VOIP SIP Phone Systems

About 9 months after commencing operations, we decided to get our own phones in the office.

It’s been quite a journey researching and finding the best VOIP/SIP enabled phones. But I guess it’s pretty rewarding.

The call rates are very competitive and cheap. And if you don’t like just switch to another provider.

I bought physical phones that look like regular telephones so that the user experience is good. The latest one I bought is this: Prolink PIP 901. (S$49 only at the PC Show!)

I find that no matter what, people prefer to pick up a handset to talk to people and hear a ring-tone. Even techno-savvy people like me!

So with the first VOIP/SIP running with our Pfingo Line, we brought in the Australian PennyTel line to make international calls and then our Jakarta partners provided us with a SIP server so we now have our own internal phone extensions.

This is nirvana for a geek because finally, I can get away from PSTN.

Our entire phone system is IP based.

And everything can be controlled over a web browser, just like you would control a wireless router: login via an IP address and play around with the settings via a web-ui.

Also, if you’re wondering what’s the stage of SoftPhones, check out HUD. This is quite ultimate. The whole UI is linked to your IP phone network. You can drag and drop calls from one phone to another. You can immediately see which of your employees are on call and using what number. Voicemail notifications are built in. It’s crazy good!

Ultimate Business Phone System I Want To Have:

So after running through all the options available by researching Wikipedia. I now have enough info the architect a complete enterprise VOIP system. So this is my ultimate system:

1. Setup a IP-PBX at our Equinix Data-Centre: Will use an old P3 Server that we have to provision it. Will put in the TrixBox (Formerly Asterix@Home) system and set up the GUI.

2. Setup TrixBox: Add in IVR, extensions, call waiting, custom ringtones,  custom greets… blah blah.

3. Have one Hardware SIP Phone (Like the ProLink PIP 901 above)  in every office for the good ‘ole ringin.

4. Setup X-Lite softphone on every computer: Everyone can call using their computer. Laptops especially. Macbooks even better.

5. Pfingo Desktop provides an outgoing Fax Function: You can upload a .doc or .pdf to the software, type in a number and it wil fax out for you. (The Fax Machine is truly dead).

6. Setup Linux based softphones on our Linux desktops.

7. Setup Fring with SIP on iPhones or Nokia phones.

8. Incorporate 3G iPhones into the picture (through SIP).

9. Incorporate blue-tooth enabled SIP Phones for wireless walk around capability.

10. Video enabled SIP phones?

11. Build a Video enabled high-resolution telepresence conferencing set up.

12. Install greasemonkey scripts that detect phone numbers on web-pages and help to initiate calls.

13. Have BluePhoneElite SMS system for heavy SMS users.

Wow!

Nice right?

Finally a super full featured, ultra-comprehensive, seamless system that’s literally free. Amazing.

Why You Should Try It:

It just works. Once you get past the initial learning curve it just works.

Here we get our employees to participate in building out the IP Phone system so it’s an internal ‘hack’ project for everyone.

It saves you money.

You can have multiple lines: Singapore line, USA line, Japan line, Indonesia line.. blah blah.

It allows ultra-granular configuration. So much more settings you can play with.

Why don’t you set one up for yourself today? I’m so tempted to one day wire up my entire house with an internal IP-PBX even!

New MacBook

Just bought a new MacBook!

After 13 years on the Windows OS, I’m using Apple!

Hope stability comes true!

Already I’m loving the instant sleep and unsleep feature.

3.5G Mobile Broadband… The Way to Go! Liberation is Here!

Aha, my liberation from the shackles of wired broadband is finally here. Last weekend, I spent 3 hours in the line at StarHub Plaza Singapura to buy the MaxMobile 3.5G Broadband modem and access plan.

It’s the most wonderful piece of gadetry I’ve bought this year. It’s the ultimate mobility solution. Liberation has arrived!

The modem is called the Huawei HSUSPA USB Modem E270 with a download speed of 7.2Mbps and an upload speed of 2Mbps. It’s the latest and fastest 3.5G mobile broadband solution.

I no longer have to be thetered to to home or office line. Mobility is here. I can now go ANYWHERE in Singapore and be able to get work done.

With so many libraries, cafes and McDonalds all around this 24 hour town, the possibilities are nearly endless. It has given me the opportunity to work all around town. And get stuff done even at apparently weird places like:

• In a club, I can reply to emails by slotting the SIM card into my smart phone.
• When waiting for a carpark space, I can whip out my laptop and reply to a few mails or get some work done.
• I can meet friends at McDonalds or some Library and use Windows Internet Connection sharing to share the MaxMobile connection with them.

It’s really exciting! So much so that I’ve literally been telling everyone I know about this.

Only problem now is power supply: laptop battery just doesn’t last long enough. However, with so many places that ‘could’ have sockets, it’s not a show stopper.

Eventually, i hope to be able to buy an ultra-mobile laptop that is RAM-Drive only and has a built in 3.5G modem so all I need to do is slot in my SIM card. It will have the OS of a workstation and the portability of a mobile phone! How nice!

Open Handset Alliance - A Powerful Payment System is what is Required

More thoughts about the Open Handset Alliance…

The problem is not so much who you can bring into the alliance or what kind of gizmos you can create with the Android SDK.

I think the problem lies in the ability to create an economy across the OHA. One that would provide an economic incentive for developers to create applications and monetize them.

The biggest problem with the current mobile industry is the world-wide stranglehold that telcos have on application revenue. They think that every piece of revenue should be squeezed out of everything that runs through their lines.

Probably the only Telco that shares lots of application revenue is NTT DoCoMo. That’s why they’re so successful. They successfully created the model 10 years ago and nobody else has been able to replicate their success.

If you don’t already know, NTT DoCoMo keeps 10% and gives away 90% to developers who create apps for iMode. Apps are super easy to create using a variant of HTML that’s readable by their handsets. They handle payment so they take the 10% which is fair enough for the convenience.

By doing so, NTT created an economy where Japanese sites and developers could profit and hence a virtuous cycle of profitable content creation was put in place. It became a win-win-win for telco, developers and consumers.

Hence I hope Google would find a way to deeply integrate a billing system into OHA so that economic incentives are there for developers. It’s the virtual economy in Second Life or the alluring draw of Facebook Apps. If there is a super flexible and global payment interface that a) all telcos can connect to and earn a part of the revenues and b) sends money into the pockets of developers, the alliance would really take off.

And when I mean deep integration, I’m referring to the depth of Facebook F8 Platform-seque that extends to the ability to bill for premium SMS/MMSes. Only then would mobile be truly open and accessible to all.

Google’s Android

Google just launched it’s Android project that’s part of the Open Handset Alliance.

Quite an interesting concept. It seems to be much more low-level than even the Symbian OS.

They’re offering at $10m prize to application developers. Sometimes I wonder what kind of applications are worth building onto the phone? A better way to take notes, a better way to store your contacts?

I’m not sure if innovative applications will come out of this. For that matter, would people use it? It’s a classic chicken and egg problem: handset manufacturers need to adopt it. And they wouldnt adopt if there were no applications.

And in the era of iPhones and Web 2.0, the fun part is at the application layer and not so much at the operating system area. It’s also much more worthwhile to write a flash app or java app and deploy through J2ME/Brew than to write an android app. For that matter with 3G and good quality web browsers able to run ajax coming to mobile phones, it might be better to concentrate on create web apps that can transcode on to the smaller form-factor of a mobile phone.

However, all is not lost. 1 thing about Android that could be good is providing people with deep workflow customization. Imagine being able to download themes which can change the entire workflow and UI of your phone. Say for example a Hello Kitty theme that totally metamorphosizes your phone into a Hello Kitty gizmo with its own workflow, menus, fonts. I think that would be the “next big thing” after ring tones. The thing we’ve learnt most about the mobile market is that customization is the where the big aftermarket is and for most consumers, it’s about experience customization rather than being able to run the most apps on it. Running apps is only for that very small niche of power users.

Synergy

Managed to get synergy running between my XP desktop and my new Ubuntu mega souped up machine. Even did some theming to make my ubuntu look like a pseudo-mac with widowing effects and more!

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon!

It’s so good! I got it installed on my this other PC and it has compiz running automatically. I couldn’t get it to run smoothly previously. This is way better than Vista!

Amazon’s Dynamo

Don’t know why I like to torture myself by reading dense academic papers but this paper about Amazon.com’s Dynamo was quite interesting.

Check it out: http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/10/amazons_dynamo.html 

S$6.3b to be invested in building world’s largest solar cell manufacturing complex in Singapore.

From making transistors, cpus and electronics to Solar Cells, Singapore is in transition. This news of Norway’s REC building a S$6.3b plant in Singapore nearly went off the radar.

How big is this deal? The last major deal from EDB was ExxonMobil’s $4b+ oil refinery. This has nearly eclipsed it.

It is also close to the size of the two $5b casinos.

Of course, most people wouldn’t bother too much about it since there wouldn’t be much media hype about this.

I think it’s a good move to turn existing wafer expertise that we have into new sectors of clean energy.

It’s same same…. but different.

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Dearth of Power Sockets

I’m sitting at McDonalds. It’s been nearly a year since Wireless@SG was introduced. I was lucky to find a power socket. Looks like life hasn’t changed much in terms of the availability of power sockets for the laptop toting population.

I last wrote about how cafes could attract more people by encouraging them to stay. For outlets like McDonalds which open for 24hours, the late hours can be quiet and one way to boost business is to bring in the laptop crowd. Even coin-operated power sockets would be welcome and turn this into a good business case for these companies.

Maybe somebody could start a community awareness programme to improve the lot of the laptop crowd?