Andrew Garcia

I just wrapped up a two-day visit to the VON.x telephony show in San Jose. Below are some of the highs and lows from my experience at the show. Most Lively Booth: BroadSoft BroadSoft, a company that makes VOIP platforms and applications, then resells them to carriers and ITSPs (Internet telephony service providers), was at […]

At the VON.x conference in San Jose, Calif., Polycom let me play with their latest voice over Wi-Fi phone — the Polycom SpectraLink 8002 Wireless Telephone. Intended for small-business customers, the phone is intended to be easier to set up and manage — and cost significantly less — than its higher-end SpectraLink cousins. Designed to […]

When Motorola March 12 publicly announced its 802.11n initiative and rolled out equipment for enterprise customers, this meant all of the biggest names in the wireless LAN space in terms of market share were now offering the products based on the draft standard.This blanket availability shows that these companies have paid heed to their customers’ […]

BeyondTrust is all about solving problems that perplexed me six years ago. And I mean that as a compliment, since no one else has really addressed those problems in all this time. Before I came to eWEEK in 2003, I worked at an IT consulting firm serving small businesses in and around San Francisco. One […]

Every morning, it’s the same story: Dock my laptop, connect my iPhone, then sync my calendar from Outlook. I’m sick of it. But I need iTunes on my work system to sync that damn calendar. And as I’ve stated before, iTunes is a pig–consuming copious processor time and memory for what, in this case, is […]

Today, Texas Instruments announced support for Microsoft’s RT Audio codec in its voice over IP chip sets, paving the way for an influx of new devices that work with Microsoft’s Office Communications system 2007 Unified Communications platform — and much greater choice for customers thinking about deploying Microsoft’s platform. As I noted previously in my […]

Today in my spare time, I’ve been combing through Microsoft’s e-mail trail (PDF) regarding the internal (and external) confusion about what Vista Capable really means (and Microsoft’s blatant capitulation to Intel regarding low-end chip sets), and I caught this little nugget that made me smile: On page 34 of 158, there is a note that […]

I spent Tuesday afternoon visiting iSimCity, Ixia’s new for-hire testing facility and Executive Briefing Center, which is located in Santa Clara, Calif. With the new facility, Ixia hopes to give their customers–service providers, government agencies, high-end enterprise and network equipment manufacturers–access to the testing equipment, know-how and test plans needed to perform extremely large-scale performance […]

After reading Cisco’s press release and many of the news reports about Duke University’s gigantic 802.11n deployment, I found many of my questions were left unanswered. So Cisco put me in touch with Duke’s Kevin Miller, assistant director of Communications Infrastructure, whom I quickly peppered with some more questions about the deployment. Duke’s 802.11n network, […]

My recent review of Microsoft’s Response Point awakened in me an interest in speech recognition technology. Microsoft’s product utilized speech recognition to help users perform regular commands using only their voice — to call contacts, check voice mail, or answer a few simple stock questions. I found the technology worked extraordinarily well — requiring little […]

With Windows Vista Service Pack 1 kinda, sorta ready for its public debut, I felt it was time to follow the time-honored IT tradition and make the leap to Vista on one of my primary-use PCs for good. While I’ve spent hundreds of hours with Windows Vista and its beta iterations over the last two […]