Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Somehow I missed this commentary from Jean-Louis Seguineau.  I wrote about the Value of Presence a while back, and he responded with a very thoughtful piece on how true presence is the new dial-tone.  In a prior piece he writes:

Many business process delays result both from inadequate access to missing information, and from users’ inability to locate and briefly interact with peers regarding such information. By enhancing the ability to reach a colleague using the most appropriate communication channel, presence addresses this recurrent business challenge. With presence, we no longer request, we subscribe!

That is the promise of presence, but it also neatly illustrates how intrusive it can be as well.  I’d like to see some of the clients that Jean-Louis mentions.

Randy’s got an idea he calls 4Camp.  It’s an event for geeks, to discuss new ideas.  Unlike Barcamp:

1. it takes place at a real campground (with WiFi)
2. it’s not about presenting stuff you’re doing.  It’s about discussing new ideas.

He says: “4camp is for developers and other geeks, who want to get together and start something new, on the Web or whatever, it doesn’t really matter.”

If you’re interested, head over to his blog, and add your name to the growing list.

Bill Campbell, over at Skype Journal, talks about his experiences visiting Pika in March and his reaction upon finally seeing Pika Connect for Skype.  He’s got a great shot of David Clarke, Pika’s man on the ground in Las Vegas during the Skype / EBay developers conference.  Anyway, like me, Bill is excited by what Pika has done to integrate Skype into the Asterisk PBX.  Bills says:

If you have an office phone system and use skype, find David; he is will change how you use your office phone. And if you are an eBay Powerseller, find David; he will change your ratios.

Too true!

The promise of what Pika has done is that it brings the world of creativity that exists in the Asterisk environment to the world of Skype.  Asterisk is being used to power some of the most innovative experiments in telephony today — projects like Radio Handi, and Abbeynet.  Pika can marry those mashups to Skype.   That’s huge, because there is no ability in the Skype environment, today, to create new services.  The Skype API lets you build applications that can run on an endpoint, but there was no service platform… until now.

As an example, last week David asked us to integrate Skype presence with iotum.  Up until now, we’ve only provided MSN presence.  It’s not that it couldn’t be done, easily in fact, but it hadn’t been a priority for us.  So we did a quick implementation — interfacing the Skype Web presence directly to iotum.  Now, with Skype + Pika Connect + Asterisk + iotum, iotum can manage those Skype callers, separating criticals calls from calls that can wait, and allowing those important Skype calls to reach me wherever I am. I can take those calls on my cell phone, office PBX, at home or on Skype, and it all happens transparently to me. 

And that, friends, is the power of telecom mashups.

A while back, O’Reilly’s Bruce Stewart called and asked if we’d like to submit an article to the O’Reilly ETel blog.  Of course, I said!  I dragooned iotum Chief Code Wrangler Todd Jefferson, pictured on the right in the obligatory iotum mug shot, into it (it wasn’t hard when I mentioned that the audience was O’Reilly readers), and the result is now available on the O’Reilly Network. In Building the iotum Asterisk Module, Todd explains what the iotum Asterisk module is, and how to integrate iotum into any Asterisk installation.

Check it out if you’re interested in adding iotum to your Asterisk installation!