beelinebill October 29th, 2007

What a time to be in Boston! Arrive as the Patriots close out the first half season at 8-0 by blowing out the Redskins. Follow that with the closing out of their second World Series win in 4 years. The inaugural Digium Asterisk World follows these winning events at what is expected to be the largest VON show in recent history. We are ready to enjoy this first ever event! Mark Spencer will keynote Wednesday morning on “The Road Ahead is Open!” while Danny Windham will kickoff the Digium Asterisk World Conference itself, with “Hello World” as the open source telephony movement enters mainstream.

What is it like to be in Boston? Each channel on the hotel TV has “specials” on the Red Sox. The Red Sox Nation - the worldwide fans of the winners - go wild everywhere! In watching the winners’ recaps on these TV shows, I am drawing parallels to our approaches. Preparation. Each of these winners have outstanding coaching staffs and management teams. Each of these winners prepare mentally and physically for each event, game or series, and it shows. Each of these winning teams emphasize teamwork. Each of these winning teams, when asked about the approach, answer that they focus and plan one game at a time - one situation at a time - one event at a time. Most importantly, each team has a game plan. Baseball never used to have a game plan, but with the technology available today with real time and open communications statistics are available to make situational plans and are used heavily by these winners.

Digium approaches our growing open source Asterisk-based business applying all the Boston winners’ strategies. Excellent management team and coaching staffs with preparation for each event with an emphasis on teamwork, and we approach each event with a game plan. Our team is a mix of veterans and youngsters that mirrors the Red Sox and Patriots.

Yes, it’s a great time of year to be in Boston! Terrific fall weather, the BIG DIG is over, the Red Sox win the World Series, and the Patriots celebrate their season thus far - while Fall VON 2007 kicks off featuring Digium Asterisk World front and center. Digium Asterisk World is the coming out party of Mark Spencer’s Nation - the Asterisk believers who have followed and supported Mark since creating Asterisk and finding Digium, the Asterisk Company - as we bring Asterisk IP Telephony to Business. Red Sox, Patriots, Digium Asterisk: Winners

• Community , Flip flops , Tradeshows
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malcolmd October 22nd, 2007

Aloha,

As Product Manager for so many of the things that make your life easier, I want to spend most of my time talking about boards and appliances. But, if that’s all I talk about, then many of you are going to get pretty board, get it, especially those of you that want to hear about the things that are uniquely Digium. So, after a hiatus to think of things other than products, I’m back.

You’ve likely read the last couple of posts here and have seen a few pictures of the new building. But, you haven’t been inside it and you’re asking yourself:

“When I travel to Digium to meet with them about buying millions of dollars of product, in what conference room will I be?”

Well, if you’re on the ground, you’ll meet in either the:

Emperor, Magellanic, or Chinstrap conference rooms.

Good Linux nerds are already clued in at this point; but, I continue.

If you’re on the first floor, second for you Yanks, then you’ll be meeting in the Galapagos, Adelie or Macroni (not Macaroni) conference rooms.

And, if you’re on the second floor, third for you Yanks, then you’ll be meeting in the Fiordland, Gentoo (my personal favorite, not to be confused with Gentoo), Rockhopper (which I simply can’t resist referring to as Rock Lobster) or the Mark C. Smith boardroom.

“We were at a party, his ear lobe fell in the deep. Someone reached in and grabbed it. It was a Rock Lobster.” - B52’s.

• Flip flops
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beelinebill October 18th, 2007

Let’s have some fun here. I think most readers know we have been running a “Bold Innovations Award” initiative and will shortly announce the winners. We were thrilled at the number of entries and will continue to grow this event annually. Here is another one, but we won’t be giving away any major awards, only kudo’s!

Who has the best and funniest Asterisk quotes? They can be customers, press, analysts, executives, anyone - as long as they are in good taste! We’d like you to send them to us, and they can be in the comment section below or in an email to us at Digium. As with the Bold Innovations, send your emails to jwebb@digium.com. We will collect them and have some fun with them and share them here in the future.

I will start with a couple of interesting quotes I’ve heard. In a recent phone call with the moderator of a panel I will be on for the National Association of Realtors Conference in Las Vegas, he said, “Bill, you don’t mind if you go first on the panel, do you?” Now my philosophy is I always like to go last if possible so I can use what those before me say and I work it into my talk. When I asked him why, he simple said, “Because without Digium there is no Company B!” I realized at that point he knew what he was talking about, since company B’s product is based on Asterisk!

What was so much fun for me is this occurred the week we were briefing press and analysts about both the Switchvox acquisition and the 3Com partnerships, which were days apart. Now there were many quotes that week. I think my favorite was “Wow!” from the TMC team as Mark and I briefed them. They enjoyed hearing it as much as we said it as it gives them more fuel for their blog.

At tradeshows, events, on blogs, and in the press - there are many gems. Send them along. If we get some verifiable gems, we may send out some T-Shirts and/or other Asterisk swag!

See you again soon! With Digium Asterisk World coming in only 11 days, hope you are planning to visit as the event is shaping up to be terrific! I will also pick up some solid material for this blog. Look for several announcements from Digium in the next couple of weeks! Ready to send your quotes?

• Community , Flip flops
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beelinebill October 10th, 2007

Welcome to our new building! It’s been a week now and we are settling in. We have lots of conference rooms for meetings which were at a premium last week in the old building! What’s more exciting, is we have our new duds! Offices are terrific, morale is high after closing another strong quarter…..people are happy designing and decorating their new offices and simply enjoying Digium and are working hard! Many of us have great views of NASA Space Center while others of serene woods. As the luck would have it, I have views of both the NASA Space Center and the front door so I can size up visitors!

Mark has a nice palace with a great “woods view” and is attempting to get Guardian re-assembled. His power supply (old 286) needs replacement (do you have one you can offer?) and is delaying Guardian’s re-install.

Markocam is going back in as well, but more on him later! Here are some more observations:

- all new printers require an executive training class on copying, printing , faxing, cropping, etc. Obviously not open source!

- Malcolm’s music has followed him! (See Malcom’s post)

- Visitors are enjoying visiting! Yes, there is lots of room and plenty of place to collaborate. The building fosters teamwork.

- Digium’s work now is to complete the integration of Switchvox and bring to SMBs the world’s most advanced graphical user interface on the planet for customer premise based solutions.

- We are also finalizing Digium Asterisk World (www.digiumasteriskworld.com) which is now in less than 2 weeks!

- We are focused on quality programs for our users, customers, our channels, and our community.

- We are focused on growing and supporting the Asterisk Community.

- We are focused on partners.

- Our approach is changing and for you, translates into achieving the goals of the community and driving Asterisk into the mass market.

I suspect more people will personalize their offices in the coming days. We will share some office pictures here as well as share some stories that fall into one of my favorite categories: “You can’t make this stuff up!” These are pictures that can be sold or bartered……So stay tuned (just kidding). I’ll share more over the coming days and others will join me as well. So back to coffee….one thing this building always has available!

………….bill

• Flip flops
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malcolmd October 5th, 2007

Howdy,

Yes, it’s another products posting.

First up, all of you existing HPEC users out there should upgrade now, ahorra, to the newest release, 9.00.005.  For those of you that might have done your first HPEC install in the past 2 weeks, especially those of you that came by Astricon and got free keys, you’re fine - you’ve already got the latest build.  But, for those of you with an older build, you’ll really want to upgrade.

Why?

Because we fixed a bug, that’s why.

What kind of bug?

One that affected primarily 64-bit systems, but also impacted some 32-bit users.

What was the bad thing the bug did?

Well, a bit of memory was being overwritten that caused hard locks, crashes, etc.  In other cases, it was likely affecting your audio, without crashing, and you didn’t even know it.

Is upgrading easy to do?

Yes, simply download the new HPEC binary from http://downloads.digium.com, drop it in your Zaptel HPEC directory and rebuild and re-install Zaptel.  “Easy as cake.  Is piece of pie.”

Happy Echo-Free Days

• AstriCon , Products
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