Archive for the 'AstriCon' Category

Start Planning for your Arizona Visit in September!

beelinebill April 28th, 2008

I get the question every day, “Is Astricon happening this year?”

Make no mistake: yes. September 23-25 in Glendale, AZ.

This event is “The ONLY true Asterisk Conference” originally founded by Sokol and Associates and acquired by Digium in July, 2007. Details forthcoming next week on www.astricon.net

To respond to the second most asked question every day, “Is there a Digium Asterisk World” in Boston this year? The answer is no, there is not due to the changes at Pulvermedia. Thus, Astricon is THE conference for your Asterisk needs. Developers. Integrators. Resellers. Distributors. Newbies. Partners.

So plan now for heading to Astricon, and watch for the announcement next week with details on registration and final dates and venue information.

See you soon!

Thank You Pulver. On to Astricon!

julie April 12th, 2008

Digium would like to take this opportunity to thank all the participants and exhibitors from Digium Asterisk World (DAW) in Boston (October 2007) and San Jose (March 2008). We are excited in the growing interest in the Asterisk open source telephony software and look forward to seeing you all and more attendees at our next event! We at Digium believe our experiment with DAW was a tremendous success. We are committed to Astricon.

The Digium team enjoyed working with the Pulvermedia team and wish them all the best. Digium, however, will move forward by growing AstriCon, the original and only dedicated Asterisk Open Source Telephony Conference. We hope that those who of you supported and were excited by the DAW event strategy will join us at AstriCon in Glendale, AZ in September of 2008.

Last year, we had a successful event in spite of the last minute venue changes forced by the new hotel not being ready in time. Those challenges moved us to the outskirts of the city. This year we are committed to the event and to make it better than ever! The venue is completed and committed to working with Digium to deliver a world class event. It is a great new hotel!

Dates: September 22 - 25, 2008

Venue, check it out:

Renaissance Glendale Hotel & Spa
9495 W. Coyotes Boulevard
Glendale, AZ 85305
Phone: 623-937-3700
Toll free: 1-800-Marriott

This event is open to all those companies in the Asterisk ecosystem. Because this event is designed for Asterisk community and Asterisk enthusiasts, we are expanding it to add a business track as well. As Asterisk moves mainstream, expect the usual technical track, Asterisk 101, business track, code zone for developers, resellers and integrators, and a world class slate of speakers and workshops.

Digium will sponsor and manage the event and we will encourage booth space and sponsorships to help grow the event! Our goal is to educate more people about Asterisk, advance people’s knowledge who are already using Asterisk, and share everything from best practices in open source to end user experiences.

Check out www.astricon.net next week to follow the changes which will start to occur frequently. Stay tuned. for more information on Astricon, check out the web site - give us a few days to get this work completed.

We look forward to seeing you all this year at Astricon in AZ!

10 things to know and love about Asterisk

beelinebill March 7th, 2008

I have seen this type of blog or article before, but thought I would do my version today which will clearly be different. Sharing one person’s view of Asterisk its community and its evolution, we shall explore through these 10 data points!

10. An entire new industry was formed when Mark Spencer released Asterisk software into open source under the GPL license in 1999.

9. A passionate Community was built to harness the power of Asterisk over the next several years culminating today in the largest open source IP telephony community.

8. www.asterisk.org became the resource for developers to meet each other, share coding and implementation and war stories; there are many mailing lists and forums to communicate with others.

7. Digium started making and shipping TDM gateway cards to enable commercial growth in the 4th quarter of 2001. This enabled businesses around the globe to start building hybrid TDM-VoIP IP PBXs at very low costs

6. Third parties started to develop GUIs for Asterisk in the mid-2000s to build specific targeted products based on Asterisk. The GUIs were proprietary on top of Asterisk to configure it more easily. The Linux/Asterisk techies still prefer command line but less technical Linux folks like the evolution of the newer GUIs. Digium loved the Switchvox GUI and acquired the company. Switchvox is the best CPE-based business phone system on the planet! The advanced features include built in presence, queue management, call recording, easy to use and literally dozens of other phone features.

5. One GUI, FreePBX, along with Asterisk that became the basis for a distribution called trixbox, a distribution found from time to time. Digium created its own AsteriskNOW to simplify a distribution for non-technical users and open sourced the AsteriskGUI from this distribution.

4. Digium’s TDM gateway cards for PCI grew to over 3M ports shipped and others entered the exciting fast growing market. To clone your products is the sincerest form of flattery. Some clone totally and some build slightly different products to solve the same problem.

3. An entire “ecosystem” grew to enable the Asterisk world. Sokol and Associates built Asterisk training and the Astricon user/developer conference; Digium loved this and acquired the company; consulting companies started with those who were tired of the proprietary company way; O’Reilly published the Asterisk book followed by others; Digium former partner programs and encourages ecosystem to grow to offer more complete and custom solutions for resellers and users alike.

2. Mark Spencer, the author, visionary of open source Asterisk, CTO and Chairman of Digium is requested to speak around the world about Asterisk which he does as much as his schedule allows - especially for community related events and long term relationships that he has established.

1. Asterisk has begun moving mainstream with hundreds of companies building Asterisk-based products. Some are built on open source. Some on Asterisk Business Edition. Some are complete appliances, some are VoIP services including SIP and IAX trunking. Some are hosted and hybrid hosted solutions. Some are success, others are not - just like any business. The business model is evolving. VCs are interested in some of these companies as strong investments. Companies like 3Com and NTT who have been in the voice business a long time have commercialized Asterisk offerings built around Asterisk Business edition.

In Summary, Digium is growing up. A Seasoned executive team; Digium Asterisk World and Astricon Conferences in partnership with Pulvermedia who helps manage and market the events; Commercial offerings that are second to none: Switchvox is the most powerful easiest to use CPE-based SMB offering today, with exceptional Business telephony features, including unified communications offerings traditional proprietary do not have yet; the AA50 Appliance for small unsophisticated offices and branch offices; PCI and PCI Express Gateway card business; A loyal and growing community of developers, partners such as Polycom and Lumenvox and many others, and channels; An interesting mix of open source commitment to the world of developers and user groups and commercial business building. It is fun, intense, highly competitive, eye opening, high visibility in the press and with analysts, and just coming to the office every day is exciting.

More HPEC

malcolmd October 5th, 2007

Howdy,

Yes, it’s another products posting. :D

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 2007: Confessions of a Digium booth worker

kshumard October 3rd, 2007

Well, another AstriCon has come and gone. This year’s Ast-rav-a-ganza in sunny Phoenix, AZ was another spectacle of Asterisk-based presentations and networking. It’s always exciting to me to meet members of the Asterisk community in person, especially ones whose bugtracker aliases or IRC nicks are well known to me. Matching faces to names/handles is always surprising in one way or another, but the added dimension of a real live person makes the connection seem more real somehow.

Most of my time at AstriCon this year was spent in our 10′ by 20′ booth. Besides handing out cool Digium gear like bright orange hats with our Digium bubble, bright orange “GEEK” t-shirts, and free HPEC and G.729 licenses, I also got to meet and greet hundreds of Asterisk users, administrators, and entrepreneurs. Being one of the “tech guys,” I had plenty of opportunities to hear about unique Asterisk installs and suggest tweaks or improvements. The numerous ways that people continue to extend and deploy Asterisk continually amaze me.

Of course, the big event of the week was the announcement of the Switchvox acquisition. Because that happened Wednesday night, and the Switchvox booth was adjacent to the Digium booth, we were able to tear down the wall, thank you Mr. Gorbachev, between our booths and merge into one larger L-shaped booth for Thursday and Friday. After that, “booth duty” was much simpler because Tristan from Switchvox stole the show with her live demos of the Switchvox platform. I hadn’t previously seen Switchvox’s capabilities; I don’t think I was the only person at AstriCon to be impressed by its capabilities.

Working in the booth, I missed Marko’s keynote (maybe next year the expo hall will close for keynote addresses?). But there were plenty of conversations at the booth on Friday morning describing varying accounts of how he almost crashed a golf cart at top speed during his ‘grand entrance.’ Between that and Allison “The Voice of Asterisk” Smith’s orange-and-white Asterisk dress at the Digium-sponsored party Thursday night, it was an Astricon to remember. Here’s to hoping next year’s Astricon is even better. : )

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