Politics, the environment, technology, activism. And stuff.
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 26th, 2007
Dear Lazyweb: If you have had good (or bad) experiences with USB speakerphones, I’d love to hear about it. My gut instinct would be to spend the $129 for the Polycom Communicator, since Polycom has a pretty good reputation for quality speakerphones. But I’d love to know if there are decent quality alternatives.
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 3rd, 2005
I’ve been playing around with Gizmo the past couple of days. Gizmo is a free, P2P internet telephony product that is very similiar in many ways to the extremely popular Skype. However, unlike Skype, it is based on SIP, an open-standard for making internet phone calls, which means that Gizmo can make and […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 31st, 2005
It seems that Phil Zimmerman, who gave the world secure email by inventing PGP, is taking a run at serious VOIP encryption. A welcome development in the fast-evolving but still-insecure world of internet telephony.
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 10th, 2005
David Strom reminds us that adopting VoIP — like any complex, mission-critical, leading edge technology — can land you in tech support hell every once in a while. (Turns out that he needed a DOCSIS 2.0-compliant cable modem instead of his older DOCSIS 1.0-compliant model.) My take-home from this isn’t “avoid VoIP.” Instead, this […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 11th, 2005
I love Skype for computer-to-computer calls. But apparently their SkypeOut computer-to-phone service is having a lot of quality & billing problems. Hardly surprising - VOIP>POTS is a tough trick.
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 25th, 2004
The New York Model covers some of the interesting ways that RNC protest organizers used SMS (text messaging), VoIP-powered automated telephone information lines, and other leading-edge network technology to power their “counter-convention” efforts, and the independent media coverage of it. Fun stuff, although I’m still trying to figure out how it’s relevant to campaigns that […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 23rd, 2004
Asterisk 1.0.0 is out. (Open-source PBX software.) Slashdot has coverage with some useful comments.
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 15th, 2003
Yankee Research Group did an interesting ROI analysis on the costs and benefits of bringing web/audio conferencing services in-house for a mid-sized company. They found a huge cost savings. Interesting.
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 14th, 2003
Ventrilo - Scalable Voice Communication Software is another interesting VOIP I’d like to check out when I have some more time.
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 2nd, 2003
Skype is a new p2p IP telphony application from the makers of Kazaa. Key benefits are: encryption of calls, allegedly high quality, and zero configuration even in complex network environments. Interesting. Followup: Now that I’ve installed and read the license agreement, I’m less excited. Quoth the license agreement: “You acknowledge that certain functions in […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 1st, 2003
broadband » Voice over IP forums are quite active and full of useful info (along with noise).
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 1st, 2003
Posts in this forum at Broadbandreports.com suggest that it is quite easy to hook up a Cisco ATA-186 VOIP gateway to an ordinary PBX. This would be really neat. The only question is: can several of these units coexist gracefully behind a NAT? I suspect the answer is yes, but it […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 1st, 2003
Resources for Michigan Telephone Users - How to Substitute for Traditional Wireline Telephone Service is a lengthy article, but buried in the middle is a good comparison of three leading VOIP service providers: Vonage, Packet8 and VoicePulse, with some attention to their small-office features.
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 1st, 2003
ONLamp.com: Asterisk: A Bare-Bones VoIP Example [Jul. 03, 2003] is a good introduction to the complex-but-possibly interesting Asterisk open-source PBX system.
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