Graves On SOHO Technology

Gigaset is pushing onward with promotion of their brand to the North American market, this time getting involved with the Emmy Awards. Tony Stankus sent a link to their Facebook page where they have posted a photo gallery of a number of TV actors holding various Gigaset wares.

That’s cute, and good for the company profile. However, the curious part is that in some of the photos you see them holding the a little wearable hands-free badge or the handset of one of the DX series desk phones. I wasn’t aware that these items, rumored some time ago, had even made it to these shores. This could be a sign of good things to come in the near future.

For much of the past year I find that I’ve been struggling with putting some definition on “The Cloud.” This thought process began way back on November 5, 2010 when I hosted a VUC call that was a panel discussion intended to consider “The Cloud” in its many facets. That call featured a number of guests, each of whom had specific experience with cloud infrastructure, applications and services. Since that time I’ve been pondering what was said, and further, the evolving public perception of “The Cloud.”

So it was that while attending ITExpo earlier in the month I found myself spending much of my time there in the sessions that comprised the CloudComm Summit 4. During those sessions I had the opportunity to pose some of my questions to the assembled experts. In some cases their answers were enlightening, in other cases they seemed to be puzzled about the very nature of the questions. Even so, all of this has helped to crystallize my own personal definition of The Cloud.

One of Microsoft’s more recent marketing programs made considerable mention of “reaching for the cloud,” presumably with respect to some common end-user applications. I can’t help but feel that such public representations are less than helpful, perhaps even a little misleading.

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This past week I spent a few days in Milwaukee WI. If Boston is Bean-town then Milwaukee is quite likely Beer-town. I actually drove past the Pabst Brewery. I didn’t know that they still made Pabst, or that anyone would actually drink the stuff. I took it to be like Lone Star in Texas, just something to offer the tourists.

Initial impression of the suds aside, I saw something in Milwaukee that gave me pause. I saw the signs, and they were worrying.

To be more specific I saw a few of the newer T-Mobile billboards. I still mostly like T-Mobile. And heck, Carly-of-the-patterned-magenta-dresses is certainly easy on the eyes, so billboards should be a good thing…but these were cause for concern.

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As mentioned previously, some weeks ago I moved this site into a brand new VPS. Such a move is pretty transparent to readers, but gave me a chance to rework the site, enhancing the WordPress installation in some interesting ways. I think that some of what I’ve recently discovered might be useful to others.

This new WordPress installation has been refined with respect to how it handles media. One of the niceties that I’ve discovered is a WordPress plug-in called WP Smush.it. This plug-in leverages a Yahoo API to automatically implement a best practices approach to optimizing images as they are uploaded to the site.

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Counterpath is without a doubt the leader in commercial soft phones. I’ve used numerous version of their products over the years, and found them to be robust & reliable. Thus the fact that they’re selling Bria 3.0 for Mac & Windows at a discount this weekend is worth a mention.

You’ll find Bria 3.0 is very capable, able to handle both HDVoice and video.  It’s one of the test targets that I routinely use when evaluating new devices for SIP interoperability.

Around Pixel Power Bria is the soft phone of choice for our travelling sales staff. Of course, they offer Bria iPhone and Bria Android editions as well, making it a well rounded product family.

Here’s something of a challenge; find a visual way to represent the information density of HDVoice vs a narrowband PSTN call…and try to make it something the everyone can relate to. This is part of my recent attempt at such a display.

The human voice can create sound energy in the range of 80 Hz to 14 KHz. In contrast, the PSTN conveys a much more limited pass-band, typically 300 Hz – 3.4 KHz. That means that the PSTN fails to convey more than 70% of the potential energy in a voice.

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