Posted on: January 22, 2012
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Posted by: shidan
Just a list of some of the tech news and papers that caught my eye this week:
Delivery of Multiple siRNAs Using Lipid-Coated PLGA Nanoparticles for Treatment of Prostate Cancer
Soft-lithography for medicine. It’s always great seeing nanotechnology in medicine.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl2035354
This paper from Queens University claims that the “levelized cost of electricity” for solar generation is more favorable than current assumptions and that industry analysts consider higher peak loss values for PV systems than is the actual case. I personally think solar is a much more viable solution today and some of the significant hurdles in realizing solar power are political ones driven by special interest, not technological ones.
IMT-Advanced
The ITU has finally defined 4G. Nothing unexpected here, after LTE the next enabler is true software defined radios that go beyond just cutting manufacturing costs. At every layer, network evolution from now on will be mostly about the cognitive plane.
The BBC Covers the Next Challenges of M2M
Adopting Semantic web standards is a good foundation to build solutions on for the challenges that Wayne Gilbert talks about in this article.
Posted on: January 6, 2012
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Posted by: shidan
As promised from my post, Exploring Telco Clouds with VoIP Drupal, Tropo & Twilio, this is the first part of a how-to and hello-world for VoIP Drupal with Tropo as the backend service.
The first step is to install Drupal version 6.x as the VoIP Drupal module won’t work with earlier versions or Drupal 7.x. There are many how-tos for installing Drupal and the process is quite painless so I won’t be reviewing it.
The next steps are to:
- Get an account with Tropo over here.
- Install the VoIP Drupal module in the standard way you install modules, it can be downloaded from here.
Next, configure Tropo:
- Logon to Tropo with the account you created.
- Create a new Tropo application for your site:
- In “Your Applications” section which you will find on the account page, click on the link “Create new application” and choose “Tropo WebAPI”.
- Fill in with a name of your choice in the application name field.
- Fill in the URL field with either of the following patterns, depending on whether you have enabled clean URLs in Drupal:
- Now press the “Create Application” button on the screen.
- Activate your application tokens:
- Click on “Outbound Tokens” > “Voice”, a pop-up window will appear with a “Launch Token” button. Press the button.
- Repeat the same procedure for the Messaging token.
(Note: These two tokens are required for the Tropo configuration in your Drupal site, so make sure you copy them for future use)
- Now you can go ahead with associating a phone numbers with your site. Tropo provides both a default Skype and SIP address for your application. If you want to associate additional phone numbers with your Tropo account, follow these steps:
- Click on “Add new phone number”, a pop up window will appear.
- Choose a phone number from the list and press the plus (+) sign shown on the right. The phone number you enter will be a new inbound number for your site. (Add any additional numbers you want and close the pop up window).
- You can view all the numbers/addresses in the Tropo applications’ settings where they are all listed.
Note: If you want to use a specific number as the caller ID for all calls made from your site, follow these steps:
- Navigate to your sites admin > voip > call section
- Enter the new number in the “caller id number” field. The field takes in numeric digits only.
- Now you can associate instant messaging networks with your site including GTalk, MSN, Twitter:
- Click on the icon for the IM network you want to add under the “Instant Messaging Networks” section in the Tropo application.
- Fill in the username and password.
- Click on the “activate” button located to the right.
Now you must configure VoIP Drupal:
- Install the voiptropo.module and enable it.
- Set Tropo as the VoIP server:
- Go to admin > voip > servers
- Click on the “configure” link under Tropo
- Using your Tropo credentials, fill in the “Username” and “Password” field.
- Fill in the “Messaging Outbound Token” and “Voice Outbound Token” with the tokens you saved when you configured the Tropo service:
- Press “Save”. This takes you back to the admin > voip > servers page
- Now select the ‘Tropo’ option
- Press the button ‘Set default voip server’
- Now enable outgoing calls (outbound) to be made from your site:
- Go to admin > users > permissions
- Look for the “VoIP Module” permissions
- Enable the “make outbound calls” permission for the roles desired in this location
- Press the “save permissions” button
That’s it; you now have finished configuring VoIP Drupal and are ready to start building your application, which I will cover tomorrow when I get some time…
Posted on: January 4, 2012
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Posted by: shidan
This is a quick list, in no particular order, of predictions I have for IT related technology headlines in 2012:
1. A startup will nail indoor geolocation and the z-index problem.
2. There will be a host of innovations in machine vision and camera technologies.
3. We will see start-ups develop niche and consumer facing semantic search engines and intelligent agents that actually work.
4. Natural language and voice will play a much bigger role in user interfaces.
5. Facebook will become a container for HTML5 mobile apps and will release a toolkit similar to Phonegap.
6. The trend of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) will only grow and VMWare Horizon Mobile Solution will be a big hit in the enterprise.
7. An established company will provide a very compelling concept demo for camera based biometric payment systems on mobile devices.
8. There will be speed breakthroughs for memristive system based storage.
9. There will be breakthroughs in the mass production of Graphene.
10. A slew of grass-roots early adopters will jump on the TV whitespace and spectrum reallocation opportunity.
Post Categories: Future Technology
Posted on: January 3, 2012
Comments: one comment
Posted by: shidan
Every telecom related software and product that I have been involved with the last four years (and boy does time fly fast) has been on the device side and long gone are the days when I lived and breathed server side solutions. During the past holidays, I decided to take a peak back at the other side and see what’s new, especially with open source and Telco cloud services.
It turns out not much; you have a few new services like Twilio and a few of new “high level” middleware solutions. One of these that caught my eye was VoIP Drupal a project started by folks at MIT’s Media Labs and Center for Civic Media.
I decided to take it for a spin. In addition to Asterisk and Freeswitch, VoIP Drupal actually supports both Twilio and Tropo which was an added bonus for my exploration.
I must say, my overall sentiments on Telco clouds haven’t changed these years, telecom infrastructure as a service should no longer be about start-ups. You are dealing with a mature market and an overabundance of well developed technology platforms; the value adds that a start-up can provide are going to be small and easily reproducible. This doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in the Telco cloud, to the contrary, telephony is really hard and anything that makes bringing voice communications to the web easier is valuable.
Playing with Twilio, my impression was that they have done a great job in creating an easy to use system, but with quite limited functionality. The service is also very easy to replicate.
Tropo, on the other hand, pleasantly surprised me … Voxeo is taking a different approach and moving beyond a platform for telephony (phone numbers) to a platform for true unified communications that supports a slew of networks including the PSTN (phone numbers in over 40 countries with SMS in US and Canada), Gtalk/Jabber, SIP, Twitter, AIM, Yahoo and MSN Messenger. Having one API that writes to all these services can be incredibly useful. Something else to note about Voxeo is they are not exactly a start-up; their voice platform is quite mature and feature rich.
Now going back to VoIP Drupal and why I think it’s brilliant. Well to start with, Drupal is brilliant:
• It has lowered the barrier of entry for webs start-ups more than any other framework to date.
• There are countless inexpensive and talented developers who can mold Drupal into virtually any web service you can think of.
• It has many existing solutions that can be easily customized to fit your needs.
• It has the confidence of enterprise companies and it’s being developed in a way to meet the needs of the future web.
VoIP Drupal is important because it empowers the millions of Drupal web developers to build virtually any telephony service you can think of, from a GroupMe clone to a Grasshopper type of service, without knowing much more than the standard Drupal abstractions … and it does this without tying you to any proprietary platforms and services. In fact, together with a solid backend, like Freeswitch, VoIP Drupal can serve the non-specialist as their own personal (and scalable) Twilio.
I‘m confident that providers who decide to ignore or compete with VoIP Drupal, instead of surfing its wave will get washed away sooner or later; VoIP Drupal will impact the decision of millions of developers when it comes to telephony integration and the best way for a cloud platform provider to stay relevant to non-specialist web developers will be to compliment and increase the its value (and any similar projects that might pop up). A good example of this type of value is Tropo’s ASR module which brings speech recognition to VoIP Drupal, a feature that is completely absent on Twilio BTW.
For the technically inclined, I’ve taken some notes that will make a good how-to for getting started with VoIP Drupal and Tropo, I will post it here in the next few days in case it might be of use.
Posted on: December 11, 2011
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Posted by: shidan
Posted on: December 5, 2011
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Posted by: shidan
- Why do we often use GSM compression standards in VOIP rather than MP3 standards?
Shidan Gouran, Founded a CLEC and then a VoIP technology company.
Just to add to Tsahi's answer which is totally correct, codecs like MP3, AAC and VORBIS have very high delays, typically in the 80 to 200ms range when optimized; they sacrifice lower latency for higher fidelity. For communications, you really want to be in the 5 to 50ms range and there is still room for a lot of innovation for bringing HD voice to communications, specially given how networks are evolving. The best we have right now in actual devices is low delay variants of AAC and certain variants of G.722.
See question on Quora
- Is a Windows server any good for a Python based website?
Without a doubt, Linux is more ideal for running Python web apps, but it's actually not a bad idea at all to develop your app on a Windows platform. If you build a nice portable code base that runs nicely on both Windows and Linux, without unnecessary tinkering, you are going to end up with a better product that is easier to configure with a cleaner design. It will definitely make the learning curve for any new developers that work on it smaller. Even with Python, you would be surprised how easy it is to end up with something that is essentially platform specific, specially if it involves anything interesting beyond simple CMS type apps. In my experience, it's a good idea to avoid this.
See question on Quora
Post Categories: Quora Answers
Posted on: November 30, 2011
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Posted by: shidan
- Are there any Android devices that offer hardware encryption for data protection?
The only solution that I'm aware of is that of Whisper Systems. It's only available on the Nexus line of phones right now since they are the only Android phones where you can compile against their drivers. I don't know how Twitter's recent acquisition will effect the availability of Whisper Systems suite of apps. I'm sure this is a feature most OEMs will support on their devices, regardless of a standard interface or general apps, in the near future since it makes sense for enterprises and is pretty easy for them to do.
See question on Quora
Post Categories: Quora Answers
Posted on: November 28, 2011
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Posted by: shidan
- How many business people actually know all of the following well: Python, SQL, R, Excel, Hadoop?
I think you have made a mistake and the ad was for a developer of a product/service used by business analysts. It would be common to prefer someone with some familiarity in the problem domain. Nobody would actually expect someone hired for a business analyst role to understand how Hadoop works, or what it is even. If by business person you meant a businessman or a product line manager, etc, then it would make even less sense, unless the company was in the business of big data, data mining, etc. and even then I don't think they would ask for this specific combination.
See question on Quora
Post Categories: Quora Answers
Posted on: November 27, 2011
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Posted by: shidan
Posted on: November 26, 2011
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Posted by: shidan
- What’s the best tool/platform for building a community (members) website that can be monetized (ie. with ads)?
Drupal and WordPress are the most flexible CMS systems out there and have tons of hooks to change their behavior virtually completely. They are, in fact, both frameworks and abstraction layers for web development, not just CMS software and, in truth, will give you just as much flexibility as the latest trending web development framework you have heard of. They sacrifice a lot for this flexibility and I can't stand either of them, but I won't get into that. They are the best frameworks available to anyone not experienced in websites, both from a service management and development angle.
See question on Quora
- Does Skype not have push-to-talk functionality? Why?
I think the essence of what is appealing with PTT is being able to hear
a person or group as if they were present with you, the problem with full
duplex is that you would sacrifice privacy as it would be two way, and most the
time you want to be unheard of and a listener of events, except when you have a
message to share.
I think being able to step into a two way "full duplex" mode seamlessly with a group or an individual from PTT is of course a must, but I definitely think a feature like this, an always on immediate communication channel, would be wildly successful in growing Skype further.
See question on Quora
Post Categories: Quora Answers
