Link Love and Social Media Creates Business Opportunity

iotum's Alec Saunders loves to blog.

Abbeynet's Luca Filigheddu loves to blog.

Truphone's Dean Elwood runs a social community forum called VoIP User.

Together, as a result of the blogosphere, friendship and some wine, as well as a gentle push by moi, along with new opportunity to blend VoIP, alternative access, the hot Facebook platform with some very cool new ways to collaborate has been birthed.

Today, clients iotum, along with Truphone, plus Abbeynet and a French telco have joined up to make iotum's Free Conference Call solution truly global.

This direct strike is an crystal clear example of what Jeff Pulver calls "Purple Minutes." Those are where applications make the jump between PSTN, Mobile and VOIP, plus what else comes along. In this case, with Truphone we now have a Mobile VoIP/WiFi play which means when a user is in a hotspot, a SIP call goes to iotum, not a PSTN, further reducing the costs of conferencing, but also increasing the quality and the utility.

So where does wine come into all this? At my insistence, Truphone's Elwood had to skip the 2007 Fall VON Wine Dinner which I hosted to run his VoIP User gathering. Alec, who also loves wine, had to go hang at VoIP User, while Howard Thaw also of iotum, got wined and dined with the likes of GrandCentral's Craig Walker, Vincent Pacquet, PulverMedia's Scott Kargman and many others. But Alec and Dean were on a mission. The mission was to find a way to work together. Since both knew each other from their online communications, the prospects were good and the introductions made in advance. Over the next few months all parties worked together and the result is the iotum FaceBook Free Conference Calling service now has more ways to be reached in more places.

Comments

[randulo]

We run a VoIP Users Conference weekly on Friday at 12 Noon EST.

www.voipusersconference.org

Iotum was one of our first guests last year in March, I think.