Where Have You Gone......A Look Back At Some Famous VoIP Companies

I've been covering Voice over IP for what is now going on 13 years. Along the way we've come into contact with dozens upon dozens of brands, services, idea and applications. Many are still around, some with their original names, others with new names. Some of the technology has found its way into other services, while some are simply collecting dust on the shelves...here are a few:

TalkPlus                The "originator" of the second line concept and the shadow number.

Jangle                        The "originator" of the disposable line.

Gizmo (aka Gizmo Project) The first real rival to Skype, acquired by Google, and parted out into Hangouts and Google Voice.

GrandCentral        We know you now as GoogleVoice.

GIPS                        The engine that made VoiP sound great. Now part of Google, and inside Hangouts.

Free World DialUp Started by luminaries Carl Ford and Jeff Pulver. Sometime after the loss of VON, it died.

Webley                The first voice activated phone system, doing things well before Siri and Alexa, now called CommuniKate.

CallVantage        AT&T's successful and best in class VoIP product that was put to rest due to merger mania

Jajah                    The carriers undercutting carrier was selling VoIP connectivity on the cheap. Telefonica bought it.

Dialpad                Rock solid VoIP least cost routing and fraud detection. Bought by Yahoo and sadly, not much was done with it.

AOL Internet Phone  The best rival to AT&T's Call Vantage and a Vonage killer. It was killed by internal Time Warner fighting.

Earthlink's True Voice It's sorta still alive buried inside some Earthlink PBX product, but not the consumer product it was to be.

Yahoo Voice        At one point Yahoo wanted to rival Skype. By 2013 the service, that was running on Jajah's network was off.

Simple Signal    Now part of Vonage Business

Telesphere         Now part of Vonage Business

Aretta                 Now part of cBeyond providing rapid spin up of customer services in the cloud.

My View--some of these brands have equity. Others have significant technical value and of course there's the patent and intellectual property portfolios. One thing about this tells me is that companies want to be moving forward in the communications sector should look at the past for clues, ideas and opportunities. There's gold in them there hills..

Got a service that you remember in the VoIP world that's not quite here any more, drop me a line.

 

 

Comments

[Hernan Popper]

Definitely Sipbroker, one of the best ideas in the VoIP world, which now seems abandoned, and TRIP, although not a company, a great concept for VoIP networks interconnection (https://www.iana.org/assignments/trip-parameters/trip-parameters.xml#trip-parameters-5)