iConverged

Hi folks, as promised, HSC released the ported SIP UA including the stack. This is an update to our previous ’stack only’ release. We have overwritten the old release with this new one in our download area. You can get it from here (look for the post titled “SIP UA + Stack for Google Android).

This release includes a short illustrative manual on how to use the SIP client and some things you need to do to configure it (mostly because of the limitation of the android emulator and what it does(not) support as of the current date). We have also included a ported RTP stack with this release. Theoretically, this release is all set for a signalling + media use case. I say theoretically, because it seems the android emulator does not support audio capture, so everytime one tries to start a media conversation, the emulator crashes. Folks @ the android-dev group have confirmed this is currently not supported in the emulator (but works on their actual phone).

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Update: Apr 29 2008: UA+Stack code released here

Hey folks, HSC released the android ported mjsip stack source code.

Grab it from here. Look for the attachment to the post titled “Ported GNU Mjsip stack for Google Android”

If you see a “PDF” icon under that post, don’t worry, its actually a ZIP with source in it. Our website folks will fix that annoyance soon.

Note that this is a “developer’s release”. It will allow you to start building applications using the mjsip stack on android. It’s not an “automatic solution for long distance calling” (as some blogs reported it) - it is a tool for developers within you to make such applications.

We also have a working SIP UA we ported on top of this stack (which we called ‘SIPDroid’ - no points for being imaginative here). We are yet to release that port - will do so in a short while.

Note that this is just a SIP stack. There is no RTP included. We did some initial experiments with porting open source RTP stacks - seems very simple. We may just do it later, or you do it and add to this effort

For those who attended VON spring, it is likely that they thought it was particularly low key in terms of attendance. I was there, both at the main event and the unconference (which was interesting, especially with Ken’s ‘online’ proposal to his partner Sheryl which was covered using Qik, a company started by Ramu Sunkara - ex head of RTC @ Oracle & a really inspirational guy. Congrats Ken & Sheryl, glad we finally met after reading each other’s blog for a long time - you make a great couple).

But I digress. Back to VON San Jose. The Boston and San Jose VONs have always been very well attended. So I was surprised seeing the attendance. But then again, I thought, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. And maybe it is also a testament to how well VON has actually worked.

The ‘Hype’ of many technologies like IMS, WiMAX etc. have passed. If you look at the typical exhibitor space of VON, they are OEMs. OEMs build products before they get deployed. They need to publicize. They need to excite people. And that is exactly where VON helps them. When technology is ‘new’, you need forums like VON to spread the word. When technology gets into deployment, people are too busy deploying to actually attend shows and talk about them. This is when the ‘money gets real’. The hooplah is over. And this is exactly in line with what I am seeing in the market. I had posted earlier that we have started seeing a significant rise in people deploying applications over IMS, or, deploying IMS and they are paying money for it (not the build and we will see story).

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Update: April 2 2008: Source code of stack released here 

Hey folks. Enjoy this screencast of a working Android enabled SIP Phone (using mjsip) talking to an X-lite phone.

This is an update to the original “We have SIP working on android” post.

Click here to view the screencast

(And here is the wireshark dump for the protocol hungry)

So there you go. It’s real
Code/howtos etc to be posted in a few days

 Update: April 2 2008: Source code of stack released here 

Update: Mar 17 2008

See here for a screencast

Update: Mar 12 2008

Some other sites linking here seem to be reporting this news with their own verbiage. Lets be specific on what we are doing:

• We have taken the GPL’d mjsip SIP stack and our objective is to make it work on android (this is mostly a porting activity). We are not writing our own stack.
• We are not doing any optimizations, etc. The scope is exactly what I wrote - make mjsip work on android, so developers can use the mjsip APIs to build apps in android.
• It is a very straighforward ‘take from community (GPL/mjsip), give back to community (post ported code back to GPL/mjsip)’ activity.
• We are targetting to release the port in a week or so… (as-is - as I mentioned the objective is straighforward -a port of mjsip - if it has bugs when you do funky stuff , fix it yourself when we release it )

We (my company) had started an internal project to get SIP working on Android and some smart folks belted out some nifty code to get SIP working on android. We hope to release the ported SIP stack on android pretty soon. We used the GPL’d mjSIP stack and will be releasing the modifications as per GPL, obviously - so other developers have a good SIP API to build apps. This should happen pretty soon. Some time ago, we did a rss-to-presence implementation stub (concept here) over Google Mashup editor. I look forward to seeing the “google-phone” talk SIP to the “google-server” and other cool stuff.

Stay tuned!

Update: I have now created a sidebar widget titled “Tech Blogs I read” instead of updating this post. Please continue sending me quality tech blogs (with more focus on concepts and less on marketing) as you come across them and refer to the sidebar for updates and not this post - thx.

Total number of ‘market reporting’ VoIP blogs = k+1

where k=number of times you can blink in a day.

However, there are very few blogs that talk about more technology & architecture details and less market details for all things VoIP, SIP, IMS, web 2.0 (with focus on telecom).

So here is a call to unite!

We need a list of what I call ‘geek-talk’ - those that provide more technical insight into how things are.

Here is my list so far. Please update me /comment here with more tech-blogs and I will update this list

Many of these blogs are a mix of techno-marketing, but are written by people who are neck-deep in actually developing/architecting many of the talked about solutions themselves, and hence offer a more detailed insight.

last updated: Apr-30-2008

1. TurnGeek - focus on P2P, SBC, etc.
2. IMS Lantern - IMS architecture related
3. Voice of VoIPSA - VoIP Security
4. IMS Quality - Testing and Monitoring with focus on IMS
5. VoIP Survivor - general voip, with significant focus on their company products
6. TelCAB - IMS B/OSS
7. iConverged - this blog

I recently wrote a paper that investigates how SDP vendors can provide AJAX based telco-aware libraries and mechanisms to interface these libraries with existing telecom application servers. I personally believe that this is a gaping hole in the market. While AJAX libraries have evolved significantly, no one is currently working on adding functionality that makes it telecom aware (in terms of understanding what UI, actions, events are typically associated with telco services) thereby making t he job much harder on developers who are trying to grapple with what it really means to “web 2.0″ their SIP call control app.

Abstract:

With the increasing acceptance of AJAX as a mechanism to deliver real-time user experiences without the need of proprietary local clients and the increasing demand from consumers to have a better user experience with more features, both the Telecom and the Internet world are looking at means to be able to converge their offerings. However, being able to provide converged services is a challenge largely due to the fact that Telecom players already have existing applications they would like to monetize in addition to having limited know-how of Web 2.0 related technologies, whereas the Internet players, while proficient in Web 2.0 technologies have limited understanding of wireline and wireless networks to be able to offer ubiquitous service access. The author believes that middleware SDP providers can help bridge this gap and provide “convergence” building blocks that would allow developers on both sides of the world develop functionality, or integrate existing functionality with ease. Specifically, this paper, proposes the concept of “TelcoAJAX” – a set of building blocks that are aware of telecom primitives and how to represent and interact with users using a browser interface which developers can implement on top of SIP/Presence based applications.

You can download it from here.

(Search for paper titled “A Concept Approach at bringing Legacy Telecom Application Servers to Web 2.0″)

I spoke at the Internet Telephony conference in Los Angeles last week on IMS, hWiMAX, how they all work together (or not) and what it really means to applications. You can see a copy here

I keep telling folks around me that in this new world, “code complexity” is not the engineer’s archetypal org*sm. It is “idea innovation”. Those who still love dreaming about complex call control and the sorts will progressively slide down the bell curve of the future.

First there was Yahoo Pipes - a great new ‘tool’ to allow developers to build on existing web resources and create a chained service by piping RSS feeds. Now, there is Google Mashup Editor (GME), Google’s response to the innovation shown by the Yahoo team. Frankly, GME takes ‘mashup’ creation a notch higher. By exposing a programmable interface and letting us chain RSS feeds and link it to HTML, CSS and Javascript code, Google has effectively allowed us much more creativity, including service form factor (how it will look). This is truly the beginning of web 2.0 based Service Creation Environments and is a place to watch.

But anyway, how about the following service:

‘Trackit’ is a presence publishing system that allows different Presentities to update their presence state periodically. Presentities that publish their state also specify access rules which govern who can read this presence. Pete is a paid subscriber to ‘Trackit’ and decides to offer a ‘Map & Track’ service on top of Trackit and GoogleMaps like so:Users who use Trackit can now use Pete’s service, where they can track each other’s presence location and presence state on google’s scrolling maps. And this is just the beginning. Later, Pete decides to also add traffic information on the map, so users can not only see each other’s location and presence sate, but also traffic in that area (So Mary knows Joe is 2 miles away, and is in heavy traffic)

Motivated by this concept, I wrote up this Internet Draft titled “Motivation for RSS Feed for Presence State”. Take a look and comment, if you’d like.

Abstract:

RSS Feeds have always played an important role in providing userscontent related updates typically of Websites without having to visit those websites manually. Typical examples of RSS usage include users ’subscribing’ to the RSS feed of a website, say, CNN.com andthereby automatically receiving ‘news headlines’ then the contentchanges. Recently, there have been significant innovations (such asYahoo Pipes and Google Mash-up Editor) where RSS feeds fromdifferent sources have been combined to produce new services in a’Web Based Service Creation Environment’ model allowing users tocreate interesting services building on top of ‘primitives’ that canbe represented on the Web.This document describes the motivation for an RSS feed for Presenceinformation, which the authors believe would be useful to create newservices using a similar environment described above.

In short, SIP goes far beyond voice. SIP has a wealth of information in it which adds a very rich dimension to creating combined services. I could go on and on with other examples, but not in this post.

And here is a demo of the Trackit service in the draft, written in GME:

Try it out:

http://rsspresence.googlemashups.com/

Screen shot: (GME does not yet allow the mashups to be listed on external sites)