40 years ago, one of the major events of modern era took place -landing humans on the Moon and returning them safely back home.

We thought of letting you about our recent development deserving news -kind of our own little achievement.

We have now a Kapanga Voice client running on our beloved G1 Google Phone, using the Android operating system. This time the release will be by invite-only so we’ll have a form for you to sign up very soon.

In a way, we are also thankful to NASA’s Apollo program since we wouldn’t have gone into engineering and science have we not had such an example of teamwork applied to achieving a near impossible goal. Indeed we are huge NASA fans!

All the best and thanks for the continued support!

In fact the lack of security makes RTP (and VoIP in general) a target of call “wiretapping”. How is this possible, you may ask? Well folks, read this below to try it yourself!

1. Download and Install wireshark (http://www.wireshark.org)
2. Run Wireshark and start capturing packets with the appropriate NIC
3. Place a G.711 mu law call using Kapanga
4. On Wireshark, stop capturing packets
5. Run statistics/RTP/Show all streams
6. Click on the streams in the list, do a stream analysis and save the payload as an audio file
7. Congrats: you have a recording of the call (one stream per direction)

How can we prevent this from happening? SRTP is an upgrade to RTP that provides security through encryption and authentication. Encryption specifically guarantees that the audio is unintelligible by the time it is sent out. So if we go back to item #3 on the list above we place an SRTP call instead, the recorded audio will sound like “noise”, this is because SRTP rearranges information in the payload using the AES algorithm.

So how’s your softphone’s SRTP support? As it turns out we spent quite a bit of time supporting this feature. And yes, it is available in the public site. Enjoy!

So how does Kapanga work as a video surveillance device? Here are the main requirements:

1. Multiple Kapanga Softphones are distributed in the area to be monitored.
2. Each Kapanga may be connected to multiple cameras.
3. Kapanga Softphones can talk to other Kapanga Softphones and access each other video feeds and control information.
4. Kapanga Softphone can detect motion, loud noises, temperature changes and other trigger actions/alarms.

While you are out, you can call home from your 3G phone and a Kapanga Softphone will automatically answer. After entering a Username and Password the Kapanga will give you access to the video feed of all the cameras. Your home-based Kapanga will also provide control and status information of all the detectors since your last call. Sounds like 007 stuff, eh?

Another cool thing you can do is to configure Kapanga to call you in case of any event triggered (for example an alarm triggered by an event). We used this setup at a NASA group during a scientific field campaign when an instrument needed on-site attention at random times. We configured Kapanga to call one of our engineers’ cellphone when attention was required. And voilá!

If you want to give this feature a try, please feel free to contact us at support [at] kapanga [dot] net.

For those that want to read more about the Skype glitch, you can read here and here. Oh, and here is an update.

Cheers!

So how can you do it? Very simple. Just follow this easy steps:

1. Click on the K icon on the upper left side of the phone

2. Select View, then Language and then Deutsch

3. Voilá, you’ve got Kapanga now working in German

Enjoy!

PS: If you are a big fan of Kapanga and you are interested in translating it to other language, please send us an email to support at kapanga dot net and we’ll work with you on the details. Thanks!

So how do you define an interactive service?

I believe an interactive service has 3 main components:

• Enables users to interact with the service or other users in real-time by an online interaction.
• Utilizes “presence”.
• Allows the service logic (or backend application) to send unsolicited events to the user or subscriber.

IM services like Skype, MSN and Yahoo Messenger, etc., are perfect examples of this type of service. Note that interactive services are not a new concept and many BBS in the 80s or the 90s or even terminal based services on the French Minitel used these principles already. Except that at this time there was no video transport and very crude UI and protocols. And let’s not forget that an interactive value added service willl be the combination of both interactive and value added service.

What technologies and protocols enable us to produce interactive services then?

I can summarize them like this:

1. A user interface technology.
2. A set of protocols to download the user interface, authenticate the user and provide a two way interactive conversation composed of media (IM, audio, video), server events and user commands.
3. Application servers that implement the business logic and protocol connectors to interact with clients.
4. Billing servers.

For now let’s focus on items 1 and 2. For these items there’s an obvious choice: Adobe Flash. It is a widespread UI technology and it has interactive functions provided by Flash Media Server. However, control and media transport use a proprietary protocol called RTMP based on TCP and a proprietary video codec On2. This severly limits the interoperation with other infrastucture.

We also studied the MPEG4 framework that has provisions for client/server interactive services. However, there is no known implementation of this.

Another choice was Microsoft: they prepared an alternative with XAML and its offer Microsoft Live Communication Server but it will be deployed with Vista. It will take two years for Vista to be supported enough to build mass services and we believe that HTML, Ajax will be in place already and it will be extremely difficult for XAML to take over.

Given these constrains, we decided to stick with “the triplet”: HTTP, HTML and Ajax and combine them with these great protocols:

• XMPP: It is a very tempting choice because it has all the primitives and the extensibility built-in.
• SIP: which provides a very good interoperability with the existing telco infrastructure.

Finally, at Ivès we chose SIP because of the reasons stated above. Without being too specific, the fact is that the MESSAGE primitive can be used for IM services, the INFO primitive can be used by the user to send commands or receive events and thus a SIP presence server can be created.

What are Value Added Services?

Value added services (VAS) are not necessarily marketing buzz words. They are predefined business models and processes implemented on an IT or telecommunication infrastructure. eBay is a value added service, Salesforce.com is another one, Amazon.com also. Newspapers with online subscription fees are also good examples. Their offerings have enough value in itself that customers are ready to pay for it.

They are opposed to what I call basic services. Those are multi-purpose tools that do not serve a business in particular, like E-mail, IM, Wikis, Blogs, telephone. They can either be offered for free or charged and they are not bound to any business process in particular.

And there is this so called Internet model that consists in setting up free services that capture a lot of audience then generate revenue streams by selling advertisement space. It allowed a surprising number of businesses and non-profit organizations to grow and have the venture capitalists interested in it. These type of companies range from the Web 2.0 kind(like You Tube, Daily Motion or NetVibes) to community services like Wikipedia. They are not easy to categorize. Some of them can potentially turn into value added services (like YouTube broadcasting content for TV companies). Some introduce innovative concepts (like location based services, tagging, social networking). Some of these are financed by wealthy investors. When such services are useful or attractive to users, they add value to the Internet as a whole, ultimately justifying the fees paid for Internet access that finance the Network evolution and deployment.

We believe at IVèS that there is a confluence of factors that will make a new wave of interactive Value Added Services emerge: The high speed Internet connectivity access is spreading, the mobile data networks are maturing, the technology is already here and oil prices are making travel more expensive.

On the contrary, most of the SIP signaling links are done using UDP. So a lot of error correction and retransmission has to be done using the SIP protocol to account for the unreliability of the UDP protocol. SIP over TCP is possible but I would rather make it the standard. I would improve the RFC to impose permanent connection between user agents and registrar and whenever it is possible, make permanent TCP connection between SIP proxies. TCP keepalive should be mandatory for those connection. As a side effect, this would also help the NAT traversal for SIP.

For interdomain SIP communication, where the destination proxy is determined by a DNS SRV lookup, proxy to proxy connection needs to be made only when a SIP session between the two domains is initiated. I would make the connection linger and the reused in case of subsequent calls.

I dream of the day I can use SCTP for proxy to proxy connections (instead of TCP) but this is still a very “exotic” protocol.