Source: www.voip-news.com

Go FON.

FON’s WiFi community recently registered its 1 millionth member. Yes. 1 millionth. The record breaking registrant is from Japan. FON has 400,000 free registered hot spots.

According to FON:

Martin Varsavsky, Founder and CEO of FON, is very proud of this rapid growth. ‘When we started less than three years ago, some people were skeptical about the future of WiFi and the concept of sharing. Now everybody talks about WiFi and uses it. Even Apple’s 3G iPhone makes you download from iTunes via WiFi. The best wireless proposition is one in which light applications are used over 3G and heavy apps such as music, TV, videos, movies, games, etc. communicate over WiFi. That is what one million people have realized!’

Source: www.voip-news.com

There’s a new product available that combines elements of trixbox Pro Unified Agent Edition and salesforce.com’s AppExchange. Fonality’s trixbox Pro Unified Agent Edition can be obtained from Fonality Australia.

The collaboration of the two innovative systems provides a unique customer centric view of a company’s telephony interaction and contributes to the customer value creation.

Fonality Australia director, Marc Englaro said that it used to take time and budget to create the kind of deep integration between a CRM and a phone system.

“Fonality is creating a clear channel between the two systems and helping organisations get a complete picture of the interactions with a customer or prospect. Fonality is the first company to provide automatic logging of phone calls into Salesforce.com. No longer do the sales and service representatives have to manually log calls into the CRM system. Now, all inbound and outbound calls are automatically matched with the corresponding record in Salesforce.com, and call data is captured and logged,” said Fonality Australia director Marc Englaro.

According to the companies:

The Fonality UAE value creation process is driven by the following features:
- Performance Management:
- Automatic Call History provides a detailed history of who employees are calling and the duration of each call.
- Integrated Call Recording allows any call to be recorded from the PBX system and attached to the corresponding record in Salesforce.com.
- Lead Management Reporting provides reports on how many calls were required for conversion, lead activity, etc.
- Agent Activity Reporting ranks agents based on activity and productivity.
- Outbound Call Reporting shows which reports are busiest on the phone, how many calls have been made to leads and customers.

Source: www.voip-news.com

Have you heard of Indafon.com? Apparently it’s a new VoIP-instant messaging-SMS service that can be accessed from anywhere via PC. It offers free Indafon to Indafon calls, as well as cheap calls to other networks (payable through PayPal.
It was developed in Europe.

According to a press release:

The Hungarian version of the service was launched in its current form four months ago. It has acquired 50.000+ Hungarian users by now and Indafon.com is working on the first partnership program with one of the largest webmail providers in the country. Indafon.com has made every effort to lend contacts a friendly appearance and keep the contact list, instant messaging and, of course, phone calls very easy to use. Together with Indafon the mail partner will keep all the features on its own website, making possbile to all of its users to have real-time communication features like Gmail, but also adding phone calls with nearly no investment.

The company has launched with a promotion to spark interest where potential users can create wanted posters about their friends to lure them into trying the service.

Has anyone tried this? I’d love to know some thoughts.

Source: www.voip-news.com

Always with the new!

VOXOFON is the latest in VoIP. The company is billing itself as low-cost and easy-to-use for international internet telephony. The service has a good deal of flexibility as well. Calls start at 1.3 cents per minute, and can be made from computers, landlines or cell phones.

“We think VOXOFON will appeal to a wide audience because our customers can use whichever services they are most familiar with,” said Alexey Goloshubin, president and CEO of VOXOFON. “Many people are still using calling cards and some don’t have computers and may prefer our virtual phone numbers. As our customers become more comfortable with the newer technology, they can move on to that without having to change their VOXOFON account in any way.”

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

Since December I’ve now been in Madrid, Barcelona, London and Paris and as much as I try to find a FON, none of them seem to be anywhere. I don’t mean casually traveling through, but spending enough time to feel like a resident or at least a semi-resident.

I mean, I wander the streets, dine in cool and hip bistros, tapas, wine bars or find the trendy places that one can enjoy oneself. I don’t just visit the tourist spots. So with my Nokia N and E series phones, plus my Blacberry, MacBooks and now Asus eeePC, I regularly log on to the net. But over the last year, finding the FON has been harder than finding an Earthlink Muni WiFi signal….

I think Jonathan Greene was right.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

Open source developers have another place to play, with the start of FACE by Fonality.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

It’s taken Lee Dryburgh a while to get all his eComm video posted, but one of the waits was worth it.

Client Fonolo captured the eComm Best New Product.

You can view CEO and founder Shai Berge’s presentation on the page as well.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

In a move that totally pre-empts the likes of FON and other "social hotspot" networks, BT has taken the concept of openness to a new level with the launch of a HotSpot available option at all TOTAL BROADBAND locations.

In their announcement they are actually promoting VoIP so this is a good sign for client Truphone and other VoIP on the mobile handsets.

What this means is BYE BYE MuniWireless and HELLO PUBLIC WIRELESS, a concept I have shared with friend and WiFi diva Esme Vos of MuniWireless fame. Basically what BT has done is what I suggest to a few folks years back on what the cable MSO’s should do…..darn I hate it when I’m right (again.) Steve Garrido are you remembering ?

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

I hear that Fonality is doing an overhaul of Trixbox. It’s all geared for solution providers. The news is supposed to be out soon, but with some travel planned I figured I’d point it out now.

Fonality is clearly in a spot where the VoIP world is watching. With offerings also pouring out of company’s like cBeyond, CallTower, onSip from client Junction Networks, M5 and others, businesses now have lots of options that go beyond the Cisco Call Manager and Avaaya PBX’s. With Hosted VoIP gaining ground, and with Asterisk based systems on the rise, Fonality has to make some moves.

It sounds like this is one of them.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

One of the companies that first crossed my radar back in the fall at Fall VON was Fonolo. Shai Berger took me through his deck, much the way Craig Walker did a year earlier with GrandCentral. As I listened to what was unfolding I kept relating mentally and verbally to my own personal experiences, and like GrandCentral was a solution to a major pain point, I realized just how much Fonolo would do to solve other pain points for so many of us.

I liked what I heard so much, I joined their advisory board and they’ve also become a client.

Fast forward to February. Shai and his team were closing in on their beta release. eComm was looming. He was presenting and the day of the presentation, he hit it out of the park. In the hallways and in chat sessions a lot of people were talking to me about Fonolo. Now this week, one of our favorite industry analyst/consultants, and good friend, Martin Geddes has weighed in with what is typically Martin. A bulls-eye, dead on the mark post that crystalizes all the Fonolo is and will be.

Martin uses words like genuinely brilliant and extra interesting the way I open bottles of 1982 Bordeaux. Sparingly. His high praise for a company that is still angel backed and in beta is both heartwarming as it as it further reaffirms my hunch that Fonolo is a true Voice 2.0 company that has a market to serve.

You can hear more great insight from Martin if you attend Telco 2.0 like I am in London on April 16 and 17th.

Source: www.voip-news.com

No contract, unlimited use, voice prioritized . . . specifically designed for telephone and internet usage. Sound too good to be true? It’s not. That’s the new offering from the European company, VoIPFone.

VoIPFone’s new service uses VoIPFone’s broadband, which as a result makes the two services work perfectly together.  The new service can carry up to  25 calls at the same time as a dedicated voice line, or the broadband can be shared between calls, internet and email traffic.
VoIPFone is a pay-as-you-go, contract-free service.

“Our business customers use their internet connections for more and more activities – email and web browsing of course, but also for document transfer, database back-ups, video upload and a whole host of other things. When telephony is added to all that, the broadband connection becomes a mission critical component of the business,” Colin Duffy, CEO of Voipfone, said. “Something has to give and because a telephone conversation has to happen in real time it’s the first to suffer if the connection is poor and congested. Our new network is both voice prioritised and private peered so that our customers get the best possible call quality and line reliability – all the time.”

Source: www.voip-news.com

Fonality is hitting some pretty big numbers.

• 2.6 million: the number of trixbox downloads - trixbox is Fonality’s open source project.
• More than 5,000: the number of customers Fonality has across the globe in more than 100 countries.
• 225 million: the total number of calls over Fonality’s hybrid-hosted systems, PBXtra and trixbox Pro

“We’ve hit the 225 million call threshold and have proven that Fonality can scale with the market opportunity,” said Chris Lyman, Fonality CEO. “We are on track to serve a broad segment of the 35 million small businesses that will adopt VoIP over the next several years.”

Fonality’s PBXtra phone system can support both VoIP calls and traditional telephony. trixbox CE is an open source project that integrates many applications including Asterisk, Linux, MySQL, FreePBX and HUDlite, among others.