Graves On SOHO Technology

While I travel I like to listen to podcasts. While there are a variety of podcasts that are routinely found on my cell phone, I also try new things from The Conversations Network and similar sites.

This evening as I’m on a flight to Raleigh-Durham NC I happened to give a listen to a short podcast from IBM. It was The IBM Institute For Business Value podcast entitled, “The Changing Face Of Communication.” It’s an older podcast, from June 2009.

While this file had been on my phone a while I had thought that it still might be interesting. IBM certainly knows a thing or two about communications. I was at Astricon 2009 when IBM had a keynote address. They also announced a partnership of some sort with Digium.

However, I was startled to hear the audio quality of this podcast. It’s simply atrocious. Seriously. It’s really bad.

Remember Marshall McLuhan? The medium is the message. In this case the medium, poor quality podcast audio, completely destroys the message…and along with it the credibility of the participants.

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Earlier today Dan York posted a lovely and very simple explanation of how to completely circumvent the DNS based filtering scheme that’s been put forward in the Stop Online Piracy Act. This bill, known generically as SOPA, has been the focus of the senate judiciary committee for the past while.

The bill is being promoted by Big Media in all it’s facets. I would have thought that a decade’s worth of debacles with digital rights management (DRM) would have taught the industry something. There is no technological solution that cannot be overcome. This I understand to be a universal truth.

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Let me be blunt, at present I’m just on the periphery of the telecom space. I’m still a user, specifically a home office user. Not being directly involved in the telecom industry I don’t get the opportunity to take part if many of the major industry events. However, when TMC decided to hold IT Expo West 2011 in Austin, TX it proved just too good an opportunity to pass up.

Austin is essentially right in my back yard. “Just over yonder” in local terms. OK, it’s really a two-and-a-half hour drive, but that’s still close compared to its usual location in Los Angeles. When TMC offered a deeply discounted uber-early-bird registration back in February I took the plunge and bought a show pass.

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Yesterday Dan York, in his role as Director Of Conversations at Voxeo, gave a webinar* on HDVoice. Dan’s presentation included a good basic introduction to wideband telephony. He cited the well known limitations of the legacy PSTN before moving on to highlight the wideband capabilities of Voxeo’s new  Prophesy and Prism product offerings.

This session was part of the companies Jam Session series that introduces new capabilities to developers. To put it simplistically, Voxeo is a tool-maker. The offerings of the tool-makers typically lead the services that we eventually see in the larger consumer space. That makes the tool-makers very important. That the tool-makers show both imagination and leadership is critically important.

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Late last week I took an hour to sit through a Voxeo webinar on the impact of IP v6 on SIP communications. It was the latest in their series of Developer Jam Session presentations.

Dan York presented a nice introduction to the issues surrounding IP v6 implementation with respect to real-time communication using SIP. If you’re new to IP v6, as I am, then the recording of that session is a recommended resource.

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Digium and Skype have partnered to provide a formal means of integrating the Skype and Asterisk worlds. It’s possibly very exciting although it’s early days yet, with a limited beta program just about to start.

It seems to me that this gives Skype a lot more exposure to business applications, especially in the SMB sector.

There’s a lot of coverage about this elsewhere online. Here’s some recommended reading.

• Dan York’s Disruptive Telephony blog
• Jim Courtney @ Skype Journal

Of course there has been a number of people demanding that Skype open their network to interoperability with the standards-based SIP world, key amongst them Voxeo’s Dan York and Gizmo5′s Michael Robertson. For their part Skype seemed reluctant, but maybe that was just gamesmanship.