Small Biz Technology Reviews

The long wait is over for those consumers who love Apple iPhone’s technology. Apple finally took the wraps off its 3G iPhone. Thinner edges, full plastic back, flush headphone jack, and the iPhone 2.0 firmware. Apple’s taking a lot of the criticisms to heart ever since they launch the earlier iPhone. 3G is at the forefront, but they’re also making sure it’s available all over internationally, works with enterprises, runs Third party applications and does it all cheaper. Apple claims its 3G speeds beats the competition, with pageloads 36% faster than the N95 and beats the old EDGE data speed.

I have always been on the lookout for an IM messenger aside from Gaim or Pidgin that could host multiple IM providers such as Yahoo, ICQ, AIM & IRC. In my search for the right messenger who could do this, I chanced upon Trillian by Cerulean Studios. It s a fully featured, stand-alone, skinnable chat client that supports AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and IRC. It provides capabilities not possible with original network clients, while supporting standard features such as audio chat, file transfers, group chats, chat rooms, buddy icons, multiple simultaneous connections to the same network, server-side contact importing, typing notification, direct connection (AIM), proxy support, encrypted messaging (AIM/ICQ), SMS support, and privacy settings.

I’ve always been anticipating every major release of Dimdim. In my view, Dimdim is one of the coolest open source project around. Its promise of a rich media collaboration for all is something I’d really love to see happen. Dimdim is the world’s free open source web meeting company whose mission is to become the leading provider of open source web meeting software. Since launch, it has been used in 165 countries by over 350,000 people.

Dimdim is marching on. After starting on private beta, it is now open on public beta and just recently released the Open Source Community Edition Version 3.5, codenamed “Eagle”. The “Eagle” release includes the following new and improved features:

What is an Asterisk Appliance?
Asterisk Appliance (AA50) is a reliable, cost-effective and full-featured Internet Telephony Solution pretty much tailor made to the small to medium businesses. It features the first AsteriskGUI™ framework developed by Digium as an easy to use graphical user interface to manage the Asterisk system.

We’ve been covering Asterisk here as we’ve been a big fan of this open source project. It’s a great product and has the potential to lower the telecommunication cost for your business. If you are paying too much on your telecommunication needs, definitely check out VOIP and Asterisk. Do not allow yourself to be enslave by the Big Telcos.

I was excited when I learned that there was a book that just came out on AsteriskNow. As far as I know, this AsteriskNow book is the only one available for the subject matter. For those who may not know, AsteriskNow is an open-source software appliance from Digium. It’s an easy to install, customized Linux distribution that includes Asterisk (the leading open-source telephony engine and tool kit), the AsteriskGUI, and all the other software needed for an Asterisk telephony system. The improvement on the original Asterisk release is that it packaged everything one needs allowing for a quicker and easier way of deploying Asterisk. Surely, it’s a great step towards making Asterisk within reach of small businesses who may not have the technical capabilities necessary in making Asterisk run in their enterprise.