[asterisk-users] FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: NEW CHANNEL DRIVER FORASTERISK RELEASED TODAY

[Dovid Bender]

I wish we could have this for real....

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Olle E. Johansson" <oej at edvina.net>
To: "Asterisk Non-Commercial Discussion Users Mailing List -" 
<asterisk-users at lists.digium.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 01, 2009 10:18 AM
Subject: [asterisk-users] FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: NEW CHANNEL DRIVER 
FORASTERISK RELEASED TODAY


>* NEW CHANNEL DRIVER FOR ASTERISK 1.6 AND VOXSWITCH 3 ADDS AUDIO AND
> VIDEO TO MICROBLOGGING!
>
> In a surprising move, Digium in partnership with Edvina today released
> a new channel driver for Asterisk, chan_tweet. The driver connects
> seamlessly to several microblogging platforms, including Twitter,
> Facebook, Laconi.ca/Identi.ca and GSM text/SMS. The main feature of
> this new module is to add audio and video capabilities to
> microblogging, making the popular microblogging networks a new
> platform for VoIP and IP realtime communication.
>
> - "I have seen that the microblogging solutions building on the social
> network infrastructure have had enourmous unexploited capabilities",
> says Mill Biller at Digium, "I've used it for a long time both
> personally and for the company and we realized early that by adding
> IAX2 support, we could now take these platforms one giant leap forward
> by adding realtime multimedia. I can now spend evenings chit-chatting
> in audio and HD-resolution video with all my audience around the world
> instead of sending short text messages. It's truly awsome!"
>
> Digium contracted Edvina in Sweden, a well-known company in the
> Asterisk community and long-term Digium business partner, to build
> this solution. Edvina has many years of experience in building large-
> scale IAX2 networks, as well as doing development on the IAX2 support
> in Asterisk.
>
> - "IAX2 recently was published in an IETF RFC and we're pushing it
> heavily in all VoIP forums." says Olle Johansson of Edvina, "We're
> hoping that the IAX2FORUM will get a lot of new members that are
> willing to adopt this technology for their intranets, microblogging
> services and VoIP infrastructures. In the coming month, we will
> present more information about new partners with more than 100K users
> that are going to switch from old technologies, like Hype, SIP and H.
> 323. All of these protocols failed, either because they where
> proprietary or simply became too complex. SIP currently has more than
> 5.000 pages of documents describing all the features of the protocol
> and there's no single implementation of all of these to test with.
> Considering the protocol being over 10 years old, this is a sad story."
>
> - "We've done our best to fix the Asterisk SIP channel support for
> customers, but the customer base has been shrinking as more and more
> converted their networks to IAX2 and now, there's simply no one
> interested in us doing that work. We've stated over and over again
> that the SIP channel in Asterisk is broken and no one can prove us
> right or wrong, because the protocol is just too complex."
>
> * The Microblogmedia platform
> ------------------------------------------
> The Microblogmedia(TM) platform, developed by Digium and Edvina, let's
> users use any microblogging network to set up multimedia sessions. By
> compressing an IAX2 call setup event in the microblog message, web
> browsers and clients will connect automatically peer-2-peer if
> possible, or through the MicroBlogMediaRelay network that supports
> seamless NAT and firewall traversal by using automatic IPv6 tunnels.
>
> Asterisk 1.6.3, released later this month, will support this feature
> in the IAX2, H.323 and maybe in the old SIP channel (that is now
> marked deprecated). There is work on adding this feature to ISDN
> calls, by using messages in the D-channel for tunneling the IAX2 call
> setup messages. Digium's VoxSwitch will support this feature in the
> next release, planned for q3 2009.
>
> * Ending the Hype project
> -----------------------------------
> In the same press release, Sock Stevens, product manager at Digium
> finally acknowledged that the Hype channel driver that was launched at
> Astricon 2008 will not be released after all.
> - "We found only one partner to test interoperability with, and that's
> not enough to make sure the channel driver being compatible with the
> protocol. And the protocol wasn't published in any RFC at all, or any
> other document. So we finally gave up. We're now dedicating resources
> for the new chan_tweet project and enhancing presence support in our
> IAX2 solution. With the installed base of IAX2 and the new
> MicroBlogMedia platform, this will be an even more impressive
> solution, reaching millions of IAX2 users in the enterprise as well as
> public sector and homes."
>
> * Technichal factoids
> ----------------------------
> - chan_tweet is the result of the project labelled "Codename
> orangepeel" amongst the development team and builds on the new
> "Pinemango" architecture. This is the first channel driver not
> connecting directly to the Asterisk core, but to the Pinemango API
> over Adversion, the Ruby framework developed by Phil Jaysip.
> - The MicroBlogMediaRelay IAX2 platform is an open distributed network
> that builds on IPv6 and a facebook application, thus using the
> enormous bandwidth provided for free by the Facebook(TM) platform
> - chan_tweet will be released with the core module in Open Source, but
> with a license exception for plugin developers to add proprietary
> modules, like the Wireless Village plugin provided by the 3GPP project
> and the Unistim Microblog Solution by Nertol Networks.
>
> For more information, please do not contact Digium sales.
>
> To be released: 2009-04-01
>
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