Graves on SOHO Technology

This past week I was called upon to give a demonstration at a TV station in San Diego. The exercise involved flying from Houston to LAX and spending a day in our Burbank office getting the demo gear ready to roll. The next day an associate and I would drive down to San Diego to make the presentation.

For various reasons I don’t often fly Southwest Airlines, but it just happened that they were the best choice this time around. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the outbound flight was equipped to offer in-flight wifi.

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Introduced in early 2009, the Gigaset SL78H is the top-of-the-line cordless handset that they offer in North America.

Like the C59H and S79H, the SL78H is only being offered as an expansion handset with respect to the IP-capable A580IP and S675IP systems. You may see it offered as part of the SL780 or SL785, but these are not IP-capable systems.

As I’ve moved up the product range there has been a natural progression in features and physical attributes. Each better model builds logically upon the previous, but adds certain improvements in hardware or software.

At the top of the range the SL78H is physically a very different device. To start, it’s heavy. Unlike the prior models there is a lot of metal in the SL78H. Even the keypad itself has a brushed-metallic finish.

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This past week I worked a few days with our west coast salesman who is the proud owner of a brand new iPhone 4. A long time user of the iPhone 3 GS, he’s thus far very happy with iPhone 4. Both he and his wife carry new iPhones.

One of the things that they’re been enjoying is the new FaceTime application. While I was there he used it to call his wife who was spending some time with family in Las Vegas.

He also used it to show her how their dog was feeling much better after having been ill for a few days. Clearly, to see the dog wagging his tail for herself is a lot more convincing that merely being told he feels better.

This was for me a revelation. I’ve known this gentleman a long time and know that he is not drawn to techno-gadgetry for its own sake. He’s not an early adopter, but he appreciates stuff that works well. In this regard he’s squarely in Apple’s target market.

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Sometimes the simplest questions result in the most interesting path of investigation. So it has been with Soljon’s initial question;

I am looking for an IP phone that supports G.722 and has audio inputs / outputs so I can connect it to my mixer. We are trying to connect two studios together for an online radio station. I have yet to find anything other than high end Polycom gear that has something like RCA in/out jacks. Have you by any chance come across anything?

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In part 1 I addressed Soljon’s question about how to physically connect a G.722 capable SIP phone to a traditional audio mixer for use in an online radio project.

I understand and appreciate the intention to use a phone as the audio interface device. Phones are effectively appliances, offering excellent audio quality combined with simplicity of operation and high reliability.

This very logic leads me to use my Polycom IP650 in some unusual ways. For example, when I occasionally guest host the VUC calls I will call the ZipDX wideband conference bridge on one line, then call the Talkshoe G.711 bridge on a second line and perform an on-phone conference to connect the two bridges. Finally I engage the call recording function on the IP650 to give me an uncompressed WAV recording of the entire call.

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Barron’s has a curious story about the merger of YMAX and Vocaltech. YMAX is the Florida-based parent company of Magic Jack. VocalTech, based in Israel, is one of the software pioneers of the voice-over-IP revolution. From their roots in the first retail soft phone they went on to become an early leader in VoIP to PSTN gateways.

My very first exposure to VoIP was using Vocaltech’s Internet phone software way back in 1997. At that point I was on dial-up and Internet Phone allowed me to call my girlfriend who lived 900 miles away without concern for call duration or cost.

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This morning I received a very interesting question from a reader:

I am looking for an IP phone that supports G.722 and has audio inputs / outputs so I can connect it to my mixer. We are trying to connect two studios together for an online radio station. I have yet to find anything other than high end Polycom gear that has something like RCA in/out jacks. Have you by any chance come across anything?

Soljon Zool
Citizen Media Group

While not usually of concern to a small office or home office such issues are routine in broadcasting, which remains how I earn my living. Further, if you’ve read much around here you’ve probably realized that lousy audio quality on radio call-in shows is one of my pet peeves. Even online radio operators should be concerned about audio quality.

Finally, this is a novel application for HDVoice. It’s not something that I’ve done previously, so it caught my interest.

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It appears that SkypeKit is now truly available in the wild. It’s been released for Linux, OSX and Windows. These last two being released just this week. Given a little time we should start seeing Skype-enabled devices and software starting to turn up.

One….in this case me…wonders a lot about where we will see the impact of SkypeKit? Will it be seen as an opportunity by the likes of Gigaset?

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If you hang around here you likely know that Alison Smith is “The Voice Of Asterisk” and “The Voice Gal” as well as being a fellow Canuck. However, her leadership role in Asterisk space may be in question….or is it?

Here’s  the Old Spice page on You Tube where this can be found. And I see that it hit the Boy Genius Report this morning where they point out that someone has already mashed up a tool for creating such VM messages online.

Isn’t technology fun?

Every so often it’s fun to look back. Such is the case with this episode of Revision 3′s Systm from December 2005. John Todd takes Kevin Rose through a basic Asterisk configuration. Thanks to Michael Iedema for pointing this out during his recent appearance on FLOSS Weekly.