Voxeo Talks

Today over on his Tech News Comments blog, Markus Göbel writes about how he uses an application on our Evolution site as a bridge from Skype to the phone network. People who call him on his Skype ID ring him on his desk phone or cell phone. It’s a great little demonstration of our transfer capabilities.

Markus also wonders what I think about this solution, especially given that I had written about Skype’s lack of interoperability on my Disruptive Telephony blog earlier this year. Well, first off, I’m delighted that Markus is experimenting with our platform and we do appreciate his kind words and writing about his experience. We’re glad to see he liked our Designer tool. We’ve put a lot of work into making that an easy and simple way to create voice applications without requiring you to learn all the intricacies of VoiceXML.

Second, he’s right that I’ve known about the “Skype-to-phone” capabilities of our platform and in fact I’ve used it for some of my own applications that I’ve developed on our platform. I just haven’t written about it on any of my blogs for two reasons:

1. The inbound Skype connection is there to allow our developers to build interesting applications for Skype; and
2. The connection is only one-way and doesn’t provide the full interoperability that I was writing about.

Let me hit each of these points separately. First, one of the coolest things to me about developing voice apps on our Evolution hosted platform is how incredibly easy it is have an app that can be reached from a range of different sources. As shown in the diagram to the right, any application you create can be reached through the following methods:

• Direct dial across the PSTN to a direct phone number (and applications can be assigned more than one number – for instance if you wanted numbers in different area codes)

• Dialing across the PSTN to an 800-number with a PIN code.
• Dialing across the PSTN to a non-800-number with a PIN code (which I didn’t show in the diagram)
• Inbound connections from SIP endpoints
• Inbound connections from Skype users
• Inbound connections from FWD (formerly FreeWorldDiallup)

Any of you reading this can try it out – just follow our Quick Start Guide. Skype is one of the ways that you can connect to whatever kind of application you create. As an example, here are the contact numbers for a small application of mine (a call-in comment line for my Blue Box podcast):

Pretty cool stuff, eh? Of the many things you can do with your application, you can of course make outbound transfers to the following services:

• Regular PSTN phone numbers (note that free Evolution developer accounts are restricted to making calls within the USA)

• SIP endpoints (including FWD users)

Note that outbound dialing is not enabled by default but if you email our support team we will issue you a “token” that you can use for outbound calling from your app.

What Markus did was create a very simple app that did an outbound transfer over SIP to a service which then rang his various phones. (As he is in Germany, the free Evolution accounts could presumably not call his number directly. Paid Evolution accounts, can, of course, call anywhere and pay the corresponding rates.) Calls can come in via Skype (or other means) and go out via SIP.

So if this is a “Skype-to-SIP” gateway, why aren’t we trumpeting it to the world? Simple… that’s not the purpose of the Skype connection. The inbound connection from Skype is to allow the 30,000+ developers on Evolution to build interesting apps that can work with Skype. Sure, you can obviously create a simple Skype to SIP “transfer” application like Markus did, but that’s not why Skype created the connection with us and if all we used it for was Skype-to-SIP transfers probably at some point Skype might clamp down on the usage. So while it certainly can be done, we ask people to understand the real reason we have the connection and to please not abuse that.

The second reason I personally haven’t written about this capability is because it’s not a full Skype interoperability solution. If you look on the right side of the diagram above, what’s missing? We can accept inbound connections from Skype (which is admittedly very cool for our apps), but we can’t do outbound connections to Skype users. If you look back at my article about Skype interop what I want is the ability to make SIP connections from within the Skype client itself. In contrast to Markus, who is now delighted that he can turn off his Skype client yet still receive calls to his ID, I want to use the Skype client and be able to call SIP endpoints.

In any event, I’m delighted that Markus is trying out our platform. He concludes his piece with:

Let’s see which other solutions I can develop with Voxeo. Their visual tool makes the design of VoiceXML fairly easy.

I, too, look forward to seeing what other solutions he’ll develop!

Technorati Tags: skype, sip, voxeo, applications, xml, voicexml, fwd

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Do you do Linux software development? Want to be the point person on an exciting Linux/MacOS project? If so, we’re looking for you! As we say in our job posting for a “Senior Linux Systems Engineer“:

Voxeo is looking for a seasoned Linux Systems Engineer with exceptional C/C++ development skills to spearhead Voxeo’s Linux and Mac OS X development projects. This is an exciting opportunity to get in on the ground floor of efforts to bring our Prophecy SIP Platform to enterprise Linux and Mac OS X.

As you may be aware, our award-winning Prophecy software today runs only on Microsoft Windows. We’ve heard very clearly from our customers that they would also like to have it run on Linux and, since we all use Mac laptops, we’d sure like it to run on Mac OS X as well. We’ve started the work to port the code, but now we’re looking to bring someone in very specifically to spearhead this effort. We’ve got a great engineering team and this project will be a great one to be a part of. Because this role will involve heavy interaction with the rest of our engineering team, the position will be based in our Orlando, Florida, headquarters. (where, as they remind me, it’s nice and warm right now!)

If you are interested in applying for this position, please apply through CareerBuilder.com (i.e. please don’t leave replies here on the blog).

Technorati Tags: voxeo, linux, macosx, jobs, voip, voice, applications

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We’re very pleased to note that we’ve signed on as a sponsor of BarCampOrlando coming up on April 5th and 6th, 2008. In keeping with the BarCamp spirit, this event is one in which people are strongly encouraged to participate with some kind of brief presentation about a topic that interest them. This is the second BarCampOrlando, though, and it’s grown to encompass two days!

• Dev Day, Saturday, April 5th – Programming, Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, robots and other technologies
• Media Day, Sunday, April 6th – Social media, video, music, photography, graphic design, blogging, podcasting, and other new media

Being huge supporters of the Orlando, Florida, area, we’re delighted to help promote activities like this that help connect people working with technology in our area. We hope that many of you reading this will come check out the event if you are in the Orlando area on April 5th and 6th.

For more information about what BarCampOrlando is all about, there is a video available from the organizers along with a less serious video on the same subject.

Registration is now open so please do sign up and come on by! (The event is free to attend, but registration is required to ensure there are enough seats.)

Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcamporlando, voxeo

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Following last week’s speaking engagements at Voice Search and eComm 2008, a few Voxeo team members remain on the west coast this week for Spring VON.x and Digium Asterisk World. The conferences, which kicked off today, are collocated at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, CA. Voxeo’s CTO, RJ Auburn, is part of a panel discussion titled, “The Impact of Next Generation Web Technology on Open Source Telephony Applications”. The discussion will take place Wednesday, March 19th from 3:15pm – 4:30pm in Room A7 for anyone who will be at the show. Voxeo is also exhibiting at the VON Expo with longtime partner, CommuniGate Systems. CommuniGate Pro’s SIP proxies are deployed in Voxeo’s worldwide hosting facilities. We’ll be in booth 725, so stop by and talk to Jose or RJ if you are attending the show.

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I’m down in Orlando this week for VoiceCon Orlando and will be part of three sessions. Tomorrow, I’m moderating a panel at 8am on VoIP security and on Thursday I’m moderating a panel on open source telephony. On Wednesday, I’ll be part of a keynote panel with Irwin Lazar on “Social networking and enterprise communication”, which should be quite fun. I’ll include below the full descriptions of the various sessions. If you are attending VoiceCon and want to connect, please do contact me.

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Session Title: Top VOIP Security Threats
Date: 3/18/2008
Time: 8:00 AM
Room: Osceola B
Session Description: There’s been a lot of concern about voice over IP security, but have there been many actual exploits? This session will inform you about the state of VOIP security. You’ll learn about generalized IP attacks that have affected IP telephony systems deployed on IP networks, and you’ll also find out what VOIP-specific attacks have actually been observed “in the wild”–and what to expect in the future.
KEY QUESTIONS: * What are the most serious voice-oriented attacks that are actually being carried out? What potential attacks haven’t occurred yet but probably will before long? * How do you protect your VOIP systems against these attacks? * What types of equipment and technologies must you implement to stop voice-oriented attacks? * What specific kinds of damage can these attacks cause?
Moderator(s): Dan York – Dir of Emerging Comm Tech – Voxeo
Panelist(s): Sachin Joglekar – Vulnerability Research Lead – Sipera Systems
David Endler – Director of Security Research – TippingPoint
Mark Collier – CTO – SecureLogix

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Session Title: Open Source for Enterprise Voice: How Much, How Soon?
Date: 3/20/2008
Time: 11:45 AM
Room: Sun C
Session Description: Open source PBXs are gaining a higher profile: Asterisk and other open-source PBX software packages continue to gain acceptance, and some traditional PBX vendors have implemented open source code for their products. But these efforts still aim mainly at smaller implementations. In this session, you’ll learn why open source PBX software has growing appeal, and whether it will appeal to larger customers as the market progresses.
KEY QUESTIONS: * What level of market share and acceptance has open source PBX software attained? What is expected? * Which products use open source PBX software? * What are the most compelling reasons for choosing open source PBX software? What are the greatest areas of concern in making this choice? * What are the technical challenges of an open-source PBX deployment, and how are these overcome? * What are some real-world customer experiences with open source PBX software?
Moderator(s): Dan York – Dir of Emerging Comm Tech – Voxeo
Speaker(s): M Raza – Product Management – 3Com
Bill Miller – VP, Prod Mgt & Mktg – Digium
Tony Pereira – Business Leader Business Communications – Nortel

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Session Title: Social Networking Meets Enterprise Communications
Date: 3/19/2008
Time: 10:30 AM
Room: Osceola C
Session Description: It?s no secret that world of enterprise communications is undergoing a transformation; IP Telephony and Unified Communications are changing the nature of the game. Now new forms of interaction, which began in the consumer/personal communications market — blogs, wikis and online services like Facebook ? are migrating into the enterprise. Where do these social networking systems ? and mindset ? fit into the enterprise communications landscape? Join us for a discussion about what?s real today and what?s likely to happen in the future.
Panelist(s):
Dan York – Dir of Emerging Comm Tech – Voxeo
Irwin Lazar – Principal Analyst & Program Director, Collaboration & Convergence – Nemertes Research

Technorati Tags: voicecon, voiceconorlando, asterisk, opensource, socialnetworking, communications, danyork, irwinlazar

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Today I will be flying to sunny San Diego for the Voice Search conference to speak on the advantages/disadvantages of using hosted IVR systems. As one of the few vendors on the market that offer both a hosted platform and a premise solution I hopefully will be able to speak on the advantages of each without the normal conflict of interest that most Venders have
After a few days in SoCal I will then head up to the SF Bay Area for an exciting week and a half where I will be speaking at eComm and VON.  Anyway the flight is now boarding so I had better get moving. More blogging later!

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When you hear mention of “Orlando, Florida”, what do you think of? Probably 99.9% of the time people think of certain giant theme parks located a bit south of the city. There is, however, a vibrant “downtown” Orlando in which our office is located. When I was down there last week (I normally work out of a home office in Vermont) I was testing out a new video camera and so I recorded some video showing the surrounding area. These were just test videos that I uploaded, but since they are now on YouTube, I thought I’d post them in case you are looking for a way to procrastinate and want to see what February looks like in Orlando:

By the way, this could be the view you see everyday if you came and worked for us – we are hiring! See our Jobs page for details.

I tweaked the camera’s settings a bit (including shifting from 16:9 to 4:3) and shot a night view from an adjacent tower:

I added a title slide, credits, etc. And yes, I probably could have edited out the part with me walking by the various columns. Remember… these were test videos, eh?

For the techies out there, the camera I am using is a JVC Everio GZ-MG330A. It’s a hard-drive camera that is small! Seems to work real well and imports nicely into my MacBook Pro. Editing, titles, etc. was done with Apple’s iMovie ‘08 which also did the conversion and upload to YouTube.

Anyway, we’ll have more videos coming out soon… in the meantime enjoy the view of Orlando.

P.S. Maybe next time I’m down there I’ll do a walking tour to show you what downtown Orlando looks like at ground level… roaming Segways and all.

Technorati Tags: orlando, voxeo, video

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