There’s been quite a bit of positive coverage on the launch of the TalkPlus service this week (read Ken Camp’s post for an excellent analysis of the offering and links to many of the other posts about it). I met with TalkPlus at the recent ITExpo and like most others in the VoIP press, I was impressed with their technology and business plans. I agree with Ken and others that their demo was one of the most interesting from that crowded convention center. I also spent some time talking with TalkPlus CEO and founder Jeff Black over a more relaxed dinner (thanks Andy!), and found him to be a smart and fascinating person who has impeccable credentials for creating a successful Voice 2.0 business. Add to that the fact that O’Reilly author and all-around telecom guru John Todd is the CTO, and I think this is one venture that will quickly rise to the top of the crop of the current wave of telecom startups.

At its most basic level, TalkPlus allows you to assign multiple mobile phone numbers to your cell phone. While a simple concept, it turns out to be quite a powerful model for a wide range of applications where you might want specialized phone numbers (dating, ebay, doctors, lawyers, to name just a few). Along with the multiple number capability comes more advanced screening and voice mail management. TalkPlus believes this capability can improve people’s privacy and offer increased control over their mobile life, and I agree. And while it sounds simple, anyone with much knowledge of the current mobile infrastructure in the U.S. will realize it’s far from trivial to implement such a system. TalkPlus has been working on the technical end for over two years and has a slew of patents behind their work. I’m convinced they have a good understanding of the difficult carrier climate they need to work in.

Two other posts I’d recommend for those interested in TalkPlus are from Tom Keating and Jon Arnold. As usual, Tom provides a thorough look at the new company and their service offering. Jon picks up on the carrier perspective, which I agree is important here. As Jon points out, even though we like to decry the walled gardens and difficulties in working with the incumbent carriers, at least here in the U.S., a company like TalkPlus who is offering value for the carriers rather than competing with them for their core business is in a much stronger position. In fact, I think the reason that TalkPlus’ launch is garnering such positive attention is that their service looks promising and offers value from both the end-user and the carrier perspective. You can sign up for the beta service now at the TalkPlus web site.

So far, the success of Skype within their walled garden of VoIP has been quite impressive. One of the more interesting things I’ve learned from my travels is that Skype is extremely popular in Asia (at least outside of Japan) so much that in many places, “Skype” is synonymous with “VoIP.” However, there is benefit in using a standards-based approach, especially if that helps us to integrate Skype’s network in with the rest of the telephone network. This has long been a point of interest; Stuart Henshall wrote about Skype/SIP interactions more than a year and a half ago.

I’ve spent a good bit of my free time in the last month investigating three small-scale Skype to SIP integration packages. You can read the details at the link. Of the three that I looked at, ChanSkype was the most promising. It had a complex setup, but by far the best sound quality and it was also the easiest to integrate into the dialplan. A new version was released last week, but I haven’t been able to try it yet. Stay tuned…

Last week, Microsoft launched Windows Live Barcode, bringing Denso’s two-dimensional, ‘quick response’ QR Code format to the Windows Mobile platform. The service consists of two elements:

- Online tools to generate contact cards or notebook entries (450 character limit).
- A mobile ’scanning’ application to read QR codes into a Windows Mobile handset (this doesn’t seem to be available from the site).

I’ve long thought the potential of 2D codes, like QR, Semacode and others, was enormous - but very few handsets are equipped, by default, with the capability to scan codes. Consequently, we see very few codes embedded in online services or the physical world. Microsoft’s move could help to kick start code usage…

I have a niggling feeling that there’s a compelling intersection of microformats and 2D codes. I wonder if LinkedIn, Upcoming, Flickr and other personal publishing service began to display their microformatted data as 2D codes, whether we’d see a corresponding uptick in code support on handsets…are 2D codes the enablers for mobile microformats?

Months ago, I was planning to commission Surj to bring his vision of an open source mobile handset to us at Orange. One of the capabilities we thought might yield some interesting applications was a bunch of onboard sensors that could aggregate various metrics for use by service providers. Essentially, transforming each handset into a spime.

Imagine…
- Hyper-accurate, block-by-block weather reports generated by polling temperature, moisture and pressure readings from every mobile device in a given region.
- Public transport services that route buses to locations where multiple passengers need pickups.
- News services that ask users near a newsworthy event to snap cameraphone images.

Last week, TomTom and Vodafone announced a partnership that takes the first steps in using mobile handsets in a distributed sensor network. Initially, TomTom is planning to utilise the locations of Vodafone handsets to feed traffic information to its customer’s GPS units. That’s a great idea, though as The Register points out, ‘Just pray you don’t get caught among motorists on their way to an O2 convention’.

Though the terms of the TomTom-Vodafone deal haven’t bene made public, this kind of ‘Crowdsensing’ could prove to be a lucrative platform business for mobile operators. I’ll watch the TomTom experiment with interest, but it’ll be exciting to hear the opinions of the ETel community on the usefulness and feasibility of such infrastructures as well as their ideas for innovative business models and services.

UPDATE: Wired’s Tagging Phones to Track Traffic covered IntelliOne and AirSage’s mobile traffic sensing services. IntelliOne are using GPS data and, interestingly, selling to media outlets, but profit-sharing with carriers - a potentially lucrative platform business? AirSage, on the other hand, are looking to service government agencies with traffic data.

Word is coming out that Cisco is purchasing the mobile software company Orative for $31 million. Orative’s software allows tighter integration between Cisco’s VoIP business systems and cell phones. Orative’s Enterprise Server sits inside of a customer’s firewall connected to Cisco’s Unified CallManager IP-PBX, and works with Orative’s cell phone client software that can run on Blackbery, BREW, J2ME and Symbian OS devices (with Windows Mobile in the works). Not surprisingly, Ken Camp is already on the story. Seems like a logical move for Cisco that should help extend the range and use of their products.

One of the more interesting bits of news coming out of this week’s Astricon is a new channel partner program being launched by iotum. Iotum CEO and VoIP power blogger Alec Saunders posts some thoughts on the new program here, noting that partner programs don’t mean much without actual partners and that iotum has already signed on several, including Angel.com, Core Telecom Innovations Inc, ESCAUX, The Flat Planet Phone Company, Integrics Limited, and Nufone Incorporated.

Alec also points out that programs like this are a “validation of the use of XML based web services to connect up new communications applications,” which he believes is one of the foundations of the Voice 2.0 platform. That’s something we heartily agree with here at O’Reilly — opening up APIs and using open and standards-based methods of interconnecting systems is a great way to encourage adoption of a company’s new products and services and to help create an active developer ecosystem around a new technology. This is something that iotum clearly understands (and which Alec has written about extensively), as they continue to expand the reach of their products with innovative partnerships and deals. By creating an iotum Asterisk module and interfacing with products like PhoneGnome and participating in developer programs like AOL’s Open AIM Phoneline initiative, iotum is quickly becoming a shining example of the new breed of telecom companies (ok, ok, Voice 2.0 companies ;) that will succeed without having to become entrenched in the slow and restrictive business models of the incumbent telecom carriers. No walled gardens for these guys!

Today EQO Communications announced support for RIM Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices, allowing EQO’s VoIP calling and IM services to be extended to these platforms. EQO supports all of the major IM systems (AIM, ICQ, GoogleTalk, Jabber, MSN, Yahoo! and Skype). While EQO had previously focused on bringing IM and VoIP to more common and inexpensive cellular handsets, this move really makes sense as smartphones with full keyboards, and which are often bundled with wireless data services, are a natural fit for IM. Having just joined the ranks of Blackberry users myself, I’ll definitely be giving the EQO Mobile services a spin on that platform.

One thing’s for sure, Fonality can’t be accused of wasting any time. Not even three weeks after Fonality announced their acquisition of trixbox (formerly Asterisk@Home), comes a major new 2.0 release of the popular Asterisk-based distribution, that includes a powerful new global, web-based GUI package manager, support for Sangoma voice cards, and integration with LumenVox’s Speech Engine.

Fonality CEO Chris Lyman told me that while they have had 4-5 engineers working on the new release for the past 4 months, in many ways they have just been building on all of the excellent work done by trixbox founder Andrew Gillis and the trixbox open source community. Lyman was clearly excited about the new trixbox release and spoke passionately about his belief in the benefits of open source, and the value that Fonality sees in supporting a free and open version of Asterisk alongside their commercial Asterisk-based products. Lyman was particularly happy about the progress that has been made in the trixbox 2.0 release towards a much simpler installation and configuration process, and views the new GUI as “a milestone of maturity for this open source movement.”

Now that all of the applications in the trixbox suite can be installed from one GUI package manager, Lyman points out that it is very easy for users to run as lean or as heavy systems as they want. If you want to go heavy, besides Asterisk, trixbox comes with Linux, SugarCRM, MySQL, FreePBX, FOP, and HUDlite. Lyman likes to use a variation on the LAMP acronym to describe the trixbox platform - LAAMPS, adding an extra A for Asterisk and S for SugarCRM to the Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python label. And Lyman proudly explains that they are reaching the achievement of being able to set up everything in the trixbox ecosystem without ever touching a command line.

The 2.0 version of Skype for the Mac has finally gone gold. The last time I gave a beta version of 2.0 for the Mac a spin I wasn’t very impressed with the video quality, it seemed not quite as good as iChat and significantly worse than SightSpeed. But now that a final version has been released I’ll give it a fresh chance and report back here soon. (Though if the comments on the Share Skype announcement are any indication, I shouldn’t expect much. It sounds like Skype may have actually sacrificed video quality in order to support older Mac models). On a more positive note, one of my colleagues who had experienced consistent problems using the Mac version of Skype for business conference calls reports that the final release seems to have fixed the troubles he was having.

Tmobile launched a test in Seattle of their @Home service which costs an additional $20 per month for unlimited calling from a home access point as well as any T-Mobile HotSpot. Customers who purchase what Tmobile dubbed a HotSpot cell phone (either a Nokia 6136 or Samsung T709) can make unlimited US data calls using pre-approved WiFi HotSpots instead of the cellular network. Anyone out there signed up yet? Got feedback?

As the number of Apple Dashboard Widgets, Google Gadgets, Microsoft Gadgets, and Yahoo Widgets being created grows I hope that emerging telephony hardware device manufacturers are comparing and contrasting what it currently takes a developer to make one of these apps vs developing a full-blown mobile application. Frankly, it’s just too hard to develop on mobile and combined with the poor carrier distribution options it can be pointless for many to waste cycles innovating here unless they are seriously funded.

So, what about developer simplification?

The companies mentioned above could start encouraging hardware developers to support (and soon help roll out) portable devices that run all the necessary local software sandboxes and free things like Gadgets/Widgets from the PC desktop and extend them onto portable mobile devices. Even better, if mobile devices ran something like the traditional LAMP architecture many developers could migrate their projects right over. Granted, there are some heavy browser, CPU, memory and HD requirements in my proposal but it feels like things are heading in this direction anyways.

While this only solves a part of the problem it immediately increases the size of the telephony application developer base (which I think is a good thing for everyone.) If a web developer can start creating mobile apps imagine the opportunities for cool new services, especially if hardware dependent telephony and GEO APIs are easily exposed?

Flash Lite, Mobile Processing, Python for S60 and Motorola’s Open Source Initiative are standout leaders making development easier but I’m still left hoping for mobile sandboxes that look and act like my webservice developer environments. If they initially look a lot like the widget engines out there, that’s good step in the right direction.

I recently uncovered evidence that Investor’s Business Daily, the second-largest print and online newspaper devoted to financial information, had at least part of its subscriber list stolen.

Now I’ve become curious. I’ve heard about selective attacks against specific targets to harvest email addresses. I can’t recall ever hearing about a Trojan or virus that harvested phone numbers.

Certainly that day can’t be far off. Phone calls sometimes attract the attention of police and regulators; therefore it makes sense from a criminal’s point of view to make as few phone calls as possible and to direct the calls at lucrative targets. As a result criminals have even more incentive to gather lists of “high quality” phone numbers than they do to gather lists of email addresses.

But I don’t recall ever hearing of a Trojan or virus that targets phone numbers or snail-mail address; the most leading-edge thefts I’m aware of are directed at IM addresses. Now I’m wondering if I missed the memo, if I’m forecasting the furture, or if there are stealthy attacks in progress…

In the wake of the proposed Truth in Caller ID Act, a lengthy discussion of the issues around reliable Caller ID data recently took place on the excellent Voice Over IP Security Alliance VOIPSEC mailing list. While many points were debated, two things are clear: VoIP-based systems connecting to the PSTN have increased the unreliability of Caller ID data, and law enforcement agencies have legitimate needs to be able to get access to call record information that is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain.

Solving the Caller ID Problem is John Todd’s proposal for a vendor-neutral industry consortium as an alternative to potentially stifling legislation to address these concerns, and was adapted from a post that John made to the VOIPSEC list.

John points out that it is not always possible or obvious how to treat Caller ID data when moving to or from VoIP and the PSTN networks, and there are even business models which are predicated on the ability of caller ID to be transmitted to the PSTN with a value that is not “expected.”

Advanced combinations of transmitting Caller ID are part of the natural progression of next-generation services, and customers are demanding a better set of methods to control the way their company and personal calls are identified. It’s going to get much more complex and customized from the customer and service provider’s perspective, and it’s up to us as an industry to figure out how to provide accountability for our customers and ourselves to law enforcement agencies.

John has given this problem a lot of thought and has come up with a plan that I think is better than other proposed solutions and well worth serious consideration. If you have an interest in the future of Voice 2.0 companies and services, I think you’ll find John’s proposal well worth a read.

CNET’s News.com recently conducted an ‘in-world’ interview with Philip Rosedale, the CEO of Linden Lab, operators of Second Life.

Buried within the interview are some interesting comments on the application of voice in Second Life…

Let’s talk about voice support in “Second Life.” Vivox is now doing a push for its third-party VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) client/phone booth in-world. What should “Second Life” residents expect when it comes to voice support from Linden Lab?

Rosedale: OK. First, we clearly agree that voice can be very powerful in “Second Life” for many things. There is a critical feature–the ability to properly 3D-spatialize multiple people speaking in a room, that is going to allow meetings in “Second Life” between many people to blow away conference calls. This is a very powerful thing, and we want to get it working.

When?

Rosedale: I have seen demos where three or four people could talk at the same time and I could understand them perfectly. So that is a huge potential feature. But not everyone wants voice all the time. And text (communication) is very, very powerful. For example, I can use (a translation tool) I am fond of, but that only works when, socially, we are using text and are therefore tolerant of a slight delay. So ideally, the implementation shouldn’t push one over the other, or have everyone with voice “forcing” those without it or not wanting it to use it. So we are going to be careful with any built in capability, to make that work

We’ve already seen voice becoming an intrinsic part of virtual worlds in Xbox Live; as press bureaus and businesses begin to establish themselves in Second Life, it’ll be interesting to see how telephony, presence, voice and conferencing evolve. Will telephony become an irresistible development for residents? Given the growth of the service, Second Life could become both a significant platform for telephony and a valuable audience for telephony providers.

Hmmm… GTalk+ Google Earth + Second Life = ?

One of the reasons that I was late to VoIP was that the initial services just weren’t that exciting. (To be fair to myself, I probably wasn’t really that late. I just feel like it sometimes because so many of my friends were first-wave early adopters.) Another way to connect up to a regular phone number was certainly interesting, but after having been a world-traveling GSM subscriber for years, the idea of getting a number that followed me around the globe really wasn’t earth-shattering.

VoIP is much more interesting when you can find ways of supplanting the telephone network instead of attaching to it. I recently signed up for an Internet Telephony Administrative Domain (ITAD) number. ITADs come to us from RFC 3219, and were originally intended to be part of an alternative telephone routing scheme. However, they’ve been re-purposed as a generic “Internet-style” telephone number.

Like an e-mail address, an ITAD Subscriber Number (ISN) consists of two parts. Within a realm, each user is assigned a unique number. The two are then joined with an asterisk, so that user number 123 in ITAD 456 would be addressed as 123*456.

If you’d like an ITAD number of your very own, there’s a short cookbook with instructions that take you from wanting a number to being globally reachable. When I applied to IANA, I had a response from them in one business day. (Unfortunately, I was busy traveling and sat on it for a few days. If I’d been able to respond promptly, I might have had a lower number than they do!)

If you’re running a PBX and want to call me, or more likely, somebody at one of the other ITAD-enabled organizations, it’s worth it to sign up. The cookbook has instructions for advertising your reachability in DNS, and there’s a project-run DNS server that you can use if you don’t have access to a DNS server that supports naming authority pointer (NAPTR) records. When I wrote to get my ITAD number added into that server, I had a response in less than eight hours, even though I submitted my request on a Sunday.

While I think labeling the iPod Shuffle as a “PBX” in this scenario is a bit misleading, this new iBlue Mac-based IP-PBX product from Berlin-based 4S Newcom is certainly intriguing. It looks like the PBX software gets loaded on an iPod Shuffle, which you can then boot a Mac Mini from to turn it into a mini-phone system running the 4S IP PBX solution.

The iBlue entry level system is expected to start shipping in early November, just in time for VON Europe, and will consist of a Mac mini, the iPod Shuffle with the 4S IP PBX licensed for up to 250 users and 30 parallel calls, and five snom300 VoIP phones.

For the past hour YouTube appears to be completely offline (no 404 notice, etc) and revver has been having its own server issues (mainly 500 errors).

NOTE: Both services appear to be back online and functioning fine.

Scalability, QoS and the five 9’s isn’t just a telco thing anymore. I am starting to wonder if P2P is the only realistic way forward for delivering video content without bringing down an entire network either fiscally or technically.

Microsoft research launched SLAM which stands for “Social Location Annotation Mobile.”

A prototype social software for communicating and sharing with groups of friends and family, primarily on mobile devices. SLAM enables real-time communication, location awareness and photo-sharing.

Requirements include having a Windows Mobile device (and friends who have such devices.) :(

Scenarios for Slam

Real-time Coordination: Out on a Friday night? No need to decide on a place and time to meet in advance, just send a message to your friends when you’re ready to go and see where everybody is. Some people may be at a restaurant, others on the move, but everybody can send messages and coordinate immediately. Imagine coordinating a ski trip this way, too.

Instant Group Photo Sharing: You are always seeing beautiful and interesting things, but it’s too hard to send pictures to people with your cameraphone. Use Slam to take a picture and send it to a group of friends with only a few clicks. Try forming a “celebrity sightings” cameraphone group or share pictures with your family throughout your day.

Broadcast communication: Need a babysitter? Send a message to your “babysitters” group saying “Can someone come over for a few hours right now?” All your potential sitters get the message right when you send it, wherever they are.

While on the topic of Asterisk news LumenVox recently released a integrated speech solution for Asterisk-based applications.

The Speech Starter Kit includes 1-port Speech Engine Lite & the Asterisk Connector Bridge.
It is included for free in Business Edition, $245 for open source.

I’m waiting for my copy to arrive so I can give this a test run, guess who I plan to use as my ivsp?

Instant Solutions recently launched ChanSkype the first Skype channel
driver for Asterisk. One would assume that they leveraged the work done
to reverse engineer the Skype protocol but they actually went a more
legit, albeit, low-tech route to get the job done. Earlier today I
spoke with Paulo Mannheimer, a programmer on the project. He described their
implementation which instantiates a Skype client for each call and,
using proprietary kernel space drivers and X automation, enables
Asterisk to communicate with the Skype network.

Currently, this supports calling Skype users and PSTN numbers (using a
SkypeOut balance), bridging SIP channels, and offers the ability to make
simultaneous calls. They’re about to launch the ability to accept Skype
In calls and will soon be exposing presence information in the dialplan.

Licensing is on a per-channel basis, and they’ve tested it on up to 60
active calls on a Dual Xeon 3.0 GHz machine with 6 Gb of memory with
“no significant performance impact.”

I’ve been wanting to hook Asterisk up to Skype for awhile and can’t wait
to give this a try and report back.

Bryan Martin, the CEO and Chairman of 8×8, started off the TMC Internet Telephony conference in San Diego with a passionate plea for network neutrality. Martin’s conference-opening keynote traced the relatively brief history of VoIP and concluded with a discussion of the rapidly-changing regulatory climate here in the U.S. around IP communications, and the suggestion that the time is now for the industry to get a handle on these issues and speak up to our legislators.

Martin pointed out that while it is widely predicted that a new telecom bill won’t see the light of day this year, it is highly likely that within the next year or two we will see new regulations and laws that may have serious impacts on the IP communications sector. Martin particularly pleaded for adoption of some kind of network neutrality rules, which is not surprising as 8×8’s main Packet8 VoIP offering could be at the mercy of Internet service providers who are increasingly looking to compete with companies like 8×8 with their own VoIP products. Martin advocated making the case for network neutrality by focusing on the impact this issue will have on end users of technology, pointing out that much of the press so far has focused on what the effects will be on service and content providers, but if we start talking about consumers (voters) more, we may have more success influencing career politicians. 8×8 has even produced a white paper (PDF) to help make this case, and I think they did a good job with it.

The crowd here seemed sympathetic to Martin’s perspective, and I get the impression that there aren’t many in the audience who oppose at least the principle of a non-discriminatory network policy. Again, not surprising though at a conference with “Internet Telephony” in its name.

Rich Tehrani has the scoop on Pingtel’s recently announced deal with Amazon.com and rightly declares this a major boost for open source telecommunications and the SIP protocol. Amazon will be replacing a legacy PBX and cutting over some 5,000 stations to Pingtel’s SIPxchange Enterprise Communications Solution platform. As Rich points out, clearly telephone service is mission-critical for Amazon, so they must be convinced that Pingtel’s SIP-based deployment is hardened, stable, and up to the task at hand.
Ted Wallingford is also enthusiastic about the deal and sees it as a real shot across Cisco’s bow.

Another point that Rich makes is that while Asterisk gets the lion’s share of the media attention, this deal proves they’re not the only player in the open source PBX game. And as the jabs that Pingtel takes at Asterisk in the Amazon press release show (as well as the growing success of companies like Fonality), Digium can expect to see increased competition in the open source PBX space.

$1.65 Billion in stock is a lot of money but you gotta admit that an arsenal of YouTube videos would be great content for the rumored gTalk device shipping sometime next year. Not to mention, if you agree with Janus and Niklas isn’t video officially the next thing to tackle? Things are heating up in this space.

Those of us who run Kannel will be excited to learn that the stable branch has been updated for the first time in nearly two years! There are over “200 changesets.” If Open Source SMS Gateways are your thing then head over to kannel.org and get your phreaky text messaging on.

One day I’ll post a “how to” setup Kannel userguide. In the meantime, you can learn a lot from simply R’ingTFM.

Also, I do have some old posts that were really just notes to myself but still possibly useful: passing variables from Asterisk to Kannel. I wanted to simply send, receive, and respond to SMS messages using CallerID info I was getting from Asterisk, etc, etc. Unfortunately, the SMS app in Asterisk is confusing because it only supports landline SMS if I understood it right. Unlimited text messaging plans and cheap phones were never so useful. :)

Also, if Open Source MMS Gateways are what you’re really after head over to Mbuni and get your data phreak on.

Occasionally I come across blog posts that require serious contemplation and can take awhile to digest, and Alec Saunders, co-founder and CEO of iotum and a prolific blogger, has written more than his share of these. I knew I was in for another when Alec dropped me a note the other day about his latest essay, Voice 2.0 A Year Later, which was partly inspired by a wave of recent grumbling by some (myself included) about a couple of the new start-ups in the telecom space. I knew I wasn’t going be skimming this one.

Alec has been a vocal proponent of what many are now calling Voice 2.0, and his company iotum provides a shining example of the kind of exciting applications this future will hold with their relevance engine. Alec penned the widely-cited Voice 2.0: A Manifesto for the Future, you guessed it, about a year ago, and it’s definitely both fascinating and pretty impressive to see how the ideas Alec expressed in his manifesto have fared in the span of just one year.

In Alec’s original essay he coined the term “Voice 2.0″, noting that telephony applications like Skype and PhoneGnome were beginning to take advantage of the Internet and predicting that companies that could capitalize on the combination of telephony and web technology were poised to explode on the scene. Alec saw the merger of “talk” and the web as the foundation of this application-centric communications shift he called Voice 2.0

We’re witnessing the beginnings of a titanic clash between the internet and the telecommunications industry. My hope is that clash will be the, albeit painful, evolution of Voice into a full blow internet application — the birth of Voice 2.0.

Alec’s Voice 2.0 is not something that can be easily explained in a sentence or two, and I won’t try and paraphrase his writing on the topic any more here, if you want to know more you should definitely go read his first essay on the topic. But the Voice 2.0 Manifesto does seem to be foreshadowing events in the telecom space, such as the growing need to separate (and standardize) the presentation layer of an application from the transport layer.

It’s interesting to note the signs of uptake in Alec’s current reflections on the state of Voice 2.0, as he’s seeing that consumers can now buy call originations and terminations, as well as identity services, from a variety of vendors, APIs are becoming common, and a batch of new and different telecom applications are emerging. Alec also points out the wisdom of AOL’s recent moves to open up it’s network to third-party applications and developers (like iotum), noting that in this type of scenario AOL handles all the origination/termination issues and network infrastructure, and telecom developers can (finally) focus their energies on their applications. That’s very Voice 2.0 and I agree with Alec that we’ll be seeing more opening up of networks like this, and it was a savvy move on AOL’s part. (And yes, I didn’t really expect to ever be using the words “savvy” and “AOL” in the same sentence.)

In fact, just today (as Alec is one of the first to point out), Skype is making similar moves by allowing developers to switch off the visible Skype UI within applications.

It’s the first indication that Skype will allow developers to separate the UI from the engine, and deliver what Peeter Mõtsküla referred to last April as Naked Skype.

I confess to bristling at the frequent adding of a “2.0″ suffix to seemingly any technology these days, but I’m slowly coming around on this one and think Alec’s Voice 2.0 vision is insightful and right on. And I’m already looking forward to next year’s essay.

I use the “Centre” spelling in the article title with malice aforthought, since the news item is out of India, discusses an upcoming documentary to be shown on Britain’s Channel 4, and reports the reaction of the Australian public. A article in The Hindu News Update Service states the British documentary will show personal banking information — including account information — bought and sold on the streets of India. According to the report, Australians would prefer to bank at financial institutions that keep their financial data on-shore rather than off-shore.

I have to admit that my first thought after I read this article was “how can VoIP fix this?” Certainly VoIP an/or cheap telephony is part of the problem; that’s likely how the calls went overseas in the first place. Almost inevitably, the data followed, and now bank customers may be paying the price.

But before we panic, I’d like to point out that financial data theft happens here in the US; you can buy and sell ATM card information over the Internet. I suspect the real question is whether similar call center leaks happen here in the US — what’s the baseline? After all, US call centers are an established industry, handle lots of money, and have a transient work force. I imagine that it’s easy enough to steal financial information if you’re a call center employee.

But to return to the original question: Can VoIP help instead of making the problem worse? Or will the contnued use of VoIP to drive business to the lowest-cost location inevitably lead to theft, and an inevitable backlash against outsourcing? Or should the VoIP community wash its hands of these problems and pray that someone else fixes them?

I may have re-invented the wheel: Tossable Digits uses the same extension-based scheme I proposed. They’ve got a different business model than I had in mind, they have a different security model than I had in mind, and they don’t seem to have some of the other usage-tracking features I’ve been thinking about — but on the other hand, they have a commercial service you can sign up for today, and all I have are doodles and a demo.

I wish them success, and if you want to use Disposable Phone Numbers immediately, they’re the place to go. If you end up using their service, feel free to comment here and let us all know how well it works.

Now it’s official–or at least one more step toward being official. California has indicted five former HP managers for trying to get private email and phone records of board members. Officially, of course, the indicted managers are innocent until proven guilty. And finding them guilty of law-breaking will be hard, because one has to interpret existing laws broadly to cover pretexting and other shuffling through electronic records. But the ethics–or lack thereof–displayed should make all of us who work in large organizations worry.

Let’s recap:
Back in 2001 Woz joins the Board of Directors at Danger.

A few years pass.

Meanwhile, a socialite’s Sidekick gets hacked, a search entity becomes a giant, and a computer maker reinvents itself in the consumer electronics business.

The post browser wars bring us Firefox and Safari with its integrated Google search.

It starts to get interesting when Google brings over key members of the Danger team who happened to be responsible for the Sidekick. By the way, what was that Android team working on?

iChat starts supporting Jabber, a few random widgets arrive, and some Mac engineering jobs at Google start opening up.

Then, Google’s CEO joins Apple’s board. Rumors of an Apple phone start emerging everywhere.

And now this Maps thingy. Where would that GPS data come from via an Apple Hardware input device?

Do Apple and Google have some cool stuff in store?

Don’t be surprised if Dodgeball and Orkut play a part of the rollout. I was salivating for the N95 dropping in January but now I’m gonna wait to see if something better gets announced. Where do I pre-order?

We’re organizing a meetup next Tuesday Oct 10th at The Phone Booth (25th & S Van Ness), a quirky bar with a long history (it was once a favorite watering hole for Pac Bell operators).

This is a potluck phone geek meetup, so bring your own phone (rotary phones especially). We’d like someone to bring a intercom or PBX system to hook all the phones up to create an improvised table-to-table intercom system.

So stop by Tuesday and throw back a pint or two.

In a very interesting Asterisk-related development, news is coming out today that Fonality has purchased Trixbox (formerly Asterisk@Home). Trixbox is a free, popular, and easily-installable GUI version of Asterisk, and Fonality is the company behind the very successful PBXtra Asterisk-based IP PBX. Clearly this move increases Fonality’s presence in this space and it will be interesting to see what they do with Trixbox and how they interact with the open source community. It’s certainly good to hear that Fonality is hiring Trixbox founder Andrew Gillis and that he’ll continue to lead the Trixbox community. The press release also makes it clear that Fonality intends to keep Trixbox free and open source (under the GPL license).

Trixbox will remain an open source project licensed under the general public license (GPL), which encourages innovative software development both within the Asterisk environment and the larger open source community.

“Trixbox is a thriving Asterisk community, unencumbered by licensing complexities. It was free, it is free and we are going to make sure it stays free.” said Chris Lyman, Fonality’s CEO and founder.

Tom Keating was way in front with this story, speculating about it in June and breaking the news and posting an in-depth interview with Fonality CEO Chris Lyman last night. Alec Saunders observes that this move really places Fonality in direct competition with Digium. I’m going to be speaking to Chris myself tomorrow, and I’ll follow up and post some more thoughts on this deal after our conversation.

Wired has a brief note about VoIP and AJAX security, and mentions that over twenty tools are freely available that can trash and hack a VoIP call.

The current crop of VoIP softphones (Free World Dialup and the like) are too limited in extent to be of much interest to criminals. But now that Skype can outdial to the PSTN, clearly it’s only a matter of time before we see the first widespread outbreak of SPIT (spam over Internet Telephony). Imagine the joy of receiving pre-recorded telephone messages selling dubious finanacial instruments and poisoness body-part enhancers.

I have to admit that there’s a bright side. PSTN calls cost money, and people who allow their systems to become infected with SPIT viruses will at least pay for their carelessness. Or cluelessness.

I very much agree with what TelEvolution founder David Beckemeyer expresses so eloquently in his recent blog post, FCC clearly in bed with traditional telecom. David notes that with recent FCC actions like the VoIP 911 Order, the VoIP CALEA requirements, and now the Universal Service Fund for VoIP Order, there seems to be a real trend at the FCC to create new regulations designed to protect the incumbent telcos. (At the same time I also agree with David that it shouldn’t come as a surprise to companies looking to replace our traditional phone companies that they’re going to be required to fully implement 911 services.)

David plays closer attention to the fine print of these new regulations than most, and he isn’t happy with what he’s been seeing. Noting things like how there’s a buried footnote in the USF for VoIP order specifying that incumbents don’t have to pay into USF for DSL service revenues, and the unequal considerations given to telcos and VoIP providers, it sure does seem clear that the telco lobbyists are earning their money. Or as David wryly puts it, the USF and other VoIP-related orders might as well just be called “The Incumbent Preservation and Consumer Protection from Innovation Act”. I really enjoy David’s writing on Mr. Blog, partly because he’s not afraid to speak his mind:

What better way for the government to spend my tax dollars than to prop up a bloated, ecomonically dysfunctional industry so it can continue to suck the life out of the economy and destroy the competitive position of the United States in the global arena? The new USF FCC Order doesn’t even discuss its impact upon VoIP providers, but, thank God, it finds it will have minimal impact on the incumbents. Whew. That’s a relief. I’ll sleep better tonight knowing that.

Slashdot is running a story about a new line of bluetooth watches that vibrate when a call comes in on your cell phone, display the caller’s number, and allow you to press a button to send the call to voicemail. Now that’s a cool use of Bluetooth! As someone who is often fumbling for my cell phone when it’s ringing, and just about as often finding myself not wanting to take that particular call at that moment - this device would be great. The watches are being made through a partnership of Fossil and Sony Ericsson, will cost between $200 and $250, and should be available by the end of October. That’s a little rich for my blood, but if those come down a bit…