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[caption id="attachment_203" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Boxee showing caller id from Asterisk"][/caption]

While browsing around the PBX In A Flash forums I came across a post about getting incoming call notifications on XBMC and immediately thought this would be great with boxee as well seen as we use that every now and then on our Apple TV. The setup was a little bit on the painful side just trying to figure out how to make the “KaiToast” display how I wanted. Out of the box it works great on XBMC, but needs some tweaking to make it work on boxee.

Check out the How-To after the break!

So I’ve been thinking a lot about Unified Communications lately as it’s something that I might be doing a lecture on at the University of Minnesota this fall and I started to wonder is this going to be the next big thing in communications? If you look back at communications and how we have evolved we’ve seen a lot of different methods (in no particular order): smoke signals, morse code, “snail” mail, e-mail, SMS/text messages, telephone, and finally mobile phones. So where does that really leave us to go? Sure we could try to figure out that thing called telepathy, but I am not holding my breath on that one. So where does that leave us?

Head on over to http://www.tcaug.net if you are in the twin cities and use Asterisk to get all the latest info regarding the monthly meetings and such. Each meeting there will be a new phone demo so we can see the various phones out there before we buy, hopefully that will help people out when

Cisco makes some great VoIP products but yet they seem to leave out some of the most important features. Only one of their VoIP phones comes with a backlit screen: the 7970. Now as much as I would love to have that phone (it comes with a color touchscreen for web applications on the phone)