TMCnet

Skype allows Paypal payments within client

March 22, 2007

Skype will soon allow users to send money to other Skype users via PayPal, a popular online payments system -- all from within the Skype client. This was announced by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom during a speech he gave. Both Skype and PayPal are owned by eBay, so the integration makes sense. âYou can send money over Skype,â Mr Zennstrom said of the upcoming service plan.

Posted in Skype, TMCnet, VoIP

Microsoft Response Point - VoIP for Business

March 20, 2007

Today at the second annual Microsoft Small Business Summit, Microsoft Corp. unveiled a small-business Internet protocol (IP) phone system, code-named âResponse Point,â designed for ease of use and manageability. The new system comes in an easy-to-install box, supports both voice over IP (VoIP) and traditional phone lines, and includes a voice-activated user interface.

Now in beta testing, âResponse Pointâ will be generally available later this year in three models: D-Link DVX-2000, Quanta Syspine and Uniden Evolo. Microsoft designed the âResponse Pointâ software to empower small-business customers to manage system changes themselves.

Posted in Microsoft, TMCnet, VoIP

TeamOnCall for Windows SIP-based Presence Management

March 19, 2007

Want a SIP-based presence application that monitors all your various SIP phones and centralizes the presence information to provide centralized presence management? Well, Vonalink's TeamOnCall is a new real-time call status display software that works with any VoIP phone system based on the SIP standard to provide real-time display of call status. Put into context of the hosted presence solution Tello, which recently bit the dust, this just shows you that presence-based solutions are still in high demand.

According to Arcosoft, "While VoIP phones are being adopted by small and medium sized businesses at a growing rate, the tools to make effective use of the phones are lacking. In a business environment where a receptionist receives an incoming call and needs to transfer the call to the appropriate representative, the receptionist has no way of knowing which representative is free, unless the company has deployed a costly and complex call center solution."

Works with any SIP based VoIP system, including hosted services such as Voipfone or Vonage
Use with soft phone, hard phone, or analog phone via an adapter
Web server based
Automatic discovery of all phones
Real-time display of call status including remote caller and name
Flexible grouping of phones
API accepts Do-not-disturb notifications from IP phone
Ethernet network switch with port mirroring (more than 6 phones) or a hub (6 phones or less)

Based on one customer's feedback, TeamOnCall was created specifically to address this business pain, says Tony Leung, Director of Arcosoft.

Posted in TMCnet, VoIP

Fonality's trixbox appliance Part 2

March 19, 2007

Fonality's release of their Linux-based trixbox appliance certainly is creating some buzz in the Asterisk community. According to Fonality, the trixbox appliance has the following features:

The appliance comes with a 4-port network card, so (just like the Digium appliance) you can do your office networking on it.
It comes pre-loaded with the trixbox software – which saves you time
It comes with two 80GB hard drives so it has lots of storage (the Digium appliance comes with 1 1GB flash drive).
The appliance comes with a powerful Intel processor (vs.

Posted in Asterisk, Linux, Reviews, TMCnet, VoIP

Tello bites the dust

March 18, 2007

Tello, a Pulver-backed startup, apparently has packed it in. I covered Tello pretty in-depth last year (Jan 2006) in a skeptical article titled Tello, a near term solution? Apparently, it was very "near term" as it only lasted a little over a year. In my January post, I wrote, "At first glance, this hosted solution to the IM interoperability dilemma seems like a great idea. However, it seems like a near-term solution to me.

Posted in Microsoft, TMCnet, VoIP

Clocky the alarm clock hides to block your snooze addiction

March 15, 2007

Do you hate getting up and the blaring alarm clock only results in you hitting the snooze 5 times and arriving to work late? Surely, you curse the alarm clock and accuse it of snoozing for only 9 minutes instead of 10, robbing you of 1 minute extra sleep. (Actually, little known fact, most alarm clocks snooze for 9 minutes not 10.)

Truly, you want to make it to work on time, but ohhhhh how tempting hitting the snooze button just 1 more time is. More Americans suffer from "snooze button addiction" than any other.

Posted in Gadgets, Home Entertainment, TMCnet, Technology and Science

Cisco acquires WebEx

March 15, 2007

Cisco has acquired WebEx for approximately $3.2 billion, according to the Cisco website. WebEx is one of the most well-known companies in the hosted on-demand collaboration application space. Although WebEx is very well-known (who hasn't used it?), in my opinion Cisco overpaid for WebEx. First, the hosted collaboration space is very crowded. You have Raindance, Placeware (now part of Microsoft), Genesys, and a dozen other smaller players all in the web collaboration space.

Posted in Microsoft, TMCnet, VoIP

Microsoft - Tellme - What does it mean?

March 14, 2007

Microsoft has acquired Tellme Networks, a hosted provider of speech-recognition solutions. I had dinner with some Microsoft reps last night at Tao Restaurant in NYC and asked about the pending Tellme deal, but their lips were sealed and they wouldn't even acknowledge such an acquisition was pending. But I saw right through their poker faces, and with a wink and a smile they changed the subject. I was actually meeting with them to check out a demo of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 which combines VoIP, presence, and other features for a "unified communications" experience.

Posted in Microsoft, Mobile Phones, TMCnet, Wireless

Skype Prime Allows Users to Charge for Calls

March 12, 2007

A beta of the Skype client recently made available allows users to charge for voice and video calls placed to their account through a new service called Skype Prime. eBay-owned Skype has developed Skype Prime to grant users the ability to either charge by the minute or a single charge for the entire call. Fees would be taken out of the caller's Skype account, and the called party would receive 70 percent of the proceeds collected, payable through PayPal, another eBay-owned proprietary. This is very similar to Ether, a service I have written about, except Ether gives you a separate phone number.

Posted in Skype, TMCnet, VoIP

Previous 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 Next

VoIP & Gadgets Blog

TMCnet