Adhearsion - Great name, great project

The Adhearsion project (which I have been following for a while) has some big news today. A new site Adhearsion.com and a new member of the team, and friend of mine Jason Goecke. Jason knows call centres and telephony probably better than anyone I know - this guy gets Voice and Web 2.xxx. Jason is excited about Adhearsion, if I knew nothing else about the project that would be good enough to get me interested.

Adhearsion (from the site):

is a new way to write voice-enabled applications. It's not just an API or library — it's a fully-featured framework, the first of its kind, designed for maximal code reuse and intuitiveness. The name "Adhearsion" is a combination of "adhesion" and "hear" because Adhearsion shines best when integrating technologies with voice.

I will be watching very closely what is coming out of the Adhearsion project. This is something completely different in a very hot market segment. IfByPhone, Ribbit (now BT), Voxeo are all sucessfully entering/defining the market with unique voice services platforms. Adhearsion is something a little bit different - marrying Asterisk with Ruby without any of the complications.

Adhearsion will make the 'cool voice stuff' mainstream - I have been a long proponent of IVR becoming web/visually based - Adhearsion is the first step to that reality. I encourage you to check it out, play in the Sandbox and start combining the web and voice together in the most complicated; yet simple ways easily.

Superbowl - Etrade Baby

It is almost that time - the big game is on Sunday, E-trade has a teaser video out of some of the video that didn't make the cut for this years commercial.

Classic stuff - hat time Rimarkable.

Skype for Mac beta 2.8 with ScreenSharing!

Dan York has the scoop on the new Skype for Mac beta 2.8. Probably the most interesting for me is the Screensharing feature. This has been a favourite of Skype developer partners for some time, and it is now native to the Skype for Mac client. It even supports dual monitors!! full screen and application only.

It was announced at the Showstoppers event this evening - pre MacWorld.

New features (from Dan's Blog):

• Skype Access
• Screen Sharing (awesome)
  
• Improved chat management: ability to sort chats in the drawer and set priorities to chats
• Quick Add: much easier to add people to chats
• Mood message chat: mood message updates from your friends as chat messages
• Large avatars: 256x256 pixels
• Hidden avatars in incoming contact requests
• Ability to add your own notes to contacts

You can check out the UI on Dan's podcast.

Circumventing SMS - Nokia takes on Blackberry Messenger

Nokia has launched a push email/IM service called OVI. It is a very smart move for Nokia, as they have 200M handsets worldwide and they have just opened the door to low cost or free federated text, media and presence connections between all of them.

One of my absolute favourite features of my Blackberry is the BB Messenger application - it is a great IM/File transfer/Voice Note Sender/presence app., exclusively for BB owners on any network anywhere, you exchange PINS and you're good to go. Until you start using it, it is hard to explain how handy and productive this application is. It provides INSTANT communication with other BB users, it is so handy in the office, a tradeshow or an airport - you can't believe it. The best part of course is it is completely free for anyone who has a Blackberry, no bandwith charges - only a small user fee per month on most carriers worldwide.

Now that Nokia is rolling out this OVI service globally (Australia, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom and Venezuela to start) it will take very little time for this to start resonating with there customer base - I expect Apple to follow suit with something for iPhone users as well.

Long live the unfederated IM networks.

Gapless Playback is irritating...

My love affair with my new Mac continues, but there are a few things that are a bit irritating. iTunes insists on running a process called "Determining Gapless Playback Information" - this process looks at all the albums in your collection and with some algorithm allows you to play them back with no crossfade gap. Good in theory, but bad if you have a 250 GB music collection on a shared network drive. There is no way to turn this feature off, and it basically renders iTunes completely useless while it runs.

It will probably take 2 days to chug through my collection, and once finished; since I don't rip entire albums for the most part, it probably won't have much effect.

I also have all the album art for my collection, but iTunes seems bent on downloading it again, I can't seem to get it to 'see' that it already exists.

I think there are some ways to tinker with your iTunes folder, but I haven't figured out quite everything.

Transfer your Skype IM history from PC to Mac

Having recently made the jump to Mac (and loving it) the first thing I installed on my new MacBook was Skype. It is fantastic on the Mac by the way - with the built in iSight and screaming fast processor - the HD video and voice sessions on the Mac are incredible. The omni-directional mic is just fantastic. The Mac was built for Skype.

Much like my Outlook .pst file, I wanted to transfer my chat/IM history to my Mac. It is quite simple and here are the steps.

First - on your PC go to: C: > Documents and Settings > "username" > Application Data > Skype >"username"

and copy the entire "username" file that you want to transfer.

Copy this information to a thumbdrive and transfer it to your mac desktop to which you have Skype already installed. Place the folder on your Mac desktop and open Finder.

Navigate to "Username" > Library > Application Support > Skype and then drag your username file from your desktop to the Skype folder and replace the folder with the new one you are dragging.

Presto.. start Skype and you have your IM history.

I did get an odd "password is incorrect" notice on my first boot of Skype, but after I entered it - I had my IM history intact.

I have been Liberated - the Mac switch is done. Microsoft officially sucks.

A quick post to hereby declare my Apple Fanboy status. After much deliberation, thought, and planning - I have made the 100% switch to Mac.

I can't really put into words how much I love this new MacBook - the trackpad is just fantastic. Until you use one and see your productivity skyrocket you can't fully understand.

One hiccup during the switch that I must say was most irritating, and I do apologize to the CSR @ Microsoft I probably made cry last week, was that Microsoft Entourage isn't compatible with Microsoft Outlook. I am not kidding - you cannot import your inbox/sent items .pst file to Microsofts very own product on the Mac. They provide no conversion tool, you are just SOL. There is a complicated and time consuming method of importing to Thunderbird then exporting to a Mac friendly format - but if (like me) you live inside your PST file, I strongly suggest paying the 10$ for O2M - this software from LittleMachines did exactly what it was supposed to do and converted my entire .pst folder to mBox.

Apple isn't perfect, but compared to Microsoft - they are in a league of their own.