tvb

Last week, I wrote about the under-appreciated but impressive Phono, a jQuery plugin that lets you embed a softphone into any web page. Phono is made by Florida-based Voxeo, a long-standing and innovative telephony software vendor. With a pinch of … Continue reading →

I’m happy for Twilio. This week they announced a JavaScript library that supports VoIP calls from within a browser. Or in their marketing words, “audio pipes for voice communications in web and mobile apps”. With a few lines of code, … Continue reading →

I’ve been exploring less expensive Android gadgetry lately in my search for a capable but not overly glitzy e-book reader. My experience with Velocity Micro’s Cruz Reader, which I have previously documented, was not a positive one. I’ve now turned … Continue reading →

I missed HackNY’s Fall hackathon event which was held at NYU’s Courant Institute over one long weekend earlier this month.  HackNY—it’s a non-profit—had the idea that entrepreneurship can be nurtured at the college level. HackNY is itself a kind of … Continue reading →

Yesterday at the jQuery Conference held in Boston, Voxeo announced its new plugin that “turns any web browser into a multi-channel communications platform.” Called Phono (rhymes with Tropo), this is a pure client-side solution that is simple enough to implement: … Continue reading →

Another weekend, another hackathon.  But the one that was just held in Seatle concerned itself with Gov 2.0 projects. And Technoverse favorite Tropo was there, along with open data service provider Socrata. The winners were …  ChatterCast, which monitors 911 … Continue reading →

In my evolving unified communications projects, I've been searching for a way to switch between voice and text. My current two Tropo apps (the headline reader and the Gov 2.0 bill browser) are voice-centric, but at times I would like to eliminate the text-to-speech part and just send the text. This should be possible with SIP, which underlies the unified communications platforms I've been accessing with my X-Lite softphone. So called "multi-modal" communications, in which device capabilities (plain cell phone, smartphone with keyboard, smartphone with video,etc.) and presence ( in meeting, on the road, in the quiet car) are acknowledged in routing and rendering decisions, is one of the important advances of this session technology. Continue reading →

I have been writing lately about my experiences setting up several unified communications applications, most recently one involving an open government project with hosted service provider Tropo. The projects were cell-phone centric, and assumed I would be issuing commands into … Continue reading →

Earlier this month, I glued together two neat apps using parts supplied by two different VoiceXML unified communications companies. The first lets me call in to a VoXMLPHP script hosted by Tropo, which then interprets my voice commands and reads … Continue reading →

Were you distracted by iPad mania and overlook this year’s Emerging Communications Conference that was held this week in San Francisco?  I did.  eComm is the successor to the short lived  O’Reilly  eTel conference. The talks and presentations all looked … Continue reading →