Developers

Using PowerMedia XMS Restful within .NET C# Environment

dslopres — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 18:05:55 GMT

One of my colleagues, Leo Pilifosov, wrote an introduction to using PowerMedia XMS's RestFUL interface via C# (link). It shows using the various HTTP methods to post and receive information from PowerMedia XMS. It will also show how to handle the various asynchronous events that an application would need to be aware of by using a separate thread to manage these events.

Text Messaging Turns 20

dslopres — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 18:54:02 GMT

Twenty years ago on Dec 3. 1992 the first text message was sent. Here is an article providing a short history of SMS link

DM3 to PowerMedia HMP Migration

dslopres — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 20:11:30 GMT

I get this request often enough and wanted to provide some pointers on migrating from Dialogic® DM3 Media Boards to Dialogic® PowerMedia™ Host Media Processing Software (HMP).

If you have an existing DM3 application and are considering a migration to HMP, our application engineers have put together a helpweb article that provides tips that you might find useful. You'll find it available here.

As a general overview, DM3 applications use the GlobalCall API for call control and DX voice library for media play, record, streaming, … etc.. Those same APIs are all available on HMP and DM3 based application should migrate . If you have a need for TDM you'll need an HMP Interface Boards that provide the traditional analog, T1, and E1 access. From a coding standpoint, the migration should be fairly straightforward per the article.

To utilize pure IP in your solution you would check out the technology guide available here

PowerMedia XMS Performance Testing

dslopres — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 20:26:57 GMT

We recently received performance certification for Dialogic® PowerMedia™ Extended Media Server (XMS) 1.1 from the Tolly Group. In it you'll find useful information on conference and caller performance, PESQ scores, latency, ... etc.. You can check it out at http://www.dialogic.com/landing/tolly-2012-xms.

As a reminder PowerMedia XMS provides developers access to various media server functions controlled by either MSML or HTTP RESTful Web Services API. MSML or RESTful gives you flexibility to use a wide range of development environments and application servers in conjunction with the XMS media server. With XMS 1.1 you'll also see the addition of HD 720p video resolution.

Simply REST

dslopres — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 14:55:18 GMT

One of the interfaces available in our PowerMedia Extended Media Server (XMS) is the ability to use RESTFul web services to control the media server. RESTFul web services provides an easy paradigm to get access to call control and media resources via web services provided by XMS. A developer can use any programming or scripting languages they are familiar with to accomplish this, as long as it supports functions for dealing with http services. Development environments could include Java, C#, PERL, PHP, ... etc.. This post is to give a brief overview of the XMS RESTful interface.

You are probably already familiar with the idea of http serving up, for example, web pages as shown below:

PowerMedia XMS provides a similar interface for communication media platforms:

The above shows a simple request to create a call. You’ll notice an application ID (appid) which allows you to define discrete appids so that multiple applications may be simultaneously run on a single XMS server. The payload that would go along with the request looks like this:

<web_service version="1.0">

<call destination_uri="SIP:user@192.168.0.5"

cpa="yes"

</call>

</web_service>

The payload is straightforward in that it specifies the destination and whether you wish to have call progress analysis enabled, i.e. cpa=”yes”. Once sent to the XMS, a response comes back as 201 to let you know that the process of creating a call has been started. The 201 will also have a payload that will give a little more information on the call that has been initiated; most import is the call identifier which is a unique reference # for the call.

This is pretty much it to create call, i.e. (1) specify http command and (2) associated payload.

To be upfront, there is a little more work needed to make a full robust application. With communication applications there are unsolicited events such as call status information, play completion events, etc. that you would need to look out for. This can be done with http event streaming. With a typical http request, a connection is made between the client and the server and is closed out when the request is done. With http event streaming, the connection remains open which allows the web service to continue to send raw data across. You would want to open another thread or process that is monitoring for events. For a call you would get back an event message with the call identifier that would let you know the state of the call.

For more information on PowerMedia XMS, please visit: http://www.dialogic.com/en/products/media-server-software/xms.aspx

Subliminal Messaging

dslopres — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 18:05:59 GMT

In Leonard Mlodinow’s book “Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior” , he discusses how the unconscious mind affects us in everyday life and how it impacts decisions, perspectives and relationships we have. It’s a good read.

One specific area touches on how our minds receive subliminal non-verbal cues in conversations we have with people. These cues can significantly turn the conversation into a more positive or negative experience. On an audio call, tone of your voice can certainly color the words you are speaking. However on video calls or video conferences, non-verbal cues provide a richer and deeper experience with the person(s) you are speaking with. Integrating video into business processes is a great way to provide a more robust experience whether you are making a pitch, closing a deal, working on a project, teaching someone, providing patient care or trying to solve a problem. Overall, video conferencing is an excellent way to bring more engagement in our everyday interactions. If you’re interested in learning more about this subject, please visit the video conferencing section of our website: http://www.dialogic.com/Solutions/Mobile-VAS/Services/Video-Conference.aspx.”

Over the Air

mdavies — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 14:42:58 GMT

I just attended an event called Over the Air in London, a mobile developer-focused conference, now in its third year. There were some great topics, talking about HTML5 and widgets, the Android OS and software for social networking. Unusually, the event features a "hack-a-thon", where a number of teams worked through Friday and overnight into Saturday to create a novel mobile application. Some ideas that I saw there included:

A remote control helicopter controlled via iPhone (the flying device comes from a company called Parrot).
An Android app that gets information from the UK National Traffic Control Centre and shows you relevant information for where you are.
Using a new API from PayPal to add in-app payments to mobile apps

It's really very interesting an stimulating to see what a focused team can build in a short time on a mobile platform.

A highlight for me was Saturday morning's keynote, delivered by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web. He spoke on a number of topics, including the semantic web and making the information on the Internet available to the developing world. Largely this means making information suitable for mobiles (and not just smartphones), because the next billion internet users will not have PCs, or even high-end phones. Berners-Lee is an enthusiastic character, and really must have quite a capacity for hard work, since he's not only got posts at two universities on opposite sides of the Atlantic (Southampton and MIT), but also chairman of the W3C and founder of the World Wide Web Foundation.

Practical Steps for HD Voice in HMP

mdavies — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:21:49 GMT

If you already have voice applications that use Dialogic's HMP media server (now known as Dialogic PowerMedia HMP), you might be interested in the steps needed to support high-definition voice (e.g. G.722 or AMR-WB) with the same application. HMP has had HD Voice for some months now, and we have just published a whitepaper that goes into the detail of how you can adopt that:

http://www.dialogic.com/products/docs/appnotes/11962-hdvoice-hmp-an.pdf

There's a lot of interest in HD voice right now, with lots of ideas out there about HD-enabling legacy applications (like voicemail); interconnecting PSTN and NGN networks; and even new applications, for example streaming music and improved-efficiency speech recognition.

Keeping Busy This August

mdavies — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:20:18 GMT

August is normally a sleepy month, with many going away for their Summer holidays, but next week there are a couple of highlights in the Dialogic calendar.

Firstly, in Chicago, the ClueCon conferenc e is getting underway, and for those in Europe there is the IPTComm conference, held this time in Munich.

ClueCon is an increasingly popular open-source conference coming from the team that brought you Freeswitch. Our own Jeff Dworkin and James Rafferty will be there talking about DiaStar, and also about combining Freeswitch with Dialogic hardware. I can see that there will be some educational and interesting talks from the likes of Daniel Mierla, Moshe Yudkowsky and Jason Goecke. I wish I could go, if I were not travelling myself.

IPTComm is a conference I’ve visited a couple of times over the last years, a much more academic-type conference attended by researchers from academia and industry. This year Jeffrey Bloom (from Dialogic Media Labs) will be waving the Dialogic banner, and he will be talking about video quality of service and, importantly, quality of experience.

Note that there’s still time to get an entry in for the Dialogic Innovator Challenge, before the close at the end of August. We've recently opened a new hosted developer network (called inCloud9) that allows you to build, test and host video applications in the cloud. You can read about this (and see a video) here. This would be an ideal way to test out your ideas, with no cost other than the development time that you invest.

The Developer is King

mdavies — Thu, 27 May 2010 10:28:29 GMT

When I started developing software (back in the '80s), developers were back-room people that were just required to sit quietly in the office writing code. They were not seen as entrepreneurial, and in general few people sought their advice when it came to product (or company) direction.

You can see how different the world is today by looking at Google's recent I/O conference, where Google annually reach out to their developer community. Google pamper their developers and give them gifts, and I think this is how it should be. Now top business people see the developers as the source of the brilliant new ideas that will make all of our businesses successful. This year, Google launched Google TV, a new service allowing TV and the web to be combined on the living-room TV. This is anchored around set-top boxes built on Google's Chrome browser and Android operating system.

As part of this, a panel session featured the CEOs of Google, Intel, Sony Entertainment, Adobe, Best Buy, DISH and Logitech. These top CEOs had made the time to attend, in person, to spend an hour selling their message about Google TV to an engineer audience. I think this could not have happened even 10 years ago, and it shows that now even in the world of consumer electronics, shipping dumb boxes is really a thing of the past. Today's high-tech market is about configurable, programmable platforms, and it's you, the engineers, that bring the boxes to life and create the experiences that the users want to have.

Video Apps for the World Cup

mdavies — Mon, 03 May 2010 09:24:29 GMT

Thinking about our new Innovator Challenge this year, I was interested by the opportunity for sports-related apps for the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. The football world cup will attract an estimated 350,000 visitors to South Africa during the Summer, and I’m guessing that a large proportion of those visitors will be carrying a mobile phone with them.

A number of high-profile football teams already have their own mobile fan site for the fans to connect with, for example Real Madrid charge €12 per month ($16) for membership to their site. In addition there are many sports-oriented TV channels that have a mobile product, like ESPN and Sky Sports, the latter I know has a subscription of £5 per month ($8). In other words, sports fans are used to spending a good chunk of money getting the latest news, goals, pictures etc on their phones. They are loyal and can be relied on month after month for revenue.

So putting these together, there must be a great business opportunity in mobile services for the world cup this year. In the context of our own Innovator Challenge, we are asking companies to use video in an app, and one technology that is fast understand and to implement is video calling (sometimes known as 3G 324M). In South Africa, the telecom companies MTN and Vodacom both support video calling, and looking at MTN tariffs, video calling looks comparable to voice calling. Addressing the needs of visitors to the World Cup, we can imagine applications like:

Video news and goals (this is the obvious one, and you probably need a license from FIFA to do this one) ·
Football fan social networks (e.g. video share, see-what-I-see).
Fans will want to share with their friends travelling with them, but also those at home.
Perhaps as an extension to this, location-based services. Games and “find-me” services.
Tourism. Fans will want to know where to stay, where to eat and drink. They will need maps, car rental, directions to airports, etc.
Perhaps mobile-implemented guided tours? This is already becoming a common application for voice calling.

There are many more examples of things that have already been built on Dialogic at our YouTube site.

There is of course an ‘app’ goldrush at the moment, with Apple probably at the centre of gold-seam, and increasingly I see services that only cater for smartphone users, and perhaps target three platforms, namely Apple, Blackberry and Android. This means that they are aiming their product at only about 35% of smartphones (see Gartner for figures), and smartphones themselves are only a 15% niche within mobile as a whole. In other words they have access to 5% of phone users, or about 18,000 of those visitors to the World Cup. Perhaps it’s a little higher since people that can afford a holiday in South Africa (in these troubled times) are more likely to be able to afford a smartphone?

It seems to me that 3G-based video services are a much better bet for creating services for the World Cup, as many non-smartphones (like the excellent INQ handsets) have video calling capability.

Of course there’s not much time until the start of the tournament now, so you’ll probably be wanting to use one of our VoiceXML-based products (like the Vision VX Platform or Dialogic IP Media Server) to get your implementation and testing done in a hurry. If you’re entering our 2010 Innovator Challenge, then I wish you good luck, and I’ll be looking forward to seeing what people come up with.

Watch the Skies

mdavies — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:36:06 GMT

My travels took me recently to Jodrell Bank, one of the World’s first radio telescopes. The 76m dish (which can be seen from 30km away) is a famous landmark in the UK, bound-up with the Space Race and often used in TV programmes (fictional and non-fictional) related to science.

The Manchester University astronomers picked this site because the electric trams of the city caused too much interference to their experiments. Today also it is a “quiet zone” and Jodrell Bank visitors are encouraged to power-off their mobiles. In any case, the mobile coverage is poor; presumably because the cellcos have agreed not to come too close with their cell towers anyway.

One story that I hadn’t heard before was about Luna 9, the unmanned probe sent to the moon in 1966 by the USSR. The scientists at Jodrell Bank pointed the telescope at Luna 9 and managed to record some of its transmissions. Thinking that the stream sounded a bit like a fax, they quickly borrowed a fax machine (fax was an exotic and rare technology then) and rigged it up so that they could play the Luna message into the fax machine. To everyone’s surprise, what came out was a close-up photograph of the moon, which was subsequently published in the UK newspapers, and all over the world.

If you read my last blog, you’ll know that I was an enthusiast for the FORTH language years ago when I was a student. Interestingly, the FORTH language was written by Charles H. Moore, who needed a portable programming language for controlling radio telescopes. I wonder if there is any FORTH code running there still at Jodrell Bank?

Vintage Computing and Gaming

mdavies — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:45:00 GMT

This is my first post of 2010 on the Developer blog, so let me first wish you all a Happy New Year!

At the end of 2009 I had the opportunity to enjoy some computer industry nostalgia. My first computer was the Jupiter ACE, a machine made by Jupiter Cantab Ltd., one of perhaps 15 UK companies at that time trying to build and market computers. It was a machine inspired by the Sinclair computers, but was different in that it used a language called FORTH. Most machines at the time were either programmed in some form of BASIC, or directly in machine code. FORTH was designed originally as an operating system for radio telescopes, and has some very interesting characteristics. I loved FORTH and I loved my Jupiter ACE.

As it turns out I was not the only one to love my ACE. If you look at the Jupiter ACE Resource Site (http://www.jupiter-ace.co.uk) you will see that a small team of enthusiasts are trying to save every detail of the hardware and software that they still can. As it happened, I still have some Jupiter ACE software on cassette tape, and the good people at the Jupiter ACE Resource Site were able to read the information in from the tape (which was 20+ years old) and recover the software.

The result is that they were able to resurrect a game called “Snake” that I wrote at the time. In a rather interesting juxtaposition of old and new technology, you are now able to use YouTube to see what my game looked like. Take a look here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSH8mZ72Ud0

Obviously the technology looks very crude compared to today’s games like the Xbox, but I’m pleased to have my small contribution to games recorded in history.

Focus on the Developer

mdavies — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:53:19 GMT

These are trying times for the industry, as in most of the world we fight back against the recession. I’m heartened, however, by signs of companies investing in their developer programmes, and reaching out to the software development community.

Mobile is still an area of frenetic activity. Most famous, I suppose, is Apple and the iPhone. A runaway success since its launch, the iPhone has frightened the handset manufacturers, galvanized mobile app developers and excited the cellcos. The iPhone SDK and developer programme is, in my view, a brilliant lesson to us all in how to execute a programme to get meet the needs of software developers.

Also in the mobile SDK area we see Android making good progress at recruiting software partners, and attracting handset partners. Google’s Android Developer Challenge attracted a lot of new apps and created excitement. Symbian also refocused on open source, and are making headway in their own reserved, British way. Developer programmes in the mobile carriers, like Orange and Vodafone are also great areas of activity. Vodafone have been talking about mobile “widgets” for a while, i.e. self-contained web apps (using Javascript and CSS) that can run on a mobile phone. Samsung have also been trying to stir up interest in widgets with their own developer challenge for the Omnia. Equipment and software vendors are also building their developer outreach. Just in the last few days we’ve had announcements from Syntellect (reaching out to CT-ADE developers), and Ericsson (reaching out to web developers).

As equipment providers ourselves at Dialogic, we understand the importance of developers and our APIs in creating opportunities for our product. We recently ran our own innovator challenge for developers, and if you’re interested in the results, you can see them here:

http://www.dialogic.com/press/press_releases/pr-2009-1023-innovatoraward.htm

We’re going to run another developer challenge in 2010. If you’ve got any ideas about how that should look, or how we could better help you develop for Dialogic platforms, we’d be happy to hear your comments.

The Birth of Wireless

mdavies — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:52:25 GMT

I was recently with our service provider division in Hyannis, and had a little bit of time for some sightseeing on the Cape Cod coast. I didn’t know this before I arrived, but Cape Cod was one of the first places on Earth to have a wireless transmitter station. In 1903, Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi established wireless stations at Wellfleet, MA, USA; Cape Race, Nova Scotia, Canada; and Poldhu, Cornwall, UK. So I stood on the site of the Wellfleet wireless station, which sent the first ever transatlantic wireless message, which was an exchange of greetings between President Roosevelt and King Edward VII, sent of course in Morse Code.

This marked the start of a new era of communication, since transatlantic communications had already been possible (via undersea cables) for perhaps 20 years before that point. But of course wireless meant also that ship-to-shore communication was possible, as well as between fixed sites. Interestingly, these wireless stations are part of the RMS Titanic tragedy in 1912, since the ship was in contact with Cape Race in the hours before it struck the iceberg and sank. Radio was then an innovation on ships, and was very much used for routing messages from the passengers. The sinking of the Titanic was one of the events that helped people to see that there was a safety aspect to radio systems also.

Now of course we take these wireless links for granted, and when I switch on my mobile phone in Cape Cod, there is a rapid transatlantic exchange of messages with my cellco’s Home Location Register that authorizes my phone to work in the USA. It’s transparent to us, and we never think about it anymore.

The Marconi station closed in 1920 (by which time many commercial wireless services existed), and today it has quite literally fallen into the sea, but there are some small pieces of evidence there of the birth of the wireless industry. I like to think that the innovation started at Wellfleet is still going strong in Cape Cod and in Dialogic. Looking out across the blue Atlantic, it felt anyhow like there was some kind of connection across the century.

SMS Telemetry

mdavies — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:47:52 GMT

Last week I stumbled across an inexpensive electronics kit that allows SMS messages to monitor and/or control things in the home. This board has 8 control outputs and 4 monitoring inputs, and is designed to link to a cheap Nokia phone handset via a serial cable. I imagine that the phone, cable and SMS board could be bought for under $50. Add to this a prepay SIM card, and for a minimal spend, you have a system that can be programmed to respond to a range of commands sent via text message.

Given that people increasingly have electronic systems in the house that record information to computers, it would be possible to link these systems to SMS to be able to remotely control and monitor a whole variety of systems. For example, one friend of mine has an electronic weather station at home, so imagine being able to check via SMS if it is raining there. Another friend has a system that measures the power usage in the home; for him it might be interesting to be able to send a text and get a response back giving the current power usage? Perhaps from this information he could also conclude whether other members of the family are at home?

These kinds of telemetry system were just science fiction when I was a teenager interested in electronics, and even ten years ago they would have been expensive enough to limit their use to mission-critical industrial use. However, with the falling costs of prepay and SMS, coupled with the falling cost of electronics and computer systems, we can expect that these applications will become all too common in the coming years. The cellcos themselves are expecting that demand for 3G/GSM SIM cards will continue to grow in the coming years, not just for humans (who increasingly will have more than one phone), but also for robotic or automated systems that need a phone number for applications like remote control.

Come to eComm !

mdavies — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:42:47 GMT

I'm very honoured to have been chosen again as a speaker at the eComm conference in Amsterdam later this month. eComm is a unique gathering of entrepreneurs, thinkers, internet and telecom industry experts who come together to talk about the future of communication. This is the first time the conference has run in Europe, so a great opportunity to take part without travelling to the opposite side of the world. There's still time to register, so please come along and join us!

Spinning Plates

mdavies — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:12:59 GMT

We tend to take multi-tasking applications for granted these days, as the tools and APIs for developers have really become very user-friendly. In fact even the term "multi-tasking" has been absorbed into mainstream business jargon, because it's so much understood that not just machines, but people also need to be able to execute many tasks at the same time.

I was reflecting this week on a system I worked on years ago where the “multi-tasking” was actually provided by the application programmers themselves. The system had a 64kbyte space that you could swap a small code overlay into. This is not a typo: 64 kilobytes, rather than megabytes. If your app exceeded 64k, then you had to split it into multiple overlays which would be swapped in and out of the same space one at a time.

The most difficult part was that you absolutely could not block, or delay in your overlay at any time, otherwise the system would hang. The concurrency (or I should say apparent concurrency) depended on each application running in a few hundreds of milliseconds and then quitting again, leaving the space free for another user task.

Now modern operating systems like Linux and Windows manage tasks for you, by automatically pre-empting apps in order to share the CPU and other resources fairly. You could say at the time (in the 1980’s) that operating systems were not that sophisticated, at least not in desktop computers. UNIX existed then, but had yet to become popular outside of universities. Back then only minicomputers (like VAX) and mainframes (like the IBM System/370) had fully preemptive multitasking.

Through the 90’s I worked with UNIX operating systems that brought more convenience with multi-processing, so you could use the ‘fork()’ command to make an identical copy of your process, and therefore create sub-processes, each in their own safe address space. Later on Windows popularized ‘threading’, or lightweight processes, which were adopted in Linux/UNIX and now even on embedded systems like phones.

In some ways threading brings back a little of the “danger” of those early times. Threads all share a single address space, so it’s possible for one thread to corrupt the memory and spoil the environment for all of the co-operating tasks. The tradeoff is that threads are much lighter (both the CPU and memory usage) for the system to manage, so you can have many more of them in a single server.

Making threads communicate safely, and rendezvous with each other safely still requires care and skill from the software engineer, but in a lot of ways our development environments are really a very comfortable environment compared with those of twenty years ago.

Crash and Call

mdavies — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 07:53:49 GMT

I saw that the GSMA are backing an initiative called eCall, which aims to put a device into cars that can automatically contact the emergency services in a crash, and tell them your position, direction and vehicle identification in order to speed-up emergency response. This is part of a wider umbrella of technologies now referred to as Machine-to-Machine (or M2M), that communicate some kind of telemetry automatically over a network, to a central computer.

In many developed countries, penetration of mobile phones is now exceeding 100%, not only because people often have more than one phone (for example work phone; personal phone), but because increasingly machines themselves have a phone number; a mobile terminal; a SIM identity. To give some examples: high-end cars have for some years used locator devices that can report the position of the vehicle (In some cases the insurers require such a device to be fitted because the risk of theft is high and the recovery percentage low). GSM modules are now cheap to buy (and thanks to the prepaid revolution, cheap to run), and can be used in applications like remote video surveillance, or simply triggering an alarm via SMS. The same modules can be used for other straightforward telemetry applications like regular weather reporting from inaccessible locations, or for measuring domestic gas or electricity usage without the need for a man-and-van operation reading meters. As the price of wireless modules continues to fall, we can expect a lot more of these M2M services to emerge. This is of course great news for telcos, who can expect ‘mobile phone’ penetration to reach 200% and beyond.

As for eCall, I think it’s an interesting application but devices reporting your location stir up a lot of strong emotions. Many people resent nearly any new safety measure applied to vehicles, so perhaps this is a “double whammy”. Automated speed cameras are still highly controversial. Truck drivers fought against the tacograph (that measures how long they drive in a day), dubbed “The Spy in the Cab”. In various countries there has been resistance to the compulsory wearing of seatbelts in cars (still very strong in the United States), and resistance to the prohibition of using hand-held phones while driving. The GSMA can expect vocal resistance to their project, even though its aims are laudable.

Combining Video and SMS

mdavies — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:39:12 GMT

This week I was reading a newsletter sent around by Kirusa, who are business partners with Dialogic. The newsletter talks about Voice SMS, which is a service that Kirusa are enabling for some telcos now. It's worth explaining what this service is, as it builds on regular SMS to create a whole new service, including video technology from Dialogic.

The basic idea is that instead of making a voice call, you make a video call (to their recipient's number but with an extra '*' at the start). The service intercepts the call and connects you to a video server that allows you to record a video message using the camera on your 3G handset. Once you're happy with the message, you hang-up, and the service sends an SMS to the recipient, giving a special link number for them to call. When they call that link (another video call), they can view the video message that has been left. So it's a kind of store-and-forward video-mail application, linked into SMS for ease-of-use.

There are a number of ways that you could implement this service with Dialogic products, but in fact the route Kirusa chose is to use the Vision gateway, which provides the 3G video magic, transforming the video stream into IP/RTP so that next-gen media server platforms can manipulate the audio and video.

SMS has proved to be a great money-spinner for the telcos; a simple idea, but able to be used as a building block to provide messaging (very importantly with billing attached) in all kinds of different service models.