telephony

It was just over two years ago that I wrote about Line2, a clever VoIP app that adds a second phone number to your iPhone.

Now developer Toktumi has released Line2 HD, an iPad-specific version of the app, which should prove popular among business users. It not only turns your tablet into a full-featured phone, but also provides a nice hub for managing calls and messages.

To get started with Line2, you need to sign up via the company's site. (Unfortunately, there's no longer an in-app sign-up option.) You can test-drive the app and service with a free … Read more

Phone Amego is a clever little menu-bar app that integrates your iPhone--or other Bluetooth phone--with your Mac and with the Google Voice service. At its most basic, Phone Amego provides onscreen caller ID (a small window on your Mac displays incoming callers, and you close the window to send the call to voice mail, or you can program it with AppleScript to respond when you speak the name) and enables you to call contacts from your Address Book with just a couple of clicks. There are also basics like a call log, timer, and a hot key for answering calls. … Read more

Strip away the tracts of FarmVille land, the politics of tagging and untagging photos, and even the near-vestigial "poke," and you have Facebook at its core: this is what has become, for hundreds of millions of people around the world, the next generation of the phone book.

So it's understandable that even in the age of the text message, telephony would become a part of Facebook at one point or another. Except you won't find it on Facebook.com. Instead, the social-networking site is baked right into the latest version of VoIP service Skype, which was … Read more

Skype has appointed former Cisco Systems Senior Vice President Tony Bates as CEO, the company announced today.

Bates, who has been running Cisco's enterprise division, comes to Skype with more than 20 years of experience in enterprise solutions. The networking giant said he managed Cisco divisions totaling more than 12,500 people and generating $20 billion for the company annually. He currently holds nine patents and has served on YouTube's board of directors.

Josh Silverman, Skype's current CEO, will be leaving the company, though he said that he will work with Bates to help with the "… Read more

Google Wave and Google Buzz may have had troubles attracting usage, but the new ability to place calls from Gmail appears to have caught on quickly.

"Over 1,000,000 calls placed from Gmail in just 24 hours!" Google tweeted Thursday, evidently pleased with the number.

For comparison, there are somewhat more than 300 million people in the United States. If the average person makes 10 calls per day--research in 2008 put the number at 208 calls per month--that means about one out of every 3,000 calls in the U.S. went through the service … Read more

Skype and Verizon announced a partnership Tuesday to bring the Internet-calling technology to a number of 3G BlackBerry and Android phones starting in March.

Under the deal, the Skype mobile software will be available on a variety of smartphones: RIM's BlackBerry Storm 9530, Storm2 9550, Curve 8330, Curve 8530, 8830 World Edition, and Tour 9630 and Motorola's Droid, Eris, and Devour. Customers will need to have a data plan to use the application, the companies said in an announcement at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona.

Skype, independent once again after an eBay spinoff last year, is … Read more

Google Voice just got a little better on the iPhone, thanks a new Web site for iPhone users, google.com/voice/m. As iPhone users will painfully recall, Apple last year rejected Google's iPhone-native Google Voice app, leaving those who wanted to use Google Voice with what was at first a bare and limited Web-based app. But one of the big advantages of the new HTML 5 spec, which the iPhone's Safari browser supports, is that it lets Web developers bring more application-like functionality to Web apps. The new site is proof of that. (News story)

The new … Read more

Sold!

Auction site eBay has, as long anticipated, sold off the Skype telephony service to a group of investors that includes Marc Andreessen's new Andreessen Horowitz group, Silver Lake, and the Skype co-founders' Joltid Ltd. The investor group now holds about 70 percent of the company; eBay retains the rest in a minority stake. Joltid was brought into the investor group as part of the settlement of a copyright suit that the Skype co-founders, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, filed against eBay over Skype's technology. At one point, that dispute was looking so ugly that eBay was reportedly considering rebuilding Skype's technology altogether.… Read more

Sure, Google Voice is cool, but it's not necessarily the best Web-meets-phone service one can imagine, is it? The field is still open, and switchboard-in-the-cloud company Ribbit (a division of BT) will stir things up when users get their hands on Ribbit Mobile, a new telephony service for consumers.

Like Google Voice as of last week, Ribbit Mobile adds services to your existing mobile phone number, using a standard telephone company service called Conditional Call Forwarding. You set up your phone service to route to the service when you don't pick up the phone, and it gives you all its features on the calls it then grabs: voicemail, forwarding, routing, and so on.

Ribbit Mobile isn't purely a mobile app, name notwithstanding. Rather, the "Mobile" means that your phone number becomes nomadic, moving to and temporarily setting up residence on whatever voice platform you want to use at any moment, be it a mobile number, a landline, or a VoIP system. Users set up their Ribbit Mobile features on a Flash-based Web site. Smartphone apps are coming, as is, most likely, another Apple app store approval drama.

Ribbit CEO Ted Griggs doesn't seem to want Ribbit compared directly to Google Voice, since Ribbit is a telephony platform company with ambitions well beyond the consumer app. Ribbit's revenues to date have come from its platform business. But Ribbit Mobile will be compared with Google Voice, and it's a fair and interesting battle.

Ribbit Mobile bests Google Voice in a few key ways. Its voicemail transcription feature will be better, although users won't get that feature for nothing. Free users will get machine speech-to-text, with likely the same quality of amusing and borderline-useless transcriptions as in Google Voice. But paid users will also have the option of using human-assisted transcription so their voicemail-to-text messages are actually sensible and useful.

Ribbit can also connect to VoIP services like Skype or SIP phones (Google works with phone-company phones and SIP, but not directly with Skype), as well as voice-chat features in some IM services, and you can transfer calls between phones while you're talking.

… Read more