Visionary business leaders from leading companies in the Indian telecom market will come together at the “India On” Conference in New Delhi on September 2, 2009.

India On is an initiative led by Qualcomm to bring together leaders of Indian industries to envision and create a wireless India like never before, where wireless technologies are deeply integrated with our everyday lives.

Please visit http://www.qualcommindiaon.com for details of the conference agenda, the list of distinguished speakers, topics of discussion and more related information.

Check out blog posts at http://qualcommindiaon.blogspot.com/ by top level Qualcomm executives, sharing their opinion on different aspects of the wireless industry.

Follow the website for updates on the significant announcements that will be made at the conference by several of the leading companies present at the event. Watch online videos of some revolutionary new innovations in the wireless space. Post your comments online and join related threads of discussion on Twitter.

Tweet This Post Delicious Digg This Post Facebook MySpace Ping This Post Reddit Stumble This Post

Unstructured supplementary service data  is a capability associated with GSM based mobile phones with the ability to process real time data. Messages sent via USSD cannot be stored and sent later or manupulated. This implies that it is session oriented.  Messages can be sent from the cell phone screen page directly. Response times of applications using USSD is less compared to other SMS since USSD is session oriented. USSD allows for virtual home network where the commands sent via USSD are routed back to Home Location Register of the home mobiles network. Sim application toolkit and the wireless application protocol complies with USSD.  This concept is the same as that while roaming. USSD is basically a trigger rather than some application and it can be used to sent text between the user and various applications. Basically it enables other applications to function based on USSD. USSD is something like telnet while on the other hand SMS is like a regualr mail.

Tweet This Post Delicious Digg This Post Facebook MySpace Ping This Post Reddit Stumble This Post

When we deal with bulk outbound calls sometime there is a chance to miss calls if you are using call file as a mechanism for auto dial out. This is called asterisk choking. when too many files are moved simultaneously into the outgoing directory. Therefore it may be advisable to move them step-by-step with a slight delay.

Solutions to overcome this Asterisk choking

1) Using Manager API is a solution

2) Feed the outgoing folder with less number of calls simultaneously.

3) Find the cause and fix it in the source code.

4) Find out apt time delay between copying of call files.

Tweet This Post Delicious Digg This Post Facebook MySpace Ping This Post Reddit Stumble This Post

This application works only for zip codes in the United States. This tools is not available for commercial use. However we can use this for educational and personal use. The application pull up information from 4INFO.net’s WAP service.

There are certain prerequisites to make the application works.

1) Internet connection enabled asterisk server for pulling information from 4INFO.

2) Ceptral voice synthesizer for asterisk

Add a SIP user with an that points to the context “hotspot” with extension 9434 which is actually WiFi on the keypad of the softphone or mobile phone.

Add dialplan for the context hotspot in extension.conf.

[hotspot]

exten => 9434,1,Answer
exten => 9434,2,Wait(1)
exten => 9434,3,Set(TIMEOUT(digit)=7)
exten => 9434,4,Set(TIMEOUT(response)=10)
exten => 9434,5,Flite(“At the beep enter the zip code for the Why Fye Hot Spots list to retrieve.”)
exten => 9434,6,Read(ZIPCODE,beep,5)
exten => 9434,7,Flite(“Please hold a moment while we contact Four Info dot Net for your report.”)
exten => 9434,8,AGI(nv-wifi.php|${ZIPCODE})
exten => 9434,9,NoOp(Wave file: ${TMPWAVE})
exten => 9434,10,Playback(${TMPWAVE})
exten => 9434,11,Hangup

Log on to the server as root and navigate the folder “/var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin” using the terminal.

cd /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin
wget http://nerdvittles.com/wp-content/nv-wifi.zip
mv nv-wifi.php nv-wifi.old.php
unzip nv-wifi.zip
rm -f nv-wifi.zip
chmod 775 nv-wifi.php
chown asterisk:asterisk nv-wifi.php

vim /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/bv-wifi.php

Update this variables.

$paywifi = 1 ;
$freewifi = 1 ;

$ttspick=1;

We have to create a tts directory which is the place where sound files created during the execution of AGI.

Log on to the server as root and navigate the folder “/var/lib/asterisk/sounds” using the terminal.

cd /var/lib/asterisk/sounds
mkdir tts
chmod 775 tts
chown asterisk:asterisk tts

Done with configurations. You have to clean the tts folder on a periodic basis, use some crontab for that. If you are not doing this some kind of issue may pop-up which destabilize the asterisk sever with signal and sound issues.

How it operate with a phone?

1) Dial 9434

2) It will prompt you to enter a 5 digit zip code in US.

Now you can hear hear the report, if you are not hearing anything, that means no hot spot available.

Tweet This Post Delicious Digg This Post Facebook MySpace Ping This Post Reddit Stumble This Post

What is Asterisk?

Asterisk is an open source software PBX (Private Branch Exchange). It provides all the functionality of high-end business telephone systems, and more over its the most extensible and flexible telephone system. In layman’s terms its the software version of a telephone exchange. Install it on your linux machine and with some configuration you can have a VOIP telephone exchange in your home PC.

Is it Complicated?

It is just like any other linux open source project. You have some configuration files, edit it and you are up and running. Some knowledge of Linux commands can be helpful, even if you don’t know it you can always refer some ebook or the man pages. Setting up a VOIP telephone exchange and making calls via software phones wont take more than an hour. See how simple it is.

Whats in it for my Academic Project?

You can create your own IVRs (Interactive voice response) systems, answering machines, caller identification systems, call routing systems and your own private secure internet telephone exchange. Once you get into it, its your imagination that limits the opportunities.

Will it Help me Find a Job?

Asterisk is your ticket to the telecom domain. There is no other easy DIY means to get into the telecom industry and the technologies that it uses. Asterisk experts are paid 50$ to 100$ per hour in foriegn countries. All the hardware PBX machines will be replaced with Asterisk machines in a few years time.

Oh This Sound Cool. But Where do I Begin

These links will help you get started.

• http://www.asterisk.org/
• http://www.asteriskdocs.org/
• http://www.the-asterisk-book.com/unstable/

Tweet This Post Delicious Digg This Post Facebook MySpace Ping This Post Reddit Stumble This Post

Good news Skype users!!!, they have recently introduced a unlimited plan for just $9.95. User can call internationally to 34 countries world wide. I am sure this will spurn all providers in this arena. You can now call to your relatives all over the world by spending $9.95.

Hold on, like all other providers, Skype also have some hidden things in the unlimited plan. It is not actually unlimited, restricted around to 10000 minutes. I think its more than enough for international calls for a month. Actually the cost is $12.25/month, but if you purchase a package for 3 or 12 months you will offered a 33% discount. The offer is valid till June 1′st 2008. So hurry up and grab this offer.

Skype already merchandised their products all over US and Canada. How ever still lagging very much behind in Indian markets, where the real tech geeks and internet enthusiast resides. Yes this plan is not applicable for Indians .

Tweet This Post Delicious Digg This Post Facebook MySpace Ping This Post Reddit Stumble This Post

Apple released iPhone SDK, Now its gonna heaven for developers to write there own applications. The SDK does support all the features available in iPhone. The SDK have an emulator for testing your application. We can develop application and licensed upon apple’s agreement.

Register your account @ mac, download SDK and start developing application.

Tweet This Post Delicious Digg This Post Facebook MySpace Ping This Post Reddit Stumble This Post

VoiceXML is a technology used to recognize speech patterns in web oriented content delivery IVR applications. For example if a site xyz.com, a site that provide all kind of information about a state. We can create a application so that when a user call to a number lets say 1234, call will be landed to the site xyz.com. Since xyz.com provide contents of a particular state you can ask temperature of the particular state by saying a keyword “temperature”. The user get temperature of the particular state as response.

We can build IVR using asterisk IVR framework with-in 5 minutes. What if we can integrate the voice pattern for IVR flow, its cool idea ? A lot of software are there but almost all are very costly and not much simple. Here is a solution for this, The SpeakRight Framework.

SpeakRight Framework is an open source java framework. We can develop speech recognition applications. Using this framework we can build voice based IVR application in asterisk IVR framework. We can use both the SpeakRight framework and phpagi to build voice based IVR with asterisk. The framework use code based approaches. Let me explain what is code based approach with an example. A lot of IVR application are UI based applications so that a normal user can define the IVR logic by simply drag dropping components. But when the IVR logic become complicated its very hard to understand if we develop using visual programming languages. But we can simply develop any complicated IVR using dailplan. The dialplan use code based approach since we do code the IVR logic using simple functions. Like wise SpeakRight  are also using same logic for recognizing speech patterns.

Let me explain how to integrate in the architecture diagram below.

I will soon come back with the implementation

Tweet This Post Delicious Digg This Post Facebook MySpace Ping This Post Reddit Stumble This Post

Fastalerts the best online alerts solution. User can send sms, email’s and voice alerts (on demand) using easy interface which have a feel of desktop application. The performance for sms sending are comparatively very high compared to other online applications. Fastalerts is an effective online solution that create value to its customers.

The main features includes

• Create and manage users online.
• Send alerts single or group wise.
• Provide bulk sms in india.
• Sub accounts creation and management which are helpful for enterprise.
• We can send 15K sms in a single click which no online system delivers.
• Reseller support.

There are some plan to fully open up voice solution to all customers. Probably it will happen in the next version. The application is fully AJAX based so that end user get a feeling of desktop application. The fastalerts have a 24×7 online chat support and customer support available. One of the main feature of fastalerts include its reseller support. So that anyone can become a reseller.

The fastalerts have around 5000 user sign up which is very big. The application is powered by mobme the fastest growing mobile media and entertainment company. I am so happy to say that i played a key role in fastalerts application development. I was the chief technology architect for that product.

Tweet This Post Delicious Digg This Post Facebook MySpace Ping This Post Reddit Stumble This Post