ajdmserver - Asterisk Java Fast Agi OSGi dynamic module

Embed Asterisk-Java FastAgi server into SpringSource dmServer

Main benfits of using ajdmserver:

* hot deploy of scripts without stopping or restarting server
* www administration panel ((server starting/stoping, deploying scripts, listing servers, statistics)
* no changes in way of creating scripts- just implement AgiScript interface
* access to OSGi services inside your applications
* multiple agi servers in one application
* easy access to all advantages of Spring framework (IoC, JDBC Spring Abstraction Layer, J2EE resources access and much more...)

check out the project (developed and mantained by my colleague) at google code

SIP applications ...in PHP

With basic SIP knowledge and a few lines of code any PHP developer can develop SIP applications. PHP-SIP is a PHP implementation of a SIP UA that allows to implement things like click-to-call, message waiting indications or SIMPLE based instant messages.

On Level 7 Systems' blog they show how to implement click-to-call functionality
triggered from a web page - in a relatively simple PHP script.

$api = new PhpSIP();

$api->setDebug(true);

$api->addHeader('Subject: click2call');
$api->setMethod('INVITE');
$api->setFrom('sip:c2c@'.$api->getSrcIp());
$api->setUri($from);

$res = $api->send();

if ($res == 200)
{
$api->setMethod('REFER');
$api->addHeader('Refer-to: '.$to);
$api->addHeader('Referred-By: sip:c2c@'.$api->getSrcIp());
$api->send();

$api->setMethod('BYE');
$api->send();

$api->listen('NOTIFY');
$api->reply(481,'Call Leg/Transaction Does Not Exist');
}

Check it out the full application here:
Click to Call with PHP-SIP

more on google wave

some interresting things I have come across related to what google wave might bring us.

Pulp Fiction quotes wave
cool video with quotes form Pulp Fiction showing the different functionalities and mashups that are possbile within a wave. I think this basically shows what wave is all about.



Voice collaboration in Waves ..by Ribbit
Two voice gadgets are brought to wave by combining the Ribbit REST API and Wave API. Ribbit conference gadget allows for wave participants to join a real time conference call. And Ribbit mesage gadget allows session members to leave each other offline voice messages. The gadget displays the transcription of the message while the actual recording is attached as an mp3.

Conversation Streams in Google Wave
Powered by Ribbit

Ribbit brings voice collaboration to Google Wave

Asterisk and Google Wave
10 possible ideas on how to integrate google wave sessions with asterisk functionalities

Asterisk and Google Wave: 10 ideas

open source stuff

Facebook released as an open source tool the web framework that powers the functionality of FriendFeed. This is part of Facebook's open source initiative. The Framework called Tornado Web Server is written in Python and was designed to handle large amounts of traffic and thousands of simultaneous connections.

Tornado Web Server

Facebook Tornado: FriendFeed’s Real-Time Web Framework Goes Open Source

google voice

some google voice links that I've recently stumbled upon

good stuff:

Gmail Lets You Check Your Google Voice Messages

Google Voice steps on carriers' SMS turf

and this is quite funny about google voice auto-transcribed messages:

Google Voice Creeps Me Out On My Mother’s Birthday

35 Great free Asterisk applications

-Flash Operator Panel
-PHP AGI
-Web Meetme
...and lots lots more.

Check out the link:
http://www.venturevoip.com/news.php?rssid=2184

Great stuff!

Lech Wałęsa - very active GaduAIR user

Lech Wałęsa is one of the most active GaduAIR (Gadu-Gadu MVNO) users. Lech Wałęsa is the first president in non-communist Poland. He co-founded Solidarity, the first independent trade union, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, more on Lech Wałęsa – here.

Check out his BLIP (microblogging) multimedia rich profile -
http://blip.pl/users/lechwalesa/dashboard

free mobile services, ad based

I've already written about free ad based voip services here, but this time it's in the mobile context. I am a big fan of the concept of free ad sponsored telecom services, i.e. the Internet business model applied to telco services. I believe in the concept and I have seen what giving away such 'free' minutes can do to the overall traffic and incomes in an IM / Internet telephony service. While the effects of a nicely wrapped offer and some good marketing can be spectacular, the problem is in changing the mindset of advertisers who are generally sceptical in adopting new advertising channels - telephony. Why should they pay for this new exotic channel when they can stick to the good old banners and page views in the Internet or TV/Radio ads.

The most popular free mobile telephony service is Blyk with their services in the UK and Netherlands. The service gives away free minutes and SMS monthly in return for receiving SMS and MMS based advertisements. Blyk started off their services as an MVNO in the UK and then in partnership with Vodafone in the Netherlands. The company has recently informed of closing their MVNO based services in the UK and will move from MVNO to operator partnership with Orange as their exclusive partner in the UK.

Blyk continues its move from MVNO to operator partnership – Orange named as Blyk’s exclusive UK partner

Another Blyk-like free mobile telephony service Tomato Plus has been launched in October 2008 in Croatia. While Blyk targets youth aged 18-24, Tomato Plus does not limit its offer.

If you are interested in this as much as I am, I'd recommend you read more on free ad based mobile offerings by following the very valuable links below:

ANAYLSIS: Orange UK Buys Into Blyk Ad-Funded Model; But Is There Something Better Than Free?

Tomato Plus Seems to be a Winner

Blyk concept validation, if clone can make big success out of it, then..

Final thoughts ?

* FREE is not only the kicker, it's the quality of their service offered
* The concept seems to be validated
* Tough market education of potential advertisers

2009-08-25, additional link:

Mobile Advertising: 100 times more customers - Blyk’s Wholesale Strategy

Dead Parrot

For all of the (still) IMS enthusiasts out there waiting in vain for all of the rich multimedia applications to be deployed by carriers and vendor ecosystems I suggest reading this post by Dean Bubley ...which I find particularly funny - for some maybe sad but true.

Mobile IMS and LTE networks: Dead Parrot

Mobile Social Contextual Applications & Services

...presentation on Mobile Social Contextual Applications and Services at Club de Creativos in Madrid on April 24, 2009 by Rudy De Waele.

Mobile Social Contextual Applications & Services

View more Microsoft Word documents from rudydw.

even more eager...

to see this live!

google wave

After google voice this is next big service launched by google. Very, very eager to try it out ! http://wave.google.com/

tales from the mvno project

The launch of MVNO at Gadu-Gadu was by far the most difficult project I have overseen to date. It wasn't difficult because of its complexity but because so many people, departments and companies were involved - half of which from my current perspective were unnecessary. Of course the technical bits and pieces along with integrational aspects were not easy and the business offer was not just plain per minute tariffs - but the hardest part of the whole project was to coordinate the whole thing. The hardest task was to exchange information across all teams and later verify that what was to be implemented was implemented in the way it was intended to be implemented :) And what was nearly impossible was to get the marketing guys to decide and spell out what it is that they actually want..

Looking at the purely technical aspects of the project, I'd say that the complexity grows exponentially (to infinity) when you look at the architecture components moving up the osi model. All the network and transmission releted staff is ..well - easy. Core network and ss7 singalling is manage'able in a relatively short period of time - once you get the network all planned out its just configuration. The intelligence in the services - IN / Camel is where it gets hard, implementing service and related tariffs is doable - ok, but once you start verifying the logic, its integrity and stability of platforms you start to have doubts if it can ever be grasped. But then when you get to oss/bss and applications - you start loosing hope ! :)

It's now nearly two weeks after tha launch and I think today is the first day that most of the technical teams involved can safely say - I think the beast is under control. We have nearly cut to zero the 'manual adapters' and bugfixed all the major issues...

voice for second life

Second life has been offering VoIP services to its users - residents, allowing them to speak to each other through their avatars. Second life carries 1 billion VoIP minutes per month which is quite impressive.

Linden Lab (creator of second life) has announced recently new services that they will be introducing to second life residents.

Residents will ba able to morph their voice ..to customize their voice to match their avatar.

Avaline will bridge second life voice chat and real world telephones. Residents will obatin for a monthly fee and extension allowing calls from real life phones.

Residents will be able to send messages from second life to cell phones.

Some links related to these:

http://www.secondlifeupdate.com/news-and-stuff/second-life-role-playing-just-got-a-lot-more-fun-morph-your-sl-voice-chat/

http://www.secondlifeupdate.com/news-and-stuff/second-life-avaline-now-in-limited-public-beta/

http://www.voip-news.com/feature/voip-boosts-second-life-052009/

Gadu-Gadu MVNO finally launched..

Last week we have finally launched GaduAIR – Gadu-Gadu’s MVNO. The whole project took more than two years, and span off rapidly after we signed the deal with Polkomtel in December 2007. So what is GadAIR ?

GaduAIR pre-paid offer integrates the mobile phone with Gadu-Gadu Instant Messenger. GaduAIR combines mobile telephony, instant messenger, Internet telephony and Web 2.0 social networking services. It also combines all prepaid services to single account with one recharge valid for all paid services offered by Gadu-Gadu. It is a convergent offer – in terms of services and charging.

So what does the user actually get ? ..well first of all new, cool mobile offer with free access to mobile version to Gadu-Gadu. Other Polish GSM networks either charge for the data traffic or a fixed monthly rent fee – so it’s a clear distinction. The MSISDN number also becomes Gadu-Gadu number (GG uses numeric identifiers similarly to ICQ). Apart from that the user gets a bunch of bonuses for online recharges and data packages with each recharge which in effect make the offer quite interesting and an average user gets Internet access for free.

GaduAIR innovative offer includes:
1. Single number, the MSISDN number is also Gadu-Gadu number
2. Mobile/Java version of Mobile Gadu-Gadu for free
3. SMS, MMS, voice notes to SNS blog profile and gallery
4. Single prepaid wallet for all services, mobile, voip, e-commerce
5. Single voicemail box for all services, GSM and internet telephony/IM

I have my fingers crossed and hope to see the statistics shoot sky high…

Asterisk on Amazon EC2

Amazon EC2 virtual computing environment allows you to launch instances with viariety of operating systems, manage network permisions, etc through web services API. Voxilla made a two part article about how to set up Asterisk on Amazon's computing environment.

http://voxilla.com/2009/02/12/amazon-ec2-voip-1096

The first part of the article is an introduction to EC2.

http://voxilla.com/2009/02/13/asterisk-amazon-ec2-1178

The second part is a step by step tutorial that describes how to sign up, configuring and starting the EC2 instance, configuring network settings and installing Asterisk.

the mobile user experience

some links worth noting ..on user experience from the mobile phone

http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/03/29/follow-the-mobile-user/

http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/11/daddy-wheres-your-phone.html

mashup contest

Circus Mashimus - a mashup contest, quite interresting

http://www.circusmashimus.com/

"The Contest

Developers may submit applications for either of the two categories:

Best Overall Mashup: Must contain two or more of the participating API Lounge APIs

Best in Show: Application using at least one sponsor API

* Best Buy Remix
* Billboard
* New York Times
* Ribbit

* We encourage you to use other APIs along with the contest APis to create something cool"

virtual currencies

Facebook is looking at adding virtual currency to its social networking service..

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/03/facebook-gdc-vi.html

http://mashable.com/2009/03/28/facebook-virtual-currency/

I have been interrested in virtual goods and services for quite some time now. Some really interresting links with regards to social networking and mobile services.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/20/virtual-goods-the-next-big-business-model/

http://blog.zong.com/2008/10/25/virtual-goods-currency-and-mobile-payments-the-business-model-for-social-apps/

http://vgsummit2008.com/video/

http://www.vgsummit.com/

Virtual goods provide an alternative to advertising revenue stream. Most social networking services introduce some sorts of virtual goods - these usually go by micropayments via premium sms through the mobile. Now.. the good thing about virtual currency is that it brings element of fun into the game, the user does not think twice about paying as he would with real money :)

So we have, social networking services and virtual goods, mobile servies, services with virtual currencies - what be interresting to see a single services blending all these together!

telephony in the cloud

One of the first services to offer hosted telecommunication services by exposing an API for developers to create telephony services was Ribbit - developer.ribbit.com. Ribbit offers a Flex SDK to develop telephony services.

It is interresting to see a lot of startups recently offering cloud based approach to telephony services with even simpler API's that give even the most telco-unexperienced developers the tools to create cool telephony services.

Examples of telco in the cloud services:

ringful.com
www.twilio.com
www.tropo.com
tringme.com

Create ivr servies in minutes without even any hardware.

The T-Mobile Dance

Not much more to say - this is just an excellent marketing action ! I don't know how effective it was in the sense of how it spread across the internet or as word of mouth but since I - a guy here in Poland - am writing about it in my blog I would guess it made some proper fuss. I wonder how I would react if I was there in the middle of the crowd - I'd be really surprised at what the hell is going on.

Sunday links

links to some services worth putting up

calliflower

web scheduled conference calls, documents sharing, local dial in numbers, flat rate pricing

Contails

synchronize mobile phone contacts, exchange contacts, import contacts
..poland startup

free ad based telephony

callingamerica.com

Calling America is a free telephony service. It is web based and you can call any landline or mobile number in the US free of charge. The user has to watch an advertisement on the web site before the call is connected. The web site uses a flash phone to deliver the media. For unregisterd users the calls are limited to two minutes whereas registered users can place unlimited number of 15 minute max telephone calls.

I like this idea, it is close to what I have done in Gadu-Gadu (Gadu naGłos). Users can place free ad sponsored calls to landline numbers in Poland. Calls are limited to 10 mintes in duration - the caller hears up to 10 seconds advertisement before the call is connected and every 2 minutes once the call is connected both the caller and calle hear up to 3 seconds advertisement interruption. Internet telephony is becoming (is) a commodity - business models based on per minute charges just don't work anymore! Fixed lines are nearly as cheap as VoIP now, for a fixed monthly fee you just dont worry about the costs and dont have to sit by the PC to call. Furthermore mobile calls are cheaper and cheaper, you always have the mobile nearby and is just much damn easier to place the call from your fave mobile. As far as I care the only way to go with your VoIP offering is to boundle it with something that generates dough and give the VoIP for free...

mobile industry of 4 billion users

I really enjoy reading this blog. This post gives a 360 overview of the mobile industry worldwide and shows you how huge of an industry mobile actually is.

'Lets start with comparisons. Newspapers? the total circulation of all daily newspapers worldwide is about 480 milllion. Cars? There are about 800 million cars on the planet. Cable and satellite TV subscriptions? About 850 million. Personal computers including desktops, laptops and netbooks, about 1 billion. Fixed landline telephone connections, about 1.2 billion. eMail users about 1.3 billion. Internet users about 1.4 billion. Television sets about 1.5 billion. And credit cards? About 1.7 billion people carry at least one credit card in their wallet.

But there are 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions now in January 2009. More than twice the number of credit card owners, 2.5 times the number of TV sets or internet uses, approx 3 times the number of email users of total landline phones and yes, four times the number of personal computers. This is a monster sized industry, totally towering over all others.'

I really recommend reading this post.

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2009/02/bigger-than-tv-bigger-than-the-internet-understand-mobile-of-4-billion-users.html

some more on camel and wireshark

So what we did to trace Camel over Sigtran with wireshark. As I mentioned in my previous post, we have connected a dedicated linux ‘sniffer’ machine to a port on a switch with port mirroring enabled for the Sigtran port. If you plan to run the traces on a windows machine – install an X server, I have been recommended Xming Server. Then you enable SSH X11 forwarding in your putty session, login to the machine – type wireshark, choose the appropriate interface to capture and you are ready to go. For me the capture did not decode the packets at first – all I got were SCTP packets and the trace did not go beyond that. To get the capture to decode Camel I had to change some Protocol settings in the preferences menu window (Edit->Preferences). First M3UA Version was changed to RFC 3332, then Camel TCAP SSN was changed to 146. After applying the changes the capture properly decoded Camel packets.
Example of initialDPSMS packet:

No. Time Source Destination Protocol Info
324 2009-01-30 17:52:21.464283 2660 3406 Camel invoke initialDPSMS

Frame 324 (278 bytes on wire, 278 bytes captured)
Ethernet II, Src: HuaweiTe_db:c8:e8 (00:e0:fc:db:c8:e8), Dst: HuaweiTe_db:d2:7b (00:e0:fc:db:d2:7b)
Internet Protocol, Src: 10.10.100.17 (10.10.100.17), Dst: 10.10.100.16 (10.10.100.16)
Stream Control Transmission Protocol, Src Port: 4010 (4010), Dst Port: 4000 (4000)
MTP 2 User Adaptation Layer
Message Transfer Part Level 3
Signalling Connection Control Part
Transaction Capabilities Application Part
Camel
invoke
invokeId: present (0)
present: 0
opcode: local (0)
local: initialDPSMS (60)
InitialDPSMSArg
serviceKey: 15
destinationSubscriberNumber: 8105617588F7
callingPartyNumber: 918427090000F0
1... .... = Extension: No Extension
.001 .... = Nature of number: International Number (0x01)
.... 0001 = Number plan: ISDN/Telephony Numbering (Rec ITU-T E.164) (0x01)
Address digits: 48729000000
Country Code: 48 Poland length 2
eventTypeSMS: sms-CollectedInfo (1)
iMSI: 62009195006930F0
TBCD digits: 260019590096030
locationInformationMSC
vlr-number: 918406010011F0
1... .... = Extension: No Extension
.001 .... = Nature of number: International Number (0x01)
.... 0001 = Number plan: ISDN/Telephony Numbering (Rec ITU-T E.164) (0x01)
Address digits: 48601000110
Country Code: 48 Poland length 2
cellGlobalIdOrServiceAreaIdOrLAI: cellGlobalIdOrServiceAreaIdFixedLength (0)
cellGlobalIdOrServiceAreaIdFixedLength: 62F0102AFEA3E0
sMSCAddress: 918406010013F0
1... .... = Extension: No Extension
.001 .... = Nature of number: International Number (0x01)
.... 0001 = Number plan: ISDN/Telephony Numbering (Rec ITU-T E.164) (0x01)
Address digits: 48601000310
Country Code: 48 Poland length 2
timeAndTimezone: 0290100371755140
tPShortMessageSpecificInfo: 11
tPProtocolIdentifier: 00
tPDataCodingScheme: 00
tPValidityPeriod: FF
smsReferenceNumber: 00C03B083264CBE8
mscAddress: 918406010011F0
1... .... = Extension: No Extension
.001 .... = Nature of number: International Number (0x01)
.... 0001 = Number plan: ISDN/Telephony Numbering (Rec ITU-T E.164) (0x01)
Address digits: 48601000110
Country Code: 48 Poland length 2

poor man's tektronix

All SS7 switches, prepaid or IN platforms come with some sort of signaling tracing capabilities. Now, for performing SS7 tests or debugging low, non production traffic they are usually OK - some text file gets written decoded signaling messages. The file can be then opened with notepad and Ctrl+F does the trick. What if we are dubbuging and tracing a problem on a production system with heavy traffic - obviously notepad will not be easy. Well, we can always spend a little (or a lot) on a Tektronix K15 ..but what if we don't want or don't have the budget for Tektronix ? It seems we have some other options and the keyword is Wireshark.
The first, easier option is if we have Sigtran somewhere in the picture. If the SS7 traffic is transported over IP - things are relatively easy. What we do is we setup port mirroring no the switch carrying the Sigtran traffic to replicate that port and connect the replicated port to a PC on which we run Wireshark. That's it. Traffic can be analyzed locally or via remote desktop / vnc.
The second case is if we don't have Sigtran - and this is trickier. I haven't actually tested this one but I think it should be doable. Here we have to tap into the SS7 traffic on an E1. To tap into the E1 we should be able to use Sangoma's PN 633 Tap Connection Adapter. We then connect Tx Net and Tx Cpe ports to a Sangoma card - for example A102. We then configure the ports on the card and dump a pcap log file with wanpipemon. In the end we open the file with Wireshark. Like I said, I haven't yet tried this but I'm quite sure it would work and save us a little money on a K15.

VoIP.. dead.. what ?

Alec Saunder made a post in his blog recently entitled 2008: The Year that VoIP died. His blog is very popular in the VoIP/Tech community so the post just had to trigger a lot of responses and a dabate on whether VoIP is or isn't dead. I'm listing below some of the posts that I find interresting.

Jeff Pulver responds with VoIP is NOT Dead!.

Andy Abramson with Putting VoIP In It's Place.

Alec Saunder again with VoIP: "If you hadn’t nailed its feet to the perch, it’d be pushin’ up the daisies!".

Luca Filigheddu and his post VoIP ? What is It ?

Jeff Pulver continues with VoIP Still Isn’t Dead - Part II.

Saunder again and All we’re talking about is arbitrage.

And then Dan York makes his post Define "VoIP" - and then we can debate whether it is dead!.

While I agree with Jeff Pulver, Andy Abramson and Luca Filigheddu, I think Dan York precisely hits the spot and puts the end to the discussion. VoIP is understood differently by different people, depending on the context and part of the industry they are associated with. For myself 'VoIP' without any context is just a technology, a group of concepts, protocols, codecs - it's the pipelines. VoIP is not a service, it'a a technology that allows to create services.

The first and most popular services created with VoIP were the 'cheap Internet telephone calls' - but theses like PSTN are bound to die - and true 2008 might have been the year the 'cheap Internet telephone calls' died. Or rather - making business from 'cheap Internet telephone calls' died. Why ? Because there are thousands of ITSP's, and they push the margins to absolute minimum. Because mobile calls are now cheap and its just much faster and more convenient to call from your mobile than the PC or hassle of buying installing configuring that VoIP gateway.

As for for the VoIP as technology - c'mon ! it's doing better than ever. It is the underlying voice technology, it's mainstream, it's ITU, 3GPP and Open Source.