Tzah 2.0

Did you know you can make conference calls from your mobile? Yes, we can! This functionality is hidden inside your phone and my guess is that 99% of mobile users are not aware of it. Here’s a quick step-by-step on how to do it on Nokia S40 phones. I welcome you to add in the comments explanations for other manufacturers.

1. Call someone! (that’s easy, right?) and wait for your friend to answer. Let’s say his name is Riker.
2. Press options, New call (ah ha!) and type the phone number of another friend. Let’s say his name is Worf. Wait for Worf to answer (Kapla!)
3. Back on your phone, you’re now talking to Worf while Riker is on hold. Now press options, scroll down and press on – yes, you got it – Conference. Now you, Riker and Worf can speak all together.
4. If you wish to add another friend - Data for example - simply repeat steps 2 and 3.
5. To finish the conference just hang up. All your friends will be disconnected from the call.

A word of caution. You should check with your operator how much this calls will cost you. I’m not sure it’s just the rate of one call times the number of participants in the conference call.

Finally, if you wish to make low-cost conference calls to friends and colleagues abroad, you can use JAJAH’s conference call service. If you’re not in front of your computer, you can make conference call as described above with JAJAH.Direct numbers.

We recently began to explore Freeswitch. This is a powerful telephony platform that provides many communication functionalities with  agile configuration. Amongst others, we looked at the dingaling implementation which enables communications with GoogleTalk using XMPP implementation. We quickly found out there’re a few steps to complete before the code will run on Windows/VS environment. So, instead of having others struggle like we did, here’s a list of the required steps. Have fun.

1. Configuration
   1. Enable mod_dingaling by un-commenting on modules.conf.xml the line . Alternatively, you can run on the console load mod_dingaling.
   2. Enable debug mode for the module (dingaling.conf.xml). It’s not required but will helps in understanding what’s going on.
   3. Create jingle-profile like the one below: 

      <include>
        
        <profile type="client">
          <param name="name" value="<meaningful name>"/>
          <param name="login" value="<your username>/gtalk"/>
          <param name="password" value="<your password>"/>
          <param name="server" value="talk.google.com"/>
          <param name="dialplan" value="XML"/>
          <param name="context" value="public"/>
          <param name="message" value="Send help or ? to learn more"/>
          <param name="rtp-ip" value="$${bind_server_ip}"/>
          <param name="ext-rtp-ip" value="$${external_rtp_ip}"/>
          <param name="auto-login" value="true"/>
          
          <param name="sasl" value="plain"/>
          
          <param name="tls" value="true"/>
          
          <param name="use-rtp-timer" value="true"/>
          
          <param name="exten" value="1000"/>
          <param name="vad" value="both"/>
        profile>
      include>
      

2. TLS. You need this to insure your XMPP stanzas are encrypted as required by the specifications. There’re few steps you need to do on windows:

   1. Install GnuTls for windows. Pick the latest exe file. At time of writing, the last one is 2.7.3.
   2. Assuming you’re using visual studio as your IDE, open visual studio command prompt (not your normal console) and type: lib /def:libgnutls-26.def on GnuTls bin folder. This will create a libgnutls-26.lib that can be used as a import library for Visual Studio projects.

3. Configure library ixemel to work with TL S libraries:

   1. Add additional include directory

        

   2. Add additional dependency. 
        

4. Last step, make sure the TLS dlls are copied to the configuration environment. For example, if you’re running on debug mode, you should have the following files in /Debug:

   • libgcrypt-11.dll
   • libgnutls-26.dll
   • libgnutls-extra-26.dll
   • libgnutls-openssl-26.dll
   • libgpg-error-0.dll
   • libtasn1-3.dll

   A post-build event should take care of it:

   xcopy "$(SolutionDir)GnuTLS-2.7.3\bin\*.dll" "$(SolutionDir)$(OutDir)\" /C /D /Y /S /F

5. I-can’t-find-config.h-step. Copy it from \libs\win32\iksemel. Make sure the following line is not commented:

   #define HAVE_GNUTLS 

6. Questions?

High broadband speeds means abundant  information. However, time remains constant. Hence, less time to consume all this  information. Consequently, we become headlines-junky seeking immediate information rush but no thorough exploration. Not good.

I’m not the first to say that but, hey, at least I didn’t take too much of your time reading this post, absorbing and moving to the next topic.

Have you heard the latest news about Google Mobile latest cool feature? Well, I’m not talking about Google Latitude, an application that can show you friends near your position. Though cool and have much revenue potential, it will take several iterations for the application to know which of my friends I’m interested to share with my location and equally important – when! Perhaps some integration with the phone’s call log can help show people the user’s interested in keeping in touch with.

Still, I think an even more important, and immediate, feature is coming from Google Mobile. Android voice search is a way for you to search from Android by voice. Finally! Let’s face it. You can have the latest, coolest, feature-packed , girls will fall at its sight, man will envy you smart-phone (BTW, it’s time to come up with a better name). However, it will be pretty useless if you can’t easily activate it. And what easier way do you have to activate your phone than your own voice? I know, I know. Gestures, stylus, customized buttons and QWERTY keyboard are nice and help using the applications. However, in many cases that’s still not comfortable. With voice search you can literally tell the search widget your query.

How great is that? The trouble with many mobile apps is that they’re trying to mimic desktop application by squeezing user interface to ~3 inches (and that’s usually with smart phone). Using voice should be the first choice for any mobile application. Now, let’s consider the possibilities. Hopefully, as voice-recognition technology becomes better and available for non-English languages, we could see more voice-activated applications on mobile phones.