vtalk

Kickstarter Backer Update: Day 2 from vtalk on Vimeo.

Hey Kickstarter!

Locating your vtalk from vtalk on Vimeo.

Its been a little while since we posted any tips and tricks. With the release of vtalk 1.7, there's a new feature that allows you to set a prefix for a particular provider to force calls out through them. This can be useful if you have multiple numbers and want to call different clients from different companies on the one vtalk.

If you're using Snom handsets, you can program the phone to automatically append the prefix you've chosen so you can dial like normal and the phone will take care of the rest!

Login to your vtalk and edit the provider you want to set the prefix for. You will see a field that lets you set a prefix.

Remember the prefix. Now find your Snom phone and login by clicking on the device name under the extension (this will take you directly to the phone's IP):

When prompted for a password, the username is vtalk and so is the password.

Once logged into the phone, click on "Identity 1" and then the tab "SIP":

There is a textbox named "Dial-Plan String", enter the following in the box and click "Save":

|^([0-9]{7,})$|sip:99\1@\d

In 2011 vtalk were lucky enough to exhibit at CeBIT Sydney supported by The Australian Technology Showcase (ATS), a NSW State Government initiative. This year I attended CeBIT again and saw the conference through a different set of eyes - that of a spectator, not an exhibitor. Walking into the exhibition hall there were elements of nostalgia from last year especially around the ATS stand. Red lanyards, laptops, makeshift signage and that startup “hustle” vibe were definitely present.

My first stop was to see the twelve new companies under the ATS banner who were busy pitching, explaining their ideas and innovations and gauging the interest of passers by. One exhibitor that has been a crowd favorite on the Sydney startup scene and a graduate of Fishburners Coworking Space was GoCatch. The startup took the market by storm in 2011 with their free booking App for taxi drivers and passengers. GoCatch also featured in the 2011 Tech 23 awards (alongside vtalk) taking the grand prize of $50,000. Sydney based startup Deputy.com also made an appearance in the Showcase. Deputy.com have developed really simple cloud based staffing software designed to make HR management easy. All in all there were a bunch of great new companies doing exciting things. It's always good to see the NSW Government supporting local start ups, the ATS is a truly great initiative.

Like every year the show had a big turn out. I enjoyed catching up with the folks from Snom, MyNetPhone, TPG, Xero, Air Watch, Telstra, Alloy and the NSW Government staff from the ATS. I was impressed to see a few tier two telcos (like MyNetPhone and TPG) getting up and having a crack against the big guys. There’s no doubt about it, I’ll be back again next year. I’m really looking forward to seeing who is featured on the ATS stand and find out about the next wave of entrepreneurs and the innovative things they are developing!

When we launched vtalk touch in December of 2011, we were really excited to bring it to our customers, giving them the opportunity to replace a desk phone with an iPhone or iPod touch.

Now, we’re pleased to announce a long awaited, massive update to vtalk touch! We’ve spent the last few months giving the app a major overhaul. Thanks to the hard work of our team this update has improved the stability of vtalk touch, made the app faster and improved on the audio quality of the previous version. 

Since vtalk cloud is now free, all customers can download and start using vtalk touch right away! The latest version can be found on the App Store now.

Late last year I wrote about our experiences with Meraki, a San Francisco based networking company that makes some really great gear. After using their hardware I was so impressed that not only did we keep it, but we've decided to make it our hardware of choice. We've rolled out their MX security appliances and MS switches as well as the wireless access points to create a superior WiFi network to our previous setup.

The Meraki guys really get it, and their secret sauce is in their cloud controller. You have a central dashboard where you can view and configure all of your Meraki gear.

The hardware looks after itself and you can even schedule when you'd like it to receive firmware updates, or even alert you when someone makes a config change or plugs a device into one of their MS switches. Its pretty amazing stuff.

Their access points are super simple to setup, you connect one to your network, and the rest just need power. They'll auto mesh and you end up with a robust wireless network.

For one of our customers, we put in a pair of their outdoor access points to link two of their buildings together. They're now able to push almost gigabit speeds over a distance of around 500m.

We couldn't be happier with the Meraki equipment we've deployed and we really think our products complement each other.

We're proud to introduce a major new update to vtalk, dubbed version 1.6. We've been listening to our customers and working hard to deliver the most requested features in this all inclusive update!

Today we've pushed out the new software and your vtalk will automatically update overnight to the latest version which will give you the following new features and benefits:

Multiple group support - You can now have members part of multiple groups eg. Sales Team, Support or IT Department.

Group caller ID - When you receive a call on a group extension, you'll now see the caller ID name of the group displayed on your phone, great for multiple companies on the same vtalk.

Follow me - You can now choose to have your extension follow you to another number, whether its your mobile or another extension in the office.

Improved call log - You can now see missed, incoming and outgoing calls on your vtalk and download CSV files for each of these.

User interface changes - We've been making changes to our vtalk user interface to provide a much better experience all around.

Improved backup performance - When your vtalk backs itself up each night, we've made improvements to the amount of bandwidth that is used saving up to 90%!

Reboot - A simple but much asked for feature, you can now reboot your vtalk from the System page.

General bug fixes and improvements - We've made lots of behind the scenes changes to little bug fixes and general improvements.

Improved firmware update process - We've improved the way your vtalk gets its firmware updates, so they are now 2-3x faster than before!

We're really excited to be offering you this major update. As always if we can assist you in any way, please don't hesitate to call or email us!

Our team has grown steadily since our start way back in 2008 and we've been lucky to work with some really great people. Today we're excited to announce a new addition to the family - Matthew Welty, who is joining us as an investor and advisor.

Matthew is an engineering director at Path, an up-and-coming San Francisco social networking startup that vtalk adores. Before that, he spent over 4 years at Facebook managing infrastructure teams and contributing to the effort to scale the service to over 850 million users. Some of the key projects he oversaw included starting Facebook's original 24x7x365 site reliablity team, conceiving and managing the application operations group and helping to architect, implement and support the technical infrastructure behind the relaunch of Facebook Messages.

We look forward to leveraging his extensive experience to help scale the backend operations for vtalk and our complementary cloud product.

It's been an exciting month here at vtalk HQ. We're continually growing our reach across the country and we're proud to announce another great milestone: our first customer from the southern most state of Australia - Tasmania!

Jonathan Morffew, a tech enthusiast, father and expert renovator took on the projects of installing new phone systems at his local church as well as Leap Health Physiotherapy. After seeing an old analogue phone system go out on the blink, Jonathan decided it was out with the old and in with the new. I had a few good chats with Jonathan pre purchase and delivery and helped guide him in the right direction when it came to porting his analogue PSTN phone lines to Internode - a big money saver! Jonathan was also assisted by the one stop shop guys at Warcom who helped him get all of his networking gear and Yealink phones. 

It's great to see another customer so happy with their vtalk and the ability for them to customise it to suit their business. A shout out to Dan from our support team who provided stellar service in getting Jonathan up and running as quickly as possible!

You can read more of Jonathans thoughts here http://www.morffew.net/?p=84

Cheers,

We often get asked by customers and colleagues, "What router do you recommend we use?". This can be a tricky question as it will often depend on a number of factors such as features and price. More often than not price will be a big factor in the decision.

Being the BSD geeks that we are, we generally run pfSense on embedded hardware, which is extremely powerful and feature packed at a price you can't beat - free. Its not for everyone though, as its a little more complicated to deploy than the standard run of the mill routers available on the market.

Recently we were given some hardware by the folks are Meraki to have a play with. Meraki make wireless access points predominantly (they also make routers) that are cloud managed. What does this mean? Well you can send one out onsite and remotely configure and provision the device without ever physically touching it or needing remote access to the site. I wanted to share my experiences after using it for a few days.

To be clear, we haven't been paid or asked by Meraki to write about them, I have had such a great experience with their product that I really wanted to share the experience.

The router that we migrated to is their MX60 router, which is a neat little router that is extremely powerful, and actually looks nice as well. Its got a single WAN port and an inbuilt 4 port switch, and a single USB port.

The Setup

The setup process was extremely simple, I took our pfSense offline and plugged the Meraki into our network. Within a few seconds it started giving out IP addresses on our network. I logged into the Meraki router (Default username is the serial number and no password). Once logged in, I configured our provider details and within 10-15 seconds we were online again. Voila!

I transferred the VPN and other configurations from our previous router to the Meraki and within a few minutes everything was running identical to our pfSense router.

One of the really great features I've found with the Meraki is the "Layer 7 Traffic Shaping". What is this you ask? Normally on a router when you're setting up your Traffic Shaping or Quality of Service, it asks you for an IP address or particular port you want to catch and then how much bandwidth you want to allocate. This is fine, but it doesn't necessarily give you complete coverage.

With the Layer 7 Traffic Shaping you can tell it exactly what the traffic is. In our case its configured to make sure that all Voice and Video conferencing traffic always gets the highest priority on the network. After putting the changes in place I thought i'd give it a quick test to see how effective it is. I started downloading a bunch of files to max out our connection and then decided to make some test phone calls. The calls were crystal clear and the latency on the vtalk never hovered above 50ms to our SIP provider (NodePhone). I'm hugely impressed with this feat.

The MX60 doesn't have inbuilt Wifi, so we also deployed one of the Meraki MR24 Wireless Access Points. Deployment was as simple as plugging it into our network, and typing the serial number into the Meraki cloud console. Once it had added our device, two or three settings later and we had extremely fast 802.11n Wifi up and running, and our devices all started reconnecting to the new access point.

Both devices are now available for us to manage and monitor in Meraki's cloud controller. The amount of detailed information available in the controller is quite amazing, showing traffic utilisation, and breaking it down by client and by type.

All in all, i'm very impressed with how well the Meraki hardware works and just how easy it is to manage and configure. What I haven't mentioned is price. The Meraki hardware isn't cheap, but for what it is its not expensive either. The MX60 retails for about $900 and the MR24 I believe is around $600. Meraki are in the process of organising local distribution here in Australia.

I'll report back on our experiences after another week.

Yesterday saw the unfortunate loss of one of the world's best and most talented individuals. Our beloved Steve Jobs passed away from his struggle with Cancer. It was a very sad day indeed, however out of everything bad always comes something good. The good is the legacy that Steve has given the world, and what so many people enjoy and use on a daily basis.

What's new at vtalk?

Since our first customer install back in 2008 vtalk has grown the business and changed dramatically. With our awesome growth, we've had to bring on three new rockstars in the office!

The biggest change and innovation in the business has been the appointment of Warcom who now handle all retail and wholesale distribution and the appointment of Anixter who now strictly deal with resellers. From there, things have grown and flourished and we now have a reseller and installer network that covers almost the entire country.

Introducing the vtalk cloud!

vtalk cloud key features:

Work from home using a cloud supported phone.

Feature updates will happen automatically.

Back your vtalk box up every night, automatically.

Provide you will unlimited licence for vtalk touch, for iPhone. (coming soon).

vtalk cloud will replace your existing support contract, so there will no longer be annual fees, making it it the perfect companion for your vtalk, for only $29.95/month. Regsiter your company's interest here: http://register.vtalkcloud.com/

vtalk Cloud Promotion!

Sign up today and receive your first month free on the vtalk cloud. As an introductory offer, refer a new customer and you’ll receive 3 month’s of vtalk cloud for free! Simply send your referral details to us at [email protected] and we’ll credit your account once their vtalk is shipped.

What’s new?

Since the first version of vtalk, we’ve had a number of additions to the capability and updates of which we’ve rolled out to your vtalk already. Some of the more recent editions to our 1.5 software release include:

- IVR / Auto Attendant builder

- Voicemail to email

- Calling Groups

- voicemail for groups

- Sounds Manager for music on hold and sounds

- Auto provisioning support for Aastra, Snom & Yealink handsets

To login to your vtalk and play with these features if you already have a vtalk, navigate to locate.vtalk.com in your browser to login with the default password as default (unless already changed).

New Website

We are very excited to announce the launch of our all-new website. Another way for us to showcase how this small blue box is designed to demystify and simplify VoIP with a do-it-yourself, set and forget philosophy. We tasked ZHC with the design and layout of a concise, informative and technically impressive online presence. A photographic component was created for the website and promotional items for our recent successful launch at CeBit. A great resource for current and new customers and resellers alike. Enjoy! www.vtalk.com

We’ll be in touch with you again soon and would welcome any feedback!