Brough Turner, founder of Netblazr which he describes as "a radically new form of wireless ISP." 358: Brough Turner of Netblazr by VoIP Users Conference

I really like this product!

You can make free calls between units, so if you have family at a distance that costs money to call, you can effectively set up free calls between the units.

Got Google Voice? You need one of these ObiHais at home or at the office to connect it to a phone and not need to have a computer on all the time.

Check the Amazon link for pricing on the Obihai. (support the VUC buy buying it through Amazon if you care to)

While the ObiHai product is a geek's dream with a zillion parameters to tweak, an ordinary mortal can set it up in a few minutes.

It showed that one typo can become a funny theme.

Thanks to AG Projects, Counterpath, Squarespace, Phone From Here and all of those who participated including @mjgraves, @kfife, @steely_glint, @darrickhartman, @e4voip, @cypromis, @FredPosner, @civeljahim, @AusTexVoIP, @akant, @StevePerich, @MaximCH, @saghul, @packetman, @daveac, @worldmikel, @voipaware, @qxork, @vbhoj74, @teleku, @wintermeyer, @jasonwert and countless others! If you are interested in VoIP or the Voipathong concept, follow these and @voipusers of course!

Sifting through 24 hours of recorded live podcast is time-consuming, but there will be some excerpts posted on VUC and on Disrupt *This*!

Voipathon(g) brought together over 500 people from America, Algeria, China, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, England, France, Germany, Croatia, Switzerland, Bermuda, Arab Emirates, Czech Republic and a bunch of other places, probably.

The VoIP component got to hear some rare Allison Smith (@VoiceGal, not the singer) and discussed aspects of VoIP, telephony and motorcycles as usual.

More geeky VoIP stuff - tying two bridges together

Experimenting gave us results on three interesting softphones: Blink (AG Projects), Bria and Eyebeam from Counterpath. I've used the commercial version of Eyebeam for thousands of hours on my conferences with perfect stability on Windows XP. During the Voipathon, I had two conference servers bridged for over ten hours straight with no problem. When the connection broke, it wasn't Eyebeam that crashed, but Vemotion, and when this happened, I lost the entire local recording as well.

It's important (for us geeks) to understand the bridge between ZipDX and Talkshoe. Talkshoe is near Pittsburg, PA. ZipDX is around San José or Palo Alto. The bridge that stayed up for ten hours was from San José to Bordeaux, Bordeaux to Pittsburg and the return leg, Pittsburg to Bordeaux, Bordeaux to San josé.

During another part of the Voipathon, we bridged two Talkshoe shows. Michael, host of World Mikel, connected to Talkshoe from Detroit. I connected from Bordeaux. I was connected to Talkshoe twice, once for each show. People in the two shows were able to converse normally, from all over the world, bridged together from France. The unusual thing about this bridge was that it was done on my three year-old Macbook running Blink and connected to the same DSL connection I used for the Voipathon via wifi.

After 24 hours, of which I slept about three, I won't be ready to do this again for another year or three, but it was an amazing, worthwhile experience that proves you can do alot with a bit of perseverance.

Last week: people came and went during eight hours of VoIP Users Conference

This week: we had the largest simultaneous turnout on ZipDX.com wideband bridge, htting the limit of 50 participants. I've been on several Talkshoe conferences that had one hundred or more simultaneous conferences, but our average of the two bridges combined, Talkshoe and ZipDX is about 35-50. There were about 55 simultaneous callers on the two bridges last night.

Why this matters

We used to do this kind of thing in the 70's in Los Angeles on ham radio repeaters. We also used to get together for drinks and even parties and picnics, but that was easy since we were all in the same area. The gathering of people for the VUC is made of of callers from several continents: Countries include most of Eastern and Western Europe, North America, Africa, Australia, China, the Carribean...

I'm impressed that people take the time, their time, to come share ideas, knowledge, rumors and facts live each week. Subjects range from uber-geeky to why everyone picks on AT&T or a comparison of mobile handsets by those who own them. Authors, project leaders, programmers and hobbyists come together for the event and we look forward to occasions where we can meet in person. One of those was Astricon, last October. There's one coming up in Europe (AstriEurope, Paris in April) that I look forward to attending.

Community is everything

I've tried to make this kind of event happen in the world of wine, but I haven't been able to get the critical mass needed to keep it going. The VUC community is definitely sustainable and still growing. If you have any interest at all in telephony and other internet technologies, join us some time. Visit http://vuc.me/next for the next session, shown in your own time zone, or go to http://vuc.me for all the info on how to call in using VoIP, regular phone or Skype.

The VoIP Users Conference is Fridays at 12 noon ET: http://VUC.me

Thanks to our friends at Digium and PhoneFromHere.com you can now join our live VoIP Users Conference free from anywhere in the world using Skype.

How can we count the ways (to listen or talk)?

Widget: http://phonefromhere.com/vuc/

Or call Skype:vuc.me (g711->ZipDX) or

Call Skype:ld.vuc.me (g729->Talkshoe)

If you run a successful Talkshoe conference or podcast, you might be interested in arranging this service.

After doing the weekly conference for over 2 1/2 years, several regulars had a Chance to meet up at Astricon in Phoenix last week. I think everyone came away happy to have been there. Two of them had the courage to bring their wives, something I might do next time, depending on where it is held. Thanks to all who participated! http://VUC.me for video and more info on VUC, the largest live voip conference with an average of 35 callers and thousands of downloads. Sent from high above Chicago.

Edited from ORD

I love doing live conferences. The ones I do are available as podcasts
through Talkshoe and can be downloaded, but I prefer the live part.
Plus, because I know they can be downloaded, I tend to want to edit
them to sound a little less idiotic. Fortunately, I'm also very lazy,
so I rarely edit unless something happens that needs to be rearranged.
Last week, Tom Cannavan got cut off for a bit and I did edit and
reorder things, removing the wait for him to call back.
 
Two years ago, Talkshoe CEO Dave Nelsen worked with me on producing
the first live 24 hour Kivathon, which was a terrific success,
bringing a lot of awareness to what was then not very well-known.
Since that time, Kiva has become so successful, you literally have to
wait in line to loan! Oprah and Bill Clinton's book are largely to
thank for that. Dave and I both very much enjoyed the fact that we
were able to have fun and pay back some of the amazing and wonderful
things the Internet has brought us.
 
Anyway, talking with a few friends about the whole Talkshoe thing made
me go take a look at the statistics for the conferences and I was a
little surprised to see that for the New Wine Consumer, which has few
live participants, the average download number for a particular
session is around 800. This is a small number compared to popular tech
casts like TWIT, where at least 200,000 people are hearing it each week. On
the other hand, those 800 unique IP downloads measured by Talkshoe are
people who actually listen to the recordings. We know that to be
motivated enough to click on listen or download, people are interested
in the subject on some level, whether professional or amateur.
Remember, those page views you see for your blog have plenty of chaff
with the wheat, lots of robots, lots of people wandered there by
accident but are not interested, lots of everything but your target
audience.
 
For the VoIP Users Conference (running 2 years since March 2007) we
have a highly focused group with an average of 30 live callers each
week. When we had Asterisk creator Mark Spencer on and simulcast in
video, we had about 100 live. I also did a live session with Chris
Brogan for his Grasshoppers initiative and there too we had over 100
people. The conference has not one but several sponsors.
 
Advertisers haven't come around in droves yet to understand the
podcast paradigm, although Leo Laporte has more than proven its value.
When a site is mentioned live on TWIT, it usually brings down the
server almost immediately.
 
I think we are still waiting for the easy way to join the
conversation. Twitter proves that "if you build it easy, they will
come". I am trying various methods to allow Skype with its millions of
users to call in to our conferences. One of these days I will find a
way to make this work reliably. If, in the meantime the applications
for iPhone etc begin to work well, things like Gizmo5 and iPhone Skype
app, the whole thing may be an enabler. If and when this happens, I
will be looking for communities to help make use of this technology
and I have the experience and ideas to make it work, I hope.

Incidentally, speaking of Gizmo and Skype, Michael Robertson is our guest
this Friday to talk about Gizmo5 and OpenSky.