Softphones
You are currently browsing the articles from the VoIP Digest matching the category Softphones.
With all due respect, I believe that not enough of we pundits are grasping the big picture implied in Yahoo!'s announcement yesterday that it is pairing up with Cisco's Linksys division to offer a $99.99 list, Linksys-Dual Mode Cordless Phone for Yahoo! Messenger with Voice.
Let's look beyond the coolness- the handset with color display [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on November 11th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Softphones and yahoo and Cisco.
For the life of me, I've long failed to understand why every single darn social software website and program doesn't have an officially sanctioned IP talk client.
We're so into "well, duh" territory here. Social networks are not only about posting your photo and engaging in forum discussions. They can, if you so choose, lead [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on October 17th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Software and Softphones.
Now here's one of the most practical ideas I have seen in quite awhile- a way to access most of your IMs over your mobile phone. Kind of like a Trillian for cell.
The latest version of Java-enabled EQO Mobile lets you perform IM-related functions, but take lets you take and make calls on your mobile via [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on October 5th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and General and Providers and Softphones and AOL.
Skype Journal’s Phil Wolff posts that after lots of brouhaha, San Jose State University’s Computing and Telecommunications department (SJSU UCAT) have said they will not ban Skype.
Apparently, a Monday meeting between SJSU officials and Skype-owner eBay’s governmental relations team did the trick.
Although Phil was not in on that meeting, he recommends that any [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on September 27th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and General and Regulatory and Security and Softphones.
Based on Alex Saunders' suggestion, I have downloaded and installed a new free softphone called hullo.It's so easy..no complicated configuration procedures.It's scalable in terms of conference call participants. As Alex points out, the scalability is due in large part to the fact that hullo is not a P2P application, but one which runs Versatel Networks [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on August 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
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Barrett Lyon has created a don't miss resource that shows you how to configure P2P SIP URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) dialing on your Asterisk-based PBX."There are thousands of people that operate their own Asterisk based PBX systems, yet they do not enable any method to allow for p2p sip URI dialing," Barrett explains. "These [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on July 12th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Vonage and General and Softphones and SIP.
Late last week I had a most interesting conversation with Matt Rosen, CEO of Internet phone company Efonica. Here are some highlights.I asked Matt why there is no IM client in the inaugural Efonica Fusion softphone build (shown at the top of this post). While he did say there would be IM capability within [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 25th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on News and General and Softphones.
Spent a busy evening last night downloading, installing and demo-ing some IP softphones.After being quite impressed with Windows Live Messenger, I then decided to give efonica a whirl.That's the new softphone from New York-based Fusion Telecommunications International.Calls are cheap- 1.8 cents a minute. They go through clearly. The set-up is a bit unusual. The [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 20th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Softphones and Reviews.
Some people collect stamps. Others collect coins. I collect VoIP softphones.In that vein, I had to be one of the first to try the VoIP services bundled into Windows Live Messenger, which was released yesterday.Delivered via a partnership with Verizon, this service lets you make outbound calls to pretty much any phone in the world. [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 20th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Softphones and Microsoft and Reviews.
As was widely expected, eBay CEO Meg Whitman used her keynote speech at the eBay Live conference in Las Vegas to announce the first formal phase of eBay-Skype integration.Let's take a look at how this is supposed to work. In a companion post, I will give you my thoughts on whether this will work or [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 14th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and General and Softphones.
Fellow blogger Andy strongly suspects that sometime late this evening, we'll finally understand what eBay's plans are for their $2.6 billion acquisition. That'd be Skype.Tonight would be as good a night as any. At 6 p.m. Pacific, eBay CEO Meg Whitman will keynote the EBay Developers Conference in LV. Lots of Skype folks are hanging [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on June 13th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and General and Softphones.
SIPphone CEO and chairman Mike Robertson wrote me yesterday to tell me that Gizmo 2.0 is now live, and I should try it.I just have, and I like its attractive User Interface and general ease of use.But what's more interesting is something Mike told me.He views this build as in essence, a SJLabs and CounterPath-softphones [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on May 24th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Softphones and SIP.
I've been lamenting the lack of audio quality on VoIP headsets for some time now. Not only the tinny sound, but the fact that these headsets are fragile, and don't survive a lot of user-to-user adjustment. End result: they are brittle, and they break. Listen, I am no audiophile. Barely an audio file. [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on May 17th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Products and Softphones.
I've often felt that Skype needed to be more intuitive to set up and use. This is especially true as more users not necessarily gifted with innate software navigational instincts tip their toe in the water by trying Skype.Well, Skype took some steps forward early this morning, when the eBay-owned Internet-based calling service introduced their [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on May 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Ashod Apakian is quite likely the most brilliant programmer you've never heard of.But if you want to use video over your Skype connection, this is someone whose work you might want to become familiar with.He's come up with VWHO, a new 10-party video conferencing system that runs over Skype and is downloadable as well as [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on April 19th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and General and Software and trends and Products and Softphones.
According to Beta News, Yahoo! is testing Wi-Fi access for its Yahoo! Messenger users. The service will enable users to send instant messages and make phone calls from selected Wi-Fi hotspots.On Addict3D, poster ^A^C^E highlights a survey he apparently has received from Yahoo! during a Yahoo! Messenger download. As you can see in the screen [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on April 19th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Software and Softphones and yahoo and WiFi.
At the CTIA show last week, digital advertising agency isobar's CEO Sarah Fay described a mobile marketing campaign her agency did for the tv series "Veronica Mars." (That's actor Kristen Bell, who plays teen sleuth Veronica).Here's how it worked. Viewers sent SMS' to a specific address, and then those viewers received SMS' back from "Veronica." [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on April 9th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and General and trends and Softphones and Google and yahoo and Promotions and CTIA.
Remember Lycos? At one time, they had an important search service. Now, after being at the periphery of search, they are using a partnership with India-based Global 7 to launch a softphone product called Lycos Phone. (First duh: Lycos Phone got its own website before a link to it was posted on the main Lycos [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on March 26th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and News and General and Providers and Softphones and yahoo.
Those of you who come to this blog know that I am not one to throw around superlatives. In fact, I am more of a critical curmudgeon than one who says "cool" a lot.But within hours of Yahoo! Messenger With Voice's 7.5 beta release here in the U.S., I downloaded it, tried it, and even [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on March 22nd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Softphones and yahoo and Reviews and Streaming media.
I have this theory about folks who are new to technology, don't know much about a tech company, but maybe see an ad or get word-of-mouth recommendations.More than a few such folks are liable to mis-spell the name of the vendor or service and give up out of a sense of confusion. If they use a [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on March 9th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Vonage and Skype and News and General and trends and CallVantage and Softphones and Google and Microsoft and Cisco and BlackBerry and Earthlink.
You're looking at a screen grab of a 10-participant Skype conference call- on an AMD X2-powered CPU. "Now wait a minute," you might be saying. "I thought Skype conference calls on non-Intel boxes had a five-participant limit."Well, yes, they do- and as I posted here the other day, AMD's attorneys are not too pleased about this. [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on March 4th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and News and General and Security and Softphones.
Acoustic shock happens when loud or unannounced sounds travel through phone lines, and hit your ears.Your ears may not know what hit them. As a result, they can suffer the auditory version of a panic attack.We're talking some nasty stuff- ringing in the ears, inordinate sensitivity to sound, and difficulty in processing the details of [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and General and Softphones and Research.
Ever know a woman or man who could have done better, but married below their station because they didn't get out in the world and make themselves available to all the better choices out there?That's sort of the feeling I have when I think about this IDT-Net2Phone consummation formally announced less than a week ago.Background: A [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on News and General and Softphones.
I have been touring Microsoft's new kind of hosted Office Live beta.What a waste of server space. Or, as my colleague Phil Wainewright rightly says:The power of Microsoft's branding is so great that slapping the labels 'Live' and 'Office' on a piecemeal bundle of rehashed services seems to have the whole world agog. [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 16th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and trends and Softphones and Microsoft.
I have been touring Microsoft's new kind of hosted Office Live beta.What a waste of server space. Or, as my colleague Phil Wainewright rightly says:The power of Microsoft's branding is so great that slapping the labels 'Live' and 'Office' on a piecemeal bundle of rehashed services seems to have the whole world agog. [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 16th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and trends and Softphones and Microsoft.
Just got an email from SIPphone CEO Michael Robertson.On Thursday, SIPphone is announcing a new service called Area775. If you switch back and forth 'tween VoIP, cell and land lines like I do, you'll be interested in learning more.Which you are about to: "It's the first service to give you one number that will reach [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 15th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on News and General and Providers and Softphones.
Just got an email from SIPphone CEO Michael Robertson.On Thursday, SIPphone is announcing a new service called Area775. If you switch back and forth 'tween VoIP, cell and land lines like I do, you'll be interested in learning more.Which you are about to: "It's the first service to give you one number that will reach [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 15th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on News and General and Providers and Softphones.
On Tuesday, Skype released a version of their calling software for the Pocket PC platform.There are builds for familar brands such as Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP, i-mate and others.Since the ease- or lack thereof- of the installation process will help many of you decide whether to arm your PocketPC with Skype, I thought I would describe [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 15th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and General and Softphones and Tips.
On Tuesday, Skype released a version of their calling software for the Pocket PC platform.There are builds for familar brands such as Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP, i-mate and others.Since the ease- or lack thereof- of the installation process will help many of you decide whether to arm your PocketPC with Skype, I thought I would describe [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 15th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and General and Softphones and Tips.
Last week in my post entitled Why is Skype giving AMD the second-class treatment?, I wrote about an apparently significant advantage Skype is giving Intel chips over rival products for some advanced services.As just one example, I drew reference to an earlier post where I cited Skype's new 10-participant-capacity conference call feature. This offering is [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 13th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and News and General and trends and Products and Softphones.
As I reported here yesterday, Skype and Intel have been working together in an alliance to power and enable advanced Internet calling features. The first evidence of this is a new conference calling capability in Skype 2.0 for up to 10 people. Some of my colleagues have been taken aback by the fact that this [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 8th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and News and General and Software and trends and Softphones.
Tom Keating’s post today, Vonage opens SIP credentials? quoted a anonymous source stating that Vonage will be opening up their SIP credentials.
A source informed VoIP & Gadgets Blog that Vonage plans to open up their SIP credentials to enable users to configure their own SIP softphones and SIP hardphones to work with the Vonage service at no additional charge. Today Vonage still has kept the SIP credentials “closed” preventing users from using their own SIP devices with the Vonage service. One of the main reasons why Vonage has kept the SIP credentials “closed” is that they charge $9.99/month for their SIP softphone client, which then gives you access to your “personal SIP credentials”. It comes with 500 minutes along with a different SIP URI and PSTN number than your main Vonage phone number. The obvious question is why would Vonage do an about face, open up the SIP credentials and start giving away SIP credentials access for “free” when they curerntly charge for them?
I don’t see Vonage opening up their SIP credentials for their residential offering.
What I do see is Vonage opening up their SIP credentials for the re-introduction of their business class offering. No, not their “fake”, $49.99 offering, but their robust, multi-line offering that they did away with just prior to the FCC E911 rulings. It is common knowledge that Vonage had conducted interoperability testing with numerous SMB IP PBX companies. It is also known that a primary reason for their discountinuing of the service was due to E911 problems. It makes sense for them, now that they have a E911 solution in place, to re-offer the business solution with open credentials for use with a variety of IP PBX’s like Asterisk.
People are looking to leverage the IP phones they already have with their VoIP service provider. Why wouldn’t Vonage want to leverage the millions of Cisco IP phones and other SIP-based hardware phones out there? Additionally, Asterisk is a very popular open-source IP-based phone system that many Asterisk users have configured with SIP trunks for outbound termination. Vonage is shooting themselves in the foot by forcing the Asterisk community to use Vonage’s competitors for PSTN termination.
A move towards a bring your own device offering for Vonage, would sound a fundamental shift in the way they presently do business. A move that, for their residential offering, allows no “financial” protection for them because a user can leave without loosing much. Their current closed credentials acts as financial protection and aides in customer retention because most customers will not drop the service until they receive their rebate (3-4 months). This ensures that Vonage will at least break even on the transaction (ARPU $24.95×3 = $74.85, device is $59.95).
The source summed up his thoughts when he stated, “If Vonage wants to continue to build their customer numbers and retain the ones they have, then they need to continue to innovate. Offering SIP credentials to users is a perfect way to ensure the loyalty of ‘techies’ and ‘teenagers’ that also often recommend a VoIP service provider to their parents and friends.”
Techies and teenagers made up the first round of Vonage activations. Vonage is now focused on the next round of consumers, the dsl and cable internet subscribers who are not techies, but that want to use their “personal bandwith” to its highest potential and save money.
If Vonage is to offer an open credentials plan, it is my best guess that it would be in the form of the re-birth of their previous business class offering or as a bolt-on of their current offerings requiring a annual contract with an early termination fee and or an activation fee. Tom’s sources are great and they usually are right, but this time, in the fashion that his source described the offering, I do not buy it.
Garrett Smith
Written by Garrett Smith on February 8th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Vonage and VoIP (the New Phone) and VoIP and News and General and Softphones and Business VoIP and Residential VoIP and Promotions and VOIP 2.0.
To read about the upgraded conference capability just announced for Skype 2.0 by Intel and Skype, you'd think it is all about the chips. Intel notes that the new 10-participant conference call capacity is available only for home and business Skype uers with Intel Centrino Duo-powered laptops, and desktop PCs that run Intel Pentium D [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 8th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and News and General and trends and Products and Softphones.
On the Skype corporate website, Skype chief security officer Kurt Sauer has kicked off his new Skype Security blog.For his first post, Sauer explains why Skype has designed their PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) into the program in a way that is transparent to Skype users and precludes more user-generated precautions against hacking of Skype sessions [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on February 5th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and General and Security and Softphones.
Within the next few months, you will be able to buy Skype ringtones from artists such as Madonna and Green Day.These ringtones will cost $1.50 a pop.First of all, I think this deal is plain dumb. A short, non-obtrustive ringtone on my cell would work. Helps differentiate my phone from others when I am in [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 31st, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and News and General and Softphones and Promotions.
Sometimes, you can learn the most interesting things from monitoring the financial findings of companies in the VoIP space.Take for instance yesterday's Securities and Exchange Commission Form 8-K filing by Florida-based VoIP services provider VoIP, Inc.The filing is entitled "Entry Into A Material Definitive Agreement." Read thru this agreement and you'll quickly learn that Google [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 31st, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on News and General and trends and Softphones and Google.
Yesterday at the VoIP 2.0 IP Telephony Conference in Fort Lauderdale - wearing my ZDNet badge ever-proudly -I moderated a "VoIP Mobility Reality Check" panel.Over the next several days I will be seeding this blog with statements and insights offered via this panel, as well as some take-aways I obtained from it.But couldn't wait to [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 26th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and trends and Softphones.
I have been writing that MySpace would be an ideal acquirer for Net2Phone's underpriced, iconic softphone's assets.Now it appears that the hugely popular social networking site- owned by News Corp.- has had other ideas.MySpace has partnered with theglobe.com to release tglophone for MySpace users.Any Myspace user who downloads the tglo software receives a softphone allowing voice [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 26th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Providers and trends and Softphones and Images and Promotions.
I visited the Packet 8 booth at the Consumer Electronics Show. Tried the Packet 8 videophone, a product that has been having some modest success via direct website sales but has frankly not wowed them at retail. The phone was stocked at New York's J&R Music World last year- but didn't exactly fly off the [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 6th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and trends and Products and Softphones and Packet 8.
I'm posting this from the Sands Exhibition Center, which is the Consumer Electronics Show's overflow exhibition and conference facility here in Las Vegas.Just had demos of the new softphone from NetZero Voice, as well as Packet 8's new softphone.Unlike more familar softphones such as Skype - these softphones are, in a word, pretty. The dialpad, especially [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 5th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Providers and trends and Products and Softphones and CES and Packet 8.
Esteemed colleague Dan Farber thinks a Google-branded PC could work. In fact, rumors are flying that Google will announce such a product on Friday at the Consumer Electronics Show. That's where I am, incidentially.I think a Google network appliance- such as the oft-rumored Google Cube- would be a better idea. The way I envision Google [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 4th, 2006 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on General and trends and Softphones and Google and CES.
Update: New information, confirmed by several sources including Andy Abramson on his blog, indicates that the tip that some of us in the VoIP blogger community received about this announcement was erroneous. Or, as Andy puts it, "factually wrong related to a false claim." Big news. On Monday, Skype will announce the integration of [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on December 18th, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Skype and General and Softphones.