Virtual PBX

There’s nothing new about Agile development. Of course, it means all kinds of things to all kinds of people. Of late, I often bump into the idea of Agile business processes. Companies want to speed things up. They’ve heard of this agile development stuff and think that they can apply it elsewhere. Sounds good, in theory.

Sadly, this often means putting the word Agile in front of existing business processes, making people work harder and simply insisting that timescales get shorter, as if simply saying that a 2 week job should be achievable in 1 week will actually make it so. This reminds me of the frustrated - and generally incompetent - teacher whose only means of getting more from a student is to raise his or her voice. Take a different stance? No. Give an alternative explanation? No. Use a different method? No. No. No. Just repeat the same explanation a bit louder.

I was recently asked if I could work on a project that needed to be done in minus three weeks - the usual extremely ‘urgent’ that never is. You probably know the story. Gets delivered in minus three weeks and sits in some ‘in tray’ for another six weeks, perhaps doesn’t even get used.

Clearly this is a human problem, not a process one, if we can distinguish the two. It’s an emotional problem. People need to feel good about themselves. They need to feel as if they’re making a difference, making progress, getting things done. It’s all about the feeling and not the actual results. That’s how we often end up with someone whose surge of adrenalin, or some other brain chemical, sends out a big URGENT signal. Everyone gets in a frenzy to get things done. Was it the right thing to do? Was it really needed? These questions get asked later. About six weeks later on a minus three weeks project.

In my experience, the greatest delay is not the actual doing, it’s the deciding to do. Unfortunately, the so-called agile processes are almost exclusively about the doing, not the thinking. There is a critical phase called ‘Preamble’ that is worthy of all kinds of attention, but falls outside of the scope of what we think of as ‘project,’ so it gets left out. We have project management, but no preamble management. Problem is that all these preambles add up to a lot of time. Ironically, they probably add up to all the time that the Agile processes save.

Just in time for the House Telecom Subcommittee’s May 6 hearing on Net Neutrality legislation, Public Knowledge achieved a new level of notoriety when we were prominently mentioned in a blog post on the American Spectator, the publication best known for funneling millions of dollars to investigations of Bill and Hillary Clinton…

We are a big fan of Truemors and are always interested in what our ever-busy friend Guy Kawasaki is up to. In March 2008 Guy Kawasaki, Will Mayall and Kathryn Henkens launched Alltop. It’s a great summary of the top news and views on any topic, from politics to pets, ADHD to yoga, all collected neatly on a single page. The pages follow a simple format – URL is topic.alltop.com (e.g. news.alltop.com) and all the main news sources are there. There is a surprising and impressive range of sources, from the usual suspects to the insiders.

“A good metaphor is that Alltop is an ‘online magazine rack’ that displays the news from the top publications and blogs. Our goal is to satisfy the information needs of the 99% of Internet users who will never use an RSS feed reader or create a custom page.” says Guy Kawaski in his blog

You can think of an Alltop site as a ‘digital magazine rack’ of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points—they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that we are trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed. In other words, our goal is the ‘cessation of Internet stagnation’ by providing “aggregation without aggravation.”

Alltop is inspired by our friend Thomas Marban’s popurls (who also designed the interface of our popular JAJAH iPhone Web App).

Of course the topic that caught our eye was the newly launched VoIP section with a very familiar looking blog listed high up on the top of AllTop. We are honored to be one of the selected sources keeping you up-to-date with what’s going on in and around IP telephony companies and services along with a bunch of friends including Dameon D. Welch-Abernathy, Garrett Smith, Phil Wolff, Pat Phelan, Luca Filigheddu, Jon Arnold, Alec Saunders, Tom Keating and others.

Thanks for inlcuding us and check out voip.alltop.com.

[tags: jajah, alltop, guy kawasaki, popurls, thomas marban, voip, ip-telephony]

As the debate over white-space heats up to a white-hot burn, Shared Spectrum Company (SSC) is coolly surveying the field and finding holes in some of the arguments for opening up white-space in an unlicensed manner just like its cognitive radio technology finds holes in spectrum.

The Vienna, Virginia-based company, headed by CEO Dr. Mark McHenry, specializes in cognitive radios, or Dynamic Spectrum Access radios, that detect where there are holes in unused spectrum and then redistributes the fallow spectrum for wireless use.

The technology, which McHenry started developing in 2000, has been gestating at and developed for DARPA, the Pentagon’s research wing, and is being tested for battlefield use. The idea is U.S. soldiers can have higher quality radio access in harsh environments, where, for instance, enemy fighters might be trying to jam radio transmissions on certain parts of the spectrum.

Where SSC fits into the white-space debate is slightly ambiguous, mostly because of the uncertainty about the FCC’s decision on whether to heed Google’s and others’ admonitions to make the white-space unlicensed. Therefore, SSC has been on the sidelines of the debate over the commercial aspects of white-space applications. 

“The only difference between what we’re doing now and white-space is the type of detector you build. We’ve already built the white-space detector, but there’s no market right now,” because of the uncertainty, McHenry said in an interview with FierceWireless. “Now that the whole thing might fail we’ve purposefully stayed out of it.”

The difference between SSC and the Googles of the world when it comes to white-space is the power of the transmission that could be used in the white-space and the nature of the system. Saying, “90 percent of what we want, they want,” McHenry said that his company’s DSA radios could transmit at a power level of 10 watts, when what the FCC will probably provide fore is about 150 milliwatts, or maybe as high as 1 watt. What that means, he said, is that those company’s transmitting at that power level will not be reaching as many people as they could, especially in rural areas, where DSA radios could link 15 kilometer stretches that are out of range of wireless cell towers because of the topography.

“That’s what the FCC should focus on,” McHenry said. “Here’s a bunch of under-served people who are 10 to 15 kilometers from a tower. How do we help them? And they have no other answer.”

McHenry said what he envisions as one of the possible achievements of cognitive radios is a world in which SSC’s software and radio technology is harnessed to provide spectrum to a smaller constellation of wireless service providers who did not have the capital to buy it auction. After a larger commercial entity had aggregated spectrum, DSA radios could be used to parcel it out smaller players. He said SSC was “not trying to be another Motorola,” but that because of the uniqueness of DSA radios, it could partner with a larger company that had the capital and infrastructure to take advantage of the technology.

“Why do I need the big carrier? You can almost envision a new way of providing wireless,” he said.

Analysts were both skeptical and appreciative of the technology.

Andrew Seybold, president of Andrew Seybold Inc., a consultancy firm, and a FierceWireless contributor, said he had some concerns with cognitive radio technology in general.

“When you have licensed spectrum and you have interference, you know who to go after,” he said. “How do I do that if someone’s using that spectrum, if suddenly you need it for something? It’s an interesting idea and it’s certainly worth looking at, but to me, there’s a lot issues with it.”

Seybold said rural build-out should be done using the D-block’s 700 MHz spectrum.

Kostas Liopiros, principal and owner of the consultancy The Sun Fire Group, said the idea of cognitive radios turns on whether the white-space will be licensed or unlicensed.

“And that will make the difference in the reliability of the service. With licensing, you would divide it where you can have areas with guaranteed availability of service,” he said. “Unlicensed is where their might be interference but you depend upon the device not to transmit.”

Liopiros said because SSC does not have the capital to branch out across the entire United states using the D-block, it would have to find some partner to help it do so.

“It’s a neat technology. I think it generally works,” he said. “I think it’s going to be driven by the marketplace and the licensed vs. unlicensed thing, and that goes into the FCC.”

Related Articles:
Google’s Page, allies express support for white space
Google steps up white-space lobbying efforts with new web site

Speaking at a New America Foundation event yesterday in Washington, D.C., Google co-founder Larry Page tried to bolster his firm’s case for the FCC to make white spaces–vacant channels of Read more…

Here are some nifty ways to get cheap, and in some cases free international calls.

Saved By: Jajah | View Details | Give Thanks

Tags: jajah, voice 2.0, voice over ip, web 2.0, voip, telephony 2.0, mobile 2.0, telephony

A phone numbering plan is a plan used to allocate international telephone numbers between different continents and cities and among mobile phone networks. It’s still not right to confuse international calling codes with numbering plans. In regions like Australia or Canada there appears a closed numbering plan which supposes special length territory codes and telephone numbers.

The so-called open numbering plan supposes that phone numbers and calling codes can differ according to the country and district they are located in. The plan works in many countries nowadays. The numbers defined by the open plan are dialed variously. You should know which units are to be anyway dialed (they complete the local phone number) and which may be missed (area calling codes).
It seems really much difficult to unify the rules. Though the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) tried to introduce common rules of numbering plans and international dialing codes, they still are different in different lands. E.g. double zero was supposed to serve as an international code of access. Some nations have agreed to the offer and entered the combination, but as changing the combination was not compulsory for the state members in some of them like the USA the dialling codes stayed as they used to be. Missed the idea? Give a try to new reverse phone look up!

According to the international numbering plan country calling codes are assigned. Country code stands for a country or a number of countries. The E.164 standard serves exactly for regulating country calling codes at the international level. It sets the general size of a complete international phone number. It happens so that in every region the phone numbers are fixed differently by local standards. District area codes then can exist with:

- Defined standards of the calling code that includes several digits like three in USA or 1 in Australia.
- Indefinite dialling code norms. So in regions like Austria or Argentina the code varies between 2 and 5, on japanese isles – between 1 and five and in Peru and Syria the code contains from one to two digits.

- The dialing code incorporated into the number itself. It’s popular in several regions like Norway and Spain. This way the closed numbering plan is applied. It happens that interurban area dialing codes are popular in countries like Italy, the Netherlands, South Africa etc. And generally for this purpose 0 is applied.

The calling code of the region mainly enables to charge the subscriber for calls the right way. As a rule making calls on the numbers within local calling code is much less expensive than making calls on the phone numbers with some other area calling code.

Still as in States the rates for home calls are assigned by the state norms while trunk-line calls are defined by competition, it happens so that home calls seem to be less cheap.

As sometimes in States the interval between the callers of one large location may be too long, the calls are charged considering the interval though the area dialing code is the same.

Rate centers usually define the prices, which are assigned for sections from zero to six miles, from 6 to 12, and bigger zones. But it became different with the end of regulation of local call services.

It’s now going popular among the people to take the so-called all-you-can-eat plan (an assigned rate of nearly thirty dollars monthly as actual for spring 2008 giving an opportunity to reach any place of the USA).
In several areas mobile phone systems use special area dialling codes. As well the codes are applied for some exceptional rates, free or premium accounts.

There as well can be various particular circumstances. E.g. in areas like Egypt dialling code define nothing because the costs are similar for the whole territory and in Great Britain the area dialling code is made of 2 segments each with its rate.

T-Mobile was the one national US mobile operator who really didn’t have much of a strategy when it came to upgrading its network. While Sprint, Verizon and AT&T all were working on 3G options, T-Mobile kind of sat around twiddling its thumbs. Then it finally realized that it was way behind and made an effort to catch up. Years after everyone else got around to launching stuff (and as they’re all now setting plans for their 4G options), T-Mobile is finally launching its 3G wireless service. But in a move that makes absolutely no sense, it’s only for voice — not for data. If it’s only for voice… there’s no reason to move to 3G. The very purpose of the 3G mobile network was to enable higher bandwidth for data. This is like building an entire highway next to a perfectly good bike trail… and then saying the highway is only for bicycles. Why bother? Update: Well, phew. Turns out the original story was simply not true. T-Mobile launched with voice and data…

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Interestingly, I’ve had a lot of people contact me recently to remind me about, or ask after, those original 100 Ideas I posted on my website, which you can still find (and they went beyond 100) with the search box (try this). I apologise that I never got around to collating the first 100 ideas into an ebook, as promised. I might get back to that, but with a fresh 100! Or maybe a Top 10. I shall avoid mobile banking of course, as we won’t have any banks left by then.

I first started publishing ‘ideas’ because I didn’t want to blog about other blogs blogging about other blogs blogging about vacuous press releases etcetera. I still try to avoid re-posting. The other reason was just to share and to make sure that I recorded some of the ideas in the public domain.

There are plenty of ideas that I think I had first, although I recognise that this is a common delusion that goes along with other ones, like ‘my kids are smart and above average’ (everyone thinks that) and ‘I can make money from good ideas by viral marketing’ (lots of developers think that) and ‘I am destined for great things’ (who doesn’t think that?). Anyway, no need to go into all these neuroses - let Grey’s Anatomy and other brilliant US TV serials do that, or Seth Godin perhaps (for a corrective about the viral stuff). Hey, maybe we need a TV series called ‘Purple Cow!’ I will gladly pen the script, now that I am officially a paid script-writer (more on that some other time).

Anyhow, I wasn’t embarrassed to throw out any product idea that came into my head, so long as they were roughly related to mobile. Like I said at the time, ‘big or small’, ’significant or silly.’ I did say something like that, didn’t I? Oh dear, I hope I did, I mean qualify the dumb ideas.

So, resuming the tradition, here’s one that popped into my head last night, related not only to wireless but to US TV shows too! I settle down to watch an episode from a boxset and, guess what? You will know if you have kids. Yes - ‘where’s the bloody remote control gone?’

Under cushions, under sofas, in plant pots, in the toilet (not down it, I hope) and everywhere on the trail of the kids.

Then it dawns on me. If only these things used wireless and could receive a signal back from the DVD player. Yes - you’ve guessed it, a paging feature to make the remote buzz and let me know where he’s hiding. By the way, it was CSI Miami, so my mind was well tuned to investigation.

Now, which idea was this? 10,038 I think, filed under ‘nice to have but won’t make me a million.’

Earlier this year, India demanded that RIM allow it to easily snoop on any email messages sent via Blackberry devices. The company explained that since the end user sets the encryption key, there’s simply no way to provide a backdoor to snoop on the messages. However, now the government is proudly claiming that it’s cracked the code and can now monitor Blackberry messages on various mobile operator networks. The details are quite vague, especially an offhand comment about how this is “wholly for non-enterprise solutions.” That would suggest, then, that enterprise Blackberry messages may remain secure. It also raises questions about whether or not the mobile operators in question are simply providing access to their mail servers. Either way, the whole thing seems weird — including the government’s effort to publicize the fact that it’s spying on Blackberry messages.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story