Joining us this Friday is Vidtel, a cloud-based video conferencing service that is easy to use and price-disruptive based upon Any to Any model. Spanning boardrooms, mobile workers and everything in between, the Vidtel Meet Me service allows room-based video conferencing systems, executive desktop video systems, PCs/Macs, smartphones and tablets to work together. Any combination of SIP, H.323, Skype and Google Talk technologies can interoperate on demand with Vidtel’s service. The cloud service is targeted to the small-medium enterprise market, priced for any-sized budget and is as easy to use as a telephone.

Scott Wharton, Founder and CEO of Vidtel, is a recognized leader in the VoIP and video industry and will join the call to discuss video landscaping and why any-to-any video calling will be important in the coming years.

From 1999 to early 2008, he was the VP of Marketing at BroadSoft, Inc., the leading developer and marketer of VoIP application servers, which also handle video IP calling. Scott made significant and enduring contributions leading to: the dominance of the BroadSoft brand in the voice application space, the company’s acquisition of 9 of the world’s 10 largest telecom service providers as customers, and the expansion of the company’s presence in over 60 countries. Scott also defined a new product category for the telecom industry, a next- generation applications layer, establishing BroadSoft’s global leadership in the VoIP applications market.
In 2003, Scott was honored with the Frost & Sullivan IP Telephony Executive of the Year Award. It is presented each year to the individual who has excelled in developing and executing a business strategy allowing his or her company to gain market leadership. In 2006, Scott was recognized as a “Top 100 Voice” in the IP Communications Industry by Internet Telephony magazine.
Prior to BroadSoft, Scott was Vice President of Marketing at VocalTec Communications, the pioneer and a leading developer of VoIP software solutions. From 1995 to 1999, Scott spearheaded numerous groundbreaking initiatives, including the development of the first commercial VoIP product and the creation of the VoIP service provider industry. In the 1990s, Scott created one of the first IP video products for the consumer market as a senior marketing exec with VocalTec, the pioneering VoIP company. Scott holds an MBA from Yale University.

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.

Voxeo Director of Conversations Dan York joined us for a detailed explanation of what happened to the supernodes and what Skype engineers did to bring the network back up. Dan’s CNN moment is on Disruptive Telephony.

Skype has had a “monopoly” in this space for a long time. Also, the news just came out that Skype purchased Qik and Dan and a few of conjecture about what this means for the future.

In the second part of the call, after a brief excerpt from Silver Water, Leif Madsen, co-author of the Asterisk Book (aka TOFT) and Russell Bryant Digium’s Engineering Manager, Open Source Software tell us about the imminent release of the 3rd edition, “Asterisk, the Definitive Guide” and how you can help make it even better.

Superman Cartoon Theme by Zip Caplan. The “intermission” song “Silver Water” was written by Randy Resnick and Coleman Head.

Total Call Duration (not recording): 4h15m – Audio Legs: 245 (Max concurrent: 48)

VUC Holiday Special Edition

Today, our sponsor e4 Strategies is giving away two  HD-capable Gigaset DE380 IP R VoIP phones (shipment to North America only)

Polycom Productivity Suite licenses. We’ll be giving these away each week for the next few weeks. The suite adds the following features to your USB-equipped Polycom IP phone:

Corporate Directory Access
Local Call Recording
Visual Conference Management
Voice Quality Monitoring

From Voxeo Labs and Tropo

Guest: Jim Courtney.  Jim tells us about Skype-certified FREETALK Connect. Here are the technical specs.

By connecting your IP desktop and conferencing phones to your network, your phones will be detected and configuration files for your phones generated and pushed out to your phones.

• Auto-provisioning works with almost all models of desktop and conference IP phones
• Install wizard configures all basic networking, telephony system and user functionality on the FREETALK Connect
• Remote administration capabilities that enable the system to be administered from anywhere Internet access is available.

Jim Courtney writes on the web at Voice on the Web,  Voyces and other places…

Links for FREETALK Connect

Product Page/Data Sheet: http://www.freetalk.me/product/freetalk-connect/
Getting Started: http://www.freetalk.me/faq/freetalk-connect/
Reseller Application: http://www.freetalk.me/partnership/

Other links

Wireless Stereo Headset  with discussion of WiStereo: http://voiceontheweb.biz/2009/11/freetalk-freedom-wireless-stereo-headset-2-0-when-you-just-cant-sit-still-during-a-skype-call/

PamFax: http://www.pamfax.biz/en/
Pamela for Skype:  http://www.pamela.biz/en/
Calliflower: http://www.pamela.biz/en/

and boy, are my arms tired! But wait! It gets better!

Part 2 may be an acquired taste, but some people really like to listen to these, so here it is.

My advice? Be there. Join us every Friday at 12 Noon Eastern Times, standard or daylight, which ever is in force that day. There is a permatime link to know when the next session is in your very own time zone.

On the vuc.me web page during the live conference there is a link to the new experimental streaming URL and a widget that allows you to call VUC from a browser. We’re in IRC channel #vuc on Freenode.net.

If you’re reading this (and I know you are!) make a note to call sip:200901@login.zipdx.com or skype:vuc.me next week. Why? Because we don’t record the last 5 hours of the VUC. We might be talking about you.

Actually, it was before hours, but who’s counting? Talk about Apple TV, Cisco wanting to buy Skype, Skype for Business (was SIP for Skype), bluetooth headset woes and much more.

SIP for Skype is now called “Skype Connect”. We’re wondering about the cost of the service. At one point I heard there would be a base charge for Skype Manager and then a charge for each user, plus a per channel charge. If this is the case, I can only say “Get a Life, Skype!”

Freetalk Connect wants to put Skype on every phone in your office.
Designed for offices with between two and 50 users, the FREETALK Connect offers  unified communications functionality, including Find Me, Follow Me; a unified voice mailbox; automated attendant and auto call distribution.

Intelligent routing capabilities:  incoming Skype calls, as well as calls over SIP, the PSTN and IAX2, can be routed by the FREETALK Connect to any local or remote Skype user, SIP endpoint, analog or mobile phone.

Set up is simplified, enabling small business users that are not tech savvy to use it quickly and simply, without formal training. Supported telephones are plugged into the company’s network and the device auto-detects and configures them. An on-screen wizard then guides the customer through a few business-related questions that help configure the company’s communication system and enables Skype calling from every supported desktop phone in the office. Adding users and administering the system after installation is just as easy.

Will the wifi hold up? We’ll see on Friday when we try this live version of the VUC at the usual time.

AMOOCON 2010 will, as always, be interesting and fun in and of itself. It’s great to meet people in person and talk about what they’re doing.

We’ll be talking to the people who offer Blink, a free OS X g722-capable SIP client (and much more) and longtime VUC regular Tim Panton, who among other things is the reason we can connect to the VoIP Users Conference  via Skype. The Skype bridge is provided by PhoneFromHere.com.

Blink is offered by AG Projects. Read more info about Blink. or download it here. AG Projects CEO, Adrian Georgescu was our guest in previous sessions. Phone from Here’s Tim Panton was recently involved in the “Telephony Island Adventure“.

John Todd gives a preview of Astricon 2010, we chat about AMOOCON in Rostock next week and about various VoIP trials and tribulations. We have a special VUC discount code for you. Enter code AC10VUC for a significant discount.

We’ve been testing Skype for SIP open beta today. This allows you to connect Skype to your commercial PBX, much as Skype for Asterisk allows connection between Skype and Asterisk. Listen to the recording to learn more about the experiences to  date.

The Incredible PBX: Free Skype, free worldwide SIP, free U.S./Canada PSTN plus rock-solid Asterisk security using the new Zero Internet Footprint™ design.

In addition to all of the Orgasmatron magic including free calling in the U.S. and Canada courtesy of Google Voice, you now get some terrific new features: randomly generated passwords for all of your extensions, free Skype support and a new backup module both of which we’ll introduce over the next few weeks. And CallerID Superfecta now is preconfigured to work out of the box with support from dozens of providers worldwide.

We talk about several topics in part 2 including Skype, USB connections for VoIP, new devices like the Gigaset One, a cellphone gateway. Lots of talk about NAT with Asterisk and SIP. The usual chatter from friends around the table in our weekly “club”.

Among the participants Tim @steely_glint, Neil from IdeaSIP, Karl @karlfife, Michael @mjgraves and Graves on SoHo VoIP, David Frankel from ZipDX who furnish our great wideband conference facilities, Dave @DaveMichels from Pin Drop Soup, Pascal from Media5.

Welcome to a very old friend of mine, Bob from Future Video. The VUC encourages new people to be a part of our weekly talks. Please join us so you can chime in, ask questions and generally have a great time.

Thanks to Digium andfor allocating more channels of Skype for Asterisk to reach the ZipDX conference bridge and to John Todd for making this happen! We had a lot of live callers, including many on Skype.

Unixdawg on FusionPbx
[audio:http://media.blubrry.com/winelover/recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-288078.mp3]

Direct mp3 link (part 1) – Direct mp3 link (part 2)

Part 1 [audio:http://media.blubrry.com/winelover/recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-256280.mp3|titles=Part 1 Skype for Asterisk]
Part 2 [audio:http://media.blubrry.com/winelover/recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-264537.mp3|titles=Part 2 Email servers SPF spam sendmail postfix]

Lots of talk about Skype for Asterisk, with Tim Panton who has been on the SfA beta for over a year and who will be speaking at Astricon in October.

IRC Transcript 2009-09-04

Talkshoe: [audio:http://media.blubrry.com/winelover/recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-224822.mp3|titles=Skype For Asterisk Tests]
ZipDX/CloudFront: [audio:http://cloud.declic.com/Part1Cloud.mp3|titles=Cloudfront verion of ZipDX recording]

Today we talked about the EXPERIMENTAL link using Skype for Asterisk (SfA for short). The more we use SfA, the more the Skype people will see that we the Asterisk community are serious about it.

The whole thing began as a phone call made by Tim P. to my Skype number. I almost never have Skype on but the number is forwarded via Gizmo5 to my phone, so when I heard it ring and saw the Skype ID, I realized the call was going through a bunch of servers and trancodings. The quality of that call was striking: total silence when no one was speaking (the equivalent of very black on an LCD display) and very good quality audio with a comfortably small latency. The call lasted at least 30 minutes, too and remaind of good quality.

So, we had at least 6 people called in via Skype from the USA, Israel, Barbados and the UK. The quality varied with the number of channels in use and time, but it was pretty good by and large.In fact, the quality when there was no packets dropped sounded good, even though it was g711.

IRC Text Transcript 2009-06-12

[audio:http://media.blubrry.com/winelover/recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-206837.mp3]

IRC Transcript 2009-04-03

I’ve been testing all the ways I can find to connect between phones and Skype. I happened to be testing OpenSky when I saw some posts from Michael Robertson on the asterisk-users mailing list. As I exchanged a few emails with Michael, I realized he had been a founder of Mp3.com and well as Gizmo5.

He was generous enough with his time to spend a full hour (on a cellphone!) answering questions and sharing thoughts about the various SIP to Skype solutions, including Digium’s Skype for Asterisk, Gizmo’s OpenSky and Skype’s SIP for Skype which Michael calls vaporware.

Post conference chat, aka “Cognac”

The post conference has discussions about the expectation that all services should be free with David Frankel of ZipDX.com Randal Schwartz from FLOSS Weekly and the regular gang. Due to some problems with Talkshoe, various audio sources are used so you can hear what different phones sound like.

[audio:http://media.blubrry.com/winelover/recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-210205.mp3]

[audio:http://media.blubrry.com/winelover/recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-170693.mp3]

Skype for Asterisk with Steve Sokol, Digium product manager. Also a general talk about life, the universe and everything such as the high points of VoIP in 2008.

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