Commentary

Junction Networks is pleased to announce that we've been nominated as a finalist for Small Business Computing's Excellence in Technology Award in the VoIP category. The focus of the Excellence in Technology Award is to acknowledge companies that have assisted small business owners in running their own business more productively. If you'd like to vote for us (and we hope you do), you can do so by visiting Small Business Computing and clicking on the Choose the Winners link.

There are a number of products to vote on, with categories in hardware, software, security and e-commerce. I personally can't wait to see the results!

I was sad to hear today that Tanta, a blogger at the finance and economics blog Calculated Risk, passed away. For me, the world will always divided into pre-Tanta and post-Tanta. She will forever mark a change in my reading habits. Outside of my narrow professional field, traditional media and journalism had always made up my primary source of information when trying to make sense of current events in the world around me. But that was before I stumbling onto one of Tanta's posts which shown bright and clear against the murky and frustrating background of noise being spewed forth by the usual suspects. From that day forward, I've looked for and found that the best signal to noise ratio on just about any topic can be had in the blogosphere. Thank you Tanta. RIP Tanta.

Andy Abramson just posted an article discussing SIP vs the calling card. I found it particularly apropos, as I've just returned from a two week vacation in Europe. It's been a few years since I've been in Europe, but what I've always done in the past is get myself to a local newspaper store and purchase a calling card in order to call home and tell my friends what an awesome time I'm having without them. I tried to do this on this vacation, except that I discovered that calling cards seem to have become obsolete, at least in the stores of Aberdeen, Scotland.

However, what I did discover in the local chain supermarket was that I could buy a pay as you go (practically) disposable cell phone. In the supermarket! I could also buy minutes to charge my phone with, for not too much more (including the phone) than I would have previously have spent on a calling card. I was thrilled at the convenience.

Why wasn't OnSIP Hosted PBX the right answer in this scenario? This vacation happened to involve a lot of travel to farms and other remote locations where cell signal was spotty and an Internet connection was out of the question. So one of the downsides to buying a U.K. cell phone was that I had to pay international rates when I called home, which I wouldn't have had to do if I were using a SIP phone and my OnSIP account, but on the other hand, the pay as you go cell worked where there was no Internet connection available.

Had I been on a vacation where I had a steady Internet connection, OnSIP would have been perfect (and far less expensive than pay-as-you-go international rates, which became really ridiculous once I left the U.K.). Touring the farm country of Scotland, Wales and the Netherlands just didn't fit into that profile...at least, not in 2008. The years to come will no doubt bring a different story.

It has finally happened and I couldn't be happier. When I first got my iPhone I couldn't wait for the time when I could make extension to extension VOIP calls via my iPhone. The iPhone has wifi access. All it needed was someone to put some SIP software on the phone and, combined with Junction Networks OnSIP hosted PBX, it would be ready to go.

That time has come. Over the weekend I downloaded fring and after just a little tweaking I got it to work. The device registered to Junction Networks and my first call was to extension 7008: Tim in Chicago. All I had to do was bring up the 'dialer' in fring and dial 7008 and hit the 'SIP' button and it dialed Tim's extension. Tim only saw a call from me, ext. 7001. As far as he knew I was at my desk. In reality I was 30 feet away on my iPhone speaking to him over the iPhone's wifi connection. Next, I told Tim to hang up and call me right back. He dialed extension 7001 and fring notified me on my iPhone that I had an inbound call.

The calls sounded great. There was no echo and no delay. No question the call was better than a normal cell-phone phone call. I shared my story with fring and received the following response from fring co-founder and Chief Technology Architect Boaz Zilberman “fring prides itself on being a best-of-breed mobile Internet communications and community application, offering its users the ability to talk, chat and interact with fellow fringsters and all their online buddies using their mobile Internet connection. Partnerships with forward-thinking companies such as Junction Networks offer a new level of openness and connectivity and provide a glimpse of the future in which mobile Internet and traditional telecoms converge to provide as rich and flexible a user experience as possible.”

The best part is that extension to extension calls are FREE. Junction Networks never charges for extension to extension calls, and since fring calls use the wifi network and not the cellular network, it does not take up cellular minutes.

The fring dial pad interface does not have buttons for actions like 'Hold', 'Transfer' and 'Conference' so those features do not work in the fring interface. DTMF (touch tone) is disabled during a call. It would also be useful to be able to put SIP addresses into contacts and dial a contact's SIP address as opposed to being limited to dialing only numbers. Even with those restrictions, fring is a great start.

AT&T just announced that they are offering free wifi to all iPhone subscribers at any AT&T wifi hotspot. This includes Starbucks. Customers can locate Wi-Fi spots through AT&T's online tool or can locate a Starbucks using this tool.

With Junction Networks, since we allow our users to be registered on up to 10 different devices, this is a free addition to our service offering. There are no additional charges to add a device to the system. (Nor do we charge per user, so you could add a new user and setup the fring device as a user separate from your normal user as well.) All of our users can now setup their iPhone (or other mobile device) to act as their extension on their company PBX. No more 'forwarding calls to your cell phone'. Now, your cell phone IS your extension!

Press/Blogs
Andy Ambramson
TMC

Junction Networks is the opposite of the companies mentioned in this MarketWatch article. Not only are we not imploding, but just this week we hired two new employees. You can look forward to speaking with Eric P. as he starts on the sales/technical support phones next week. Steve is a developer who was hired to help further increase the functionality of our product.

Since we are not VC funded, we are not living in fear that our VC will either pull their funding or not help us 'get to the next level.' Secondly, we are cash flow positive today and plan to stay that way. We did not start Junction Networks nearly five years ago to 'get rich quick' in any sort of dot.com or Internet 2.0 bubble. Our goal was to provide a real service with real value to real customers. We continue to strive to accomplish that every day. To our customers and staff who have helped to get us there, thank you.

--Mike

I agree with the article at "ZD Net about the current Money Crisis being good for Open Source. Red Hat's CEO, Jim Whitehurst, stated that the current economic climate would cause more companies to consider open-source software as an option.

Whitehurst said that this was because open-source software provided a better economic model for creating software. We, at Junction Networks agree: OpenSource, in any economic climate, is a better economic model.

I've also seen it in my personal life. My daughter's friend was throwing out a PC because she couldn't upgrade it. My daughter, who did not have a personal computer, decided to pick it up to see if she could do something with it. She (with some help from me) put Debian on it and, aside from some WiFi issues,it is working great. I would think we'd see something similar in the work-place as well. Instead of upgrading the hardware and software, I would expect to see firms start to shun the bloatware and switch existing hardware to OpenSource alternatives to keep from having to make further capital expenditures. That's why we love OpenSource.

The Wall Street Journal has published an article today about the growth of VoIP in Africa. Research and Markets has a full study available for purchase, but the Wall Street Journal reported some highlights.

Most significantly, the growth of VoIP is stunning, with the study reporting over 100% growth in VoIP usage per year. VoIP makes a lot of sense in Africa, where affordable long distance telephony is a problem and much of the existing infrastructure is government owned and regulated. To wit, VoIP is illegal in 36 African countries, because it is driving down the prices for traditional phone calls over the existing PSTN. There are VoIP providers that operate completely illegally, which says a lot for the demand. The Global Technology Forum has an article detailing which countries had legalized VoIP as of March 2007.

Can VoIP change the world? It certainly seems so.

Junction Networks is a huge proponent of Opensource in general and OpenSource VOIP in particular. Recently I found an amazing resource for understanding the Opensource VOIP universe. I'd like to share it with everyone:

http://www.voipnow.org/2007/04/74_open_source_.html

ZD Net has the following article predicting the demise of SaaS in two years.

For those of you who do not know, SaaS is Software as a Service, a la Salesforce.com. We at Junction Networks use Salesforce.com and I love it. Anywhere I go, home office, NYC office, iPhone, I can get salesforce.com status. The same for gmail (who handles our corporate e-mail). It's the 'access it anywhere' model that makes SaaS such a success.

As computers become more and more mobile, think iPhone, the business user is going to want even more software as a service. I can't image having to load software on every device I may want to use across three or more different operating systems just to get at the information I need.

VOIP is increasingly becoming SaaS. Our own OnSIP Hosted PBX is one such example. Regardless of location, you can access your OnSIP account via a browser and the SIP phone calls are accessible via any SIP device anywhere.

The reasons SaaS will remain are two-fold. One, the internet is more capable to handle high bandwidth applications such as large data transfers and multi-media traffic like YouTube and VOIP. Secondly, devices are becoming ever more powerful, smaller and more portable. More bandwith plus mobile computing is a the perfect recipe for SaaS.

As a software-on-cd provider, are you really going to port your interface to the iPhone or the Zone or the Dare or whichever new mobile device comes to conquer the world? The answer is a SaaS model where the software lives in the cloud and is accessible via any WWW browser anywhere. The indicators for SaaS show no signs of stopping, so, in my opinion, the rumors of SaaS' demise are greatly exaggerated.

Most days I work out of my home office near Philadelphia on a 5 year old Windows 2000 machine. Most of what we do at Junction Networks is virtual. We use Salesforce.com for lead tracking and trouble tickets and Google for document sharing and e-mail. I tried an experiment this week to see how virtual I could be and see if anyone would notice.

I bought a new MacBook Air. My first Mac. I have to say I LOVE IT. Buy Apple stock now. I copied over usersnames/passwords and bookmarks from my Windows box to my new Firefox install on the Mac and left town. I drove 600+ away on a 'working vacation' in Indianapolis (where I grew up and my family still resides) so my kids could hang out with their cousins for a week. I only brought with me my Mac and my Polycom VOIP phone. I wondered if anyone would notice. I didn't tell anyone what I was up to.

First problem: SSH. We use SSH to log into our servers and I didn't have my key on my Mac. I created a new key and e-mailed it to John and asked him to upload it to my .ssh directory so I could log in. I thought my cover was going to be blown right there. But I explained it as 'away from the PC' and trying to log in with the MAC. John got me hooked up and I was logged into our servers. Phew. Over the first hurdle.

Plugged the Polycom phone into the DSL line and it came right up. My username and extensions all 100% intact. I called ext. 7008 to talk to Tim in Chicago and it worked perfectly. The MacBook Air effortlessly connected to the WiFi connection and e-mail was up and running.

I have to say the week went well. I was 100% on the Mac except for one instance where I needed to manipulate an Excel file with some serious string concat functions that aren't in Google docs yet. Other than that, eight hours a day on the MacBook keyboard (including this not-short post) and there were no issues. It is an amazingly comfortable keyboard and easy to touch type on. It didn't crash once and Firefox was lightning fast even with all the tabs open.

I think I made it. No customers or other employees know I'm not in Philadelphia. I was 100% effective here being able to access servers, customer records, e-mail and documents without issue and with the phone, I was accessible via my extension and was logged into both the sales and support phone queue the entire week.

Tomorrow, on the weekly conf. call on Friday, I'll spring it on everyone that I'm 12 hours away from our NYC office, not 1 hour as they assumed. I'm actually pretty shocked that it turned out this well, but I'm sure for our engineering team it will be a case of, 'yeah, we planned it that way.' Which, of course, they did.

I'm not sure how many people can do this in their day job, but I'm happy that I can. I can 'secretly replace' the 'near' me with a 'far away' me and no one notices. Pretty cool.

Now I need to go on vacation where I leave all this stuff at home...