Hawaiian Shirt Tuesday - Jeff Pulver's Birthday

Andy has started off VON Boston, with a request to all - to say thanks to Jeff Pulver and Happy Birthday - by wearing a Hawaiian Shirt. I don't own one, but how hard can they be to find? Can I borrow one of yours Andy?


Hawaiian Shirt Day.. Office Space.

Iotum just gave me a reason to use AIM Phoneline

For reference, I am a consummate VoIP geek - I test everything, develop, tinker, sell, innovate all kinds of things. What I think is also important to mention; I have never used AIM in my life. Even with their announcement of free incoming lines (although not in Canada yet grr) it wasn't enough to make me want to try it.

With today's announcement of AOL's AIM Phoneline choosing to work with Iotum on developing and integrating the Relevance engine into AOL's Voice 2.0 offering, they not only did AOL get a new user and developer, they are going to generate revenue. AIM Phoneline offering is dirt cheap, 10$ month unlimited NA with a DID. Why wouldn't I buy this? I will gladly pay for advanced VM and relevance functions that Iotum is offering as well. Plain vanilla VM isn't enough, I need VM in my inbox, on the road, and to be able to give my clients and customers options to reach me. This partnership gives SMB's a real level playing field in the world of Voice communications. The big UM switches the proprietary vendors offer, are great - but the millions of SOHO's can now have the same functions for a fraction of the cost.

The Iotum Integration is just the tip of the Iceberg, AOL really seems to get it - platforms bring customers....

Let the development of Long Tail Voice Apps. commence.

Andy Say's - Gizmo Goes All Calls Free...Mostly

Wow, according to Andy Abramson of VoipWatch, Gizmo project (the asterisk friendly Skype competitor) is going to best the Skype marketing machine by offering all calls free...  Period.  

It will be apparently launched tomorrow, more info. here.

Bounty for tethering a Blackberry 8700 to a Mac...

Alex King has set up a bounty for anyone who can successfully tether a Blackberry 8700 to a Mac (running Mac OS X) to use it as a modem. The bounty is currently at $435.00 and rising!! The terms are listed on his website.

http://www.alexking.org/blog/2006/06/08/tether-blackberry-8700-mac-bounty/




read more | digg story

Skype Code cracked? Not a chance.

It is being reported that VoipWiki took a Skype call, from a reversed engineered client - produced by a Chinese company. This opens some interesting discussion points to say the least...

I just don't see how this is possible. The Skype guys (and left over KaZaA core) learned the lesson fron KaZaA lite. They aren't going to make that mistake again.

The Blogosphere is ripe with this story, if one thing is perfectly clear - Skype should be listening to the interest in this and recognize the opportunity to create a standard for VoIP communications on the web. Being closed is dangerous, everyone wants the protocol - why not work towards giving it to them?

"Go Big or Phonegnome"

Phonegnome, (quickly becoming my favourite VoIP appliance) just got a little better. They added Virtual Numbers, or DID's. Not to toy around with one locality at a time, they added with the help of a partner, DID's pretty much throughout the entire world.

Very impressive, and for the SOHO set - Phonegnome is a must have now. Phonegnome is like Skype in a viral way - Once you have one, you just want to tell people about it.

Two features that are must haves and I hope are on the roadmap are: Distinctive Ring for Inbound DID's (SOHO and Teen phone line use) as well as seperate VM for DID's calls and customized prompts.

Great job.

Iotum and Versature - A match made in... Ottawa?

The red hot startup Iotum announced earlier this week, a strategic partnership with Versature (a kickass hosted VoIP business PBX solution)

There are three things I love, FroYO, Intellingent UM and Call Routing and Hosted PBX's, and this deal has all but the first. By integrating the Iotum Relevance engine into Versature's Hosted PBX (the best I have ever seen btw) Iotum gets a national parnter and access to many bleeding edge customers, and Versature adds to its already uber impressive feature set; the most intelligent presence based call management engine ever conceived to date. Clearly a win-win.

I look forward to trying this solution out and will report back testing I hope to complete in the next couple of weeks.