Microsoft To Buy Skype

The giant wheels are in motion for Skype to become Microsoft’s largest ever acquisition at $8.5bn (£5.2bn).  

Luxembourg-based Skype has 663 million global users but doesn’t make a whole lot of money, so what is in it for Microsoft?

Well Microsoft’s chief executive Steve Ballmer summed it up: "Skype is a phenomenal service that is loved by millions of people around the world.”

So in truth, they are buying into potential, and it is huge potential if you consider what could be achieved if the Skype software is married up with the Xbox Kinect and an HD television set. 

For home use, we could potentially be talking home schooling or even patient care delivered remotely and in vision.  For business, Microsoft could potentially challenge the dominance of firms like Cisco and Polycom.

One major stumbling block has to be overcome first though; how do you marry an open voice/video-over-the-internet service with a company notorious for bureaucracy?

If you want to find out more about video, voice or audio conferencing Ask Adodo 0115 970 1471 | solutions@adodo.co.uk | facebook.com/AskAdodo | www.adodo.co.uk

Need to Charge Your Phone? Just Shout at it!

As big believers in the importance of new technology, the latest breakthrough in charging mobile phones has certainly divided office opinion.   

It seems, scientists have devised a gadget that enables sound energy to be converted into electricity, meaning that your mobile phone could be charged as you speak.  The greater the volume of speech, the greater the charge, which could result in people inexplicably shouting into their mobile phones to regain power.

So if you are already irritated on the bus when someone is using their smartphone to play music to the masses, or you’re baffled by those that walk around, seemingly talking to themselves with a head piece hidden behind their ear…be warned…its about to get worse!

Is this set to be the most irritating inventions in history?

Talk Talk Offer Security from the Server

Internet giants, Talk Talk, are about to offer their customers the option of filtering malicious or offensive material out of their broadband service from centralized server level.  They claim to be the first major ISP to offer such a service.

TalkTalk's Home Safe runs on the company's central computer system and sits between the web and individual home connections.  The anti-virus system works by scanning a site that someone wants to visit to see if it harbors malicious programs. Those found to be clean will be put on a "white list" for 24 hours.

Parents worried about their children seeing adult material will be able to log on to a web page and define their own content filters, so that sites containing pornography or online gambling, for example, can be blocked completely.

However, the ingenious selling point, will be the option to put timed locks on certain websites, such as Facebook or game portals, to stop children viewing them when they should be doing school homework.

Rik Ferguson, senior security researcher at Trend Micro is not entirely impressed; one of his most significant concerns is the danger posed by larger sites frequently hit by threats.  He suggested that the 24-hour "all clear" white list might not work for sites such as Facebook due to the frequency and speed that rogue apps are developed.  

Quote for the Week!

"Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other."  

Abraham Lincoln

 

Are Apple Tracking You?

Security researchers have claimed that they have found a hidden file on Apple devices that secretly records their owners' movements.  According to the report filed, data has been stored for years in some instances.  

In a website posting, the company responded to these claims, saying that they had never tracked user location and had no plans to do so in future.  In an online question and answer document, Apple went on to say:

"The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it's maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested."

Apple has now released a software update that cuts the amount of stored data to just a week, claiming that the issue of long term storage was just a bug.  The update is available through the iTunes store.  To prevent the collection of any data completely, users must disable the location services setting on their iPhone or iPad.

Another reason to read the small print!  Permission for the tracking is given by users, it’s tucked away nicely in the terms and conditions for the iTunes store.

SmartPhone Made of Paper, to be Revealed

Canadian researchers have announced that on the 10^th May they will reveal the prototype of flexible smartphone made from electronic paper.

The device emerged from the collaboration between researchers at the Human Media Lab at Queen's University, Canada and Arizona State University's Motivational Environments Research group.  It boasts all the same features as a normal smartphone, and triggers different features when it is bent, folded and flexed.

Creator, Dr Roel Vertegaal believes that "Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years".  

The prototype, that is only a millimeter thick, is built from the same e-ink technology found in Amazon's Kindle e-book reader.  They have bonded this to flex sensors and a touch screen that interprets drawings and text written on it. The prototype will go on display at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Vancouver alongside a device they call the Snaplet.

The Snaplet is designed by the same team, and operates as a wrist strap that can be manipulated in a similar way to the phone.  It is a watch when convex, a PDA when flat and a phone when concave.

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Do You Have More Than One Site?

Adodo provide tailored solutions to all of our clients, this is vitally important when it comes to clients who have multiple sites. 

In all cases we consider the communication systems that are already in place, and what vision the business has for the future.  We then provide cost effective recommendations on the latest technology available to mobilize our clients in delivering excellent service and response to their customers.

Linking systems across sites;

• Consolidates the call analysis for all sites into one manageable system.

• Allows FREE calls between sites. No longer pay thousands a year on calling mobiles or landlines for people in different sites.

• Improves business efficiency as well as communication to customers. This is because calls can be directed to the relevant person across the entire organisation, through the use of a single internal telephone directory.

• Organises your communications and streamlines the way calls are handled. You can have the main business telephone number ring extensions across multiple sites and you can transfer customers directly to an internal extension at the other site - for FREE.

As the Italian’s say “Caio”

Disaster recovery preparation is also a major benefit of multi-sited solutions.   

Why?  Because in a multi-site network with Call Servers distributed across the company's IP WAN, all Call Servers are constantly receiving updates from each other. This provides real resilience against local outages and network downtime. 

Full remote survivability means that even if an IP link between sites fails it will still be business as usual as calls can still be made and received over the local ISDN network, with full system functionality - not just a sub-set of features - available to each employee. Once the IP WAN link is restored, only database changes are forwarded between Call Servers, minimising the traffic between sites.

Disaster Recovery - Be Prepared

Disasters in Business can range from staff not being able to make it into the office due to natural disasters, extreme weather conditions, like the snow, to IT failure, or terrorist attacks.  Knowing the types of disasters that could affect your company will minimize your exposure, as will, having realistic objectives that are based on the needs of the business.

Disaster recovery plans should be clear, precise and comprehensive, concentrating particularly on the recovery and safeguarding of Voice and Data systems, should disaster strike.  A key element to good business continuity is having a disaster recovery plan in place that is tested and ready to implement when needed.

Every organisation, large or small, should have a Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery plan, and Adodo are here to help you do just that.  The SpliceCom maximiser's modularity and distributable architecture make it the ideal business telephone system for contingency plans. Not only is it simple to add maximiser modules to expand your business telephone system, it's just as easy to add extra resilience and system redundancy exactly where it's needed for business critical applications - in a very cost-effective manner. 

5 Tips For Disaster Recovery Planning:

1. Protection Planning and Day to Day Business need to be linked
Voice and Data services are intrinsic to the way modern society does business, what repercussions would you face if your phones stopped working and customers could not reach you?  Whilst people realize the best practice of creating a Disaster Recovery plan, they also see it as a compromise and face issues relating to cost. However, preparing for it should not be a burden and should be integrated with day-to-day priorities.

2. Put a Plan in Place
The plan needs to represent all functional areas within IT prior to, during, and after a disaster. It needs to include applications, networks, servers and storage. Contingencies, such as “what-if” scenarios should be considered as part of the planning process. It should be kept current as a part of day-to-day priorities.  It also needs to be tested regularly to ensure the business can recover the operation successfully and in a timely fashion.

3. Define Disaster Recovery responsibilities 
Roles and responsibilities need to be clearly defined across the spectrum of potential business disasters.  For example, a plan needs to consider redundancy of roles when ensuring that people are available to cover various responsibilities in the process.  It is also important to set sensible Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO).

4. Address Disaster Recovery risk
The definition of what constitutes a disaster also has to be considered because the plan needs to address the right risks.  It is essentially an insurance policy.  However, what happens when the backups don’t work? Application recoverability must be validated through the recovery of backups to the application level.  It is also important to have alternative recovery services; perhaps Data needs to be protected offsite so that if disaster strikes it can be recovered to the affected site.

5. Consider Costs 
Voice and Data protection and recovery requirements may seem expensive, but what is the real cost of downtime? Being able to address the I.T. cost for Disaster Recovery is an issue of integrating Disaster Recovery into standard operations as much as possible. 

There's too much at stake for you not to have emergency management and continuity plans in place. How can we help you?

SIP - Now A Reality

In October last year, it was predicted that 60% of all telephone lines would be replaced by SIP in 2011.  

Modelled on the internet, its openness allows enterprises and carriers to interoperate over IP connections. It is increasingly being regarded as a well designed and mature foundation for VoIP.

SIP trunking technologies are certainly becoming more popular to SME’s as a way to lower costs. Typically, a single ISDN30 line installation could cost in the region of £6,000 and savings could be as great as 40% when replacing a normal BT landline service.

However, there are other benefits too, such as increased flexibility, especially as scaling the number of users is easy to do. There have been problems in the past with the robustness of connectivity for voice packet applications but the technology has vastly improved and it is now considered a viable alternative to ISDN. 

When asked whether SIP trunks are ready to replace ISDN? BT’s Head of Sales Engineering, John Bedwell said; “Yes, though I believe it is a good idea to understand what journey the user is on”

We agree, which is why we encourage users to adopt an auto failover as a resilience mechanism for any potential failures. 

Quote for the Week!

"Action is the foundational key to all success."  Pablo Picasso