From the category archives:

Conversation Providers

Launch of the iAttaché (woops, iPad) has certainly generated lots of social media coverage: blogs, Twitter and Facebook are full of comments and reviews. 300,000 sold; over a million Apps downloaded, etc. Since it’s not available yet for Canadians (except those who made the trip to Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago and Seattle, for instance, last [...]

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Categories Conversation Providers, Mobile Devices, Skype on Mobile, Using Skype

Three weeks ago Skype made available the “Gold” release of Skype 4.2 for Windows. In the interim I have had the opportunity to experience many of its new features, several of which I have found improve the call experience in somewhat subtle but very beneficial ways.
Call Quality Indicator
This is what I have found [...]

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Categories Communications Stories, Conversation Providers, Skype For Business, Skype News, Skype for Personal, Using Skype

Since its launch about two years ago, I have blogged several times about iotum’s CalliFlower Conference Calling service. More significantly I have used it for several conference calls of up to 25 people, including a couple that ran for over two hours. While permitting up to several hundred participants into a conference call, Calliflower’s [...]

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Categories Communications News, Conversation Providers, Mobile Applications, Service Providers, Skype For Business, Skype Partner News, Skype Partner Solutions, Using Skype

Over the past two weeks we have started to see signs of a transition period for Skype’s developer support activities. Yes, Skype Extras is dead; however the current Skype API’s remain supported. Jonathan Christensen gave Michael Arrington at TechCrunch some hints of forthcoming developer support activity.  Skype for Asterisk was launched three weeks ago. [...]

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Categories Communications News, Conversation Providers, Skype Channels, Skype News, Skype Partner News, Skype Platform

Over the past eighteen months I have often reported on iotum’s Calliflower voice conferencing service as it has evolved and matured. For the first time in a few months I had occasion to use it once again yesterday evening. Connecting  11 participants in the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto triangle, New York and Virginia, I can report on [...]

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Categories Communications News, Conversation Providers, Mobile Applications, Service Providers

Voxeo has as its tagline “the fastest growing voice platform company”; however, with today’s acquisition of IMified, “the world’s largest hosted instant messaging application development and deployment platform”, Voxeo has become a more encompassing, “fastest growing” conversation platform company. Complementing Voxeo’s widely respected provisioning and support of hosted voice applications, this acquisition recognizes the [...]

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Categories Communications News, Conversation Providers, Developers, Service Providers

SocialScope: Why BlackBerry?

by Jim Courtney on Tue, May 19, 2009 3:05 pm

Yesterday’s post, SocialScope: for a Complete, But Managed, Twitter Experience, outlines why I have found SocialScope to be the most complete Twitter client on any platform offered to date. But it only runs on BlackBerry. Why? A recent interview with Ubiquitous Systems CEO Amit Kumar provided the answers.
As their initial goal the Ubiquitous team [...]

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Categories Conversation Providers, Mobile Applications, Social Media, Web 2.0 Tools and Applications

Yesterday’s announcement of Grand Central’s rebirth as Google Voice drew a lot of attention from both the mainstream media and blogger world. In following the IP-based communications world over the past three years, I have come to believe that the only potential real time conversation service provider challenger to Skype could come from Google. [...]

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Categories Communications News, Conversation Providers, Mobile Applications, Using Skype

Thursday evening I was checking out Truphone’s latest release only to learn that their somewhat delayed version that provides access to Skype is still on hold. At that time I went browsing for other applications on the App Store and came across one that I have had previous experience with on the BlackBerry: IM+ [...]

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Categories Conversation Providers, Mobile Applications, Skype Partner News, Skype Partner Solutions, Skype for Personal, Skype on Mobile

Truphone Breaks the Carrier Barrier

by Jim Courtney on Mon, Dec 15, 2008 9:12 am

Truphone’s announcements last week overcame a significant carrier resistance barrier to using VoIP-enabled services to reduce international calling costs. The key secret here was that it required the combination of Truphone’s iPhone and iPod Touch applications along with the Apple Application program that leverages Apple’s established carrier relationships to break this barrier.On Friday I was [...]

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Categories Communications Stories, Conversation Providers, Mobile Applications, Service Providers

Earlier this week the GMail weblog announced GMail voice and video chat; basically they are designed to add voice and video modes to an email thread; from the GMail blog post:
… today we’re launching voice and video chat — right inside Gmail. We’ve tried to make this an easy-to-use, seamless experience, with high-quality audio and [...]

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Categories Communications News, Conversation Providers

Global IP Solutions today announced a white paper on Desktop Video Conferencing, providing a background for their video infrastructure technology that has the potential to make video calling and video conferencing available to a much broader user base beyond Skype’s (even though it is quite large) and SightSpeed.
Many of you will recall that Skype’s original [...]

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Categories Communications News, Communications Technology, Conversation Providers

According to Tech Crunch and GigaOm posts late last night Logitech is about to spend $30 million to acquire SightSpeed, the video messaging and video conferencing service that recently was selected ot provide the infrastructure for Dell’s Video Chat. Congratulations to Peter Csathy and his team.
Seems like the video calling and video conferencing market is [...]

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Categories Communications News, Conversation Providers

Making Skype Calls from Fring for iPhone

by Jim Courtney on Fri, Oct 3, 2008 11:10 pm

Earlier today Fring, known for aggregating various IM and VoIP services on a mobile phone announced Fring for iPhone had become available on the Apple App Store. So I gave it a tryout this evening, exchanging chat messages and then a couple of voice calls to Skype destinations.
My quick comment:

the other party’s voice was both [...]

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Categories Conversation Providers, Embedded Skype, Mobile Applications, Skype For Business, Skype Partner Solutions, Skype on Mobile