Searching for softphones

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Remember when your office phone was a solidly built multi-line key system with push buttons for the different extensions? And you had a secretary who would answer all of your calls? It seems so quaint now, like something out of a Tracy/Hepburn movie like the “Desk Set.” (Which for those of you that haven’t seen it, features a plot about a room-sized computer that replaces human workers at the TV station. Amazingly, 50 years ago too.)

The biggest change for office telephony these days is the separating of incoming and outgoing calling plans and how we will use computers instead of an actual phone instrument. Maybe, if we all can get our softphones to work properly.

I am not talking about some Claes Oldenburg sculpture, but the software running on your PC that enables you to make and receive calls. Softphones aren’t new – I recall writing about them in the early 1990s. Sadly, the quality of software development is still akin more to this era than the modern day.

Voice over IP has made calling almost too cheap to meter, to recall a phrase from the 1950s (then it was about nuclear power, and we know what happened to that). That’s why many vendors currently offer unlimited monthly calling plans for their VOIP Service – Vonage ($25), Skype ($3), Google Voice (Free!). What is important to note is that these are all outgoing calling plans. Anyone can call you without any plan, you just need a phone number. Here is where things get tricky.

I have been a happy customer of Vonage since around 2002 or so, using their phone service in three different states and for both home and work. The best part about using Vonage (or any other VOIP phone with a reasonable feature set) is that I can set up what happens when someone calls my number. Right now I have it ring both office and cell numbers simultaneously. This way I just have to give you one number to call me, and I can change cell numbers, or add a new location if I am working someplace for an extended period of time. The next best part about Vonage is that I can do all of this with just a couple of mouse clicks, without having to wait on hold for a Bell business office service rep to try to upsell me with services that I don’t want.

But I don’t really get that many calls anymore, not that I am complaining. Most of the time when I am on the phone it is to interview someone for an article I am writing or to listen to a conference call briefing. Those are calls that I initiate and I don’t really need a physical phone anyway – I much prefer to use a headset connected to my computer, to free my shoulder so I can type in my notes. (Yes, I could use a Bluetooth headset for my phone, too.)

I started thinking that perhaps I could eliminate my office phone line, and swap it for a Vonage softphone, and perhaps save some money in the process. That led me to searching for a softphone that will run on my Mac, connect to my Vonage account, and be reliable. Getting all three criteria has turned into A Project over the past week.

The softphone costs $10 a month. A call to Vonage customer support set up things, and moved my office number over to the softphone account. I thought I was doing well.

Alas, it wasn’t so easy. First of all, while Vonage has its softphone app on both Windows and Mac, the Mac version is a poor cousin and I couldn’t get it to work properly. After spending some time with Vonage tech support, I found out that there are “issues” with it running on Intel-based Macs (which are all recent Macs for the past several years).

Vonage does have a softphone for the iPhone (and Blackberry too), but you need to set up another $25 a month subscription plan. It really is designed to call internationally from your phone and save you on these charges. So it really isn’t the softphone that I am looking for.

There are numerous softphone VOIP software companies, and some even have Mac clients. I have tried a few, and tried to get them configured for my Vonage account, but with no success. There is a lot of poor quality information online, and many of these are smaller companies with no tech support.

What about Skype? Yes, Skype can be considered a softphone (and more, since it does video calls too). The monthly unlimited calling plan is $3, but you also need to purchase an online number for another $3 a month if you want people to call you. All of a sudden, my expected savings are evaporating. I like Skype and have used it for years, mostly for the IM features, and the voice quality is terrific.

How about MagicJack? This is a pretty cool USB device that you can connect to both Macs and Windows PCs, and it will set up a softphone (or you can use a regular phone and wire it to the USB device directly). All for $40 for the first year, and $20 a year thereafter. My one problem with the Jack is that I keep getting people calling me who are calling wrong numbers. Not sure what that is all about. I do get the occasional Skype from someone I don’t recognize but not as often.

And then there are Google Voice and eVoice, a new service from J2 Communications, the people that are behind eFax and jFax. These aren’t quite softphones, but do offer some interesting communications features to manage your telephony, and if I didn’t keep my Vonage number I would probably be more interested in them. Google has also purchased Gizmo Project, which had a really nice softphone that came with a built-in voice recorder, so who knows what will happen to that.

Not having a traditional land-line phone can be an issue, I will admit. But it isn’t usually a problem. So as I transition to a phone-free desk, I think back to the days when I had one of the old Western Electric phones. Maybe I should buy one and just keep it on my desk for old time’s sake while I keep fooling around with my softphones and headsets. If you are interested, check out this site which has all sorts of great info on the golden era when people had to rent, not own their phones, and they still had dials instead of buttons.

The new browser wars: Flash vs. Swipe

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Pardon me for adding yet another iPad analysis (certainly, when a computer product launch makes it into Doonesbury, we have crossed a new threshold of hype), but one thing actually missing from the copious words and videos on yesterday’s event at Moscone was the simple fact that we have a new browser war on our hands, and it isn’t a pretty sight.

The browser wars of yesteryear between Microsoft and Netscape seem so quaint. (And look what happened to Netsacpe, too.) Today it is all about Adobe Flash versus the multi-touch swipe technology that is part of Apple’s product lines.

Why is this a war? Apple’s iPod, iTouch, and now iPad all share a lack of support for Adobe’s Flash technology, the animation glue that binds Web pages to in-line video playback. When you bring up your Safari browser in these devices, you see a big blank nothing on the pages that have Flash content to play. And what that means to me is that Apple has made it clear: rewrite your sites to support our own technologies (including new apps that are certain to populate the iTunes Store soon), or be forever absent from this brave new world of cool devices that Steve is creating.

I come to the support of Flash most reluctantly, mind you. Flash is a necessarily evil, and for the most part we just don’t even think of it when we merrily surf around the Internet, finding new video content to amuse and inform us. (Unless our plug-ins are outdated or messed up, that is.)

Flash will bring about the Internet TV revolution a lot sooner than the misinformed mainstream TV executives will like to admit, too: the more video that gets encoded in Flash, the fewer hours that 20-, 30-, and 40-somethings will spend in front of their living room TVs, if they even have living room TVs anymore. See what has happened to Leno et al. Their best bits are immediately uploaded to YouTube and watched the next morning. That is the power of Flash.

But Apple has its own idea about how to watch video, and it has nothing to do with standards that anyone else creates. It is about making Web content creators develop new iTunes Apps that can deliver their content customized for their devices. Anyone using an ordinary Web browser can be ignored. Granted, they have sold a lot of iPhones, so it isn’t a market that has been marginalized like their share of the PC market – but still. Why do so many Web site owners want this? Because of the latest Steve reality distortion field. See the comment about Doonesbury above.

It is ironic, because in the early days, Apple was a big boost to Adobe’s Postscript technology, the glue that made printing pretty pages from your PCs possible. But let’s not rest on these accidents of history.

Is a multi-touch swipe worth starting a new war? Maybe. Swiping the glass for controlling the display is very intuitive. It is a wonder that more tablet PCs haven’t incorporated it yet. In the mean time, we all will be watching and see how this shakes out, but (I can’t believe I am saying this) my bet is on Flash.

NB: As you can imagine, this essay has ignited a series of comments, some of them posted below. I will say that I should have mentioned work afoot on HTML v5 to try to bring some standards sense to this arena. And there are a few browsers, and a few sites, that support this, but not as many as we’d like. Thanks to all my readers that keep me honest!

It’s all about the jobs

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Even Conan can’t keep his job, although I am sure many of us would welcome a multi-million dollar payout as he got last week. But as our economy tries to re-start itself, I have seen first-hand how hard it is for people to get new jobs. Over the past seven months, I have been working with our local Regional Chamber and Growth Association in an effort called the St. Louis Job Angels, to help get information about new jobs quickly disseminated to the right people, and also provide self-help and peer networking to job seekers.

The effort was started nationally by consultant Mark Stelzner and has since become very successful here in St. Louis. We have more than 600 people on our LinkedIn group and a new job is posted almost daily. We also send out the postings via Twitter too, although trying to fit an entire job description into 100 or so characters is a challenge. Based on these efforts, I have some advice for employers and job seekers that I want to share.

First off, if you are going to post your opening online, make sure your Web jobs board is both search and Twitter-friendly. Try to have unique and simple URLs that people can email and Tweet to bring job seekers directly to the position at hand. Put all the information about the job on one page, including salary range, prerequisites, and reasonable experiences and skills required. Include a job number or some other identifying string that job applicants can use and reTweet so that others can quickly find the opening. And be specific about how to be contacted and with what information.

You would be surprised (well, maybe not) how many job openings I look at that don’t have this basic information. This isn’t rocket science (and we do have a few openings here in St. Louis for rocket scientists, believe me) and you would think that Al Gore still hasn’t gotten around to inventing the Internet, what with some of the postings that I see.

Some online job boards that are part of individual companies are behind registration walls, so you have to provide all sorts of information about yourself before you can get to see the actual jobs themselves. Bad idea! You want people to browse your board, because they might see something else that they are more qualified or more interested in.

There is a reason not to skimp on descriptions. The more information you can provide the job seeker, the better and more of a match your applicants will be when it comes time to apply.

The unique URL per job makes it easier to reTweet the openings: you use a URL shortening service such as Bit.ly and you can send out the job post quickly without having to worry that Twitter will mangle the URL or that users won’t be able to find it on the Internet someplace.

Some recruiters are told not to divulge the company name for fear that the company will be buried in resumes. Fair enough. But then provide more detail about the job so that applicants can understand what they are getting themselves into.

Also, be fair about telecommuting options. It is time to realize that many of us want to stay put for various reasons. If your management can deal with finding the best candidate in another city, then support this practice. I mean, we are in 2010, people!

Second, spend some time on LinkedIn. Yes, there are still plenty of places where you can post job openings, including Monster, Craigslist, and hundreds of other more specialized sites. And yes, employers should be promiscuous and post openings widely too. But the right use of LinkedIn by both employers and job seekers can be useful.

I keep adjusting my online LinkedIn profile all the time, even though I have had it for many years. I keep forgetting to add particular experiences, or to ask for references from previous bosses. So don’t try to create your entire profile in one sitting, but come back to it frequently. I have some more tips on how to improve your LinkedIn presence here if you want to view my slides.

Most of the people I know are still new at using this service, and some are unaware about the more advanced features such as Groups and Answers that can help augment your job searching and make the service more valuable too. Answers can help build your expertise and demonstrate your knowledge of a topic or niche. Groups can be used, as we do for St. Louis Job Angels group, how to find others who share similar traits and can be quickly scanned for updated information.

LinkedIn can be both a blessing and a curse. Getting groups setup is a slow process, and you have to follow an arcane series of rules if you want to play in their sandbox: for example, as group Admin, I can send out exactly no more than one weekly email to the group. I try not to bury people in emails, but still, sometimes you want to get the word out if we have had a lot of postings or some with very short response times.

Third, become better at marketing yourself. One of my colleagues here and the supervisor of the MissouriCareerSource local office, Frank Alaniz, talks about how to develop a resume that will present your qualifications in a way that a job interviewer or HR screener can quickly see you online. Most employers spend less than three minutes reviewing resumes, which means you have to grab them at hello.

Good luck with your own job search, and maybe you too can host a late-night show in the near future.

Using Windows 7 Remote Server Administration Tools

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RSAT makes it easier to manage your collection of Windows 2003 and 2008 servers remotely and securely from your Windows 7 desktop. This screencast shows how it works.

There’s plenty to learn, including setting up new file shares, managing the built-in Internet Information Server Web services, handling group policies and other sophisticated features. The installation is somewhat convoluted and you’ll want to spend some time reading the help files too.

See my screencast video at: http://itexpertvoice.com/home/using-windows-7-remote-server-administration-tools/

Using Windows 7 Remote Server Administration Tools

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RSAT makes it easier to manage your collection of Windows 2003 and 2008 servers remotely and securely from your Windows 7 desktop. This screencast shows how it works.

There’s plenty to learn, including setting up new file shares, managing the built-in Internet Information Server Web services, handling group policies and other sophisticated features. The installation is somewhat convoluted and you’ll want to spend some time reading the help files too.

See my screencast video at: http://itexpertvoice.com/home/using-windows-7-remote-server-administration-tools/

Aiding Haiti

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We all know by now about the horrific Haiti quake and how it has decimated that already impoverished country’s infrastructure last week. I have been spending time looking into how our own charitable infrastructure is holding up in getting funds and manpower to the relief effort. So far, the efforts have been mixed, to say the least, although not lacking in the best of intentions.

Various relief agencies, including the Red Cross, Salvation Army, Doctors Without Borders, and others have collected millions of dollars seemingly overnight. Many of these groups are using the tech services of of either mGive.com or the Mobile Giving Foundation. I have seen numbers for the total collected at more than $20 million. Considering that most of these donations have been $10 ones that were charged to individual’s cell phone bills, it is an impressive donations velocity. Both vendors make  systems that allow people to text one of a series of messages for supporting these organizations.  Here is probably the most comprehensive list of Haitian-related charities.

The Mobile Giving and mGive donations are what is called unrestricted donations, meaning you’re your funds aren’t going directly for Haitian relief, but for the organizations to do what they wish with the money. Having volunteered several times at the Red Cross, I can also tell you that donors that direct their donations for a particular event there are really paying it forward – just like I wrote about Kiva.org’s efforts, when you call the Red Cross and say you want to support the Haiti relief efforts, in reality you are giving money to their “International Relief Fund” which has already sent money collected from prior efforts to help Haitians today. Think of this as more of a revolving fund, with the hope that monies coming in can balance the outflows, or do even better to help less publicized causes.

But there is a problem with donating through text messages. The carriers normally place a 60 to 90 day hold on disbursing all the funds collected. This is to cover their float for those people that have a change of heart when they get their monthly cell bills, or just don’t pay them promptly, or other reasons. Some of the carriers have decided to go ahead and distribute the donations without waiting, which is admirable.

Mobile Giving and mGive aren’t the only games in town, and others have taken up the cause by organizing Facebook groups and fan pages to attract donors. Sadly, some of these are fakes, as this story from MSNBC points out.

Many stories have focused on how cell phone service is for the most part operating in Haiti, unlike the landlines, which for the most part aren’t. Why is this the case? Mainly because the cell towers have been constructed with the poor electric grid from day one. Each cell tower has a diesel backup generator – which is common practice in many developing countries – but the difference is that they were built to store several days’ worth of fuel to provide running backup power. While that means that the cell companies have to get fuel to their towers, right now this is one of the reasons why they can still make connections. Similarly the broadband wireless data services like those supporting Blackberries seem to be working too.

What about getting food and water and medical supplies – and aid workers — airlifted to Haiti? This is a big problem currently, as many of the news outlets have reported: the tiny airport is overwhelmed with flights, and a few have had to be turned back because they couldn’t get a landing slot. The air traffic tower was damaged, and imagine trying to run a busy airport like LaGuardia or O’Hare by having the controllers sit quite literally on the field – even with a single runway, it is a challenge. The US is running operations there at the airport, by the way. The nearest international airport is a six-hour drive away in the Dominican Republic, and that has been the path that some flights have had to take if they couldn’t land in Port-au-Prince.

That is how the International Rescue Committee is getting its own aid workers there. I spoke to David Goodman, a good friend of mine who is the organization’s CTO. The IRC has emergency staff on the ground and more are arriving throughout the week. They have been using a Mobile Giving cellphone donation system, “and fortunately we started our Mobile Giving campaign during the holiday season in NYC taxi cabs and so we had that infrastructure in place prior to the Haiti quake.” The IRC is part of a consortium of 28 organizations called NetHope (www.nethope.org) that provides common IT services for relief efforts, and as you imagine there have already been conference calls to pool efforts to obtain connectivity in Haiti that can be shared. Goodman himself has been to Africa several times to set up C-band satellite links for their offices and tells me that, like Africa, Haitian Internet access is still pretty spotty, although the situation is changing minute by minute as more resources get established on the ground.

In my call with Goodman, we talked about the issue of having a low overhead organization and being held to that metric by charitable givers. “We spend 90% of donations on our programs and the low overhead is attractive to lots of donors. If I could spend more money to give our aid workers better communications tools I would.  It would help increase their productivity even more.” It made me stop and think about my own criteria for donations.

I ended up giving money to Partners in Health (pih.org), a group that has medical teams already in Haiti. I wanted to see an immediate benefit of my donation and thought they would be in the best position to help. Feel free to add your own comments here if you’d like.

Automated video image analysis will be the next big breakthrough

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Remember Chance the Gardener character in Being There? “I like to watch tv” was his famous line. The problem with most business videos is that we produce a lot of unwatchable footage, especially those taken by security camera systems. And there aren’t any Chances around that want to watch them, either.

The trouble is that trying to find the one or two actionable events in all of that footage isn’t easy. As an example, take the story in today’s NY Times that mentions how the military is being buried under a massive pile of video footage from its Predator drones that are flying over Pakistan and Afghanistan. The situation is only going to get worse, as newer drone models will be sending streams from dozens of cameras within a few years.

The story has already been told about how the drones’ video feeds are available to anyone who has some minor software skills – the actual control channels are encrypted but the video transmissions aren’t. This is because many legit people need to see what they are broadcasting and the military hasn’t been able to implement any encrypted viewing packages on these streams.

In the Times article, a bunch of soldiers based in Hampton, Virgina sit in front of the screens and see it in real time, and then make screengrabs available to the right people via computer chat rooms. I hope for the sake of everyone involved that these chat rooms are encrypted, but the article didn’t say.

So how do we implement our automated Chance Gardner? There are a couple of technologies that can help here, but they aren’t easy or cheap to implement. One is the telestrator, the device made popular by John Madden and Monday Night Football where a commentator draws on the screen and you seen colored squiggles to highlight what is going on. The ones that Madden and the pros use are very expensive, but there are dozens of telestrator products available for the PC market, with some freeware products such as VideoMage Producer.

The telestrators are nice, but again, someone has to be watching the video and doing the electronic doodling. You need more than the fast-forward button to do this – ideally, you want some kind of automated system that can identify actionable moments on the video. This is what the next class of products does, called intelligent image analysis. They have computers to look at the stream and highlight particular activities that a human operator can come back to and review later.

This is what the company stoplift.com is doing with its retail checkout analysis systems. Typically, a retail store installs video cameras above each checkout aisle and records what the checker is doing as items pass through the point of sale scanning devices. There are all sorts of scams that can be used, such as “sweethearting” (a confederate is giving free items that aren’t scanned) and looking like you are scanning a bar code when you are just passing the item around and over to the bagger. So what is needed is a system that ties into your point of sale and can flag when these items aren’t rung up at the register. I got to see a demo last week and thought this was way cool. The company claims their software can have a six-month ROI and significantly reduce the cost of stolen goods. And the good news is that no one has to watch all the security tapes to see those few sweetheart moments.