As promised, here are some screen shots of Yahoo! OneSearch Voice in action on an AT&T Blackberry Pearl 8120.
Install was pretty simple. Went to http://m.yahoo.com/voice, clicked yes to a couple things and the install went ahead.
One troubling note was this disclaimer on the install page that deserves more investigation later on: "For devices that support WiFi, please make sure to turn off the WiFi option before starting the application."
I chose not to change permissions on the device at install time, so I was instead forced to approve the changes the first time I ran OneSearch.
I learned quickly that I had to hold down the Call button while speaking. Once I discovered that little detail, I was able to speak into the phone to find the status of a flight (that I am not going to be on) or look for a Sushi restaurant in town (I actually ate at the first restaurant listed last night - the Unagi was spectacular.)
What is startling about OneSearch Voice was how quickly I was able to get going with the application. Having spent a lot of time with Dragon voice recognition software recently, I was expected there would be some period of training to accustom the software to my voice. But there was none at all. The first two questions I asked it (while holding the button down, of course), I got exactly the results I was looking for.
OneSearch Voice is available now for Blackberry devices, and Yahoo! expects to have the software available via operators on new devices sometime this summer.
Wednesday at the CTIA show in Las Vegas, Yahoo! Mobile's President Marco Boerries will be giving a keynote speech "articulating the company's vision for leading and enabling the global mobile ecosystem." According to the early press notification I received, Boerries will talk about talk about new "game-changing" innovation to Yahoo! OneSearch.
Today at CTIA, I got to spend a few minutes with the new Samsung Instinct smart phone, which is coming soon to the Sprint Network.
Enabled for Sprint's EvDO Rev A. data network, the Instinct is Samsung's attempt at the iPhone form factor including the full touch-screen capability (for navigation and virtual keyboard). Samsung has added haptic feedback to the functionality, so the device offers some tactile feedback to the user when an action is triggered via the touch-screen.
"What's that grinding?" was my not-too-tactful question when I first felt the device quiver in my hands.
Personally, I've never really thought that forced feedback was going to improve my interactions with a touch-screen. It's not like it will tell me adequately whether I've typed the letter "a" or fat-fingered an "s" instead, which tends to be the kind of problem I have with virtual keyboards. (I never liked forced-feedback on joysticks either, but that is another story.) Instead, I just sit there, device vibrating in my hand, thinking about how much battery power is getting wasted.
On the other hand, I think I will really like the customizability of the Instinct. The Instinct has three physical buttons near the bottom of the device--Home, Phone and Back. The Home button can toggle between a few different menus--Favorites, Main, Web and Fun--and the Favorites menu is user customizable, so I could easily configure it with the applications I use most. Pretty slick.
Some stats and features on the Instinct:
- 2.17 x 4.57 x 0.49 inches
- 4.4 ounces
- 3.1 inch TFT (240 x 432 pixels)
- rated for 5.75 hours of talk time
- GPS (Telenav)
- 2.0 MP camera
- MicroSD slot (up to 8GB supported)
- Advanced Stereo Bluetooth
Sprint expects the Instinct will be available in June, but pricing is not yet available.
I just wrapped up a two-day visit to the VON.x telephony show in San Jose. Below are some of the highs and lows from my experience at the show.
Most Lively Booth: BroadSoft
BroadSoft, a company that makes VOIP platforms and applications, then resells them to carriers and ITSPs (Internet telephony service providers), was at VON to talk about a new development effort called BroadSoft Xtended. In essence, BroadSoft has put together a snazzier and simplified interface for its old development APIs and protocols, and invited third-party developers to create applications to work with the platform.
The program's genesis was last summer when someone developed Unified Connector for Salesforce.com integrating BroadSoft's communications services directly into the CRM service -- allowing users to place and manage calls directly from customer records. Basically, this mashup sparked a flare within BroadSoft suggesting where to next take the platform.
Among the new applications for BroadSoft that were on display in the booth were ACT! by Sage, an even more fully featured communication integration into ACT! software; a Facebook widget allowing users to place a "CallMeNow" button on their Facebook pages; and SimulScribe, a voice mail-to-text translation service.
Of course, users can only really reap the benefits of these integrations if they are customers of one of the service providers powered by BroadSoft, but as Director of BroadSoft XTended Marketing Michael Lauricella boasted, BroadSoft powers over 300 ITSPs worldwide, including seven of the top 10 (and 13 of the top 25) globally. It looks like nine service providers are on board already (including SimpleSignal ), with many other interested parties currently in discussion now.
Best Single Demo: D2
D2 Technologies, a company that generally makes low-level VOIP software for chip implementations (protocol stacks and the like), was showing the newest fruits of its mCUE Mobile Convergence Software Solution. Representatives demoed for me a mobile contact manager solution that was above and beyond anything I'd seen before.
Every time the user logs in to a communication service (such as GMail, AIM, e-mail or an enteprise directory) the software would add the user's contacts to the mCUE contact list. Over time, the user builds an über contact list, and under every contact is each of the contact's different personalities. So if I wanted to contact my colleague Cameron Sturdevant, I would select his name and a submenu of his available personalities would pop up on screen, allowing me to decide whether to AIM him, e-mail him, send him text message or simply call him at any of the numbers I have on file.
I'm probably not doing it full justice here, but it was really slick.
Unfortunately, at this time, D2 is only working on Linux platforms, with Windows Mobile and other mobile operating system availability depending on customer demand. Bodes well for future Android users, I suppose, but leaves pretty much everyone out in the cold for now.
Best About-Face: Digium
In past VON conferences, Digium has extolled the Asterisk Appliance and AsteriskNow as the next big things from the company. Neither was to be seen anywhere at the show. Instead, Digium wanted only to talk about Switchvox, the Asterisk-appliance maker it bought last fall.
I have to admit, I've been pretty curious about Digium's purchase of Switchvox, since it already had so many distributions of Asterisk in the works already. Now, admittedly, the Switchvox management GUI was really nice when I looked at the product a couple years ago, and apparently there are a lot more features in the newest version, Switchvox 3.5. But I wanted to know exactly how Digium was handling the different versions it has to offer.
From the looks of things, Switchvox is going to be the new path forward on the open-source side of things for a full distribution (the actual Asterisk binaries for the central software will of course still be available as well.) For companies looking for indemnity, Asterisk Business Edition is still available and being actively developed for.
But what about those hardware and software appliances?
Apparently, the Asterisk Appliance is still being sold where applicable, but I didn't get the sense there was much activity from partners looking to adopt the device -- which was the whole point of developing the device in the first place.
On the other hand, it really seems like AsteriskNow is a lame duck, even if Version 1.0.2 did just come out last month. Mark Amick of Digium's Business Development group basically stated that the developer community hadn't embraced it, and without that community support, Digium had to look at going another way. So now there is a Switchvox Free Edition.
Best Tagline: iRobot and Trinity Convergence
iRobot and Trinity showed me their collaboration project: a social proxy/surveillance robot called the ConnectR Virtual Visiting Robot. iRobot outfitted a Roomba with a video camera, speakers, a microphone and a Wi-Fi radio (instead of a vacuum), while Trinity provided a Web-based management console and NAT tunneling software to remotely access and drive the robot (and its components).
When Bryan Adams, iRobot's research program manager for Home Robots, told me, "It's a whole new way of interacting with your pets or your kids," I thought perhaps we'd hit a new low in absentee parenting.
At the VON.x conference in San Jose, Calif., Polycom let me play with their latest voice over Wi-Fi phone -- the Polycom SpectraLink 8002 Wireless Telephone. Intended for small-business customers, the phone is intended to be easier to set up and manage -- and cost significantly less -- than its higher-end SpectraLink cousins.
Designed to work with SIP-based voice systems, the 8002 has been certified interoperable with Digium's Asterisk Business Edition IP PBX and is expected to work just as well on any of the other Asterisk distributions available nowadays.
The 8002, which costs $349 (or $399 with a dual charger and an extra battery), weighs in at 4.2 ounces and is rated for 3 hours of talk time or 50 hours of standby time.
The Wi-Fi radio in the 8002 is only 802.11b, so the customer needs to make sure legacy protocol support is enabled on the Wi-Fi network. Built to work easily on the consumer-grade access points often found in the smallest businesses, the phone also only supports WEP and the PSK versions of WPA or WPA2 for wireless privacy. And for wireless quality of service, the 8002 supports WMM but not the SVP protocol that SpectraLink pioneered for higher-end wireless networks.
Device configuration looks like it can be done a couple of ways, but honestly it seemed like none of the Polycom people I talked to at the show quite knew the full story. Here's what I can decipher:
The phone supports TFTP, so the SIP configuration can be downloaded directly to the phone when it joins the network.
Wireless network configuration can be done either directly on the handset via the keypad or, alternatively, via a PC when the phone is connected to an administrator dock that is USB-tethered to the computer. It does seem that this admin dock is a different device than the charging cradle that comes with the phone.
Polycom also claimed that the 8002 offers text messaging via support for Open Application Interface v2.0, but they did not have this feature set up on the demo unit I played with, so I cannot verify this at this time.
Polycom's people also briefed me on the same video integration with Microsoft's Office Communications Server 2007 and IP application suite that Paula Musich reported on. I won't rehash, but will add a couple of additional details Polycom provided in response to my questions:
The suite of applications will only work on Polycom's SoundPoint IP 550 and 650 phones for the time being.
The call recording capabilities do not yet include any kind of audio notification to the participants on the call, but the feature has been requested and development is in the works.
BeyondTrust is all about solving problems that perplexed me six years ago. And I mean that as a compliment, since no one else has really addressed those problems in all this time.
Before I came to eWEEK in 2003, I worked at an IT consulting firm serving small businesses in and around San Francisco. One of our hallmarks was an early encouragement of the practice that later became known as "Least Privileged User." Basically, we persuaded a lot of clients to have their users run only with local User permissions, rather than with Administrator rights.
As a result, our customers had a lot less trouble with viruses, spyware or unwanted applications. Of course, we also had to make work all the applications they needed to use on a day to day basis -- and we ran into hundreds of applications that wanted Administrator rights, often for pretty banal reasons ("We write our preferences file in the c:\Windows directory!")
Identifying those applications that would have a permissions problem was kind of a crap shoot and I spent hundreds of (non-billable) hours poking around various apps and watching other people over their shoulders. It was hardly an effective way to identify troublesome apps, but there wasn't a tool to do it and it was bad PR for a customer to find them before we did.
And I don't even want to talk about the various things we did to actually fix the permissions problems once we discovered them. Kludgey does not even begin to describe that process.
Of course, BeyondTrust (along with a couple other companies that don't really exist anymore) helped solve the "fix" problem a couple years ago with its Privilege Manager product (formerly known as Desktop Standard's PolicyMaker Application Security). And now, finally, it is trying to solve the identification and location problem with a new product called BeyondTrust Application Rights Auditor.
Of course, Microsoft has offered a tool kit for a while that allows idividual scanning of applications for permissions issues, but that solution didn't really scale well for companies with a large application base, particularly one already deployed and in use.
With Applications Rights Auditor, BeyondTrust is looking to fill that gap. And it's free (as in beer).
The product gets deployed to a representative sample of desktops throughout an enterprise, for a two-pronged search for applications needing administrative rights. The client software first performs an inventory to identify all executable applications on each machine. The findings are then transmitted to BeyondTrust's repository, where the found applications are compared against a database of known applications and versions.
For applications that are not already in BeyondTrust's database, the client software continuously monitors unknown application as it is being used, recording and flagging specifically when (and what) Administrator privilege is required.
Administrators can then look at the inventory results of the two types of scans and run reports for individual clients or the collective to see what applications will need permissions help in a move to Least Privilege. Because all the data is stored on BeyondTrust's network, there is no need to install a local database or application server, so it should be pretty easy to get started quickly.
The hosted model scared me a little bit, for security and privacy reasons, but the folks at BeyondTrust assured me that each customer has its own unique certificate that gets generated when the customer first acquires the code. All of the agents deployed within a company transmit their data with the certificate, so all the information should be isolated from other companies' data.
Unfortunately, BeyondTrust has not yet decided to take the additional steps to make Application Rights Auditor even more valuable. Since it is collecting information specific to applications that are already in use, it makes sense that one should be able to automatically create policies based on the information provided by Auditor in order get going quickly with Privilege Manager. But of course, you can't yet do that.
Dock my laptop, connect my iPhone, then sync my calendar from Outlook.
I'm sick of it.
But I need iTunes on my work system to sync that damn calendar. And as I've stated before, iTunes is a pig--consuming copious processor time and memory for what, in this case, is nothing more than a synchronization program.
That's why Apple's announcement of the impending integration of Microsoft's ActiveSync, along with all the other corporate-geared enhancements (like Cisco VPN Client, Remote Wipe), are such a welcome relief. I would absolutely love to get iTunes off of my primary work computer. I synch music, podcasts and video to the iPhone from home--all forms of media that have no business tying up my company's storage or networked resources, and I have no other need for the application at work other than the calendar and contact sync.
But after watching the video of Apple's iPhone SDK and enterprise feature set, I'm wondering if corporations will simply be juggling one ill-considered delivery mechanism for another, as there was a pretty tidy lack of details about many of the features, including application delivery.
Apple's going to tightly control application availability for the iPhone. iPhone application makers are going to have to join the developer program (for $99) to make the apps for distribution to the iPhone or the iPod Touch, then get their application signed, vetted, and qualified against Apple's ratings system before it will be made available.
After that process, the application will be available via Apple in two ways: via iTunes (and a sideload to the iPhone) and by way of their new Web-based App Store. But since Steve Jobs said at one point that "The App Store is going to be the exclusive way to distribute iPhone applications directly to every iPhone user," we have to anticipate this will be the primary delivery mechanism as far as Apple is concerned.
But as a delivery system, the App Store seems to leave a lot of holes for the enterprise admin.
If a business is buying iPhones for their users--and I certainly expect this to now be an appealing option, given the new features and the iPhone's market-leading mobile browser--these businesses may want to control what goes onto the devices. And since the App Store is open and available to all, the problem of iPhone users running as root by default will become an even greater liability.
As root, users can install anything they want-- like AIM client and Spore, for example--whether or not their company approves. The corporate mobile admin may not be able to stop the install, and it is unclear at this point whether they will be able to automate the removal of offending applications. Listed among the new features was also "security policies" but what these consist of is so far unstated.
So I'm trying to imagine how the App Store--with security policies in place--will work. I sincerely doubt Apple will build something akin to Microsoft's Windows Server Update Services, where the admin approves certain packages which are then hosted locally and delivered to clients according to policy. Will Apple instead make some kind of group registration to the App Store available, where a corporate admin approves software packages which can be pushed (or pulled manually) to the devices directly from the App Store? The security policy would then define the group membership, and the App Store has an account page where admins need to define the MAC addresses or device ID of every iPhone that needs to access the "personalized" store.
I'm no Apple expert, but I don't think they have any kind of experience with the latter kind of implementation, and I question whether Apple would really want to get that granular, unless they can generate a new revenue stream off of it.
According to Engadget's live blog of the event, there was some nebulous talk during the Q&A session where Jobs indicated they are "working on a special app for internal enterprise applications," but I am unclear whether that means "apps designed for internal use" or "apps deemed necessary for deployment."
Of course, this point is moot if the root issue has been addressed with Version 2.0 and admin get some tools that help clearly define and articulate an individual user's rights on the device. But we don't know that yet.
As I noted previously in my review of OCS 2007, RT Audio is an adaptive codec. In high bandwidth situations, the codec is in a wideband mode, offering HD Audio quality. But in lower bandwidth situations, the codec scales back to narrow-band and standard definition voice quality automatically - which requires less network bandwidth. In both modes, I found the codec provided good audio quality without taxing my client machine's resources significantly (even with the signal processing done in software).
But With the codec integrated into TI's DSPs (Digital Signal Processors), OEMs can now rapidly produce a variety of different devices to work with OCS - from desktop phones to mobile phone to trunk gateway devices.
In the press release, TI's General Manager of Communications Infrastructure and Voice Business, Brian Glinsman said, "By working closely with Microsoft to include their wideband codec into TI's VoIP solutions, we are supporting the dissemination of unified communications solutions to the market and further enabling Microsoft to quickly meet the application demands of service providers, enterprises and SMBs."
TI's DSPs supporting RT Audio should be available mid-year.
Today in my spare time, I've been combing through Microsoft's e-mail trail (PDF) regarding the internal (and external) confusion about what Vista Capable really means (and Microsoft's blatant capitulation to Intel regarding low-end chip sets), and I caught this little nugget that made me smile:
On page 34 of 158, there is a note that says:
"Most of the software I use is OK or available for Vista except for spyware and some obscure utilities. Jon"
Now, of course, I know this is not what he meant, but that excerpt sure make it sounds like Jon counts spyware among the apps he uses.
I spent Tuesday afternoon visiting iSimCity, Ixia's new for-hire testing facility and Executive Briefing Center, which is located in Santa Clara, CA. With the new facility, Ixia hopes to give their customers - service providers, government agencies, high-end enterprise, and network equipment manufacturers - access to the testing equipment, know-how and test plans needed to perform extremely large-scale performance and quality assurance tests on network equipment, applications, and services. It seems an attractive alternative for those companies wanting to do large scale testing without requiring the significant cash outlay to build it in-house.
In addition to the access to hardware, Ixia is partnering access to iSimCity with their professional services department, which can help develop, automate, and perform tests or provide the training necessary to do all of those processes independently instead.
At the time of my visit, the testing facility was not fully populated with Ixia's equipment - according to their provided literature, the facility is running at 1/10th capacity at this time, with plans to get it fully populated by the end of the year. At its peak density, Ixia's Director of Worldwide Support, Steve Cummings, estimates that they would have the capacity to test up to 4000 gigabit Ethernet ports simultaneously, or about 700 10G Ethernet ports instead. He also estimated that they could emulate up to 250,000 simultaneous video or IPTV subscribers at a time.
Compared to a typical datacenter, Ixia's facility lacks some elements of privacy and security, like locked cages. I asked one of their representatives how they planned to deal with privacy, since they count among their customers many rival network equipment manufacturers. Privacy, I was informed, would be maintained via scheduling, essentially making sure that customers were not booked to use the facility at overlapping times. While that seems like an inefficient way of allocating resources, particularly if clients don't need the whole she-bang at once, I guess that will depend on the demand they generate for the facility.
Ixia plans to further their iSimCity initiative via worldwide expansion over time, and the company has plans in place to build similar for-hire labs first in Bangalore, India and then in London, England.
