The greatest challenge of my work is to explain exactly what our business unit is doing: Friend: “What exactly it is that you’re doing?” Me: “I am a Product Manager” Friend: “Yes, but of what products?” Me: “Well, we cater for VoIP developers” Friend: “VoIP?” Me: “You know, when you use Skype to call people over the internet? That’s VoIP” Friend: “Oh, so you do Skype?” Me: “No. Not exactly. We enable companies who want to develop products like Skype to do so. But not Skype. Skype is proprietary.” Friend: “So what do you do again?” You get my drift. The TBU (Technology Business Unit) develops standard compliant VoIP protocol stacks and SDKs for developers, who then develop their own products. That’s a mouthful. And now that we have a new video clip, it should make it a lot easier to explain what I do to my friends: Hope you’ll like it as much as I do.
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | November 17th, 2008 | Filed under Miscellaneous
Everybody talks about Unified Communications. If you once wrote a PBX, now you call it UC. If you developed IP Phones, now you brand them as UC. The only problem I see with all the hype around this is that UC is targeted at the enterprise. It’s not that I don’t like enterprises - I work for one, but I think people are missing the consumers on this one. Presence and the Enterprise About three years ago I talked
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | November 11th, 2008 | Filed under Technology
In a keynote speech at ITExpo, Jonathan Christensen from Skype stated that VoIP is dead. I wasn’t there, but there is a lot of information about it on TMCnet. In essence, the following arguments are given to prove VoIP is dead: There’s a new explicit handshake model before calling that uses presence and instant messaging. There are new wideband audio codecs in use. There are video calls. VoIP is dead? Long live VoIP. IMHO these
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | October 2nd, 2008 | Filed under Technology
iPhone 3G is by far the most hyped phone (or even product) out there today. Everything about it is great - even though you can’t get coverage, have lousy battery life, buggy OS updates and general instability when you call, the party in the Apple AppStore is going on without a stop, with over 30 million dollars of sales in the first month alone. iPhone iPhone really changed the mobile handsets market. Other than making the concept of downloading applications
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | August 28th, 2008 | Filed under Clients
IntoMobile reports that Samsung also ditched Linux on one of its planned handsets, that after Asus did the same - this is counterintuitive to my thoughts on Linux on mobile, but I still stand by my conclusions - Windows Mobile is going to lose some ground if it doesn’t do something earth shattering soon. UC is not just about communications and it is also overhyped - I totally agree. Up to the point of there’s no such thing as UC. Skype might have a back door for governments to eavesdrop - there’s no security in proprietary protocols, only in open standards. Some shameless self-promotion - we just released our eVident product, which allows companies to test their networks for video deployment readiness.
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | August 11th, 2008 | Filed under Around the net
[The IP based services such as VoIP (with or without IMS) run over open IP networks. As such, they are susceptible to security threats similar to those in the Internet. As VoIP communications becomes widely used, the security level on it becomes essential. In this guest post, Rasa Siegberg a Senior Systems Engineer from SafeNet provides his insights to VoIP and security.] The Great IP Migration The venerable voice communications industry is undergoing one of the most significant evolutionary steps
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By guest | May 8th, 2008 | Filed under Technology
Can SIP be used for consumer market devices or will it only exist in the enterprise domain? This seems like an easy question to answer - surely it is suitable for consumers as well. I met with a customer last month who is working on a videophone consumer product. Their company is specifically looking for a proprietary signaling protocol. The reason for this is: SIP is good only for the enterprise market I know for a fact that
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | April 7th, 2008 | Filed under Clients, Technology
[I went together on a business trip with Jacob Bridger, a colleague of mine. In one of our many discussions he raised his experience with the IP-PBX he has installed at home. I asked him if he can write it up for this blog and its readers.] Many of us see VoIP as a cheap alternative to the PSTN. Services like Skype, Vonage and others use VoIP to allow us to call PSTN numbers at the last mile using a
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By guest | March 31st, 2008 | Filed under Technology
I read a while ago an opinion stating that there is no need anymore for standards - people choose their proprietary way of communication by installing a given application on their desktop or mobile device - be it Skype or one of the other services out there. I disagree with this view. Proprietary solutions definitely have room in our world. If you take telecommunication, the first thing that comes to mind is Skype. They are based on a proprietary protocol,
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | February 7th, 2008 | Filed under Standardization
[Anatoli Levine is a RADVISION Senior Director of Software Support. Anatoli has over 15 years of experience in engineering and customer management, software design and development, network programming, telecommunications systems, security and computer graphics systems research. He can be reached at alevine@radvision.com.] It’s the beginning of 2008 and of course, people love to make predictions for the year ahead (if anything to guarantee a good laughter after all). Yours truly is not an exception - this post was thought to
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By guest | January 29th, 2008 | Filed under Technology
