LiveOnTheNet.com

LiveOnTheNet.com is located in the high tech community of Huntsville, Alabama. The company is part of a thriving local technology base that includes governmental organizations such as NASA, the Army's Strategic Space and Missile Defense Command and the University of Alabama's engineering programs. Technology firms include Intergraph, Adtran, Avocent, Sanmina SCI, CSC/Nichols Research, Research Genetics and many others.

Digium, Inc., also based in Huntsville, is LiveOnTheNet's primary technology partner for this product. Digium was named one of the "20 Companies to Watch in 2006" by VOIP Magazine and is the developer of the highly popular open source VOIP PBX, Asterisk. Asterisk is extremely robust and is used by millions of people around the world. Importantly, the PBX is also scalable and can easily support conference calls across a wide collection of far-flung VOIP servers.

LiveOnTheNet contracted and worked closely with Digium, to develop a powerful, proprietary, flexible and highly scalable Asterisk softphone that:

can easily be "embedded" in new applications, such as sportscasting, MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games), scoail networking, etc.; allows users to search databases with application-specific criteria to locate other users, and, allows spontaneous, dynamic conference calls between large numbers of users Future versions will also support the collection and distribution of video

Asterisk VOIP PBX - the server infrastructure supporting LiveOnTheNet's VOIP platform is based on the open-source VOIP PBX, Asterisk, from Digium. The open source community helps the PBX advance quickly to meet new technological challenges, maintain a rich feature set and remain robust. In addition, the platform uses the IAX2 (Inter-Asterisk exchange) protocol which is also an open-source standard and also evolves quickly. Among the issues being tackled by the open source community are the collection and distribution of video over Asterisk/IAX2.

LiveOnTheNet Softphone - the company's Java-based softphone was developed as work-for-hire by Digium and is LiveOnTheNet's proprietary technology. Among the proprietary aspects of the IAX2 client that propel a competitive advantage include:

The softphone's focus on giving users an easy platform to create, locate and manage conference calls organized around a limitless variety of user-defined topics -- rather than focusing on person-to-person calls. The phone's robust feature set has been designed and will continually evolve to support large numbers of online chats or conversations with large numbers of participants;
Its ability to interact smoothly and flexibly with internal databases which allows the softphone to become an integral part of customer-defined applications. In future releases, this capability will be extended to allow the softphone and its conferencing platform to be able to interact with external, customer-defined databases via an API;
The softphone interacts with databases - querying, storing and fetching data, etc. - all within the IAX2 stream… transferring text to and from databases within the signaling between the softphone and Asterisk servers which comprise the conferencing platform. In addition, there are proprietary "plug-ins" that reside on our standard Asterisk servers which enable innovative interaction with proprietary databases. There are no "side" Java scripts or HTML posts that facilitate this transfer - it is all performed within the call itself, which makes the database ties more compatible with TCP/IP, NAT, firewalls and even mobile applications.