Ever asked yourself when will video calling or even voice calling become something prevalent over the internet? I am afraid that the answer is “not so soon”. For this to happen, there are two distinct technologies that come to play: HTML5 (which is still in its early days) and Flash (which is installed on most web browsers worldwide). HTML5 It seems like the two missing pieces to get video calling going in a browser is having the ability to receive
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 5th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
Last week I attended a technology event dedicated to embedded solutions. In one of the sessions, a company focused on operating system abstraction layers (OSAL) presented their take on porting. To make a long story short, the hour was devoted to showing how porting becomes a breeze for customers using their product to the extreme – you just “use the product” and voila – no need to think about porting ever again. As someone who’s done his share of porting
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | June 28th, 2010 | Filed under Technology
The new iPhone 4 was just announced. It’s not 4G or HD – just 4. I have to give it to Steve this time – not calling it 4G means he isn’t jumping the LTE wagon just yet. And not calling it HD means he really knows what HD is, and while the display of the new iPhone is impressive, HD it ain’t. The worst part of it all? It has a front facing camera. And as someone who predicted
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | June 9th, 2010 | Filed under Clients
Our stacks and frameworks run over an operating system abstraction layer called “Common Core“. This allows us to be able to port our products in a relatively short timeframe to other operating systems – sometimes really esoteric ones. In some cases, our customers do the porting to their operating systems on their own – especially when they use a proprietary one that is only available to them. I’ve even met a customer or two that have taken some of our
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | March 22nd, 2010 | Filed under Technology
Last week, Skype announced that it is going to offer the new SILK audio codec in a royalty-free model for any use. This announcement has already sparked a large number of discussions on the web, but the one that caught my eye the most was that of Marin Perez from InformationWeek: “Giving away the codec could be seen as Skype giving up a competitive advantage, but it plays into a long-term strategy of getting its service on as many devices
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | March 16th, 2009 | Filed under Standardization, Technology
Up until not long ago, Skype was solely a downloadable VoIP client for a PC. Nothing more, nothing less. They even allowed third parties to tap in and add their own functionality to their Skype by using an SDK for developers. One thing, however, always remained closed – the communication protocol. While the rest of the world is using H.323, SIP and sometimes XMPP to do VoIP, Skype did… Skype. What does this mean? That Skype needed to conquer the
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | January 29th, 2009 | Filed under Clients
[The ITU have started working on a standard called the Advanced Multimedia System, or AMS. It is a communications protocol intended to solve some of the issues that plague today's protocols and also enable functionality that is not easily achievable with current systems. I have asked Paul Jones, the rapporteur for the AMS expert group to provide some of his insights on this "standard under construction."]One of the exciting things about the technology industry is that technology is constantly changing
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By guest | May 22nd, 2008 | Filed under Standardization
The way in which communication standards are implemented is usually done through protocol stacks. Companies will usually acquire such stacks from third parties and not implement and maintain on their own. How does one select a protocol stack? What makes a protocol stack of one vendor better than that of another? 1. Support Support is definitely the most important aspect of a protocol stack. VoIP products are complex – developers building such products will need all the help they can
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | January 17th, 2008 | Filed under Protocol stacks
