Source: www.voip-news.com

There is still money to be raised and used in telecom and VoIP, says Andy Abramson. And he points to a recent round of fundraising to illustrate that. Read about it on VoIP Watch.

Interested in inexpensive video conferencing? There is a new, cheap service that leverages on Skype. Read about it on VoIP News of the UK.

Time Warner and Comcast have topped the Keynote VoIP study. Read about it on The VoIP Weblog.

Source: www.voip-news.com

Digium has announced the keynote speakers for AstriCon ‘08. Brian Aker from Sun Microsystems/MySQL and Stefan Öberg from Skype will keynote the conference for expert developers and Asterisk telephony platform users.

Aker is an open source hacker who is the Director of Architecture for My SQL AB. He  will give a speech called The Parallel Evolution of MySQL; One Foot in the Commercial World and the other in the Open Source Community.

Öberg is the Vice President and General Manager for Skype Telecom and Skype for Business. He will speak about VoIP for businesses.

“Digium is dedicated to making AstriCon into the largest, most exciting Asterisk community event,” said Mark Spencer, creator of Asterisk and Digium’s chief technology officer. “Every year we look forward to offering both experts and those new to Asterisk insight to the new frontiers of our application by providing expert speakers and a variety of informative tracks. Plus, I’m always looking forward to late nights at the Code Zone portion of the conference where we get some really great ideas, innovation and code from our developers and users.”

According to Digium:

AstriCon will be held from September 23-25 at the Renaissance Glendale Hotel & Spa in Glendale, Ariz. FierceVoIP and TMCnet will serve as media sponsors and Polycom and Sangoma will be the platinum sponsors for the event. There is a pre-conference tutorial day on September 23rd with various introductory as well as developer tracks. Registration is open at www.astricon.net.

Source: www.voip-news.com

Are your Skype calls really private? Does Skype have so-called keys to unlock their data encryption (and thus make your Skype calls available to law enforcement)?

I don’t have the answers. Why? Because Skype isn’t talking. They won’t admit to anything, in fact.

ComputerWorld got a complete brush-off from Skype when they inquired about encryption.

Guess that means that VoIP should be treated like landlines — a communication device that can be intercepted anything necessary. I remember this one time when I was 13 and home alone and my mother made an operator interrupt an epic call I was on . . . Kind of freaky.

Source: www.voip-news.com

8×8, Inc. has new services now that can replace traditional premise-based telephone “key systems” used by companies where employees share common phone lines, regardless of location. The new Packet8 hosted Internet Protocol (IP) telephony features the Packet8 675xi series of IP desktop phones. It also adds shared line appearance services to the Packet8 Virtual Office platform.

“With the introduction of the Packet8 hosted key system solution, 8×8 has expanded its addressable market to include the millions of businesses that require shared line appearance services rather than the PBX functionality offered with our Packet8 Virtual Office hosted iPBX solution,” said 8×8 Vice President of Sales & Marketing Huw Rees. “Our new line of IP phones has enabled us to deploy one of the first hosted key system services in the world, enabling businesses to benefit from the lower costs associated with VoIP while maintaining the familiar key system feature set they are used to. As with all of our other business services, we also maintain the capability of having the IP phones situated at any location anywhere in the world, enabling one of the first distributed, hosted, multi-office/home-office shared line appearance services in the market.”

The system also includes searchable corporate directories, direct intercom paging and shared line appearance functionality.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

It has been a long time since Level 3’s founder Jim Crowe has spoken in public, but the power of GigaOm’s Structure 08 conference and the city by the bay was enough of a magnet to bring the venerable broadband IP and SIP based communications visionary out to talk Om Malik told me today by phone.

Crowe will keynote the one day event in San Francisco on June 25th…

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

According to a report from Dell’Oro Group, the trusted source for market information about the networking and telecommunications industries, indicates that IP PBX market revenues grew 10 percent in the third quarter and will be the fastest growing market segment during 2007 when IP PBX revenues are projected to surpass those of Traditional PBX and Key switch systems.
“Implementing IP Telephony paves the way for enterprises to capture the benefits of advanced voice applications including emerging Unified Communication solutions,” commented Steve Raab, Director of IP Telephony Research at Dell’Oro Group. “In the third quarter, IP line shipments increased for all but one vendor, and we project strong growth in IP line adoption in 2007,” Raab added.
The report also reveals that enterprise PBX market revenues climbed 9 percent over the same quarter a year ago partly on strong sales in Europe. During the recent quarter, Avaya and Cisco both exceeded 17 percent line shipment growth in Europe as they continued to expand their presence in the region.

Links;
Dell’Oro group