A week in VOIP and IP Telephony

Microsoft enters VOIP arena with MCI
Microsoft has announced plans to release its first beta version of Live Messenger with VoIP.
Microsoft has staked a claim in the US VoIP market by announcing its software users can soon make Internet calls to standard phones thanks to a new partnership with MCI. Although rival products from the likes of Yahoo and Skype offer extra features, given Microsoft's broad market reach elsewhere and its alliance with MCI, this should not affect the company's foray into VoIP in the longer term.
Jingle All The Way
Today, two major advances have been made in the openness of our voice capabilities. This morning, the Jabber Software Foundation (JSF) introduced two new proposed extensions to XMPP, known as Jingle and Jingle Audio. These enhancements describe how to write software compatible with Google Talk's voice features and have been introduced into the JSF's standards process where they'll be reviewed and improved by the XMPP community. To make implementing these extensions even easier, we've released a library we call "libjingle."
Libjingle is the very same code Google Talk uses to negotiate, establish, and maintain peer-to-peer voice sessions, packaged as a library for other developers to use in their own projects. By incorporating Libjingle into your project, you enable its users to voice chat with other users of the Google Talk service.

Jingle bells continued... Google opens up google talk
Google has released this source code as part of our ongoing commitment to promoting consumer choice and interoperability in Internet-based real-time-communications. The Google source code is made available under a Berkeley-style license, which means you are free to incorporate it into commercial and non-commercial software and distribute it.
You can use any or all of these components.
* base - Low-level portable utility functions.
* p2p - The p2p stack,including base p2p functionality and client hooks intoXMPP.
* session - Phone call signaling.
* third_party - Non-Google components required for some functionality.
* xmllite - XML parser.
* xmpp - XMPP engine.

All Vonage VoIP Users Now Get E911 Service
Leading VoIP provider Vonage said Wednesday that its entire customer base has access to enhanced emergency 911 services.

“Today, any Vonage customer in the U.S. who dials 911, will get help when they need it most,” read the announcement.

Providing E911 E911 capability has held up the deployment of many VoIP providers and Vonage was no exception. The Federal Communications Commission extended the deadline for compliance to Nov. 28, but then extended it beyond that date without naming a specific date for compliance.