[*] StarStar Me: Using your name as your phone number

[Ron Dallmeier]

What you are describing wasn't created by MS (so far as I know)? But I
am happy to see that they adopted the correct solution.
It sounds identical to sip.edu.
We had an project at MRnet (winter of 2004/2005). Bill had set this up
on a MRnet server (asterisk and SER). We could direct sip2sip call
people at the big universities in the US by their email address.
You attempt to make the call using the email address. The sip proxy
does a DNS-SRV record lookup to see if there is a sip gateway for that
domain, if so the call setup request to sent that way.
The sip gateway would know if the target user had a active sip
registration or the participating universities would map the email to
the respective campus phone using existing database lookups.
Funny thing the biggest problem with our project was getting it to
work with the UofM's PBX via PRI (we weren't getting the dialed
number).

...Ron

On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 8:21 AM, John Lange <john at johnlange.ca> wrote:
> That article about the ** thing is just a gimmick. Basically it's a
> speed-dial-by-name. If you a contact list you can already dial-by-name.
>
> But Ron's comment about email addresses reminded me of something...
>
> A few years back we talked about the challenge direct "dialing" people with
> the keypad who don't have a phone number. There have been a few proposals in
> this area specifically things like ENUM.
>
> What I've come to realize in the intervening time is that this problem is
> already well on it's way to solving itself and it's actually not that
> complicated.
>
> Step 1. Forget about the numeric keypad as the problem. With the
> proliferation of smartphones, just about everyone effectively dials by name.
> They lookup a contact and then press "call". On my smartphone, when I touch
> the "phone" button, it doesn't come up with a keypad, it comes up with a
> list of searchable contacts. I can't even remember the last time I called
> someone by punching in numbers using the keypad. So while I may not be
> typical, it does prove that it's possible to get rid of they keypad as the
> primary input device.
>
> With deskphones it's the same thing. If you look at Microsoft Lync, even the
> desk phone is integrated with your address book. I just start spelling the
> name with the keypad and typically within 3 key presses it's narrowed the
> list down to my intended contact (It automatically matches the name or the
> phone number as I type it in).
>
> Step 2. Adopt a standard for direct sip-to-sip calling. Microsoft (yes
> Microsoft!) has already solved this problem with an elegant and simple
> solution; DNS SRV. It works like this: take an email address and look up the
> sip service for my domain using DNS SRV, then call that destination directly
> bypassing the PSTN.
>
> So lets take this as a practical example. Lets say I have a contact in my
> address book "Mike Smith". I probably have his name, email and phone number.
> If I want to call Mike, I look up his contact and touch "call". In the
> background my voice application (my "phone") does DNS SRV lookup for SIP
> using his email address. If it returns a result, I "dial" that and talk to
> Mike. If it fails, I fall-back to a traditional PSTN/Cell call.
>
> John