Corporate Blog

Creating Mobile Feral Hogs

2010-03-18T16:21:00Z

All of these network and network infrastructure improvements, as well as likely tiered pricing options in the future, will help get us to improved mobile network service. The mobile internet marches on, and there will be increasingly more and more usage of it, and technology will solve the problem ultimately. Just don't expect the ride to be so smooth. I've read a few articles recently about domesticated pigs who get loose, and in the wild very soon turn into wild boars, eating everything...(read more)

DiaStar Release 2.0

2010-03-17T16:40:00Z

For those of you may have missed the press release last week, Release 2. 0 of The DiaStar TM Server is now available for Download at www.projectdiastar.org . This new release brings a variety of video features from the Dialogic® product portfolio to the Open Source/Asterisk® marketplace. New / enhanced features of the DiaStar Server include: Call Progress Analysis (CPA) Enhancements -User-Defined Tone Detection with detection results available in both Asterisk Dialplan and the Asterisk Manager...(read more)

Can Internet Video be Free?

2010-03-13T09:32:00Z

Content-owners attitudes to YouTube vary wildly. On the one hand some (like Viacom) have decided on high-stakes legal battles for "massive intentional copyright violations". On the other, some conventional broadcasters (like NBC) have created their own official YouTube landing pages. In the NBC case, they have taken the decision to engage with YouTube and bring more international eyes to their content, with all the promotional and advertising benefits that can come with that. Somewhere...(read more)

DiaStar Redux

2010-03-11T13:11:00Z

I've been at the UC Expo in London, where we have a show stand, with one of the major themes being our open source project, DiaStar . We're located close to the Digium Asterisk Pavillion, where there are several Asterisk-related talks going on, including on from the Director of Engineering for DiaStar, Ant Martin (it's at 1:50pm, if you're at UC Expo today). We've had a steady stream of interested people from the open source community coming to the stand, but one of my industry...(read more)

SIP Trunking and the Enterprise Network Edge

2010-03-09T18:21:00Z

I have been a product manager in the enterprise media gateway space for a number of years. Over that time, enterprise media gateways have matured from simple toll bypass devices which enabled cheap long distance calling to elements which enable a wide variety of solutions within the hybrid network infrastructure. One of these is the SIP Trunking solution. SIP Trunking is a service offered by Internet Telephony Services Providers (ITSP) allowing the extension of VoIP connectivity beyond the enterprise...(read more)

Cloud Computing – the Terminator Movies had it all right!

2010-03-08T19:17:00Z

In one of my last blogs, I talked about why the concept of Cloud Computing has taken hold now and what’s involved from a technical and non-technical standpoint. Cloud Computing sounds so easy, so all companies should just do this, right? Wrong. There are perspectives out there that say “we aren’t ready for this yet.” And people should respect these perspectives. There is a lingering concern about outsourcing of key data by IT departments and whether the data would be “safe...(read more)

Video Conferencing - an Underused Technology

2010-02-26T15:07:00Z

Video-phones used to be the stuff of science-fiction. In the 1960s the movie 2001: a Space Odyssey , one character calls home from a payphone on the way to the Moon. Of course it was a video-phone, and he was able to have a video conference with his daughter, in colour, over the many thouands of kilometres back to Earth. In real-life it was still another 20 years before commercial videophones really started to come along, as part of ISDN telephony. Like the telepresence systems of today, these were...(read more)

The Fire Is Back at the Fira

2010-02-24T21:35:00Z

Mobile World Congress, held at the Fira in Barcelona (Catalonian for fairgrounds is what I understand the word to mean), is always an exciting time for me and our company. Everyone is having back-to-back-to-back meetings and you feel the excitement of the coming year’s business. You gotta love the portable booths in the middle of the grounds, including the multiple story portable restaurants. This year’s energy certainly felt better than last year. Our booth, for instance, was so crowded...(read more)

Snowflakes, Bad Internet, Barcelona & the Video Convergence Forum

2010-02-17T19:45:00Z

By the time you read this, I will have been in Barcelona for a week. While I was coming to Barcelona anyway for Mobile World Congress, I came early since the Video Convergence Forum was launched the Thursday before MWC started. Next week, I will report on Mobile World Congress. So what’s with the Video Convergence Forum? Why did Dialogic feel so strongly about it that we wanted to be a founding member? As readers of this blog know, Dialogic has been a proponent of enabling mobile video applications...(read more)

mLearning - the School in Your Pocket

2010-02-17T09:48:00Z

This week the BBC made an interesting announcement about BBC Janala , a service that is using mobile to teach the English language in Bangladesh. Janala (which means "window") is a relatively low-tech solution, using SMS and voice on mobile phones, and for me underlines that there are still a lot of application areas for mobile technology that haven't yet been tried. The author and strategist Tomi Ahonen , has pointed out before that the mobile has a reach that far exceeds any other...(read more)

Cloud Computing - What Factors Make it Viable?

2010-02-11T00:44:00Z

In a previous blog , I discussed the early stages of cloud computing, and now I’ll touch on why this concept has taken hold now, or shall we say, why cloud computing is at least more viable now. First of all, we have better technology now than we ever did. The networks are better than ever, allowing access to remote data faster. At Dialogic, we use Salesforce.com, perhaps the most famous and successful software as a service provider, and I don’t see any difference between speed of access...(read more)

The "End of Free" - Mobile Video Leads the Way

2010-02-09T03:34:00Z

Last time , I wrote about some recent announcements (and rumors) about “the end of free” – i.e. media companies that are starting to charge for access to their content on the internet. While this is interesting for folks who are heavy users of nytimes.com or people who like to watch a lot of video on Hulu, I think the real change in business models is about to become much more apparent in the mobile world. In the last few months, we have seen plenty of items in the news explaining...(read more)

Adding Video to Voice: Crossing the Chasm

2010-02-05T19:40:00Z

I just returned from a trip to visit several different countries while attending the IT Expo trade show and participating in a variety of internal meetings. In my travels, I found a lot of gathering interest in the question of how video can be added to voice applications. In the past year, we've been adding functions to our carrier gateway products, the Dialogic® IMG 1010 Integrated Media Gateway and the Dialogic Vision TM CX Video Gateway to address these kinds of needs. Here's an example...(read more)

Cloud Computing — Those Clouds Aren't Pure White!

2010-02-03T16:09:00Z

Most people in the industry today talk about cloud computing as a fait accompli, as something already done and deployed. I saw a lot of this kind of “breathing your own fumes” thinking with regard to VoIP around the year 2000. We were all going to our own little inbred kind of conferences, but in reality, VoIP was just starting to get deployed! There was so much more work to do, not the least of which was getting the technology into the deployed telephony products. If you live and breathe...(read more)

Enjoy "free" while it lasts

2010-02-01T02:57:00Z

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the 4G Wireless Evolution (4GWE) conference in Miami. This event is produced by my friend Carl Ford and the gang at Crossfire Media , and is held in conjunction with the IT Expo conference and exhibition. I spoke on a panel titled “Mobile Video Revolution” at the IT Expo, but today I am writing about a presentation for which I was sitting in the audience. Bob Bowman is President and CEO of Major League Baseball (MLB) Advanced Media LP, and he...(read more)