Archive for September, 2004

This is really cool! Brad templeton, the first guy to create a .com back in the day, errected a Wireless VoIP phone booth and connected it to BroadVoice’s service. Over 1600 calls were made.

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The Black Rock Desert is where the rocket cars broke the sound barrier. It’s a perfectly flat dry lakebed, the location miles from the nearest village of Gerlach, and about 90 miles from Reno, the nearest significant city.

In other words, it’s about the last place you would expect to find a phone booth, which is why I had to build one. Ideally I wanted a traditional “superman” style booth, and those can be found, but cost a fortune to ship, so we went with a more modern pedestal style phone. The goal was to have the phone just sitting there, mounted on the desert floor, connected to nothing, yet working, just where it shouldn’t.

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Calabasas, CA (Monday, September 20, 2004): Tekelec (NASDAQ: TKLC) today announced that it has acquired VocalData, Inc., a provider of hosted Internet protocol (IP) telephony applications that enable the delivery of advanced telecom services and applications to business and residential customers. With the acquisition, Tekelec, a global supplier of telecommunications products for next-generation fixed, mobile and packet networks, enables operators to deliver time division multiplex (TDM) and IP services such as IP Centrex, hosted PBX services and voice virtual private networking (VPN) as they migrate to next-generation networks.

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PARIS, September 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Alcatel (Paris : CGEP.PA and NYSE : ALA) today announced it has acquired privately held US-based eDial, Inc., a leading provider of conferencing and collaboration solutions for enterprises and service providers. The acquisition of eDial enables Alcatel to continue expansion of its enterprise software offerings.

eDial is based in Waltham, Mass. and employs approximately 30 people. The company currently serves more than 100 customers, including enterprises and service providers, through direct and indirect channels. The acquisition was made for approximately $27 million (approx. EUR22 million) in Alcatel stock (ADS) and cash. The deal closed today.

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EarthLink’s R&D lab on Thursday released a proof-of-concept application to show how a popular messaging protocol can be used for purposes other than what it was designed, including sharing data. Dubbed SIPshare, the peer-to-peer application is designed to show how SIP — for Session Initiation Protocol — can be used for chores other than its typical collaboration and voice over IP (VoIP) duties.

“The emerging ubiquity of SIP as a general session-initiation enabler provides a rare opportunity to offer users all manner of P2P applications over a common protocol, instead of inventing a new protocol for each new P2P application that comes along,” EarthLink explained on the SIPshare site.

Although SIP is primarily used for VoIP, EarthLink said the Internet standard “is too important to consider use only for voice, or only for video,” and created SIPshare to show the protocol’s flexibility.

However, said EarthLink, SIP could also be used to build a P2P-style VoIP network, something that would rival the proprietary Skype in scope, but be based on open Internet standards.

“SIPshare demonstrates that it is conceivable that voice over IP, where voice is just content of a different form, itself can be implemented using SIP in a fully standards-based P2P network. In other words, the effect of Skype, but with one important difference: using standards-based protocols, as EarthLink SIPshare does for content sharing,” EarthLink wrote.

SIPshare is open-source — it was released under a BSD-type license — and can be downloaded from the SIPshare site.