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Posts Tagged ‘Registrations’

feature: VoIP in-depth: An introduction to the SIP protocol, Part 1

In our last VoIP installment, we looked at the main reasons why SIP has become a widely adopted protocol, but we left details of the protocol’s inner workings fairly vague. This article will drill down into the way the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) works, and it should serve as a good starting point for really learning SIP. If you haven’t already done so, you are encouraged to read the previous article, although it’s not a prerequisite. This introduction also covers the latest SIP extensions and changes, so it gives a complete view of the protocol’s current state, rather than just the basic, underlying RFC.

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a VoIP signaling protocol. As its name suggests, it has everything to do with setting up sessions, which means it has the responsibility for starting a session after you dial a number (or double-click, in some cases). As such, SIP’s role also includes maintaining user registrations with a server, defining session routing, handling various error scenarios, and, of course, modifying and tearing down sessions.

We’ll present this introduction in two parts. In the first part, we’ll focus on the SIP foundation layers. These layers allow creating a network of SIP servers. In the next article, we will go through the way a phone communicates with the rest of the world using this server network, based on the same foundation layers.

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Sponty: Revolutionizing the Meetup and Tweetup

Though I’m chronically checking in on services like Brightkite, Loopt and Foursquare, it’s rare that I’ll actually make an appearance at the behest of a friend’s status update. For the slovenly masses that work from home, venturing out to meet friends on a weeknight can seem daunting. But rather than submit to the unkempt perils of pantless utopia, there’s hope. Sponty offers us a chance to plan and prep for casual outings.

Sponsor

Instead of asking users to give their immediate locations, Sponty allows us to add events to a schedule. Users can add their information via the company’s web interface or its newly released iPhone app. If you know you’re going to be at a conference, happy hour or concert you can add the event, location and time to your Sponty calendar. From here it’s easy to plan meet ups and tweet ups. Once you fill in your info, your friends are notified via the Sponty community, Twitter, Facebook, email or through an embeddable blog widget. Friends then click the “I’m down” button to express their interest in joining you. Users can cancel or bail out on events at anytime.

While you may share calendars with your closest pals, a wider circle of friends would quickly make that overwhelming to track. Sponty is a great social calendar substitute and offers users a chance to plan impromptu events without the constraints of multiple registrations. What’s interesting about this service is the fact that instead of offering us real-time event updates, it’s more usefully giving us a look at real-time intentions. To register and test the service visit thesponty.com.

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LaunchSet: Beta/Alpha/Private Access and Data for Startups and the Early Adopters Who Love Them

For the earliest of early adopters, the concept of a service like LaunchSet sounds like being buddies with the biggest, coolest club promoter in town: Get a first look at pre-launch sites for testing and feedback before anyone else on the block.

For already stressed startups, LaunchSet provides a valuable service: Management of registrations and analytics during the packed-to-the-gills months, weeks, and days between launching private and public versions of a site or app.

Sponsor

Founder Danny Roa is a San Francisco-based Python/Django/.Net developer. He was also one of the minds behind Hubb.me, a product of this spring’s Startup Weekend in San Francisco.

His pitch for the site is simple: Launchset will manage your site’s closed alpha/beta registration system, including invitation codes, email addresses, waiting lists, and/or parameters such as having users follow the startup’s account on Twitter or add the app or company on Facebook before gaining access to the app or site.

“Some sites want to slowly roll out their release to the public,” he wrote on the LaunchSet site. “This can be done by collecting email addresses from users and manually giving them access to the site. Some sites build functionality that would give out and take invitation codes.

“While these are not insanely hard to code, this functionality is disposed of when the time has come to launch openly to the public.”

So why make each individual startup do something that only needs to be done once? Why reinvent the wheel?

Roa wrote that he got the idea to start this service as he was trying to create a way to grant limited access to just a few users while working on another project – perhaps Hubb.me.

In addition to allowing startups to specify exactly how many users they want to give access to for their private launches, LaunchSet can also help sites target a particular set of users once their “talent pool” of ubergeeks grows a bit more.

The idea is that by using LaunchSet, not only will the invitation/registration process become much easier for startups to manage; they’ll also be able to see how many people are interested in your site either by how many people following it or how many users are waiting to get access.

LaunchSet went live in July. Sites can sign up here, and early-adopting end users can register here. Kudos to Roa for executing a great idea that simply solves a simple problem and that has the potential to make a lot of people very happy.

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