VoIP Tech Chat

Our Hero

Early humans found hollowed out rocks to turn into homes, originating the term “Cave men”. ¹ This constraint made community difficult, so humans advanced to creating homes from natural materials, such as wood. Primitive homes were modeled on the cave, with nothing but some closed walls and an uncovered opening. Thousands of years of evolution lead us to create doors that open, close, and lock, and windows that allow us to see out and in, then glass to keep what’s out out and what’s in in, then curtains to cover what’s both out and in. In the end, we have the same caves we had before, with our darkness and privacy. Read the rest of this entry »

How's the view up there?

Cloud Computing, the buzz phrase that won’t go away, attracts new users daily. The most common “cloud” approach uses resources, accessible through the public internet, as a service. Although this computing approach provides (generally) much higher rates of reliability and lower rollout cost, an organization looking to the cloud may find some grey skies on the security forecast.

Besides unknown physical access concerns to your data (as well as not truly knowing who can access your “system”), the main security risk resides with the end user. Take for example Twitter. For the third time this year, someone accessed sensitive corporate documents via an employee email account. If a password can be guessed, cracked, or obtained, chances are your security just became a little foggy (ok, no more cloud puns).

Storing sensitive information in the cloud (including your web accessible email accounts) seems to be the 2009 equivalent of leaving your briefcase on the front seat of your car parked in a very open driveway. The AP recently posted an article on the Twitter reference, and it’s not a bad read. Read the rest of this entry »

Randulo/Zeeek created a fantastic Twitter directory for those VoIP experts / geeks / aficionados / stalkers using Twitter. To add your twitter name to the directory, please go here:

• http://tr.im/voipform

And, to view the directory, point your favorite web browser to:

• http://tr.im/voipview

About VoIP Users Conference

The VoIP Users Conference is open to all levels of VoIP expertise — from the total beginner to the experienced developer. The idea of the conference is to share knowledge, bring new people into the community, and to promote VoIP. Although the conference talks a lot about Asterisk, it is not limited to that. For more information, please visit (and join) www.voipusersconference.org.

About Twitter

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? 

More Resources

• Fred’s Twitter Feed
• Patrick’s Twitter Feed
• VoIP Users Conference Twitter Feed

VoicePulse used Twitter to Update their Network Outage

VoicePulse, a New Jersey based VoIP Provider for residential and business consumers, experienced outages early starting Monday morning. Although the VoicePulse website is down, the company reported via their Twitter account at 10:30am EST:

VoicePulse is currently experiencing a partial service outage due to a generator explosion at one of our NYC datacenters.

Read the rest of this entry »

Heard about Motrin Moms?

So Motrin (yeah, the pain reliever) just a little headache today courtesy of Twitter. They launched a new ad campaign targeting the pains of moms… however… the campaign did not sit well. Not well at all.

Mothers took offense to the add (perhaps the claims that carrying a baby is in fashion now) and posted complaints on twitter. Motrin ended up blogging an apology:

McNeil Meets Twitter – We Hear You

November 17th, 2008

By Kathy Widmer, Vice President of Marketing, McNeil Consumer Healthcare

This weekend, a lot was said about Motrin on Twitter and in the blogosphere. Unfortunately, it was not the kind of conversation that we here at McNeil had hoped to be at the center of.

For those who haven’t been following this, it all began when we ran an advertisement online over the weekend that talked about babywearing – which is a term that we used to describe carrying a child in a sling or wrap.

It was meant to engender sympathy and appreciation for all that parents do for their kids, but did so through an attempt at humor that missed the mark and many moms found offensive.

Now as you can imagine, we certainly didn’t mean to offend moms through our advertising. As a mom of three girls, I understand many of the comments made and agree that we know what’s best for our kids and for ourselves.

On behalf of McNeil, I’m sorry if you found this advertisement insulting. We are are in the process of removing it from our website. Unfortunately, it will take longer for us to remove this advertisement from magazines as several are currently on newsstands and in distribution.

One bright spot is that we have learned through this process – in particular, the importance of paying close attention to the conversations that are taking place online. It has also brought home the importance of taking a broader look at what we say and how it may be interpreted

Our take? Very interesting on how Twitter can create quick impact… now it’s time to move on to something better… like the economy, Darfur, domestic violence, or anything else.

Links:

• Controversial Motrin Moms Commerical on You Tube
• Follow Fred on Twitter