Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

This isn't Putney any more, Toto. Not when two chaps in orange wigs shoot past on go-carts, and there's a giant bicycle with footballs for wheels propped up against a lamp post. That and there are lions in football strips all over the place. I suspect they ate the Cow Parade.

Today I am in Munich, for a set of VoIP briefings. As the company I'm talking to has provided the IT infrastructure for the World Cup, this morning I was scanned, security checked, covered in passes, and let into the bowels of the Munich's old airport. Now a conference centre, it's the nerve centre for the broadcast and IT infrastructure that's linking all the stadiums and training grounds. A fascinating place, full of little wooden buildings and cabling, it's going to make cracking copy for my monthly messaging column.

The rest of the day, well, it's been PowerPoint.

I'll upload the picture of the naked anime football fairy later.

Tomorrow I seem to be going to see some football match here in Munich. It'll actually be the first game I'll have ever seen.

Skype 2.0 has just gone into Beta.

It's added video. Is web cam driven video calling over VOIP going to finally be the killer app the video phone folk have been looking for? After all, the folks at Creative are launching a Skype-branded web camera to go along with the Motorola Skype headsets...

Certainly Skype has the mythical multiplier of the network effect on its side as it begins work on popularising video and voice over IP (shall we take a stab at calling it VVOIP?). As I type this there are just under 4 million people connected to the Skype network. All they need is a cheap web cam and a software upgrade, and that's 4 million VVOIP users ready to burn the bandwidth. That's a lot easier to do than when BT, and most recently Alan Sugar, tried to launch video phone services over the POTS network.

Now to get the Gizmo Project folks to add video to their SIP system. Will that give us video blogging for LJ, along with the Gizmo-driven voice blogging service announced earlier this week?

One problem for most of us , wherever we are, is the lack of access to international free phone numbers...

While some SIP-based VOIP softphones allow you to call US 800 numbers, the rest of the world has been a bit of a black hole. However, Skype is now opening up its SkypeOut service to give us all access to toll free-numbers, without needing a subscription...

A useful thing to remember...