Building your Asterisk based Business – Part I

Since the inception of GreenfieldTech, back in 2007, we’ve assisted over 40 different VoIP companies to bootstrap their activities and launch their products. During that period, some of these companies had become a great success and some had disappeared from the face of the planet. This series of posts will bring the story of some of them – and we’ll try to analyze what made each company into a success or a failure.

Hardware Review: Allo.Com GSM Card

Honestly, this is something I should have already done a long time ago. About 4 months ago, Allo.Com approached us (GreenfieldTech) to write a review about some of their products. After they agreed to the terms – mainly that they we’ll publish our findings, good or bad – we had to move offices, so everything kind’a went into limbo. Last week, finally, we got around to start reviewing the hardware. We currently started with 2 products, the Allo.COM GSM card (http://www.allo.com/gsm-card.html) and the Allo.Com MegaPBX (http://www.allo.com/megapbx-line.html).

Technology? Religion? or just pure Ego?

Open Source – What really drives it? is the desire to change and create something new? is it a firm belief in the idea that knowledge wants to be free and that software should roam the world? or when you boil down – is it just plain Ego?

Extreme Asterisk Cloud Performance – Part I

Here’s a challenging question for the Asterisk technical savvy of you… What is the top performance you can squeeze out of an Asterisk box, running on Amazon EC2 – or to that extent, a cloud infrastructure? If you scout the Internet, you may find various answers – however, most of them aren’t backed up by real numbers or real information,made accessible in a normal readable form.
Recently, we’ve become heavily involved in a project requiring massive usage of cloud based infrastructure. I won’t go into details as to what the project is or what we are doing, however, I felt that some interesting facts about Asterisk 11.0.1 and Cloud infrastructure can be shared with the rest of you.

Updates, Astricon, Allo.com and more

So, let’s talk PRI cards. Once every often a company approaches me to evaluate their products. I do my best to be as impartial as I can – after all, Digium products are my favorite. However, I’m always happy to see a product that can compete nicely with Digium, simply because I believe it will make Digium products better and stronger. So, a couple of months ago, Allo.com approached me to evaluate their PRI card. I agreed, and they’ve sent me their PCI-e version of a quad span E1/T1 card.

Can you trust your integrator with Fraud Analysis?

As some of you know, over the past 9 months, I’ve been heavily involved in the establishment of Humbug. For those who may not know, Humbug is a Call Analytics and Fraud Analysis SAAS. Now, differing from many of the current telephony SAAS projects, we are not based on Amazon EC2 or some other public cloud infrastructure, we build our own cloud environment. Why do we build our own cloud? simple, we need to keep your data secured and confidential. At Humbug, we see ourselves as a cross between Google Analytics – in our ability to analyze and handle data and Verisign – in our security and confidentiality requirements and methodologies.

Business 2.0 – Taking the leap forward…

The following post doesn’t really fit in line with the normal spirit of the blog, simply because it’s not funny nor directly related to technology. It’s called Business 2.0, as it relates to the ever problematic question any business owner has: “When should I grow and how?”.

Asterisk, Greed and Revenue Shares

Revenue sharing is one of the oldest methods of earning profits, actually, I believe it may just be right up there with trading of goods and food.

Open Source, Philanthropy and Asterisk

When I started using Open Source software, it seemed like all Open Source projects are driven by philanthropic agendas. We were all focused on “sticking it to the man” – showing all these would be software vendors that community driven projects can do just as well – if not better.

Call Analytics – Closed Alpha testing group

Well, it’s been almost a month since I’ve started writing about the humbug project. Now, it’s time to actually get you people involved, at least in the initial levels. We are looking to add 10 additional members into the humbug call analytics suite. Currently available analytics during the alpha testing is inbound call analytics.