Graves On SOHO Technology

This morning’s news dump finds me distracted by an Engadget story about Audyssey releasing a new AirPlay-capable powered speaker system called “Lower East Side Air.”

This is the second time such an announcement from this company has caused my brow to wrinkle. The first time the company caught my attention was when Tech Crunch reviewed their Lower East Side Media Speakers.

Going beyond the press release I had a look at the companies’ web site for some greater depth on the Lower East Side Air product. I was surprised to find that there really wasn’t anything more to be had.

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After much consideration I’ve found that I am able to attend Astricon 20011. I’m already committed to a series of meeting in Burbank, CA Monday-Wednesday, so I’ll be making a stop Boulder on the way home.

I plan on arriving late Wednesday evening and spending Thursday at Astricon before heading home Friday morning. Even one day will present a nice opportunity to meet up with folks that are normally only disembodied voices from a box on my desk.

If we manage to arrange a special VUC session for Thursday I’ll have the new Polycom Soundstation Duo conference phone along to help make the recording possible.

While I doubt that I’ll be hard to find, if you’re planning on attending and would like to meet-up drop me a note.

While I ordered the DoorBell Fone back in August the fact of our extreme Houston summer kept me from completing the installation. The buried wire run out to our gate was broken and there was just no way I was going to bury a new wire in 100+ degree heat. This past weekend I was able to find the time and temperature to complete the installation.

The largest task was to completely replace the wiring from the central closet in our house out to the gate. I replaced the old-skool solid copper pair with a length of Cat-5 cable. Using Cat-5 is a bit of future-proofing. It means that I can change to a POE-powered network device at the gate without replacing the cable again.

For the moment I’m using only one pair from the Cat-5 wiring, connecting the DoorBell Fone remote unit to the controller in the wiring closet. The total cable length is about 80 feet.

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VoIP blogger and VUC contributor Dave Michels has launched a new online venture in the form of a web site that he’s calling TalkingPointz. Dave and I discussed this new venture while it was still in the just-thinking-about-it phase. The project bears some explanation as it offers something new and possibly quite valuable to the SMB telecom market.

To understand TalkingPointz it helps to know something about Dave’s background. Starting with a Master’s degree in telecommunication Dave has a long history in the area of telecom. When I first encountered Dave he was still at the helm of Buffalo Communications, a VAR based in Boulder CO. Prior to that he held various positions at some significant enterprises, including; Coors, IBM & GE.

To be concise, Dave knows enterprise telecom.

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While I have been basically offline for the past week, I took some time while awaiting one of my flights home to read some news. That little exercise revealed that the Freeswitch community call this past week featured Phil Zimmermann describing VoIP encryption and more specifically his ZRTP protocol. Happily, the recording of the call was put online Thursday.

Phil is of course one of the leading lights in the world of encryption. The call features Phil speaking plainly and openly about the need for encryption and the manner of its implementation in ZRTP.

The call remains a community call, so it goes off in various directions at times, including a little Asterisk bashing. However, Phil makes a good effort to keep the call informative, making it a great listen for anyone interested in voice security.

As it happens, I was travelling last week so not able to attend the VUC call on September 30th that featured Invoxia. Thank goodness for the podcast because their product, the NVX610 certainly looks interesting.

In fact, it’s interesting on many levels. For the past few years there have been a number of people I know who have been seeking a re-imagining of the desk phone. Fellow blogger Dave Michels is one of the more notable folks calling for such an effort.

In exploring the space looking for a solution to our latent desire for a wholly new kind of executive desk phone we’ve been distracted by various things.

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