Chris Matthieu on Tropo.com, great added comments by Tim Panton. Michael Graves, just back from NAB with a few notes. Karl Fife on WebOS (just kidding!)

Bad Wifi at the trade show, new Siemens Gigaset handsets and more DECT comments. Profiles on mobile devices, sharing books on Kindle, Nook, Android, iOS, etc.

VoIP Users Conference (VUC) is probably the largest and longest-running weekly meeting of an international technology group. Callers join us live from at least 3 continents each week. This “Christmas Eve Edition” lasted 6 1/2 hours. The first two segments are just above. Here’s the final segment: 3 hours and 45 minutes. A few highlights:

Adam Kalsey of Tropo on connecting Skype to Tropo. I’ve tried just about everything but SMS and IM on Tropo for the moment. It’s hard to believe how easy it is to get started in a language of your choice: JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, Python or Groovy. This overview will convince you to get started, since it’s completely FREE to develop a Tropo app. Creating a simple IVR in PHP took me about 5 minutes, and because they have international DID available, I was able to see what it sounds like on the phone and Skype and even do proof of concept demos for my customers.

Michael Graves tries to get the Gigaset  DE380 firmware updated and connected in g722.

Dave Michels of Pin Drop Soup fame chimes in about Google’s Chrome OS netbook prototype

David Frankel of ZipDX talks about the REINVITE issues they face with non-standard SIP implementations

Crap support

Did I ever mention that support for Skype for Business is one of the worst I’ve ever experienced? Skype blocked one of my accounts last week and it took 4 days to get it unblocked, during which I told them “I can’t log in” and they wrote back with reasons my account might be blocked and suggesting I “log in to my account…” and I wrote back saying “but I can’t log in…” etc ad nauseum. Skype support sucks, no better way to say it.

Great support

On the other hand, Voxeo support, which I also experienced that same week, is excellent. I went to their #tropo IRC channel, and had answers within minutes and action on my account from a Voxeo support person. Kudos to Voxeo.

Like a heart-broken lover, after Wave, I hesitate to get excited about the open source projects I hear about. Wave never really panned out, and personally I think there was too much T & A and not enough brains and horsepower there. All show and little tell. On the other hand, there’s ThinkUp, a project just emerging from the ashes of its previous incarnations and looking refreshed and energetic.

ThinkUp (Expert Labs Project) is a PHP/mySQL program that will scour social media sites for its members and turn the cacophony (some would say CACAphony) it finds there into a nearly coherent conversion. Currently working with Twitter, Facebook and Flickr, it has a sporty plugin architecture and a simple, modern, clean look to its pages.

Wonderful, you say, drifting off, but what does it do?

I kinda wondered about that myself, so instead of setting up the crawler as a cron job, I ran it manually. Anyone into the open source world will enjoy watching the crawler cheerfully tell you what it is doing, babbling away with just enough info about how hard it’s working and how much juice Twitter is allowing you to suck in until next time. The crawler looks at the accounts you’ve set up, grabs the posts, Tweets, for example and stores them in the database. The data is sliced, diced and messed with and displayed in many different useful ways. I guess if you wondered about the expression “wisdom of the crowd” which I’d challenge daily, here’s a tool to test that very idea. One of the plugins available will decode short links, another does something with geolocation that is probably worth doing.

Allow members of your crowd to sign up for your ThinkUp site. They then connect your ThinkUp app to Twitter (and the other sites if you care to). Assuming people are talking on Twitter, and that they have allowed their posts to appear on the public timeline, you should be able to see conversations, whole subjects developing and interlinked.

Head over to Gina Trapani’s Github and grab the code. It literally took me 5 minutes to install and get it running. ThinkUp requires a server with php5,  mysql and a minimum of pep if you plan on having members and guests. Give it a try or wait until we open our own VUC ThinkUp.

OpenVBX is a web-based open source phone system for business.
With a Twilio account and a web server with PHP 5.2+ and MySQL 5, you can build your own “hosted pbx”.

Build your own custom phone applets with just a little bit of PHP. Rebrand and resell OpenVBX to your customers.

Give every user their own phone number and personal conference line. Dial whole departments, share voicemail messages with the team. OpenVBX is for companies and collaboration.

Adam Ballai, lead engineer on the OpenVBX project and Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson are our guests.

[audio:http://voipusersconference.org/wp-content/uploads/NirSim.mp3|titles=Nir Simionovich on Asterisk AGI programming]

I had the pleasure of meeting one of the more vibrant and outgoing characters at the conference and recorded this interview about his latest PHP AGI book. I only wish I could have shared the stories, jokes and general mirth happening in the traditional German restaurant when Tim Panton, Jason Goeke, Nir and I shared a meal.

Nir’s presentation at AMOOCON was about running Asterisk under EC2 and I hope to get him to talk about this some day as he has an actual large-scale case he deployed in this way rather than just a theoretical one.

Nir’s book, Asterisk Gateway Interface 1.4 and 1.6 Programming is a great introduction to serious programming using the AGI and PHP. The book takes you through some good solid advice for truly professional programmers on how to do stable programming in the Asterisk AGI environment. This is the book you need if you are trying to do anything serious with Asterisk in PHP.

[audio:http://media.blubrry.com/winelover/recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-174659.mp3]

We’ll be talking to TringMe about their new VoicePHP which allows applications to “talk”.

Also a call for papers from AMOOCON

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