About two years ago, Jeff Black and his team at TalkPlus had an idea that could have revolutionized the mobile industry. The concept was giving mobile phone users multiple lines for inbound and outbound calling. The idea, in many ways, was the exact opposite of GrandCentral, meaning instead of one number going everywhere, TalkPlus was about multiple numbers ending up in one place, and in most cases that was the mobile phone.
Now two services offer stripped down versions of what TalkPlus' team was setting out to do.
One is called SecondVoice and the other, from TokTumi is called Line2 which has a very cool application now out in the iPhone App Store. These are both "me too" offerings, and compared to the never achieved success of TalkPlus, nothing but features, not companies.
These kinds of applications are not hard to build. I recently in London saw a technology from a leading edge company that lets you build a GoogleVoice like service in less than a minute based on a robust backend.
Bottom line, these new features demonstrate that imagination is very much alive in the VoIP world, and most of the effort is around the mobile world. These features are the kind of ideas that the mobile operators should be embracing, that being new services that add convenience to people's lives.
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