What's New In VoIP? Lots with Gizmo, Voxeo and Fonality

Today looks like the day lots of news and new things are happening in the VoIP world from Gizmo5, Voxeo and Fonality.

First up, I heard from Michael Robertson that Gizmo Project/SipPhone is relaunching GizmoCall, their Flash based, simple to configure, calling service on Wednesday. Why it's neat?

Well for starters it's all SIP based as usual, providing all kinds of capabilities with that. Users can call any Gizmo5 user, any SIP device or endpoint, 800 numbers, and if they have Gizmo5 credit they can call anyone in the world. You can also receive calls. It needs Flash 9 or better so runs on Mac/Win/Linux. According to "GoldenBoy" Michael Robertson (who is also a friend and neighbor down the beach here in Del Mar) "It's not the first such service but it's easiest to use and can call the widest user base." I would agree. Gizmo has had the track record since the era of Jeff Bonforte (now at Xobni) of developing the most easy to use interfaces around when it comes to soft clients, even better than Skype, and being married to open standards since day one.

It's in the same space as Adobe and TringMe, but built on an existing user base and with a track record of nothing but high praise. Why it's really good for me? I can now have a lightweight softphone on any of my laptops and can quickly bring it up, without a lot of configuration required.

Next up is Voxeo, a company I'm very high on, as they have over time pulled together or developed many of the pieces that make Voice 2.0 more a reality. Today they announced the acquisition of Voice Objects for the reasons best described by their CEO, Jonathan Taylor in an email interview late yesterday. "We were particularly impressed by VoiceObject's ability to deliver unified communications, or what we're calling Unified Self-Service, across a wide variety of next-generation interaction methods. VoiceObject's gives customers such as T-Mobile the ability to build a single application that works across the voice, SMS, and video capabilities of 3G mobile phones."

This is all about mashups and offering pick and choose capabilities. In my view it puts Voxeo clearly at the head of the pack of the same category as Ribbit, for a far smaller acquisition price than what BT paid. That said, this is not a turf that is totally defendable, and I can see other players chomping at the bit to bit into it, including those that offer ease of use like clients ifbyphone which has a different, yet complimentary model to Voxeo and Mobivox which has clearly built a rock solid platform now is is gaining traction with it.

Finally, Fonality has come out with a CRM play that marries SalesForce.com with their services. The new less than $20.00 a month service "combines phone system, call center, and CRM capabilities to provide a complete view of contact center operations. With Salesforce CRM and PBXtra Unified Agent, companies can increase close rates, revenue and profits, while providing much better customer service and dramatically reducing sales and support costs." Companies looking at this may also want to look at On-State Communications whose Skype integration means a lot more to me right now, as I'm realizing the more I travel how dependent the world is getting on Skype when people are at a PC when I read stories like this reporter's recent "a-ha" moment. It also means services like client Junction Networks OnSip platform and cBeyond's own are also ideal for real business grade services as well for the business user.

These types of moves are all about simplicity, delivery of audience specific services and really are Marketing 101's main goal. Customer satisfaction, by giving the audience what they want and need. They also move Voice 2.0 from being about cool, to all being about making money.

Comments

[Sergio]

Great roundup of the happenings in the VoIP world. Gizmo is a great tool and I use it all the time. They making a Flash phone offering is even better! One thing that particularly caught my eye was your comment about mashups and Voxeo.

Voxeo has a really good platform comprising of VoiceXML and other server based offerings. To an end-consumer, Voxeo doesn't provide any services directly. So I don't completely agree with your comparision here. Voxeo is still missing out on the client-end wherein Ribbit takes the cake. I think Ribbit's Flash platform was a game changer and really powerful tool to provide voice services truly integrated with the web directly to the "user".

Now, if Voxeo can do something on that front, then it will truly have the arsenal to be the industry leader in Voice 2.0 given all the unified offering stuff they mention with Voice Objects acquistion.