Recently in VoIP Category

I have started to use a new applicaiton called HotRecorder to record interviews that I am doing on SKYPE and it is working perfectly.  It is a very easy app to use.  I recommend paying 14.95 for it and that way you do not have to see the advertisements that accompany the free version.

Ellen Muraskin speculates about Microsoft's intentions in the VoIP market:

"I'm damned if I can figure out what Microsoft Corp. is going to announce with the first, most prominent keynote of all at this month's Voice on the Net show, if not telephony links to its LCS (Live Communications Server). The keynoter is Anoop Gupta, corporate vice president of Microsoft's real-time collaboration business unit—the one charged with LCS. "

I discovered IT Conversations recently and it is a great resource. It presents recordings of presentations at important conferences and it also presents conversations with other IT luminaries. It is a great resouce. I am very interested in Skype and I am a good user of the product,so I am glad that I found Niklas' talk.

Niklas Zennström, founder and CEO of Skype, presented this keynote at Supernova 2004 by telephone.

Related...

[IT Conversations]

This is a plug for Skype. I read Stuart Henshall's post about the global VoIP to PTSN deployment and while I did not appreciate the magnitude of the deployment effort, I certainly appreciate the service. I am a user who conducts long telephone conferences with European clients via Skype and it is really cheap to use the service. Sound quality is usually great and I a pleased with the usability of the product. I want to get my colleagues to use the product as well, but they don't seem to want to be tied to their PCs with a headset; they would rather talk on the phone. (I find a headset much easier for talking and taking notes at the same time). I wish other applications would pick up the Skype technology and use it as their VoIP connection to other users and to people who still use the PTSN.

In the Seattle Times, Kim Peterson, their technology reporter has a question and answer session with Michael Wehrs. He is the director of technology and standards at the company's mobile devices division. I found several of his answers interesting, especially when he talked about the future of telephone service, cell and PSTN, first in ten years, secondly in five years.

Q. What will we see 10 years from now in this business? Will we even have cellphones anymore?

Wehrs: I think the things that you will see are significant changes in user interface. The idea that you have to pick up and dial a phone probably will be gone 10 years from now. The mode switching between doing a data thing or a voice thing, that will all be gone. You'll generally interact with your device via voice or via screen, but the idea that you're doing either/or will go away. It will just be integrated in.

The devices will become combined and in general much smaller. The idea of personal area networks where devices share their capabilities and leverage each other, 10 years from now that will all work so that you may have a watch that you talk to. You may have just a headset that that becomes your earpiece and microphone. The actual phone will be something in your pocket or in your PC that you have with you, so it'll find a radio network to use and let you connect.

You will still have fashion statements in a phone. People will still have a cool device because it's cool to have one.

Q. What about five years from now?

Wehrs: You're still going to see predominantly handsets. You'll see the Moore's Law effect will have had a dramatic impact on the capability of these devices.

So whether they look like an appliance to you that just has a bunch of cool features, or whether they look like a device that you add new capabilities to, you'll see both in significant numbers, even though the hardware will probably be identical.

Half a gigabyte of storage, gigahertz processors, this will all be the norm five years out. Screen technologies and battery technologies that get you at that level of performance through an entire day of use will be the norm. You'll see multiple radios five years from now where today that's somewhat of a novelty.

You're going to see devices that simply work on whatever area network is out there, and they're smart enough to switch between them.

In an Infoworld article by Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service writes about the VoIP capabilities of Windows CE. Microsoft is including VoIP in all of its platforms, most visibly, though, in this Windows CE release.

This is a quote form the Microsoft website:

"VoIP Devices: Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a rapidly emerging technology for voice communication that uses the ubiquity of IP-based networks to deploy VoIP-enabled devices in enterprise and home environments. VoIP-enabled devices, such as desktop and mobile IP phones and gateways, decrease the cost of voice and data communication, enhance existing features, and add compelling new telephony services. Windows CE .NET 4.2 is a robust, real-time operating system that delivers a flexible, integrated platform for developing, marketing, and using a variety of VoIP-enabled client devices."

In fact, on the Microsoft site, they explain the value proposition for driving the substitution of traditional public switched telephone networks (PSTNs) and cellular networks.

"VoIP Industry Trends The overall United States telecommunications industry, including equipment and services, generated more than $600 billion in revenue in 2000.1 While VoIP is currently a small fraction of this, it is growing quickly. In North America, wholesale VoIP sales were estimated to approach well over $400 million in 2002.2 Total equipment purchases of VoIP gateways, soft switches such as IP Private Branch Exchange (IP PBX), and VoIP application servers are expected to reach almost $12 billion by 2006, a six-fold increase over 2001.3 Similarly, the revenue from selling wired enterprise IP phones may be in excess of $2.7 billion by 2006; this figure does not include mobile IP phones or phones used in private homes."

IMHO, Microsoft is poised to take over this market and actively drive substitution. You can bet that all the new versions of the OS will have VoIP as an integral component. It makes good business sense and they have all the infrastructure components in place to provide a compelling argument for a massive shift to VoIP.

I corrected the link to this very useful resource. I found it was the result of many searches on Google. Hope it helps!

I found a VoIP Wiki that is an excellent source of information about Voice communications. Since I think that this is such an integral part of collaboration I wanted to bring it to the attention of my readers.

This Wiki covers everything related to VOIP, software, hardware, service providers, reviews, configurations, standards, tips & tricks and everything else related to voice over IP networks, IP telephony and Internet Telephony.

(BTW I corrected the link, it works now)