by Garrett Smith on June 12, 2008
I hate the word SIP Trunking. I don’t even like the term “virtual trunking.”
Regardless of my disdain for industry “marketing” terms, Packet8 announced today a new digital phone line over IP product. Due to a busy work schedule, I was unable to speak with their VP of Sales and Marketing Huw Rees (so I am unsure if this product is SIP based or not), however this move into the pure digital business phone line space is a natural progression and certainly bolsters (as well as compliments) Packet8’s current offerings as it will allow them to move “upstream” and target larger sized businesses. Implementation of the service is achieved through installation of an Integrated Access Device (IAD) on the customer’s premise by a professional Packet8 installation team that will allow for management of IP based connectivity.
Packet8 should be able to effectively target the 5 to 15 voice line customer (which is typically a 15 to 75 person company depending on calling needs), a space which I suspect has previously been troublesome for them, since their hosted model loses luster (due to per seat costs) after 5 - 10 users. The service will also open up their ability to partner with a variety of PBX and IP PBX manufacturers and their VAR to provide some powerful bundled offerings to small medium enterprises.
I have previously written about how a similar offering for Vonage (VonagePro) could be just the type of offering to reignite the companies subscriber growth and I believe that this new offering from Packet8 will prove to be a great source for new revenues and could really put a dent into the business of many of the smaller SIP Trunking providers given Packet8’s size and marketing prowess. This is definitely one service to watch.
by Garrett Smith on June 4, 2008
A few weeks ago I came up with an idea to document the various uses for Asterisk after becoming frustrated at the near-sightedness of many within the open source community who view the platform as nothing more than a phone system.
The result of this idea was a contest launched yesterday on the VoIP Insider, entitled 101 Things You can Do With Asterisk.
The premise was simple.
As the open source community to contribute to a post what they (or someone they know) has done with Asterisk. After we reached 101 uses, we would pick a winner (at random) and give them a $1,500 shopping spree at VoIP Supply.
What proceed absolutely floored me. Within the first two hours we had already received 101 uses and in less than a day have well over 200 different uses for Asterisk.
The contest and corresponding post is a testament to the creativity and spirit of the open source community. To all of you who contributed to the contest, congratulations; you get it.
by Garrett Smith on June 2, 2008
VoIP resellers are finding today’s market to be a boon.
Coming off the heels of my post about the confusion as to whether the market was growing or slowing (it is doing both), I was interviewed for a CRN story about the growing VoIP reseller market.
As I stated in the article, the industry has hit a second wave of adopter of VoIP and that second wave seems a little more cautious about VoIP and therefore they are requiring more education which is causing deals are taking a bit longer to complete, pushing out sales cycles.
Due to this, many a VAR has had to change how they sell their solutions and due to this, there has been a bit of a dip as they reload.
You can read the entire piece here.
by Garrett Smith on June 2, 2008
The VoIP industry is dominated by males. However, there are quite a few prominent females making moves in the industry.
As a female who is brand new to the industry, Nicole Schuman, has created an awesome series entitled Women In VoIP. The series, which already has 20 scheduled interviews, is designed to promote females in the VoIP (and telecom) industry.
Each post in this series feature questions and answers on such topics like how they got started in VoIP, what is like to be a female in the industry and how to deal with all alpha males they encounter.
If you are interested in learning more about Women in VoIP, check out Nicole’s first two posts here and here.
by Garrett Smith on May 13, 2008
Pal and fellow blogger Moshe Maeir’s Flat Planet Phone Company has deployed a VoIP Phone System for the Democratic party. The the Call center system was used by Indiana Democrats in Tuesday’s primaries.
According to Indiana Democratic party, Flat Planet’s solution lowered telephone costs by 50 percent and allows every telephone in the system to be used as an extension for headquarters set up in New York.
An Israeli company, providing a phone system to the Democratic party; the world really is flat!
by Garrett Smith on May 12, 2008
One of the companies that has caught my eye as of late is IFBYPHONE. they are quickly emerging as one to watch in the voice software as a service space.
If the name doesn’t ring a bell, don’t worry….I’ll give you a quick background.
Ifbyphone is a hosted telephone application platform that provides small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) an easy means to increase their customer conversations and drive sales — without the high cost and complexity typically associated with building interactive voice response systems.
In a nutshell, they have created an extremely easy to use and cost effective platform for “the rest of us” to create simple Click-to-Call links on Web pages and e-mail to sophisticated call-routing and interactive-marketing solutions-transforming telephones into powerful tools to increase leads, improve sales and enhance customer experience.
Today they announced their latest application built off their hosted telephony application platform, “Verify-Me-Now.” Verify-me-now uses automated telephone verification to instantly identify fraudulent account applications.
Now this is a much needed and valuable service, but what i like most about IFBYPHONE is the way that they are going about marketing their platform. They are doing something that most folks don’t; actually using the platform to create “real-life” examples of what can be done with it.
That folks, is a job well done.
by Garrett Smith on May 6, 2008
This just came through on my Twitter feed.
Seems fellow blogger and Voice 2.0 entrepreneur Pat Phelan has partner with a number of other companies to release TwitterFone a speak to text service that allows Twitters to “speak their Tweets”. According to the press release issued today,
“Twitterfone improves upon Twitter by allowing us to make a voice call which is turned into text and sent out to our network of friends. This only costs the price of a local call, no matter how many it is sent to.”
Not only is this a great service for die hard Twitters around the world, I believe that this service will make Twitter a more usable service for the mainstream, since making a call is a more common way that folks communicate with one another. In addition, this is another awesome example of why platform providers should be offering API’s up to third party developers.
TwitterFone is a win for Twitter, those who use it as well as Pat and company. Man, voice enabling these social platforms is becoming serious business.
Update: Seems that TwitterFone has received over 500 sign-ups in the first 30 minutes of the launch.
Update 2: I got my invite from Pat, take a listen to my first TwitterFone tweet.
