Open source options for VoIP

The quickly evolving telecom world is turning out to be one the best sources of sustained growth for open source offerings.

In regards to conventional voice technology, open source software never posed a strong challenge, mainly because the “plain old telephone system” is locked into proprietary PBX bundles of hardward and software.

Lately, the VoIP option has been gaining serious ground, both with businesses and consumers. This huge shift towards IP-based networks lets open source developers apply their “open approach” to the world of communications.

Anyone with a little interest in the field of VoIP (at the office or… at home) can try out the finest solutions, that are currently made available, by installing and deploying the following open source initiatives:

• Asterisk – Its open source code was originally written by Mark Spencer so you may think of Asterisk as the Linux of VoIP.
• Digium – A company led by Mark Spencer (yep, the guy behind Asterik) that makes VoIP software.
• Pingtel – Asterisk’s rival open source platform for VoIP called SIPFoundry that closely adheres to SIP standards (they landed Amazon.com, as a customer).
• Fonality – Holds the key to older PBX systems by making Asterisk IP PBX-enabled, therefore taking aim at larger companies and entrenched vendors.

Many experts compare the rise of open source voice over internet protocol options in the business world to the widepsread adoption of Apache, for web servers. In both cases, uptime is critical and the Linux foundation has proved it’s “king of the hill” on that front.

Expect the adoption of these (and other) open source VoIP options to accelerate as more people learn about them.

Tags: open source, voip, linux, business world, apache, web servers, voice over internet protocol

Google gets serious about custom searches

While you may already know about the Google Co-op service, Google’s official blog has announced an awesome new use for the co-op engine and it’s named Google Custom Search.

While you may view Google’s regular search engine as somewhat generalist, the Mountain View search king is looking for help… from you, to build up your very custom search engine ideally pertaining to matters for which you’re knowledgable (or otherwise interested).

The results for your own “custom search engine” (or niche engine, whichever you like best) come directly from the huge “generalist” Google search feed.

In just a few minutes, anyone with basic web knowledge can establish their very own search engine catering to a vertical theme of their liking. Of course, users can still search for anything they like since they’re not limited to any given theme.

In a nutshell, any custom search engine “administrator / founder / maintainer” can:

• Add (apparently) countless URLs to their customized search engine;
• Exclude certain results or directories from different sites;
• Place a convenient search box to search results from their own website;
• Customize the appearance to match their website’s looks;
• Invite others to contribute to their custom search engine;
• Add “refinement labels” that help searchers narrow their query phrases to a particular sub-set of relevant topics.

Best of all, the more a custom search engine is visited, the better, mainly because the founder gets paid for every click on Google’s AdSense pay-per-click ads.

You might also want to take a look at the bookmarklet (Google Marker) feature that allows you to instantly add web destinations to your customized search engine while surfing online. Furthermore, you can allow volunteers (or not) to edit your search engine and add new web sites.

Overall, you could label this new Google initiative as another step towards “social search” where everybody can help everybody else find the best information possible.

Start your very own customized search engine right away!

Tags: google co-op beta, co-op, coop, social search, custom search engines, urls