web.) We're still not there. Sites like Facebook would like to be that site for us. So would LinkedIn and Plaxo and a zillion others. Plus there's any number of other startups. Plus you can always take out your own domain name and set that up (as I have done). Will Telnic and the .tel folks succeed where others haven't? I don't know.


SO WILL I BUY ONE?

So at the end of the day, would I buy a ".tel" domain? I don't know. I think it's an interesting idea and the reality is that yes, I probably would buy "danyork.tel" if by some miracle it is actually available in March... mostly just because I own most of the other "danyork.*" domains already. There are, of course, many other "Dan York"s out there and so perhaps one of them will get this one. Or perhaps some domain squatter will buy that domain after reading of my interest here in the hopes that he/she could milk more money out of me. (Sorry, but NO!) I just don't see that the value shouts out to me enough that I might be willing to join into the "landrush" and pay a premium price.

But even if I bought it, would I use it? I don't know. The potential for spam still seems high to me. We'll have to see what they do to combat it.


THE THORNY PROBLEM

In the end, the problem of locating contact information out on the Internet remains a challenging issue... where do you find the best contact info for someone? a Google search? Facebook? LinkedIn? the person's web site? Some other social networking site? Skype's directory?

Telnic's launch of .tel throws another hat into the ring... why not store all that info in DNS? Will .tel be used? Will people accept a new TLD? (Or are they getting fatigued of new TLDs?) Can the Telnic folks address the spam-harvesting issues that have basically killed public ENUM? Or are those inherent problems of using a public system like DNS? Will enough people use it to make it be a valuable database?

I commend the folks at Telnic for stepping into the ring and offering a solution - and I'll certainly be joining in watching what happens.

What do you think? Would you buy one? Or do you think there are other/better solutions?

 

Slight blog redesign underway...

Longtime readers may notice that this DisruptiveTelephony.com site looks a bit different today. The navigation bar you can see on Disruptive Conversations is gone. Some of the sidebar boxes have been re-arranged. The phone image in the header is missing... and I'm sure some other issues...

Here's what is going on - When I posted my last piece about the .tel domain, it had the unfortunate side affect of destroying my layout because the DNS entries I include in a <pre> section were far longer than my layout allowed. As a result my two right sidebars were overwriting the text and the article was basically unreadable.

So I had so spend a little bit undoing the kludgey way that I've done the 3-column layout on this blog. LONGtime readers will recall that I set up this 3-column layout long before TypePad offered it as a standard layout - and so I had to do some real TypePad-advanced-templates hackery to make it all work. Unfortunately it always had the fatal flaw that if my posts contained images or words that were too big, the sidebars would overwrite the text. Similarly, users forced to stick with Internet Explorer 6 complained that it didn't display correctly.

So what I had to do was to go back to TypePad basic templates and go to their standard 3-column layout in the form that I like. I don't know if this will fix the IE6 issue (if that's still an issue), but at least it will fix the sidebar issue for regular browsers.

The side effect, of course, is that I lost all my advanced template hacks like the cool navigation bar.

What I'll probably do is sometime in the next few days tweak this basic template to be sure I have everything in it the way I want, and then convert it over to TypePad Advanced Templates so that I can put my hackery back in. I was smart enough to save my original templates, so this transition hopefully won't be too big of a deal.

In the meantime, though, things might be a bit funky with the design.

 

Skype seeking a "Manager, Skype Developer Community"

skype_logo.pngI found it somewhat fascinating to see that Skype has posted a job opening for a "Manager, Skype Developer Community". The job description includes this:

Your challenge is to drive the Skype Community program that moves the new platform forward, compliments our platform product investments and ultimately delights our partner community and users. Your success will be measured by your ability to work closely with the product teams to develop a comprehensive developer marketing plan, and work with our marketing, product, and business development teams to evangelize Skype's tools, development environment, and unique value proposition to the development community.

You will be part of the newly formed Skype Platform team whose mission is to lead the adoption of Skype's Platform with developers and ISVs. The team is resourced and chartered to secure the future of the Skype Platform with developer audiences that span corporate and commercial developers, device developers, next generation developers in startups, students and social developers that writes plug-ins, widgets and mash-up applications today.

For those of us watching the emerging communication/telephony space, we've seen Skype make several different attempts over the years to create a successful developer program. Given their incredible user base and platform, it's been curious to see that they haven't yet found the right formula. I'm intrigued by this part:

The team is resourced and chartered to secure the future of the Skype Platform with developer audiences that span corporate and commercial developers, device developers, next generation developers in startups, students and social developers that writes plug-ins, widgets and mash-up applications today.

Particularly the part about being "resourced".

I do hope that Skype succeeds, as they are definitely one of the more disruptive players in this space and it is certainly fun to see what they do.

If you want to be part of that disruption, fit their qualifications and are okay about working in either London or San Jose, their job notice has links to apply for the position.

 

I'll be speaking today in a "Hosted Speech Solutions" webinar...

stm-webinar-20081113.jpgIn about 2.5 hours, at 11am US Pacific / 2pm US Eastern, I (Dan York) will be participating in a "Hosted Speech Solutions" webinar sponsored by Speech Tech Magazine. I'll be joining colleagues from Microsoft (TellMe), Angel.com and Convergys. We'll be talking about each of our hosted offerings and then answering a series of questions before then throwing it open to questions from the audience.

If you would like to join in and learn about our solutions (and those of our competitors), you can register for free.

 

Skype group in LinkedIn...

skype_logo.pngI've been a LinkedIn user for years but only recently started paying attention to the "Groups" feature... and noticed a group related to Skype that does include people associated with Skype, such as Peter Parkes. It's not clear to me yet how much discussion will occur within the group, but if you are a LinkedIn user also interested in Skype, you may want to check it out.

 

"Discover Best Practices for Secure Unified Communications" - a webinar I'll be giving tomorrow

What are you doing tomorrow, Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 1pm US Eastern time? If you are around, you are welcome to join a free webinar I'll be giving on "Best Practices for Secure Unified Communications".

From time-to-time, you'll notice that those of us working with VOIPSA will take part in seminars/webinars offered by members of VOIPSA and we definitely enjoy doing so. For instance, as readers of the blog know, I've been speaking at Ingate's SIP Trunking seminars for quite some time now. We're generally open to speaking at anyone's event or webinar - as long as they understand that there is no endorsement of the company/vendors's products/services and that we are there to provide an industry-neutral point-of-view.

mitel-logo.jpgSo tomorrow at 1pm US Eastern I'll be speaking as part of Mitel's "Discovery Series" where they invite in guest speakers from the industry. You can join the webinar for free at Mitel's site. They asked me to speak about the threats/risks to voice over IP and unified communications and talk about best practices for protecting them. Here's the abstract:

Discover Best Practices for Secure Unified Communications

Presented by: Dan York, Voice Over IP Security Alliance (VOIPSA) October 28, 2008, 1:00 PM EDT / 10:00 AM PDT / 5:00PM GMT

With the emergence of Voice-over-IP and Unified Communications, companies now have incredible opportunities to provide a rich communication experience to employees located in a single location or distributed globally. But how does a company do this in a secure manner? How is the confidentiality and integrity of corporate conversations protected? How can a company be sure that its IP phone systems and IP trunks will always be available for usage? What are the issues around protecting SIP trunks or using hosted services?

In this webinar, VoIP Security Alliance Best Practices Chair Dan York will discuss the threats and risks to Voice-over-IP, the tools that are out to test (or attack) VoIP system and solutions and best practices for protecting your systems. He'll also address concerns around SIP trunking, Spam for Internet Telephony (SPIT) and the move to push voice out into hosted/cloud computing environments and the associated concerns. Come prepared to learn about securing your VoIP system, to ask questions about your deployments and to leave with tips and resources to protect and defend your systems.

The webinar will be recorded and posted for later viewing as well. I'll note that they also have a nice companion webinar to the one I'll be giving tomorrow in one that HP representatives recently have on network security as it relates to VoIP.

Anyway, if you are available tomorrow (Oct 28th) at 1pm please do feel free to join into the webinar. I'll post a note on this site, too, when it is available for later listening.

P.S. And yes, as a couple of people have asked, I do obviously have a closer association with this webinar than I do with some of the other vendors given that I worked at Mitel for 6 years and was their point person on VoIP security issues for much of that time. It will be fun to be speaking with them again.

 

Skype crosses over 14 million simultaneous users!

skypejournal-skypehits14million.jpgI didn't notice the number of simultaneous users in my Skype client today, but the folks over at Skype Journal did notice and Skype Numerologist Jean Mercier captured the occasion with a screen shot. Mercier writes:

"We needed only 35 days to go from 13 million concurrent users online to 14 million."

It is indeed an impressive statistic. (Confirmed by Skype's own blog.)

Congrats to the folks at Skype!

 

Blue Box Podcasts #83 and #84 now online - VoIP, SIP, Skype security...

blueboxlogo.jpgOver on Blue Box, I've now uploaded two recent episodes:

With that I am almost caught up with our main shows... and I still have a bunch of Special Editions to finish producing and post. I'm hoping to finish post-production on #85 tonight so that I can post it tomorrow. We'll see...

 

Skype launches 4.0 Beta 3 ... still only on Windows... and still a fragmented product strategy..

In Skype's continued fragmented and confused product strategy, they came out with Skype 4.0 Beta 3 for Windows. Coverage:

Parts of it look nice... but I won't experience it myself... I've been on a Mac for the last year (like a lot of the bloggers I know) and so we have Skype 2.7. At least I'm not a Linux user, though, as they are stuck much farther behind.

Every time we ask Skype personnel about why their product strategy is so incredibly fragmented across operating systems we get the same stock answers along the lines of "each product group decides what is best and most appropriate for their operating system... blah, blah, blah" along with the reminder to us whining Mac users that we sometimes get functionality that Windows users don't get. (And in full disclosure, I'm in Skype's beta program and I am aware of tentative plans for the next Mac version.)

But that's the point - why are Skype's versions so incredibly fragmented across operating systems?

Today in 2008, the operating system shouldn't matter. Our web browsers look the same (or very similar) across platforms. Our mail programs can look the same across platforms (like Thunderbird). We're pushing so much functionality out into the web-based cloud. We are using apps like Twhirl that run on whatever operating system.

Why should I have to care?

Now obviously Skype is very definitely not alone in this. And in terms of sheer numbers, the Windows market is definitely numerically bigger. I get it. As a former product manager, I understand. I also understand the difficulty in porting applications across operating systems. Yes, it's hard.

But other vendors can do it. Why can't Skype?

Very soon I'm probably going to be helping some relatives get up and running with Skype - but they are of course on Windows. How much fun will it be for me to try to support them remotely when their menus, options and application behavior will be very different from mine on my Mac? And what about Skype's desire to move into businesses? How many enterprise IT support teams will be excited about having very different user interfaces to worry about from operating system to operating system? (And yes, enterprises do have Macs in them these days.)

And here today, when Skype is releasing a version 4 Beta 3, wouldn't it be nice for Skype if all the various bloggers out there could be writing about it? Instead of just those who have Windows or who have Macs and care enough about it to fire up a virtual machine and load it? Instead they're losing the opportunity for word-of-mouth marketing... and then when the Mac version comes out, the Windows-based bloggers won't care... more lost opportunity....

I understand and appreciate that there are differences in user interface design and behavior between operating systems... but I'm quite frankly tired of hearing that used as an excuse by Skype for continuing their fragmented ways.

I'd like to hope that maybe the new management team will do something about this and unify the product offering across platforms. Maybe we could someday have a Skype 5 (or 6 or... ) that actually brought feature/function parity across the platforms and a similar user interface. Would that be too much to hope for?


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