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!
