O'Reilly Emerging Telephony

A MySQL employee's perspective on Sun purchase

2008-01-18T23:03:47Z

O’Reilly author Russell Dyer (who has just finished the second edition of his MySQL in a Nutshell) writes about why selling the company to Sun was probably a tough decision–but the best one.

ETel 2008 Cancelled

2007-10-12T23:35:23Z

I’m sorry to report that the 2008 O’Reilly Emerging Telephony conference has been cancelled. From the conference web site:

Due to changed circumstances since ETel 2008 was announced, we have decided not to move forward with the conference this year.

O’Reilly continues to be committed to exploring this space, and we welcome your interest and contributions to the conversation. Share ideas with us by sending a message to etel-idea@oreilly.com.

We will also be winding down publishing on this site. It has been extremely interesting and rewarding for me to be involved with the ETel community these past couple of years, and I really appreciate the opportunity I’ve had to interact with you all. Thanks very much for your participation and support. I’ve learned a great deal and I know that the ideas and topics we’ve covered here will continue to push the communications envelope in many different ways. I’m sorry this site won’t be one of the places where this discussion continues, but I look forward to working with all the people I’ve met from the ETel site and conferences on other projects down the road.

Digium Buys Switchvox

2007-09-27T20:47:18Z

An interesting move by Digium today as they’ve announced the acquisition of Switchvox, a provider of SMB IP PBX systems. Digium has an informative FAQ up on its site about the deal. This move gives Digium a turnkey SMB system, something they really needed, especially as competition for Asterisk-based systems has started to heat up. Switchvox has put a lot of energy into developing friendly and usable systems, something that Asterisk is not known for. Switchvox systems can also integrate with major CRM systems “out of the box”, an important need for many businesses today.

Digium is making a concerted effort to assure the open source telecom community that they are in no way abandoning their ideals of an open Asterisk, and there is a lot of language in that FAQ speaking to that. Most interesting perhaps, is this bit:

Digium’s plan is to take selected elements of the Switchvox solution and contribute them back to the open source community to enhance Asterisk as well as migrate Asterisk features forward into Switchvox.

Dan York has the best write-up on the deal so far, and I think he’s right on the money with this bit:

To me, what is far more compelling is that Digium just bought themselves a whole group of people who “get” the world of “unified communications”, business process integration, Web 2.0 mashups, etc.

Digium has had no story at all around “presence” within its core offerings. Now it does. While Asterisk has always been a platform play where you have the ability to integrate Asterisk with other apps, doing so has not exactly been for the faint-of-heart. Hire yourself some programmers and you can do pretty much anything with Asterisk… but that’s not something that many businesses want to get into. SwitchVox now gives Digium a way to do easy integration with databases and web sites. The integrations to Salesforce.com and SugarCRM are slick. The Google Maps popup is a seriously cool mashup! (And where is that on the roadmap of the mainstream vendors?)

Propel Launches Personal Bandwidth Manager

2007-09-27T19:34:11Z

Propel, the company behind the most widely used Internet accelerator by ISPs has just announced an interesting new product for consumers who want to manage their own bandwidth usage. The Propel Personal Bandwidth Manager (PBM) could be especially relevant for people who use Skype or other voip services and have experienced voice quality issues with their existing set up. As David Murray, Propel’s president and CEO notes, there are many apps these days that use your network connection, and they don’t always play nicely together. It’s certainly in a user’s best interest to be able to prioritize things like voice or streaming video above file transfers, bit torrents, and other non-urgent network apps, and it looks like PBM could be a great tool for this.

Propel’s PBM has an automatic mode where it will make it’s own decisions about which apps should get prioity bandwidth and how much in the background, and Murray expects this plug and play mode will satisfy the majority of users. To keep current with the various apps that deserve some level of prioritization, PBM works with a continually updated definition file, much like anti-virus programs. There is also a Traffic Monitor feature that displays your current system network usage in a Task Manager-style window and gives users more information about what exactly is using bandwidth.

It’s amazing to me that this product doesn’t already exist. (I know there are plenty of ways for technical people to monitor their network connection and bandwidth use, but I’m not aware of any simple products for average consumers). Propel’s PBM was shown publicly for the first time this week at the prestigious DEMO conference. It’s still in an invitation-only beta right now, but the Windows version is expected to be released sometime this fall.

Truphone DEMOs Voip on iPhone

2007-09-26T16:53:33Z

Truphone participated in this year’s prestigious DEMO conference and the highlight of their presentation was showing off the running of their voip service on Apple’s iPhone. Andy Abramson has all of the details, as well as a video of the iPhone demonstration.

It will be interesting to see how (and if) Apple responds to Truphone. It looks like Apple has decided to start playing hardball with the hacking community that has so quickly sprung up around the iPhone, and it’s certainly plausible that AT&T is pushing Apple in that direction that as they stand to lose the most with the widespread use of iPhone unlocking software that’s currently under fire. Of course, they also stand to lose money if voip applications become popular on the device. It sure seems like a losing battle though, we’ve seen the first voip app for the iPhone now but it won’t be the last.

The Vodafone UK Debacle

2007-09-25T16:41:05Z

If you are not aware, Vodafone UK recently decided to remove the User-Agent field from the mobile browser headers. This means a web developer can’t tell if the user browsing to their mobile site is coming from a mobile device or from the PC. In my opinion, shared by many others, this will have many adverse effects on all companies that rely on delivering customized content to each user’s device.

Vodafone has done this to maintain the walled garden, essentially take control. They are maintaining a whitelist of partners where they will deliver the mobile optimized site; this means if you are not on the white-list, then your site will go through the Vodafone transcoder and likely render much uglier than your mobile optimized site.

However, Vodafone UK is allowing startups to apply to the whitelist program but this of course means that your service is subject to Vodafone, meaning an off-deck mobile content download site would probably be rejected.

I’m hoping this doesn’t perpetuate to other operators; this is the walled-garden at its worst.

Google Ponders Mobile Payments

2007-09-17T17:32:25Z

A recently published patent is causing significant speculation that Google may be entering the mobile payment space with a simple system that utilizes SMS messages to effectuate mobile payment transactions. Coverage of the patent can be found at SEOptimize, as well as at Ars Technica. The full patent application is here.

Much of the coverage suggests this application might part of the build up to a ‘GPhone’. However, I’m skeptical. With the entry of everyone from Bank of America to Paypal into mobile banking, it seems only logical that someone at Google would seek to establish a presence in this emerging market. The claims in the patent application make little to no reference to an application - refering simply to SMS messaging - suggesting this patent application may be independent of any GPhone that Google may be contemplating.

In either case, Google’s work in the mobile payment space continues to validate the emergence of mobile payments as a potentially mainstream application. While I feel there may yet be identity and other security issues that must be addressed, such a system could significantly lower the overhead small business owners face in processing credit and debit card payments today.

Worldwide Lexicon : Adding Collaborative Translation To Your Site

2007-09-17T06:29:58Z

The Worldwide Lexicon, an open source project I have led for several years, recently published a suite of collaborative translation tools that enable you or your readers to create, edit and share translations to and from almost any human language. We have been testing the system throughout the summer, and in this article I explain how you can use WWL to make your site or content accessible in many languages.

WWL applies the concept of user generated content, similar to systems like Wikipedia, to the task of creating, improving and sharing translations for texts. The system does not use machine translation, but instead relies on people. Human language demands people to comprehend it, and while machine translation has improved, even accurate machine translations are not usually enjoyable to read. The key insight in WWL is that a website that has an audience will have bilingual readers, often without knowing it. These people are both interested in and more knowledgeable about the subject matter, so some of them will be willing to translate it, whether for goodwill or for money. WWL creates a simple way for a website’s readers to contribute, edit and share translations.

We began testing the system with a Word Press plug-in this summer, and have since released PHP libraries, as well as a Firefox extension. More tools are planned for release soon. The system is open source, and we are encouraging developers to embed this process in a wide range of platforms. The ultimate goal is to make collaborative translation a checkbox option on most publishing platforms, so that anyone who wants to be accessible can be. Since the release of the Word Press plug in, WWL has logged users in 107 countries representing some 50 languages, with over two-thirds of the users coming from outside the United States, suggesting a pent up demand for multilingual publishing tools.

WWL is easy to incorporate into a wide variety of web services. In this article, I’ll describe how to use the different tools we’ve created so far, and how they can be adapted for custom use.

System Overview

WWL is designed as a client-server system that stores translated texts, revision histories, etc, on a central translation server that can deliver translations to a wide variety of client applications, ranging from a browser plugin, to an extension to a content management system. One of our design goals with this version of WWL was to make it platform neutral, so that it would work well with many different content management systems, including old systems.

In a typical implementation, the translation server will receive a request to display a translation for a document, identified via an MD5 hash derived from the URL. If a translation is available, the translation server sends it back along with metadata. The client application, a Word Press plug in for example, displays this as an overlay to the source document. Document management services (edits, revision history, etc) are hosted on the translation server, so that client applications can be simple, lightweight, and not require frequent updates. While this approach has some drawbacks, they are offset by the translation server’s ability to serve many different front-end applications, content management systems, etc.

Getting Started With Word Press

The best way to demo WWL is to use our Word Press plug in. This is easy to install and will give you an idea of how WWL works from end to end. Setting up the WP plug in is simple. Just download the plug in, extract the files into your Word Press server’s plugins directory. Then activate the WWL plugin. There is nothing to configure, just turn it on.

Once the plug in is active. You should see a list of languages beneath each headline on your WP blog. The list will vary depending on each visitor’s location and browser language preferences. If you’re visiting from Brazil, for example, Portuguese should show up at the head of the list. If you have Norwegian set as a preferred language, you’ll see Norwegian, regardless of where you visit from.

If there are translations for a text, you’ll see the first few words of each translation. When you click on a translation, the plug in will replace the original text with the translated text. If no translation is available, you can 1) contribute one, 2) subscribe to an RSS feed for translations to that language, 3) fetch a machine translation, if that’s possible for the desired language. If you decide to contribute a translation, you’ll jump to an editor that displays a text box that floats on top of the original text, making it easy to compose the first translation using a split-screen editor.

Translations published in several ways: 1) as an overlay to your Word Press blog (the reader does not know the translations reside on another server), 2) via static HTML pages on www.worldwidelexicon.org (for sharing and search engine discovery), and 3) as RSS feeds. Search engine optimization is an important aspect of the project, as the system makes original and translated texts searchable. Thus, someone may find a document that was originally published in another language when they do a search in theirs.

The Word Press plug in, while it’s easy to use, is designed for authors, not programmers, and is does not have a lot of access control or workflow management features. If you want to customize WWL or incorporate it into another system, you’ll want to look at our PHP libraries. Most of WWL is PHP based, and as such, is easy to adapt to other systems.

PHP Libraries

We have published a PHP tool that presents a similar user interface to the Word Press plug in. This can be embedded in any PHP based site, and as the source is available, it is easy to customize the appearance and behavior of this tool. From the user’s standpoint, it works just like the Word Press plug in, but as a developer you can customize its appearance, add access control features, etc.

Integrating it into a site is straightforward. The PHP script expects a small set of variables that contain the source document title, language code, and source text, making it easy work to fetch this information and feed it back into the hosted WWL service. Visit blog.worldwidelexicon.org for info.

Hosting Your Own Translation Server

If you don’t want to use worldwidelexicon.org servers to host your translated texts, you can host your own, either by mimicking the client/server communication interface we’ve implemented, or by hosting a copy of our translation server. We have not yet released this as a turnkey system, as we are still making frequent changes to the servers, but are glad to provide source on request. The WWL servers are PHP based. If you’re knowledgeable about PHP and MySQL, you should have an easy enough time with this.

Later this fall, we will publish a turnkey package that allows users to run a WWL translation management system out of the box. Users will be able to run this as is, if they simply want to host documents on their own system, but also to customize the system to add more access control or workflow management features, localize the user interface, etc. One of the reasons we decided early on to make WWL an open source project was to enable developers to embed it in a wide variety of existing systems. We’re glad to host translations for users, but we also want to see this become part of both mainstream and niche publishing platforms. We do this in our spare time, and as such, don’t have time to build a version of WWL for every platform and locale in existence.

Firefox Plugin

For independent translators, we recently published a Firefox plugin that enables users to create and share translations for any webpage that has a permanent URL. This works like a transparent overlay. If you are reading a page you’d like to translate for a friend, or for the world at large, you simply right click on a globe icon in the lower right corner of your browser window, type your translation, and publish it. The translation will appear to anyone else who visits this page, and will also be republished for search engines, RSS readers, etc. The Firefox plugin is still fairly new, and will be coupled with tools for translation communities that enable roaming groups of bilingual Internet users to discover, translate and share interesting content.

Results So Far

We have been testing WWL throughout the summer, primarily via Word Press blogs, and have noticed some interesting trends so far. While WWL is still fairly low profile, it has attracted users worldwide, over 100 countries representing 50 languages, with the majority of users coming from outside the United States.

Although the project is still at an experimental state, we have noticed a few early trends that may point toward future uses, among them:

Translation affinity groups : many people have friends or family who do speak other languages, and are beginning to use WWL to create and share translations with them, with the added benefit that the public translations are visible to others and can be shared. There are many types of publications where peer translation may catch on.

Bilingual publishers : several blogs use WWL as a way to manage their own posts, and will publish in their native language, and then turn right around to post translations themselves. We didn’t design WWL with this in mind, but it is an easy to use tool if you want to host a bilingual blog.

Education : foreign language courses can use WWL as a replacement for boring textbook exercises. Intermediate and advanced students can translate real-world texts, which is both more interesting, and useful to the world at large. We’re working on new features specifically for use by students and educators.

It will be interesting to see how it develops as it becomes a part of other publishing platforms and web services (we’re working on support for one or two more blogging and CMS platforms in the near future ourselves). If you would like to use WWL as-is, or would like to contribute to the system, for example by building a plugin for your content management system, we’d like to hear from you.

The End Of The Language Barrier

2007-09-11T19:52:47Z

O’Reilly author and ETel regular Brian McConnell has just published a thought provoking essay, The End Of The Language Barrier. Brian is the the leader of the Worldwide Lexicon project, which we’ve highlighted here before. He predicts that the language barrier, at least for published content, will be history in less than three years. In his essay, he argues that the real breakthrough is social, not technological, and that people will organize themselves to create and share translations for interesting web content, much as they already participate in collaborative systems like Wikipedia. If his essay is any sign of things to come (it has already been translated into 5 languages), this is a trend worth watching.

Kajeet: A MVNO for Tweens

2007-09-10T19:41:00Z

The MVNO market is a tough one, and most companies who have tried to make it work have flamed out. Amp’d was the most recent MVNO to go belly-up, after burning through $360 million. There’s a relatively new entrant in the field that just got some backing called Kajeet, which is targeting the “tweener” market. (For those unfamiliar with the term, “tweener” is the new term for “pre-teen”). Kajeet has just announced that they have received $36.8 million in Series B venture capital funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth Fund.

From the press release:

kajeet is the first pay-as-you-go cell phone service made from a kid’s point of view. Unique among pay-as-you-go services, the kajeet Configurator offers numerous ways for tweens, teens and their families to tailor the service to meet their needs. kajeet lets tweens and teens customize their mobile experience in ways that suit their world while offering their parents comfort about the role mobile technology plays in their lives. The kajeet service and phones are available at Best Buy, Limited Too and Longs Drugs Stores and at www.kajeet.com.

I’m curious about this “demanding niche market.” Do others see this as a large untapped demographic for mobile operators? I’m the father of a tweener, and so far we haven’t allowed him to have a cell phone (though he has definitely been asking). I don’t think having the option of a tweener-oriented MVNO and it’s associated feature set will change my opinion about my child’s need for a cell phone, but maybe other parents feel differently? Let us know in the comments.

Absolute Power

2007-09-07T12:02:07Z

With the last few days breathless reporting of Nokia and Apple’s various product launches, it’s easy to overlook one of the most important factors for mobility…power! There’s been a pair of interesting battery developments in recent weeks.

First up, Trevor Baylis (inventor of the clockwork radio) launched the Eco Media Player, an iPod-esque handheld portable digital media player that gives 40 minutes of audio playback from a minute of winding (imagine what kinda power MPEG clips’ll need!).

The fact that wind-up technology is finding its way into mobile technology is noteworthy, particularly as sporadic power is one of the key issues for users of mobile handsets in the developing world. However, Baylis’ talents might have been better spend creating a universal wind-up charger for existing mobile devices…would you rather have an Eco Media Player or an iPhone with an optional wind up charger?

In other developments, researchers from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have fashioned a combination battery/super-capacitor from carbon nanotubes and paper which means the batteries can be ‘printed’ into any shape with no loss of efficiency and indeed ’stacked’ to enhance output…and get this, it can also be fueled by blood, sweat or urine!

Find out more at…

Paper battery offers future power

A paper thin battery the size of a postage stamp

Geotagging / Geolocating your flickr photos with Yahoo! zonetag and locr - a short tutorial

2007-09-04T19:30:31Z

ok… more on the geotagging photos sent to flickr via shozu and my Nokia N95 GPS-enabled smartphone. I’ve recently been doing some research to figure out exactly how to geotag my photos, and get them up on flickr then view on a map. From the outside looking it one would think, “no problemmo”, however, things are not often as simple as they would seem. Luckily there’s a couple of good third party apps that work very well. Those of you that depend on out of the box functionality that wil accomplish this will have to try again!

My research has led me to believe the following:
- there’s much confusion out there about this.
- it’s a total pain in the arse to accomplish using the Nokia N95 out of the box
- it’s not as simple as blogs and other write ups lead you to believe
- many people seem to be having trouble with many different aspects of this.
- some people seem to be experiencing difficulties uploading via shozu from the Nokia N95 - I have yet to see any issues with this.
- apparently you can tag photos from N95 directly with GPS coords if you run sprt tracker or load the maps application - I’ve yet to be able to accomplish this seemingly simple task.

Enter Yahoo! Research labs zonetag and locr. Zonetag from Yahoo! has just recently come out with a version that supports Symbian S60 3rd edition devices (Nokia N80, N95, 6110 etc…). The application is very simple to use and it works. Simply install zonetag, setup your preferences (I’m still tweaking these) load the app, connect the GPS to grab your fix, take a photo, upload to flickr… it’s as simple as that! Once on flickr your photos will have a hyperlink to map the photo and the coordinates will display when you view the photo on a map. So far I’ve had excellent results with this application.

Locr (www.locr.com) operates in a similar manner. Install the app, setup an account, connect to GPS to get a fix, snap a photo, upload to flickr and to locr if you wish. Your photos are maintained in a locr account and from the mobile device you can also view your photos or photos that are near you. Once feature I’m not big on is that the application takes over the camera and you don’t seem to get the full functionality from your device. This contrasts with Zonetag where you use the camera in the same mode that you normally would with your device.

Please note, you should have an all you can eat data plan to use these applications otherwise the results (and your next phone bill) could be scary! I use shozu for uploads normall, however, it seems that when using zonetag or locr you are actually bypassing the shozu functionality… I’m not worried as I can use al teh data I want. Stay tuned for more on these apps. Overall, I give locr a 3.5 out of 5, zonetag gets 4.5 out of 5!

Related weblinks:

my locr and zonetag photos on flickr
zonetag
locr

LiveContacts localizer now supports nokia N95

2007-09-04T19:28:21Z

LiveContacts localizer now supports nokia N95 - plots mobile locations on Google maps

The LiveContacts localizer (friend finder app) is now supporting Nokia N95 and other S60 3rd edition devices. The application plots positions from people in Google Maps. It is a Mashup for people that want to share their positions with their friends, but also for adding content (Photo’s and spots) with others. FYI, Livecontacts is a solution from the Dutch company webintegration that facilitates the exchange of location based information between trusted contacts. A bundle of applications is offered to both consumers and businesses. The core of the system contains position information of the registered users. The whereabouts of users can be based upon their mobile phones (GSM CellID), GPS coordinates or IP addresses. See more at http://www.livecontacts.com

N95 USA and the 8GB Nokia N95 - GPS, loads of memory, now games!

2007-09-04T19:27:08Z

Well, its been some time since I’ve added any updates… my bad! To catch up I’m glad to share some of my Nokia N95 tales, tips, and otherwise interesting discoveries.. enjoy!

Rumors of the 8GB Nokia N95 are not exagerated. I have to admit, info about this device is tough to locate on the Nokia website although there are many images posted in the press area (no wonder people have a hard time buying this awesome device!) I wish I could tell you more about the availability on this elusive device, however, if you have a Nokia shop near you (New York, Chicago) you might see this cool device for sale. Like the traditional N95 its a quadband World phone, complete with integrated GPS, loads of cool apps to leverage you location information and memory - lots of it. With the supported 8GB card (supplied with this one) you can store all kinds of apps, videos, music and as of today you can try ALL the N-Gage games for free! N-Gage has matured from a device (mine got stolen from my car a couple of years ago - want some games??) to a platform. More on the 8GB N95 can be found (I think) at nseries.com or nokia.com (see also the N95 support site) - actually, nseries.com has a page devoted to this unit, however, it doesn’t appear to be available in the US yet… sorry! A tip.. Nokia, to sell even more of these units maybe bundle some integrated GPS supported apps on the deck that work without the need for doing loads of research, for example, send and MAP the photo to flickr, Google maps (like a MyMap) and try a couple of cool colors like Pink and maybe even a “Trimblish” yellow with a ruggedized, grippy shell.. that would sell! This device appeals to mobile field force workers and outdoor enthusiasts, maybe try marketing to them!

Moving forward, the Nokia N95 GPS-enabled multi-media computer (aka. smartphone) has been officially launched in the US - eventhough there’s quite a few already in use. What’s really weird is that North American users get the “lite” version.. think of it as the spanky device but with training wheels! While everyone else over the pond is being told about the 8GB N95 we get the 1GB standard version here… I guess North American’s don’t need the cooler looking version whith a whackin pant-load of memory… too bad! Nonetheless, if you want GPS-enabled mobile communication then Check out the N95. You get A-GPS, radio, awesome MP3 player, Nokia MAps app, a great web browsing experience, 5MP camera, video, loads of apps, and more. See www.nseries.com for more info - for N95 news and updates see here - see N95 photos and related images HERE

Nokia E70 vs. iPhone

2007-08-29T19:52:49Z

While it takes Nokia’s marketing department to task, this rather off-color comparison of the E70 to the iPhone from maddox’s The Best Page in the Universe has to be causing some smiles back in Finland. I’m having trouble finding a suitable passage to quote here on our family-friendly site, but suffice to say he really doesn’t like the iPhone…