Mobile Computing

Skype tutorial demos

This video takes you through the process of making free calls with Skype from downloading the software to connecting:

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This video from Skype demonstrates using the service for business: 

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FrugalTech discusses more ways to save money using Skype for business:

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Kid Guru explains how to record calls for podcasting and other purposes:

Who could resist Fennec? It’s so cute!

Site director Margaret Rouse and I were IMing a couple of weeks ago, which we do a fair amount of because our “office” spans about 800 miles. We were discussing a definition for Fennec, Mozilla’s mobile version of the Firefox browser when suddenly she said, apropos of nothing I could discern, “It’s so cute!”

As you probably know, IM conversations are prone to the occasional missed step or dropped thread. I wondered briefly what she was talking about. A cute browser, I wondered? But I had faith… and then there it was, a link.  Here’s what I saw:

No denying, it’s cute. But I was still none the wiser. I knew that Margaret is a dog person and, in fact, has raised guide dogs. That’s a cute pup, I said. “What kind is it?” It’s a fennec, she told me. A little fox. (Comprehension was, you’ll be glad to hear, swift and, well, comprehensive: Big Firefox: full-sized fox mascot. Small verson: small fox mascot. Gotcha.)

At least at this point, the mobile adaptation of Firefox is named for a small, desert-dwelling fox. Here’s a video demo:

All clear? Me too. Now I wonder what this week's IMs will bring...

~ Ivy Wigmore 

Joel Maloff on SIP trunking

“For a service that was forecast by Gartner last year to be part of a more than $2 billion market segment by 2011, SIP trunking remains one of those technical phrases used in vendor circles that is marched out with pride to prospective distributors and customers and received by the marketplace with bewilderment.”

I’m always extremely impressed when marketing people actually demystify terms, instead of spinning hype and building the “baffle ‘em with BS” model to new levels. In this article, Joel Maloff, VP of Marketing for BandTel, explains SIP trunking. Here’s an excerpt:

In a survey commissioned by my company earlier this year, we discovered that even so-called industry experts — analysts, reporters, and others — could not agree on a definition for SIP trunking, nor could they consistently identify the leaders in delivery of SIP trunking services. However, it is not hard to understand the confusion in the general marketplace. For example, a February 2008 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) draft document entitled “What is aSession Initiation Protocol ( News - Alert) (SIP) Trunk Anyway?” provided the following definition:

A SIP trunk is a virtual sip entity on a server constrained by a predefined set of polices and rules that determine how to process requests. (J. Rosenberg, 2008, http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-rosenberg…)

No wonder there is confusion!

The same draft also describes SIP trunking in more mainstream circles as a service for enterprises that allows connection to the PSTN as a displacement for circuit-based connections, and as a replacement for costly leased lines connecting distributed telephone systems within an enterprise.

So let’s cut through the mystery and confusion. SIP trunking, simply put, is a way for organizations to accomplish something that they already do, but for less money, with equal or better quality, and with greater functionality. It is also a way for enterprises that were too small and could not afford leased line services to achieve comparable benefits as the big boys but for much more attractive fees than previously. All of this is now achievable because of the underlying packet-switched technology of the Internet as opposed to circuit-switched architecture from the past. SIP is simply the framework that vendors and service providers have agreed to use to accomplish the completion of telephone calls and much more.

Another challenge is that SIP trunking providers differ from one another, and can roughly be grouped in the following three categories: SIP trunks via dedicated lines, SIP trunks in conjunction with hosted services, and pure SIP trunking providers.

Read the rest of the article.