Alec Saunders SquawkBox

It’s an important day at iotum.  In fact, on a scale of importance from 1 to 10, today is an 11. Today, we turned our trial system on, and we’re ready to accept applications from beta testers.  At this point we’re looking for folks physically located in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and the surrounding areas.  That means area codes in 613, 514, 519, 905, and 416 primarily.  If you’re interested, please pop over to the Simply Relevant blog, have a look at the criteria, and send us an application. 

And to the iotum development team: congratulations!

You may recall Martin Geddes announcement of a new addition to the Geddes family.  Well, I guess she’s sleeping through the night now, because Martin is back to his old, skeptical, contrarian self.  Check out Martin’s broadside against Net Neutrality.  He opines:

Net Neutrality is a dead end, because as Searls and Weinberger correctly noted, the Net isn’t a thing, it’s an interconnected set of agreements. These are bilateral and freely entered into. And since those agreements weren’t modelled off a viral template such as the GNU General Public License, they are all unique. There’s no contageous clause that insists the Internet becomes a “thing” by virtue of everyone having to agree to freely and neutrally pass packets in an ever growing pool of Neutraldom. So to impose neutrality you’re going to have to interpose yourself into a lot of contracts.

And finishes with:

Everything’s bass-ackwards. Neutrality is a sign of healthy supply competition and sophisticated ways of demand expression. It’s an output, not an input. Beware demanding net nuetrality as a blanket principle, rather than a scalpel to excise particular local anti-competitive acts. Kruschev decalred the corn harvest was great, too — but it didn’t create the incentives for more corn to be sown and for the system to succeed on future iterations. And net neutrality rules are likely to have the exact opposite effect of that intended too.

Net neutrality messes up freedom of contract, freedom of association, and property rights.

I don’t buy it.

Net neutrality as a communist plot?  Ouch!

I’m on a bit of a rant at the moment.  iotum has just moved into new offices, and we’ve put in a spiffy new IP PBX.  Until now, we’ve been running our business in true startup mode: a single Vonage line with a couple of softphones for extensions.  My office and Howard’s were next to each other.  If the phone rang, we heard it, and one of us answered it on either of the analog handsets we had installed on the Vonage box. 

We broke down and got a PBX in the new offices. In recent months I’ve been using Gizmo Project, or Skype, for virtually all of my outgoing calls.  I’m spoiled.  I’ve become used to the softphone and much prefer a headset to a handset.  However, now that we’ve got a PBX, neither Gizmo Project, nor Skype, can be used as an extension on it.  Both products only work with the service they were designed for. 

No problem, sez I, I will just go find another softphone.  Easier said than done.  It’s as if I have returned to the dark ages of software design.  The hunt for a decent softphone is proving to be very very difficult. 

1. Most have only extremely primitive integration with Outlook, which kills one of my favorite features: dial-by-name. 
2. They all handle multiple soundcards badly, or not at all.  I have a laptop with an analog soundcard, and a USB headset attached.  I want the ring tones to be played on the sound card (so I can hear them), and the headset / microphone to be used for the actual call. 
3. Most have incredibly poor design.  I’m a Windows user, and I expect Windows apps to behave like… Windows apps!  Go read the Windows UI style guide, folks.  Options are part of a top level menu called Tools.  They’re not called Properties, they don’t hang off the File Menu, and so on…  I’m singling out the designer of X-Lite out for a special place in hell.  It emulates a cell phone interface on the PC desktop, right down to the glare on the screen, and left and right arrow keys to navigate menus just like a GSM phone. 

At the moment, I’m back to a plastic handset hooked into a cheap ATA.  I take as few calls on it as I can, and encourage everyone I know to get a Gizmo Project account. 

If you know of a decent, standards based, softphone that works well with SIP PBX’s, please let me know.

Don’t try this at home: Spoofing Caller ID with Asterisk. 

SPIT.  It’s coming.  ‘Nuff said. 

BusinessWeek speculates that Microsoft and Cisco are getting ready to battle it out on VoIP, following yesterday’s Linksys One announcement.  Naturally, both companies are playing it down, claiming that their collaboration has never been stronger.