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2005 Round-up

Published by in annual round-ups, Arjun Roychowdhury on December 30th, 2005

*Auuugh* ! This is the second time I am writing this post. I had almost completed my previous post and then I erroneously closed the browser window. Boom. Now I know why Gmail’s auto-save to the draft folder is so useful. 2005 is almost done. I thought it would be nice to do a quick roundup of the various opinions we posted, incase you missed any. Thanks to all the readers who have sent emails to us – we had a lot of fun voicing our opinion and it good to hear that you had fun reading too. So here is the Round-up: Technology Related (oldest to newest) All my excitement about AJAX – we talk about how AJAX may change the way we look as web based UI as well as how it may challenge desktop business as we know today (including an argument with a good buddy of mine, who happens to work at Microsoft as a Product Manager) Who makes money when consumers demand ‘Free’ (as in beer, not freedom) – with all the voice providers desperately trying to reduce per minute costs, are customer expectations unrealistic ? How will these providers survive ? Hooplah about the

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Teenage years are never easy

Published by in Sunil Veluvali, voip on December 29th, 2005

Whoa Corporate Rat! I still cannot seem to resist a good ol’ geek talk! One more of the year, OK? It is just plain hard-work when you are trying to join a communications club that is several decades old with multiple generations of engineers developing distinct applications and services. What is happening in the VOIP world is nothing new. Standardization is inherently complex. It becomes doubly more complex when you consider voice communication is of vital interest to multiple societies. It becomes triply more complex when the infrastructure being replaced is the most used and the most stable in the world! Discussing your arguments: 1. Text based Protocol: Yes, SIP could have been XML based but THANK GOD it is not ASN.1. 2. Refusal to standardize services: I don’t know why the IETF should do this? Do you really think we could get two carriers to agree that Call Forwarding RNA should terminate in an intercept or ring forever? Or that Music On Hold is an “expected” feature in business applications all over the world? I think the push for standardizing services has more to do with carriers being apprehensive that they will be locked into a proprietary solution. Industry

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Developer Perspective: The painful evolution of SIP

Published by in voip on December 29th, 2005

Several years ago, I was the lead architect for a team that was building an H.323 Gatekeeper. I remember having attended a conference where a mild mannered bearded professor talked excitedly about something called ‘ZIP’ which seemed to be an IETF initiative that was pitched as an alternative to H.323 complexities. When I got back to my office, I researched on this new thing called ‘ZIP’ and the promise it had but found nothing. I then realized that ZIP was the german equivalent of the english SIP (when pronounced). I still remember having read the first IETF draft on SIP – it was a breath of fresh air compared to what I was building as far as protocols went. Actually, even though the first draft was out in 1996, I got involed only in 1998 when the SIP draft was still a breezy 101 pages cover-cover. Infact, I was so convinced about SIP that I started a SIP group with no budget funding and working in spare time. That was till we made our first release and sold to a whole bunch of customers. That’s when the company woke up to it and suddenly everyone was interested. Well, that was

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Citizen’s Media -a Business Opportunity

Published by in world 2.0 on December 27th, 2005

The more I talk to people, the more I am convinced that in this world of convergence, he who controls user content is the one who controls the money. Last afternoon, I spent a wonderful few hours validating a new business plan with a Silicon Valley executive with an illustrious past who is looking at starting his own thing in this ‘Citizen’s Media’ space. Obviously, I cannot comment on his plans, but would like to talk about my view of ‘Citizen’s Media’ What is ‘Citizen’s Media’ ? The marketing world always needs a catchy phrase to describe any new technology that hits the market, be it an evolution or a revolution. ‘Citizen’s Media’ essentially refers to the concept of involving a wide network of participants who in addition to ‘reading information’ also act as ‘contributors’ of information. So Wiki, Blogging, Podcasting and similar are all examples of ‘platforms’ that fall under the Citizen’s media space. Citizen’s Media (CM) as a concept has been covered and iplemented in various places. Backfence.com is one example which is a community based site that allows community residents to share and discuss information for others, constantly adding to ‘live news’ for others to read. There

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Call 2.0?

Published by in Sunil Veluvali, voip on December 27th, 2005

VOIP is a giant leap forward in dragging us “Call Processing” types out of the dark ages to the modern world. SIP is the motivation. While SIP improved the interoperability between systems, it did not take away the inherent complexity of developing voice applications. Many of us VOIP application vendors basically built proprietary constructs from scratch (a HUGE benefit) that helped develop applications rapidly. The net result is that voice applications continue to be developed by a select few. Don’t get me wrong. We all use the latest and greatest available today: Object oriented design patterns for vastly improved software quality, SOAP for remote data access, CPL or equivalent for simple routing, VXML and MSML/MOML for media control, and a services oriented model for application delivery. However, they continue to be proprietary to the application vendor. The best we can do is claim SOAP or SIP as the “API” for developing applications. Want to integrate a cool conferencing application as a “converged” application? Sorry, besides SIP “interop”, no can do! Carriers are wising up to this. They are demanding an open environment that doesn’t lock them into a particular vendor. Initiatives like IMS are forcing vendors to rethink and offer

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© Arjun Roychowdhury. My personal opinions only.