I’ve just been playing with a beta version of PhoneGnome that’s now integrated with iotum, and I have to say this is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in the telecom world since we’ve started the ETel site. They plan to announce the new service officially on Monday, which will be the first actual commercial release of iotum, and I think this could be one of the best combinations since chocolate and peanut butter.

Speaking with the founders of PhoneGnome and iotum today it was clear that they were both truly excited about the partnership, and it’s easy to see why. This deal makes sense on so many levels. Both services are really easy to set up and use and complement each other nicely. Like many others, when I’d seen iotum demo’d my first reaction was “how can I get my hands on this and start using it now?”, and this deal now makes that a reality. One of the philosophies behind TelEvolution’s PhoneGnome has always been to create a platform that is as seamless and easy as possible for application developers to plug their stuff into, and this will be a great proof-of-concept of that ideal.

For those unfamiliar with either of these products, here’s a quick run down.

PhoneGnome is a drop-dead simple, plug-n-play device that allows Internet phone calling in conjunction with an existing landline service. You buy the PhoneGnome box and plug in a standard phone, a connection to your existing phone service, and a connection to your high-speed Internet, and then sit back and watch a few lights blink and it’s up and running and will route any calls that it can over VoIP and all others through your traditional phone service. It truly couldn’t be any easier to set up. TelEvolution founder and CEO David Beckemeyer was also one of the founders of Earthlink, and I suspect he learned well there the value of making things as easy as possible for users.

PhoneGnome comes with a free basic voice mail service and has no monthly charges associated with it unless you add some of the premium services, like a more advanced voice mail system that offers customized greetings and a web interface or the newly integrated iotum enhanced call screening service.

iotum has been one of the darlings of the new breed of Voice 2.0 apps that are emerging, wowing people wherever it’s demonstrated (it even won a DEMOgod award at the recent DEMO show). iotum uses intelligent filtering techniques which know about your Outlook calendar, contacts, and Messenger IM status to make decisions about how to route incoming calls. Also very simple to set up, it is a large step forward in improving the way busy people can handle their communications needs by getting the calls they want, where they want them, and pushing the unwanted calls to voice mail or other destinations. It can do things like route your calls directly to voice mail when your IM status is busy or your Outlook calendar shows you in a meeting, but then automatically make an exception to that rule for someone calling you that you have a scheduled meeting with later in the day. (Although today iotum is dependent on Windows apps, a Mac version is in the works and other platforms will soon be able to take advantage of its relevance engine technology).

Alec Saunders has been on the road showing off iotum for awhile now, and I could tell he was really excited to have a version coming to market. I know many in the VoIP industry are eager to give it a spin too, and expect this announcement will be met with much excitement. When I spoke to Alec earlier this year at the ETel conference I was kind of bummed to get the sense that they were mainly targeting enterprises and service providers, who would in turn provide or sell iotum’s services to their end-users, as it didn’t sound like it would filter down to independent road-warriors like myself anytime soon. But this new development changes all that, and starting Monday anyone can use iotum by simply getting a PhoneGnome box and subscibing to the service. When I asked Alec about this change in strategy, he mentioned that “continental drift happens faster than getting service providers to move on implementing new features” and they were getting impatient about getting iotum out into the market and didn’t want to have to rely on a carrier. This was a perfect fit with TelEvolution, who also understands the problems with the carrier-dependent telecom economy and are striving to show that these kind of apps can be hosted by companies other than the encumbent carriers and are working hard to remove the friction from deploying these kind of apps. According to David, iotum was “right up the alley of the kind of partners we’re looking for.”

As I was playing with iotum and PhoneGnome today I started getting very excited about what feels like the beginning of a new era in voice communications. PhoneGnome does a great job of hiding and handling complex outgoing call routing decisions and iotum adds a level of intelligent filtering to incoming calls that has previoulsy been only fantasized about. Even though it’s still in beta, everything seemed to work flawlessly and exactly as you’d want it to. iotum nicely handled calls based on my settings and all of the configuration options were clear and simple.

I have to believe this is a big win for both companies (I’m trying really hard to avoid the “win-win” phrase). iotum will add value and make one of the first real Voice 2.0 apps available to PhoneGnome users, and PhoneGnome integration will make iotum finally available to practically anyone who wants to use it. Heck, I’m so interested in using the iotum features that I may even switch back to Windows as my main computing platform! OK, probably not, but please do hurry up with that Mac version…

This page lists the best of the pictures that I and my author/friend Bruno Gomes Pessanha took during my trip to Brazil in April 2006 for the Fórum Internacional Software Livre (international free software forum).

Timothy O’Brien points us to the C-SPAN Network Neutrality coverage over on ONJava.com:

House Subcommittee hearing on Network Neutrality on C-SPAN 3. I’m listening to it in the background. Really important subject for everybody who uses the Internet, some great comments by Amazon’s Misener and Comptel’s Earl Comstock. The Internet is a part of the fabric of our society, if Congress messes around with network neutrality, I think we can kiss the Internet as we know it goodbye. Timothy Wu, Columbia Law Professor, makes the point that the Internet is an almost perfect free market, someone talented with a good blog can get more readers than the New York Times tomorrow, someone with a great idea and a website can become a huge jobs creator and billion dollar company.

Skype has now cut a deal with EMI Music Publishing to sell EMI tunes as music downloads and ringtones on the Skype web site according to an article in the UK Times. This follows on the heels of their recent deal with the Warner Music Group, though that one was just for ringtones. This latest deal has many speculating about whether Skype will take a stab at competing with the popular iTunes music store. While it’s hard for me to envision Skype putting a dent in that market, Phil Wolff from the Skype Journal has an interesting take on the possibilities:

Skype doesn’t sell iPods but they have another competitive advantage. Skype’s inherently social network will enable more sales than iTunes, assuming similar functionality. After buying a song, I should be able to gift it to a friend for $0.50, play it in a conference call, download automatically to my mp3 player, mix into a podcast (be sure to negotiate that license first), share playlists like mood indicators to specific users, even broadcast what I’m playing now via mood indicator.

Update: Skype Journal is reporting that it’s really all just about ringtones. That makes a lot more sense to me.

Digium has announced the formation of the Asterisk Advisory Council to assist in the overall management of Asterisk, including the selection and supervision of community developers, release cycles, and contributions. The council consists of Brian Capouch, Assistant Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department at Saint Joseph’s College; Olle E. Johansson, Asterisk Developer, consultant and Evangelist, founder of Edvina AB, Sweden; Tilghman Lesher, Developer for VCCH, Inc.; Jeremy McNamara, Founder of The NuFone Network, the first Asterisk-based Inter-Asterisk eXchange (IAX) provider; and John Todd of the Tello Corporation.

“As the Asterisk market continues to grow rapidly on a daily basis, we saw the need to expand the team managing the open source project,” said Kevin Fleming, co-maintainer of Asterisk and senior software engineer at Digium. “By identifying these key community members to participate in our council, we can ensure that the project continues to add innovations and improve without any delays.”

Steering an open source project can be difficult, especially one that’s getting as much attention and uptake as Asterisk is these days. They’re sure to be pulled in many directions. Congratulations to O’Reilly Network author John Todd and to Brian Capouch, based on their inclusion I have a very good feeling about this group.

Russell Shaw has a pretty damining post today on what sounds like serious VoIP-blocking being done by Belize Telecommunications Limited, the local telco in Belize. The good news is that it seems that enough people have made enough noise that the Belize PUC is getting involved, and Russell points out that some very influential people there are not at all happy with the situation:

Well, on Wednesday, the Belize PUC will hold a hearing on the matter. Expect to hear from some very influential people, such as Andrew Godoy, director of the Belize Tourism Industry Association. “The Board is appalled by the actions of BTL,” Godoy tells the San Pedro, Belize Sun. “We have heard from many of our constituents and this is negatively impacting their business.”

Ever since getting a MacBookPro I’ve been lugging around 2 laptops just so that I could use my Verizon EVDO connection. The new Mac laptop has an Express/34 slot which meant my older PCMCIA Type 2 card was no longer compatible. Trips to Fry’s hunting for Express/34 cards have been painful, all the reps I talked to had never even heard of it.

While I wait for a USB or Express/34 EVDO Verizon compatible card to come on the market I have been using the Kyocera 650 on my PC and routing the connection through WiFi to my Mac. That’s one expensive personal router! Not to mention, it’s heavy. BTW Linksys and Kyocera both have 3G routers on the market that support a variety of PCMCIA cards.

Good news: I got the Elan Digital Systems U132 USB Card Reader working on my MacBook’s XP partition. My back is very excited!

Once I installed the elu132 driver all I had to do was setup a modem connection and configure the modem to dial #777.

Now, if only EDS had OS X drivers I’d be really psyched. Still, this is a major welcome addition to the world of MacBookPro Mobile Broadband service. And, another great reason for Apple’s BootCamp project.

Finally, if you’re wondering: the Kyocera 650 does in fact support VoIP calls (despite the sticker on the box that says otherwise).

Note: If you configure a few extra settings on the Modem, such as port speed, dramatic improvements will be noticed. In fact, the Elan drivers appears to offer increased upload and download speeds. I believe I was capped at 56K up before, that’s no longer the case.

When you go to any hotbed of free software development in Latin America, such as the Fórum Internacional Software Livre (international free software forum) I attended this week in Brazil, it’s clear that Richard Stallman is the hero and the flagship personality. Quotes from his speeches turn up first on every web site discussing the conference, stereotyped likenesses of his signature hair style appear on posters, and supporters line up to pay five reais–a bargain compared to what he charges in Europe!–to get their photo taken with the real article. (The money all goes directly to the Free Software Foundation, so the charge is meant as a fund-raiser, and also–I suspect–to cut down on tiresome time-wasting.)

I noticed the same reverence for Stallman about five years ago when I attended FOSDEM, the impressive free software conference in Brussels. Such popularity outside North America (and in some quarters within North America) seems strange to many other people in the free software community who decry Stallman’s insistence on strong positions and his seemingly obsessive attention to language. He is criticized as uncompromising, which is not really fair because he compromises quite often on strategic grounds.

Many other people doing free software wish secretly or openly that Stallman would cede his public position and let others represent the movement. Not likely! And from what I saw at Fosdem and FISL, not necessarily beneficial to building the movement either.

I came to Brazil to deliver a presentation on documentation. But I quickly realized, after the organizers accepted my proposal, that I would come here to learn as much as to teach. I am concerned broadly with the information needs of Brazilian computer users, administrators, and programmers–and I want to understand deeply what the needs and opportunities for documentation here are. In short, I’ve come for information about information about information technology.

As it turns out, education is also the goal of the One Laptop Per Child project, which had a strong presence here. (Project Athena and X Window System pioneer Jim Gettys came to promote it–just one of the many luminaries from North American who made the long journey down to show up at this conference.)

Surj Patel has just published an intriguing column over on the VoIP-News site that discusses the new open source Freeswitch project. Surj is excited by the announcement last week that Freeswitch has the ability to broker calls between the PSTN and the VoIP-specific protocol Jingle (used by GoogleTalk), and sees this as a potential tipping point for a flood of new innovative applications:

What really excites me about this is the mere fact that it can be done. This alone will spur innovation and uses we haven’t thought of yet.

• What if a spreadsheet could call you when there was a problem with automatically updated figures?
• What if your address book was indexed by presence on Jingle so you could only call people who were available to answer the phone?
• What if you wanted to talk to someone before making a purchase about a product? (That’s why Ebay bought Skype, but the more than 100-year-old-POTS has a few more users than Skype).
• I just realized you can set up a web based/configurable PBX and have GoogleTalk for all the clients….perfect should I ever set up a small business.

What excites me most is not what has been done, but what will be done by people who manipulate this simple, yet powerful, bridging technology.

Surj is the program chair for O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony conference. Watch this space for updates on the time, place, and program for next year’s ETel conference — from what I’ve heard so far it promises to be even better than this year’s was!

Yesterday I arrived in Porto Alegre, in the South of Brazil, and introduced my readers to the Fórum Internacional Software Livre. At that time I had met some of the animals but had not yet attended the circus. Today I experienced the full excitement of being with thousands of people with many different interests: free software developers, students, government leaders, and more. I estimated a full two thousand people in today’s keynote presentation, which featured a range of government leaders and a little video in which the Brazilian national anthem was played by a variety of musicians from different regions and ethnic backgrounds.

I attended a few talks in English–which were quite good–but mostly got taken around by colleagues to meet interesting folks in the Brazilian free software community. I also learned more about the state of documentation and the need for new models here.

Carla Schroder points us to her excellent three-part series on Building an Asterisk@Home Test Lab over on Enterprise VoIP PLanet:

Learn how to build an Asterisk@Home test lab. This series is also a good howto for setting up a small production Asterisk iPBX on the cheap. This three-part series is aimed at both telephony and Linux noobs. If you understand computer networking basics, this is just the Asterisk howto you need to get up and running. Not only for a test lab, but also a small production system. The series covers installation, what hardware to use, how to set up local extensions and automatic call routing, how to connect to the outside world, and how to replace the Asterisk@Home logo with your own custom logo.

VoIPowering your Office with Asterisk - Building a Test Lab, Part 1
VoIPowering your Office with Asterisk - Building a Test Lab, Part 2
VoIPowering your Office with Asterisk - Building a Test Lab, Part 3

Brazil, when it comes to IT development, suffers more than nearly any other country from a gap between aspiration and capability. A huge number of talented developers want to contribute to the world’s software, and to their own country’s development, but they’re hampered by difficulties of obtaining hardware, software, and (of particular interest to me as an editor) documentation.

I’m here in Brazil right now–the relatively affluent town and tourist mecca of Porto Alegre, to be precise–for a software conference expected to draw six thousand attendees. It’s the seventh free software forum, an event supported by a lot of companies and several key government ministries in Brazil. A full-time staff person organizes the conference for the NGO that started it, and a lot of people I respect in the free software field come to it regularly from around the world.

Our pals at Makezine noticed this write-up in Popular Science on a low cost way to do your own cell phone tracking using the Mologogo service:

Cue the Mission Impossible theme. I’m working a top-secret operation, and my support team is monitoring my every movement. OK, so I’m just going to the hardware store, but my girlfriend, Jen, is tracking me. Using a $100 kit from Mologogo (with a $6-a-month data plan), I’ve turned a prepaid cellphone into a GPS tracking device. Every few minutes, the phone transmits my location within 100 meters to mologogo.com, which posts it to a Google map that Jen can access from any computer. She can view my most recent spot or my past 100 recorded locations as little pushpins stamped with date and time.

No decision has been made yet around rebranding of the telecom powerhouse that will emerge from Alcatel’s acquisition of Lucent, but the costs involved in such a massive rebranding effort may keep this on a backburner for awhile. MarketWatch is reporting that SBC spent as much as $1 billion to rebrand themselves as AT&T, after acquiring the remains of the best known telecom brand in the universe. When the Alcatel/Lucent deal was announced, Alcatel CEO Alcatel Serge Tchuruk said that they would “choose a name later on.” The MarketWatch article makes the points that the new company has more important things to worry about for now, like integrating two large organizations on opposite sides of the Atlantic, trimming 10% of their 88,000-person workforce, and finding other ways to cut expenses to make the transaction pay off for investors. It also points out that with increasing global tension over these kind of cross-border mergers, Alcatel and Lucent may want to maintain both brands to forestall any domestic opposition.

Craig Walker’s latest venture is helping out some of the most disadvantaged in our society as his new company Grand Central has started offering free voice mailboxes to the homeless in San Francisco. Walker was the CEO of Dialpad, which was purchased by Yahoo! last year, and while his new company Grand Central isn’t yet talking about what their planned commercial service is going to be, they are certainly garnering some positive attention by offering this free, life-long service that can help homeless people get reconnected into society. Much like the Pulver/Evslin petition asking for communications providers to provide universal voice mail in disaster situations, Walker’s company is making good use of the fact that the cost of providing voice mail services has dropped to an all-time low.

Walker is also blogging about the project:

Even though they may not have much else, they now have a communications identity they own and can use on job applications, with medical clinics, for friends, family…etc. The clients were great and it was really amazing to realize how powerful something as simple as a basic communications identity could be. We’re really looking forward to the next event in June, but the impact that this experience had on all of us at GrandCentral won’t be soon forgotten.

(Thanks Jeffy!)

An evergrowing list of “take me with you VoIP services” are becoming available to mobile device users. EQO just announced Mac OS X support (in addition to their already long list of devices.) iSkoot also has a number of clients available. Looks like VoIP is turning up wherever you can dial and is becoming client, device, platform and even initiation/termination agnostic. VoIP (as a middleman) is turning up some interesting services which are offering consumers valuable telecom alternatives.

Last week, I was at the Interop Labs working with the VoIP Security and Integration initiative. Before arriving, we set two major tasks for ourselves. One is to look at how VoIP interacts with security products (particularly in light of the counter-intuitive SSL VPN call quality improvements that were observed recently). The second, and much more interesting objective from my perspective, is to look at how much 802.11 phones have improved in security and quality of service from a year ago.

And the results aren’t pretty for the U.S. Consumerist just posted a great letter from his mother, who after using a simple pay-as-you-go Vodaphone cell phone plan in Ireland tried to find a similar arrangement in the U.S. and was floored by our complex and unfriendly plans. I had the same experience after spending time in New Zealand in 2000, using a dead-simple pay-as-you-go plan, and then being surprised that there was no comparable service in the states when I returned. It doesn’t sound like much has changed in six years.

Yesterday, I trotted off to the Mall to “buy” a USA cell phone. My son had told me the closest I would find to Vodaphone was either T-Mobile, or Virgin mobile. There were at least 2 kiosk for every vendor, and that didn’t count the sections at Best Buy, Walmart, and Targets. I took a brief glance at Cingular, but minute charges, daily access fees, unlimited calls to other cingular mobiles, I was confused before I even talked to someone. Verizon was even worse, although affiliated with Vodaphone, the plans, and charges were nothing like what I had experienced in Ireland, and having worked for multiple incarnations of this company for 30 years I was not about to additionally line their pockets when they were delining mine with raised retiree copays, and decreased benefits.

The FCC has opened up the petition on Post-Disaster Communications that Jeff Pulver and Tom Evslin submitted earlier this month for Public Comments. Jeff’s got the low-down, and I agree with them that the encumbent communications providers could relatively easily implement either universal emergency voice mail for all customers or provide expedited local number porting to an alternate service provider in times of infrastructure failure, and that this could go a long way towards improving communications and ease locating friends and family during crises. Here’s your chance to let the FCC know how you feel about this idea.

Makezine is pointing to a plan for building a mobile mesh repeater node that can be used in a variety of settings, including when the communications infrastructure has been damaged in a disaster.

After Hurricane Katrina hit, BellSouth announced that it would take 3 months to restore phone lines. Volunteers using WiFi gear were able to connect churches and community centers within the first weeks and within three days of setting up an asterisk call server, routed 10,000 phone calls. Reliable backup infrastructure can be brought up in hours or minutes if you are prepared and have a plan in place.

(If you haven’t checked out the Instructables site that this plan is posted on, I reccomend giving it a spin. It’s a great and inspiring resource for DIY folks).

Solely competing on price in the VoIP space is not a particularly attractive business model. Another provider has gone public slashing pennies off PSTN termination (even to free calling in many cases). It will be interesting to see how long, and if, these rates last:

VoipDiscount

I’m back home from the Interop Labs, and I am starting the my next technical project. Soon, it will be initiative season in California’s political cycle, which means that political surveys, telemarketers, and presumably, push pollers will soon be upon us. I intend to build an Asterisk server to keep them away from my phone. I also want a PBX so that I can continue to study VoIP, especially VoIP on 802.11. Before I could start working on Asterisk, though, I had to get the motherboard BIOS straightened out.

VoIPNuke picked up on this tidbit flying by on the Dow Jones Newswire today: Comcast is going to start offering its broadband, video, and phone services at Wal-Mart. Starting this spring customers will be able to sign up for the Comcast services at over 500 Walmart locations. That’s one way for Comcast to get in front of a whole lot of potential customers who may be especially interested in their new bundled services that may reduce a household’s overall phone, cable and internet charges.

I heard a radio ad today here in the San Francisco bay area for TomatoVine, a “Next Generation Telephone Service” (they seem to avoid using the term “VoIP” anywhere in their marketing materials or web site). Maybe they’ve been around for awhile and I’m just now hearing of them, but I’m still scratching my head over their name and branding. What does a vegetable vine symbolize with regards to Internet telephony? That it’s going to grow fast? Well it sounded like TomatoVine is making a Vonage-like play for residential customers, with nearly identical features and pricing as the industry leader in consumer VoIP. If they’re going to have any success with that plan, I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more commercials from them in the coming months. (And let me offer some unsolicited web design advice: the flash-based menu options jump around far too much for navigational comfort, giving an almost “Ha! you missed it, try again!” feeling when a menu item is selected).

Note: You can save your comments, I know tomatos are technically not a vegetable, but I’m sorry, to me they always will be. They just don’t fit into my world view of fruit.

I came across Ted Wallingford’s “mini-white paper” on ten things the industry should work on to overcome the cultural challenges to the VoIP revolution as I was making my rounds today, and as usual Ted offers up his insightful and practical take on things. From improving the communications about features and requirements, to coming together on E911, to making VoIP systems and devices more interoperable, all of these suggestions are good ones. And Ted isn’t afraid to point out something that I think is obvious to most in the industry, but rarely discussed, that there are genuine quality of service issues for today’s residential VoIP users in the U.S. (At least I know my Vonage connection over Comcast isn’t always up to snuff.) System designers can create enterprise VoIP systems that really shine with regards to voice quality, but the fact is that many U.S. home users cannot today consistently experience the higher quality that VoIP is capable of.

Splunk, LTSP, and others all contribute to a healthy evolution.

The always astute and entertaining David Pogue takes a look at the VoSKY Call Center from ActionTec in today’s New York Times, and gives it a big thumbs up, though he does point out a few “gotchas”. The $60 VoSKY unit allows you to use a standard home phone to make and recieve your Skype calls, as well as from your cell phone — which Pogue thinks is a pretty neat trick. It also offers a call return feature, so that numbers you call via Skype that aren’t available will generate a call back to your specified phone when your buddy is back online, prompting you to place the call again.

Pogue isn’t thrilled with the voice talent ActionTec used in the prodcut though:

And speaking of the recordings: Good heavens, was this the best voice-over talent ActionTec could find? The young lady speaks slowly and self-consciously, like the world’s worst actor in a junior high musical. You can just imagine her saying, “Do not look now, Dorothy, but are those flying monkeys I see? Oh dear me.”

If those gotchas don’t getcha, though, you’d be hard-pressed to find another $60 gadget that works so crisply, reliably and efficiently. If you’re among the 25 million existing Skypaholics, the Call Center could magnify the pleasure of making those free calls. And if you’re not, the VoSky Call Center is one more reason to see what Skype is all about.

On Wed I installed Apple’s Boot Camp and Microsoft’s XP on my Apple MacBookPro. So far, it’s been surprisingly smooth sailing and I’ve been amazed at the speeds.

I installed the product I work on, Yahoo! Messenger with Voice, and made a few telephone calls. It worked great. It’s very exciting to see PC applications running on Apple hardware.

One thing is certain, it’s going to be hard to continue to justify carrying two different laptops around (I doubt I’m alone.)

Mark Del Bianco provides some intresting commentary in a CNET editorial about a possible hurdle to the AT&T-BellSouth merger, that Del Bianco acknowledges many in Washington expect to “sail through with flying colors.” Noting that the merger would give the combined company a sizable chunk of valuable spectrum in the 2.3GHz and 2.5GHz ranges, right where WiMax is poised to take off as a viable competitor to wireline broadband services, and not a whole lot of incentive to compete with its own existing business, Del Bianco predicts that the FCC and the Justice Department could very well look to force some divesture as a condition of the merger.

Both BellSouth and AT&T own considerable chunks of prime wireless spectrum that is unused and that could quickly and relatively cheaply be used to provide broadband services that would compete with telecom and cable wireline broadband services–in other words, the long-sought “third pipe” to the home or business. Competitors will no doubt argue that the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department should worry about the loss of intermodal competition that will result if the two companies are permitted to retain this valuable spectrum.

The looming threat of spam invading IP Communications systems is getting a lot of hype lately in the business press, but many experts in the field are questioning whether this typically doom-and-gloom reporting about SPIT (for Spam over Internet Telephony) is justified. Ken Camp has a great post on the subject today over on Realtime-VoIP, taking issue with a recent Red Herring article on SPIT. As Ken points out, while lots of people like to talk about SPIT, the reality doesn’t seem to be so dire and current VoIP systems do not appear to have experienced any serious troubles along these lines. Dan York and Jonathan Zar also discussed this issue on a recent episode of their Blue Box Voip Security podcast along with commentray on the topic by Rick Robinson, and came to similar conclusions.

While no one likes telemarketing calls (and just like regular spam it seems a little mind-boggling that it’s an effective strategy to sell much of anything), it’s unclear why current VoIP systems would be any more susceptible to such tactics than the PSTN. I’ve worked as a telecom manager for a large university and I can tell you that telemarketers have had the capability to identify and auto-dial large groups of consecutive DID numbers in non-VoIP settings for many years, it was a constant irritant. It’s true that as we move to using IP-based communications systems, tighter computer integration becomes easier which may simplfy some telemarketing tactics, but in the end I think the result is the same. Unwanted marketing calls feel the same to VoIP or non-VoIP users. And I have to admit that although I was very skeptical of how effective it would be, here in California I’ve actually been pretty impressed with how well our Do Not Call list system has been working. Since getting on it I’ve seen my telemarketing calls reduced to practically none.

I’ll admit that someone came up with a sexy acronymn here, and certainly IP-based networks have a host of security-related issues, but for the most part these issues are well-known and defensible, and aren’t about spam.

Ken Camp, who runs the excellent Realtime VoIP Community site, has come up with what I’m sure will be a real winner of an idea — a monthly group podcast by some of the most knowledgable folks in the industry. Dubbed the VoIP ThinkTank, the concept is sort of a Gillmor Gang for the VoIP business, and I think they will find a big audience for this. Ken has already got participation from some of the most insightful folks in the field, including Andy Abramson, Martin Geddes, Phoneboy, Jeff Pulver, Alec Saunders, and Ted Wallingford. I know I’m going to tune in. Keep your eyes on Realtime VoIP for announcements and the first show.

Speaking of technology podcasts, my all-time favorite is still Daniel Steinberg’s Distributing the Future, though I may be biased from having worked with Daniel for several years at O’Reilly. I also remain very impressed with Dan York and Jonathan Zar’s Bluebox VoIP Security podcast. But what am I missing? Drop me a comment with your favorite technology podcasts, especially any telecom related ones.

Lucent and Alcatel put an end to the rumors yesterday and announced their intentions to merge to form a $25 billion telecom giant. The combined company will be headquartered in Paris and Patricia Russo, chairman and CEO of Lucent, will become CEO of the new company.

Although the press release calls it a “merger of equals,” Mark Evans points out that “unofficially Alcatel is buying Lucent given its shareholders will have 60% of the new entity.” Om Malik agrees, “This is not really a merger of equals, and if you read the terms of the deal, its Alcatel swallowing Lucent.”

The combined company will reduce its workforce by 10%, eliminating 8,800 jobs. Although its been expected for awhile, there are some concerns being voiced about the deal. According to Mark Evans, RBC World Markets’ analyst Mark Sue believes that Lucent and Alcatel have distinctly different corporate cultures, which could impede any expected synergies for at least a year. Cynthia Brumfield on IP Democracy points out that there could also be problems with the French incorporation and high level of French government ownership of the new company as it pertains to Lucent’s Bell Labs, which has long been involved in super secret military research for the U.S. government.

Lots of buzz about a new service called Jajah riding the VoIP PR wave. They offer a way for people without a broadband connection to use VoIP, which is clever. You go to their Web site, put in your phone number, the number you want to call, and both ring and you can talk while paying “sensationally low rates.” However, the rates aren’t listed anywhere until you plug in both numbers, with international area codes. When found, the rates seem good, but I’m not sure if they’re worth the hassle over a good discount phone card.

Anybody using this and thrilled? Let us know.

James

I posted about a few of my favorite April Fool’s stories making the rounds on the net on Saturday, but how on earth did I miss this one?? Andy Abramson reported that O’Reilly To Buy TMC and PulverMedia. I’ve noted recently that it’s very interesting to see Tim’s world intersecting more with what’s happening in IP Communications, it seems like a perfect fit to me actually. But boy, that would sure add some interesting wrinkles to my job! Nice one, Andy.

Alec Saunders of iotum is making what I think will be an important announcement today at VON Canada, that they are releasing an Asterisk integration module and an API for iotum. This is great news for both the Asterisk community, who will get the chance to start using iotum and incorporating its relevance-based communication tools into new Asterisk applications, and for iotum which in one fell swoop has greatly increased it’s potential user and developer base. Ted Wallingford broke the story last night and provides some good background on what iotum is trying to achieve with its relevance engine as well as the text of today’s press release.

The iotum Asterisk integration kit includes the source code and API documentation for an Asterisk module to allow the PBX to communicate directly with the iotum server. The integration kit has been released as a free, non-commercial beta for now, but Alec says licensing and pricing info will be coming soon, as well as details of a revenue-sharing program for Asterisk resellers and application developers. My reccomendation to Alec and the good folks at iotum is to keep the non-commercial licenses free and easy — one thing we’ve seen over and over at O’Reilly is that the companies that put up the fewest hurdles for developers to experiment, explore, and work with their technology reap the greatest rewards, often in very unexpected ways.

Perhaps the most impressive part of this announcement is that Alec says they decided to build iotum integration into Asterisk only about 6 weeks ago! That’s a great example of what I think is one of the most important changes happening in the world of telecommunications today — that new applications and features can now be created and deployed in a matter of weeks or months, instead of the years we’ve been used to when the communications infrastructure was solely the domain of the big telcos. I think both Asterisk and VoIP are huge parts of this, and the pace of change in telecommunications is only going to get faster and faster.

I know that as I’ve seen iotum demo’d one of the main things I’ve come away with is a desire to have their technology available to me, now. I suspect that this announcement and the integration with Asterisk will make that a reality soon for me and I’m really eager to see what devlopers come up with using iotum. I’ll try and get some hands-on tutorials on working with the iotum API and Asterisk publsihed here on ETel soon, so if this news excites you as much as it does me, watch this space. Congratulations Alec and company on another great move for iotum!

• Slashdot is pink and its posts are filled with “OMG!!!” and “LOL!”
• Opera launches “a groundbreaking new online photo library that aims to offer realistic images of normal people and how they really use technology in their everyday lives.”
• Makezine joins the new Webringr service and rebrands itself as Buy with an upcoming 50-page black and white issue coming next.
• Gizmodo morphs into Gizombo because “the zombie apocalypse is upon us.”
• Yahoo! while in the midst of buying Dogg (a Web 2.0 cross between Digg and Dogster “Where Every Dog Has A Webpage”) decides instead to just buy Web 2.0.
• TechCrunch profiles Goop, which has “a number of del.icio.us/flickr-like features to allow anyone to create their own topic-based version of the main service, create a mashup with any XUL or LUX interface and prominently display the results to users on a Soap based platform with fully closed APIs.” Uh huh.

You have to love April 1st on the net. I know there’s many other sites pulling fast ones today, drop us a comment with your favorite.