It’s a brand new year, the time of renewal, resolutions and optimism.  IfByPhone had a great 2008, and we’re looking forward to another great year including some exciting new applications and features in the coming weeks and months.
I think it’s a good idea to focus on one of the ways we differentiate ourselves from some […]

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Are you on Twitter?
Yes? Follow Ifbyphone On Twitter.
No? You can sign up for Twitter.
Then, read this neat post on an Ifbyphone / Twitter Phone Call Mashup.

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For a while now we’ve been saying that Ifbyphone makes developing telephony solutions as easy as building websites. The idea is that anyone who can develop a website can easily and quickly develop a custom telephony solution to integrate voice into advertising and marketing campaigns.
For example, ad agencies generally use our instant trackable phone numbers, […]

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Serdar Yegulalp at InformationWeek recently wrote,
…the award for Single Coolest Thing Done With Open Source at the Web 2.0 show has to go to Ifbyphone.
What is the “Coolest Thing” they are referring to? Well, as the article puts it:
Enter Ifbyphone, a “cloud telephone app platform.” Anyone who can build a forms-based Web app can […]

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Just want to wish Skype a Happy 5th Birthday. Skype has helped make VoIP a household name and has carried more VoIP minutes than any other VoIP software application out there. Well done Skype.

I hope you continue to innovate, though Andy Abramson writes today Skype is dropping Skypecasts, a nifty feature. Andy poo-poohs the move when he writes:

What’s puzzling though is that Skypecasts are one more example of how eBay really missed the mark with their purchase of Skype. For example, SkypeCasts were the perfect way to hold training sessions for new sellers; for sellers to provide how to tips to customers and for eBay buyers to share experience with eBay and eBay sold items.

Skype is the best example of Voice 2.0. Unfortunately, eBay is all about trying to be 1.0 and that’s the disconnect.

Well, I just hope Skype gets their innovative mojo back.

Here’s to the next 5 years, Skype!

Tags: Andy Abramson, birthday, eBay, Skype, Voice 2.0, VoIP

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I wanted to share a quick story of one of our customers.  They write software that (among other things) manages shifts for busy and complicated work environments.  In the past, when people couldn’t make it into work for any reason, someone had to guess who might be available, look up their contact information, make a […]

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The launch of our Voice Broadcast application for the iPhone went very well.  The application is rapidly climbing in popularity, and we’ve listened to the feed back from our users.  To that end, we’re making some changes.

Our iPhone accounts will now work forever (instead of the previous 6 months before signing up for a package).  […]

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In a new post, mobile advertising guru Andrew Grill highlights U.K.-based Yell.com’s new mobile map-based “yellow pages” services.  The free-to-use (ad supported) service takes advantage of both browser and phone capabilities to offer a true Web 2.0/Voice 2.0 experience — for example, every number is click-to-call, and you can add contact info automatically to address books and send it to […]

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Venture Beat reports that American Express customers can now take Reardon Commerce’s personal concierge with them when they leave home. It illustrates the converging of several trends: context-centric application mash-ups, multiple ways of interacting — voice, SMS, email, Web. This could be taken to the next level with a smart interactive voice application at the end […]

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With virtualization - and its fellow travelers: on-demand functionality and free form mashups — as the belles of the tech ball these days, it’s surprising how little buzz there is about these subjects in the telephony space. There the prevailing model remains a fixed suite of functionality from a single vendor. 
So I was initially excited […]

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I’m a big fan of Social Media in general.  Anything that can bring people together and help create interesting conversations has a great deal of value.  I’m on Twitter, Plurk, FriendFeed, Facebook, keep about 3 blogs besides this one, am online on about 5 different IM platforms, and I put my click-to-call in almost every […]

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My son just finished a term paper on the history of computers. One of the more interesting details he unearthed in the course of his research is this 1980 remark by an anonymous IBM employee: 
“Why on earth would you care about the personal computer? It has nothing at all to do with office automation. It […]

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Even shopping cart businesses can benefit from adding rich voice applications like click-to-call to e-commerce sites.
As I’ve noted before, the lowly phone call gets short shrift in the esoteric art of Web marketing. But often the one thing that would turn a window-shopper into a buyer, or a frustrated subscriber into a happy one, is […]

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Recently in this space we’ve talked about the lack of interesting VOIP Applications. It seems that people all over are asking where the apps are. No less than Jeff Pulver has decried the lack of innovation in this space. At first, I objected to Jeff’s post, saying that there were several companies […]

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Here’s news to make online marketers salivate: A majority of mobile Internet users (three in five) “are more inclined” to buy in response to relevant opt-in ads on their phones, according to a 2008 study conducted by UK-based mobile ad agency Aerodeon. And it’s not just impulse shopping like songs from iTunes. Almost half of […]

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Voice can add color to customer satisfaction metrics.

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More than a year ago PhoneGnome CEO David Beckmeyer posed the question Where are the Voice 2.0 developers? We’re still waiting for the answer. 
If you’ve been around the VoIP space any length of time you’ve heard plenty about the uber-cool applications that digital voice was going to bring us. Well, we have mobile personal ads […]

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In the last couple days, there has been bad news for a couple Voice 2.0 startups, Jangl and TalkPlus.  There are people commenting on what this means for Voice 2.0: has the bubble burst?  What does the future hold for Voice 2.0 companies?
I feel bad for the people at Jangl and TalkPlus.  More or […]

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Om over at GigaOm writes that Jangl was looking to sell itself earlier this week and is "headed towards an ignominious end" and adds that Talkplus "is going nowhere fast". I wrote a detailed write-up on TalkPlus, interviewing TalkPlus CEO Jeff Black at ITEXPO and my biggest fascination was how the supposedly reverse engineered Skype. I wrote, "One final interesting thing we talked about at ITEXPO is that TalkPlus has built their own Skype gateway. In fact, when pressed further, Jeff mentioned they actually reverse engineered Skype’s protocol. Although the Skype gateway isn’t part of TalkPlus’s launch today, Jeff explained that they have tested it in their labs and it’s working very well."

The TalkPlus Java application was designed to allow you to view the presence of your Skype buddies, initiate a Skype call or even receive a Skype call. It even has SIP support with the ability to support other IM/VoIP clients such as Google Talk, AIM, MSN Messenger, etc.

It was cool technology, but perhaps a bit ahead of its time. One of the biggest features espoused by Jeff Black was "throwaway numbers". As I wrote previously, you can ditch a number if need be. Doctors or lawyers that are calling patients/clients can use their personal mobile phone and yet have their office CallerID number appear to the client/patient instead of their personal mobile number. In essence, this is a form of "CallerID spoofing", often a popular tactic used by hackers utilizing the Asterisk platform.

Does the fall of Jangl and if Om is correct, the fall of TalkPlus spell trouble for VoIP/Voice 2.0 applications? Maybe we’re not ready for VoIP applications. Maybe we just want cheap minutes. Maybe "it’s the cheap voice, stupid!" after all. Hmph… VoIP just got boring.

Tags: gigaom.com, Jangl, Jeff Black, Om Malik, TalkPlus, Voice 2.0, VoIP, VoIP 2.0

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Jangl, a Pleasanton, Calif-based start-up that launched with much fanfare and lot of promise ran out of time, and is headed towards an ignominious end. Venturebeat had first reported that Jangl was looking to sell itself earlier this week.
Jangl is not the only VoIP company to nosedive. We have heard from reliable sources that TalkPlus, […]

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