Silverlighting Olympics 2008

Apart from the bright sparkling Beijing sky this Olympics, 2008, there is a Silverlight to the Olympics thanks to Microsoft.

NBC (National Broadcasting Corporation) in collaboration with the Microsoft Silverlight technology has come up with the Olympics site - www.nbcolympics.com.

Silverlight technology is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Also, Silverlight is competing with Adobe's Flash in providing an enhanced online experience for the viewers.

It is providing 3,000 hours of on-demand video and more than 2,200 hours of live coverage for the Olympics through the NBCOlympics.com site. The site is free to use with a custom NBC media player to watch multiple video streams at once, using picture-in-picture boxes. Silverlight works on both Apple Macs and Windows PCs and it uses an adaptive streaming technology.

Microsoft is adding its own Silverlining to the 2008 Beijing Olympics through NBC Olympics site.

Asterisk IPPBX Indian Forum

I was searching for Digium's open source PBX Asterisk in India and found the India forum - which contains blogs, Howto's, list of Asterisk consultants in India including Hyderabad. Also present are Tips, tricks for Asterisk, a place for ordering Asterisk hardware like FXO cards - FXS and ATA's seem to be not present yet on the site. Lots of information and useful tips for India deployment. Check out the site - http://asterisk.pbx.in/.

Click to dial application from Webpage

If you are looking for some cool scripts that you can use to dial a number using VOIP clients like Skype, you can use either AstJAX dialer script for Firefox or Dial Engine Pro application.

For AstJAX to work, you need to install greasemonkey (http://www.greasespot.net/) which is an extension to Firefox which allows you to customize the way web pages look and function. Make sure you are using the latest version of Firefox (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/). Follow the instructions from (http://www.yaptele.com/asterisk-firefox-click-to-dial-ajax-script) and you are all set to dial from your webpages.

Phone Dialer Pro site has a list of products (nine to be precise) which work well with dialing from webpages. They are TAPI compliant products and can be used with any PC modems. For more information, check http://www.phonedialerpro.com/index.html and http://www.phonedialerpro.com/apps.htm for instructions on usage and features set. The Phone Dialer applications are not free, you can get a trial version for testing out.