Those of you on Twitter would have seen the news first, but in case you didn’t:

1. Facebook buys Instagram photo sharing network for $1bn
2. Why Microsoft spent $1 billion on AOL’s patents 

The first one is cool and shows you how the social media sector can pay for itself when an app is released free. Instagram allows you to takes pics and automatically upload them up to Twitter, Facebook and do fancy effects on them. The native Facebook iPhone app was clunky to use with pics.

There are also 13 guys in Instagram now all worth almost $100m (CEO got most). The general comment is that the Android release last week had a big impact on the deal and also their powerful RESTful API and OAuth 2 (just like the SureVoIP API, but we weren’t first ).

The scary news is that the newly owned Microsoft patents are so powerful. They just bought one for SSL, you know, the thing that allows you to go to https:// for your bank and the whole web.

There’s a lot of other mobile patents in that list too. Food for thought as to what damage they can do in the future like create a Microsoft tax for many things and kill a lot of mobile innovation and there’s even some in there about VoIP!

We’d like to remind existing and potential customers that when deploying their own IP PBX from scratch, namely software like Asterisk, FreeSWITCH, OpenSIPS and others that you should be very strict with regards to VoIP security.

With that in mind we would like all customers that fall into the above category to review the ITSPA Best Practice guide on VoIP security – IP-PBX deployment for end users

ITSPA takes the safety of its customers seriously. Telephony systems using VoIP bring many benefits
in cost and flexibility, but in common with many of today’s advanced technologies, there are also
threats. In 2010, ITSPA formed a security committee to discuss best practice and create advice for
its own members and for customers of IP telephony systems. We distilled some of the best
practical advice from service providers, security experts and vendors and used it to create this
document.

ITSPA has its own Quality Mark that recognises ITSPA members that aspire to be the best in their field. Part of qualifying for this Quality Mark is the adherence to best practices, and this includes the area of VoIP security. When you choose a service provider with the ITSPA Quality Mark, you are choosing a partner that has a deep understanding of VoIP issues, and a commitment to delivering services of the highest quality and safety. SureVoIP have the ITSPA Quality Mark