A1 InnovationDays

:: Final Call for the International Developer Challenge A1 InnovationDays ::

Since almost 4 weeks, the international developer challenge A1 InnovationDays attracted more than 30 ideas from creative minds. The challenge is open to anyone who addresses the grand theme “Open Communication by Open Standards” and can come up with ideas for cool services built on IP-based communication (SIP & IMS).

Ideas can be posted on the platform

www.a1innovations.at/en/static/a1innovationdays until August 15, 2008.

All entries are open for voting and discussing by all users. On August 15, the 10 highest ranked ideas will be short-listed and judged by a panel of recognized experts as well as representatives from the sponsors. End of August, the best teams behind the ideas will be invited to a prototyping event near Vienna in order to realize their ideas and demonstrate their potential. The winning team can choose among several awards, such as a week of powder snow skiing in Austria. After that, the sponsor (mobikom Austria) is keen to bring your idea to the market.

All submissions must be based on Open Source Software.

: More Information :

For all details about this challenge, go to the FAQs:

http://www.a1innovations.at/en/static/faq

For registration, go directly to: http://www.a1innovations.at/registrierung

: Important dates ahead :

August 1, 2008: Two prizes for the best interim ideas will be awarded

August 15, 2008: End of idea entries (CET 24:00)

August 18, 2008: Announcement of the five selected teams for the prototyping event

August 29 - September 1, 2008: Prototyping event at the monastery Und

(near Vienna: http://www.und.at/)

OPENSER renamed to KAMAILIO

Here is the announcement of project rename:

"OpenSER project and the community around it have grown considerably in the past three years. Because of its extensive development and high adoption rate, conflicting interests related to the OpenSER name and similar trademarks emerged.

Consequently, we have been forced to find a new name for the project that stands on itself and represent the project in its future expression.

Starting with version 1.4, OpenSER is called Kamailio. Existing OpenSER users can keep on enjoying the benefits of the best open source SIP server available on the market under this new name.

All project infrastructure like the website and mailing list will be in the future accessible under the kamailio.org domain, but we will keep the old one functional for a transition period to make the switch as easy as possible for you.

Kamailio is a hawaiian word. Kama'ilio means talk, to converse. It was chosen for its special flavour. It is hopefully easy to remember and the meaning fits well with the project purpose. We hope you like it too!"

Visit: http://www.kamailio.org

SIP/SIMPLE-XMPP Developer Workshop 2008

INRIA, French National Research Network in Computer Science is hosting an workshop dedicated to SIP/SIMPLE-XMPP Interoperability. The event aims to bring together people with large expertise in both protocols, interested in development, testing and deployment of SIP/SIMPLE-XMPP solutions.

I am going to be present and coordinate the XMPP interoperability tests and development for OPENSER.

The workshop takes place between September 2 and 5, 2008, in Paris, France.

Among participating projects and companies:
- Asterisk
- INRIA
- Edvina
- Asipto
- AG Projects
- OPENSER
- MSRPRelay
- eJabberd

Read more details here…

RTP Proxy in Erlang

Just found this project:
http://code.google.com/p/erlrtpproxy/

erlrtpproxy seems to be a RTP relay for OPENSER written in Erlang, an alternative to RTPProxy and Meidia Proxy. I didn't dig for more details, but I guess it is working together with the nathelper module in OPENSER.

Hope that Erlang fans will enjoy it.

Updates of NAT Traversal Solutions for OPENSER

There were lot of development efforts in the two options available for NAT traversal with OPENSER.

Mediaproxy relesed next generation version: v2.0. More details at:

http://ag-projects.com/MediaProxy.html

Rtpproxy brings lately lot of new stuff, information is available at the dedicated site:

http://www.rtpproxy.org

Approaching OPENSER v1.4

The time for a new major release is approaching. Last minute discussions about some lately introduced code keeps the situation a bit unclear for the moment regarding the release day.

However, this post tries to underline the new features and important aspects that happened during last development cycle.

There are six new modules:
- db_oracle - database driver to connect directly to Oracle servers
- dialplan - regular expression based dialplan management
- nat_traversal - helper for nat traversal
- peering - RADIUS based peering
- ratelimit - call rate control module
- userblacklist - user based blacklisting

Lot of other new features and refurbishing in existing modules such as carrierroute, dispatcher, dialog, mediaproxy, msilo, cfgutils, pdt, textops.

Review of the DB API, fixup functions, new transformations and pseudo-variables are some of the core updates.

Related to this cycle, worth to mention the first OPENSER Devel Guide, a free, electronic book available at:

http://www.asipto.com/pub/openser-devel-guide/

and first printed book about OPENSER:

Building Telephony Systems With OPENSER.

I encourage everyone to start testing the upcoming OPENSER 1.4. Will be a big step forward.

OPENSER Dinner, Berlin - remarks

What can I say first, great beer! Although, since I have been there last time, the place has changed the name, still nice and good quality.

The talks focused a bit on the two events taking place in Berlin, the AsteriskTag and the LinuxTag. Part ot SUN/OpenSolaris team joined us -- some one there worked hard in the past to make OPENSER compiling on OpenSolaris with the native compiler. Thanks.

As the VoN show in Amsterdam was canceled, this was the last social event in this cycle. I returned to work at ASIPTO, preparing for a new major release.

AsteriskTag and LinuxTag 2008 - week in Berlin

I covered a bit about AsteriskTag2008 and LinuxTag2008 at:

http://www.asipto.com/index.php/2008/06/04/remarks-asterisktag-and-linuxtag-2008/

There you can find links to some photos and the slides I presented in the first day of AsteriskTag.

I had no photos from the OPENSER dinner in Berlin, on the 28th, but I will post about soon.

OPENSER Dinner, Vienna - remarks

Very good restaurant - delicious food and local made beer - credits for selection goes to Andreas Granig. Located in the old part, in the city center, the place was somehow protected by the tourists crowd, offering a quite atmosphere.

As we got two visitors from Bratislava, Slovakia, the discussions went global wise. A hot topic (I guess not only there) was the cancellation of VoN show in Amsterdam. What will be the meeting place from now on for the VoIP guys as the VoN disappeared? Who knows, lot and lot of discussions and opinions here and there on the web forums and mailing lists...

Personally I got an update regarding WiMAX, deploying phase started in some countries. Although I know there are still many issues, the pressure of production environments will give more confidence and attract investors and creation of new or better products and solutions for this technology.

And of course, answering many times, again and again, it is VoIP in that dark castle in Transilvania, only SIP, SIP, SIP (I think is actually lower case :-) )...

Interview: Mysql and Openser

I have found an interesting interview by MySQL with Juha Heinanen, developer and management board member of OPENSER Project. Targeting the carrier grade deployments, the key components approached are the MySQL cluster and OPENSER, to leverage reliable and distributed storage system for routing large volume of VoIP calls.

See the interview here.

OPENSER Dinner, Berlin, May 28, 2008

Bound to Asterisk Tag (http://www.asterisk-tag.org) and Linux Tag (http://www.linuxtag.org) events, Henning Westerholt and I will take care of an OPENSER group meeting in Berlin, Germany, May 28 at 20:00.

The place is a small brewery next to Chartlottenburg Castle in Berlin, named Lusinen Brau, the website:

http://www.luisenbraeu.com/

Organized in same idea of casual community meeting, everybody is welcome to join at any time. It is recommended to contact us to announce your participation so you got your seat reserved.

http://www.asipto.com/index.php/contact-us/

Confirmed Participants:
- Henning Westerholt, developer OPENSER, 1&1 Germany
- Elena-Ramona Modroiu, co-founder OPENSER, asipto.com
- Olle E. Johansson, main SIP developer Asterisk, edvina.net
- Dan Bogos, VoIP consultant, itsyscom.com
- Daniel-Constantin Mierla, co-founder OPENSER, asipto.com
- Bogdan Pintea, developer SER, Iptego

OPENSER Workshop, Berlin, May 26-27, 2008

The Asterisk Tag conference hosts two presentations related to OPENSER. In the first day, starting with 4:00pm, will be Asterisk and OpenSER - blending together for scalability. The main focus will be how to plug OPENSER to scales Asterisk-based services.

The next day will be a two hours workshop dedicated to OPENSER. The target is to reveal where OPENSER fits in IP communication services, Voice over IP and beyond, and to give the starting point to use it.

The evening of 28th May will host an OPENSER Social Networking Event at Luisen Brau in Berlin (more details in a new post very soon).

openser.vim

I just found VIM OPENSER syntax specs for configuration file, courtesy of Stanislaw Pitucha. As a heavy VIM user, I am glad to have it available. You can download it from the VIM site.

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2242

OPENSER Dinner - Vienna, Austria, May 24, 2008

The OPENSER Dinner to be held in Vienna, Austria, is scheduled for May 24, 2008, 19:30 at Plutzer Brau

http://www.plutzerbraeu.at/plutzerbraeu.html.

Already confirmed the presence:

- Elena-Ramona Modroiu, co-founder OpenSER, COO at http://www.asipto.com
- Andreas Granig, developer OpenSER, CEO at http://www.sipwise.com
- Daniel-Constantin Mierla, co-founder OpenSER, CEO at http://www.asipto.com

See photos from the previous similar event (Barcelona, Spain).

Next event will be in Berlin, in the week with Asterisk Tag and Linux Tag (more details soon).

The OPENSER Dinner series targets local community meetings around the world for social networking and business discussions. If you want to participate (free of charge, everyone pays for its expenses) and secure a seat, contact us at:

http://www.asipto.com/index.php/contact-us/

OPENSER v1.3.2 Released

New minor release in the series of 1.3 is out as v1.3.2. It includes a bunch of fixes from the time of v1.3.1 release. All running 1.3.x in production should upgrade.

The compatibility is kept at database level and for the configuration file. No need to apply changes, just install the new OPENSER version.

More details at www.kamailio.org.

See detailed changes for this release in ChangeLog file.