Source: goebel.net

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Much has been said about startups like Ribbit, Tringme or Flashphone which use the Flash browser plugin for click to call widgets. Aswath Rao even declares 2008 the Year of Flash based VoIP Clients. I can only say that you don’t have to wait till next year to call me for free using Flash. I love my Tringme call widget:

These calls are entirely free to you, because the caller speaks into the Flash widget on my website using a headset or the laptop’s built in phone and speaker. On Linux the sound is a little bit weird. The automatic voice, which says "please wait while we connect your call" before every connection, sounds like a 45 rpm record played on 33. The phone call itself sounds like Mickey Mouse, but still the the words are understandable. On Windows everything works just perfect.

Also to me these calls are entirely free. Other than my widgets from Sitfono and Voxalot where I have to pay to call the person who wants to contact me.

I achieve this by using FWD as SIP provider to power the Tringme widget. The Tringme account website says "Connect my phone and voicemail widget to Phone number or extension". Unfortunately it accepts only numbers and no SIP addresses in this input mask, but as a workaround I have simply put my FWD number there. In the "TringPhone SIP Settings" part of the account configuration I left my FWD login data. Which means that every Tringme call is in fact a free FWD on net call. You can probably do the same with Gizmo Project’s SIP account data and phone numbers, as well as with many other VoIP providers.

Also there is another widget for people who don’t want to talk to me, but just leave a voicemail.

Only seconds later I get a call and a voice says "You have a Tringme" before it plays the message. The Tringme widgets are much better than Gizmocall which also allows free calls from a website.

You could call me for free by simply typing http://www.gizmocall.com/mgoebel in your browser’s address bar. This website also uses Flash, but additionally you have to install a plugin for Windows or Mac. For ten months yet Gizmo owes us a Linux plugin. Although the company’s CEO, Michael Robertson, even has his own Linux distribution, Linspire.

But why bother? The Flash browser plugin gets more and more versatile and works on all platforms. It’s a new way to disrupt the telco industry, circumventing the PSTN and offering a new option for free phone calls that so many people appreciate.

So, if you want, please give me a Tringme call!

And, before you ask: No, I couldn’t get Truphone’s Facebook application running, which should basically do the same like Tringme, only that it uses Java. After one week of tinkering I gave up. But congratulations for winning the "Red Herring 100 Global" Award.

Source: goebel.net

In one of my last posts, "Why isn’t the US the "land of the free" also in VoIP?", I critized US American VoIP companies that normally lock their ATAs to just one provider. I also mentioned PhoneGnome, but that was a little bit unfair since they are a real example of openness on the market. Their box does exactly what I want from an ATA: Be open for other providers too. CEO David Beckemeyer explains it in a comment on GigaOM:

Users of the PhoneGnome box can select ANY third-party SIP-based provider for call termination (in response to Fritz!box comment). We offer a number of plans from our partners, but users do not have to use them. See Bring Your Own Provider option on this page: http://www.phonegnome.com/minutes.html and also, we have promoted open and interoperable as a cornerstone of our philosophy, so it comments tossing PhoneGnome in with all the closed services out there is a tad annoying: http://www.phonegnome.com/open.html

David also gave a good explanation of "free on net calls", just to show afterwards that PhoneGnome has something even better:

With a service like Free world dialup (FWD) or Skype, it means I can call another FWD user using FWD, but I dial a weird FWD number (not their normal number) and the call rings to their FWD bat phone or PC (not their regular phone).

In comparation PhoneGnome provided when introduced in 2005 and continues to provide a unique version of on-net calls:

1. I dial the persons real phone number
2. The call rings to the persons regular phone (fixed or mobile)
3. I pay NO monthly fees

So PhoneGnome seems to store normal PSTN numbers in their system to reach them for free by VoIP, similar to what Fonality does with its new trixnet service for free VoIP calls.

Sorry, David Beckemeyer, you seem to be one of the good guys in the industry who really embraces the openness of the SIP standard for VoIP. It was wrong to choose PhoneGnome as a negative example of how VoIP companies use the feature of "free calls between their members" in their marketing message. I should have chosen another company which really doesn’t any offer more and uses closed ATAs.

As long as there is no flatrate for worldwide free calls we need the ability to tinker with many VoIP providers in one ATA. Luca already made the call "Lets give up on the PSTN", and said "if any broadband owner became a FWD member, the dream of PSTN-free communication could quickly become reality". Yes, if all broadband owners would listen to Luca and use the same VoIP provider, FWD, then we needed for phone calls only our "weird FWD number", as David calls it.

All phone calls would be free on net calls. No need to install several providers in one ATA.

Source: goebel.net

The blogosphere has criticized Ooma for various reasons, while traditional media have praised it to the skies for Ooma’s unlimited free calls to the US, probably not knowing that this is part of most VoIP offers today. Now Ooma’s co-founder Dennis Peng took the time for some explaining words comments section of GigaOM:

There are three pillars to our core value proposition that are unique to ooma:
* unlimited calling to any number in the US - with no monthly fees
* the Instant Second Line - the easiest second line youll ever use
* the Broadband Answering Machine - the best voicemail experience ever

His insightful comment is quite interesting to read. Especially for sentences like: "Both the Instant Second Line and Broadband Answering Machine are unprecedented features. To do them requires a unique combination of assets (processors, lights, buttons, speakers, inter-device networking, etc.) and architecture (star vs bus) that no ATA or other embedded device has ever had". Or: "What they will see, however, is a continual set of new services and the trained-eye will realize that weve designed this platform so that new services dont all need to be in-the-cloud, but rather a unique blend of client/server intelligence and interactions".

This makes me hungry for more details, because the public still doesn’t know how Ooma manages its Peer-to-Peer network, and whether it can survive if the company breaks down. Vinay has some interesting thoughts under the overpromising title "Ooma VOIP to offer Worldwide Free Calls?":

Some people reportedly said, Ooma won’t work if they got closed down without understanding how they exactly work? No one really knows whether they use a Hydrid P2P or pure P2P. If they use hybrid P2P, then they have a central server that keeps information on peers and responds to requests for that information. I guess this could be required since regulation might require companies to know about their customers and some quality/security issues related to it. If they use pure P2P, they could have serious legal issues but ooma will continue to run irrespective of the company, coz the peers are responsible for data transfer and there is no central server.

Unfortunately Vinay’s text doesn’t mention how to use an Ooma device for worldwide free calls, although the title promised. Technically this should be possible, since there are many countries with free local calls or cheap nationwide phone flat rates, such as Germany. Jeff Pulver tries to build a worldwide free communication network around this with his fwdOUT service for Asterisk, yet for more than two years.

As I see it most ATAs run Linux and have been hacked for other purposes than the intended.

So will be Ooma.

Source: goebel.net

Now finally it’s out what Ooma is:

With one fell swoop, it hopes to let people share their phone lines with each other in order to disrupt the business of major telecommunications companies.

Heres how it works: You install an Ooma hub device, costing a $399 one-time fee, in your home that routes phone calls through your computer or your land-line. Oomas device also sends and receives calls for other people in your geographic area (local land lines that Ooma takes advantage of).

A P2P calling application? That’s pretty dangerous and has failed before! I think it will not work, especially in the USA where people are so afraid of terrorists. Would you borrow your phone to Al Qaeda for their next announcement? No? But you might be doing it with Ooma, without even notice.

Out of the same reason Jeff Pulver’s "fwdOUT Phone Sharing Network" (former Bellster) never made it big: People cannot control who is talking under their number. When someone uses Ooma or fwdOUT, his call will appear on someone else’s phone bill or call record. This poor person would then have to prove that it was an unknown criminal who made the latest phone call. Quite difficult.

Jeff Pulvers fwdOUT idea sounds quite similar:

The fwdOUT Network is a system that matches callers with other users that can complete the call for them at no charge. The only catch is that to make some calls, you have to let others use your phone. fwdOUTis free and not to be used for commercial purposes.

For Instance, Erik lives in New York City, and he gets free local phone service, his family is in Holland. Joe is an expatriate from New York living in Holland that calls New York on a regular basis. Using the Free World Dialup Phone Sharing Service, Erik shares his number. Joe also shares his number. When Joe calls New York, he uses Eriks line and Erik uses Joes Line. The sharing is not done on a one-on-one basis, members share with the entire community and accumulate credits when their line is used. These credits can be used to place calls through other members phones. Free World Dialup maintains the tallies so that no line is used more than the owner has permitted.

Only that fwdOUT doesn’t connect slick Ooma boxes over the internet but private Asterisk PBXes worldwide. It doesn’t work too good because there are to few people providing their phone lines and the project has to face legal problems. Some Russians use it, but that’s not enough. Boingboing wrote already two years ago about Bellster/fwdOUT:

The Bellster challenge for 2005 is to find out whether or not there are still people in the world who would let total strangers place non-commercial phone calls for free in exchange for the ability to do the same thing themselves. At the moment we have a handful of active nodes around the world, and as the word of Bellster spreads, my hope is that our network will be able to deliver calls to the PSTN all around the world.

Now Ooma wants to do the same. Good luck! As far as I know Jeff Pulver’s project did not fail from technical difficulties, but from lack of acceptance. Jeff downsized his support when he realized what a difficult issue it is. Here you can read the fwdOUT risks, collected by voip-info.org. Many of them apply to Ooma as well:

Possible Risks:

• Potentially a criminal offence in some countries to provide this service, and you could face jail time, while there you would end up meeting a big guy named bubba who wants to be really good friends.
• Your phone line could be used for credit card fraud or to report bomb threats or death threats, and you will have a lot of explaining to do when the police come and confiscate your equipment and take you down to the station for a little chat. Unlike carriers who are explictly exempt from being responsible for facilitating these kinds of things occuring, home users aren’t and you could end up being the one facing court over it. Even if you get off, there will be no doubt a great inconvience for some from having their machines confiscated for any arbitary length of time. Although if you decided to give smart answers to the police you could end up being the next rodney king.
• Contractually, the phone company could cut you off, or could introduce clauses in your contract to cut you off in future if they feel you are participating in this kind of service. Phone companies can and do monitor call patterns in different countries and people have reportedly been cut off when their call patterns changed legimately, they were still required to sign documents that it was their calls, the calls were valid and even had to pay a reconnection fee.
• Security, any route your call takes could easily be monitored, recorded or altered, all without your knowledge or consent, even if this is against bellsters terms and conditions you may not know it is happening until it’s too late.
• You could end up with large phone bills, it’s one thing to setup asterisk for home use for your own toll by pass but securing asterisk to prevent unwanted calls is a whole other thing and it’s your phone bill on the line if someone works out a way round your filtering. Some 1800 numbers in the US offer to bill your phone line like a 1900 number, so this could also increase your phone bill. Some people apparently are listing themselves as +1 area code, what they don’t realise is that there is 20+ countries other then just the US listed under +1 which could also give them a nasty surprise if the bellster route filtering is breached. These calls are not blocked by the fwdOUT network (but instructions for blocking them are available). There are other locations that aren’t being listed that could cause similar damage to your phone bill/wallet.

Minor points:

• Only likely to benefit those in cheap call areas, in which case you can use VoIP providers which in general have MUCH better call quality and are bound by privacy regulations regarding your privacy.
• Call quality, you are relying on the fact that someone else won’t suddenly flood their home line with a massive download causing your phone call to be lagged or jittered severely.
• You could end up receiving calls from people in foreign languages if you don’t setup asterisk properly to block out bound caller ID (also you can’t always block Caller ID apparently)
• Bellster has the potential to make it easier for telemarketers to push their sales pitches by leveraging the bellster network.
• Time to establish a phone call could dramatically increase if you hit a bunch of hosts that only allow calls out of hours, so while the network hunts and trys different routes you either hear local ring back or dead air depending on your local configuration of asterisk, which could potentially miss inform people about the true state of the call.
• non-geek house hold members, is it likely that most people will want to queue to use their own phone line? try explaining it to non-geeks and see how they react to it.
• high barrier to entry, as you not only need a linux box running asterisk but also hardware that’s capable of interfacing with the PSTN network.

Source: goebel.net

Sipgate is one of the best quality VoIP providers I know for Germany, Austria and the UK. They give free inbound numbers and, with rare exceptions, they always work. Last friday they were down for a half hour, but this was no big problem.

Until people started to realize that Sipgate behaves strangely since then. As I tested Sipgate is blocking all the free "always connected" web based PBXes I know:Voxalot, PBXes.com and simplyConnect. That’s really annoying since those websites do a great job. You can deposit there all your login data for the many SIP accounts you got from different companies. Then you need only one account, for example Voxalot’s, to receive phone calls to all your different VoIP numbers on one device. Also you can define dial plans for least cost routing. Then Voxalot uses for instance provider A for phone calls to country number 1 and provider B for country number 2, always taking advantage of the cheapest connection.

Thats nice for VoIP devices which can hold only one SIP account, such as certain mobile phones or the Fring software, which recently got very important for mobile VoIP users in Great Britain. With Fring you can avoid the problem that for Orange UK and Vodaphone UK are blocking VoIP on the brand new Nokia N95 mobile phone. As an external Symbian program Frings makes SIP calls possible on these crippled N95, but holds only one SIP account. Which should be Voxalot or something similar if you have different providers. I already use more than 20 VoIP providers.

It seems that Sipgate doesn’t like the described least cost routing, since their prices aren’t cheap compared with other providers. Poor Sipgate! Mean Germans use them only to receive calls on Sipgate’s free incoming numbers, but for outgoing calls they use free VoIP services from companies like Betamax. Nothing is cheaper than free, and even Sipgate’s flatrate for Europe cannot compete with it. Maybe Sipgate did not like it that the their Voice Mail answered all calls to my dozens of different VoIP accounts that I have installed at Voxalot. Even if you called my FWD or Gizmo account the Sipgate Voice Mail kicked in. This was a nice feature since I had to deal with only one Voice Mail box for all my VoIP and fixed line calls.

It seems that Sipgate wants to work like a normal PSTN telco and tries to be as much separated from the SIP world as possible. Only if people use Sipgate for their outgoing phone calls and do not free ride their services they can sponsor the free incoming numbers. I, for instance, use Sipgate’s number and Voice Mail yet for years but never paid them any money, since all my outgoing calls go for nearly free over the Betamax company Voipstunt. People from England do the same, as you can read in Voxalot’s forum.

I suppose that Sipgate prefers to be their clients only VoIP provider and therefore it blocks more and more interoperability options. This started already months ago when they began to block phone calls from other VoIP providers to their SIP adresses. SIP to SIP is normally free. But now the only option is to call the phone number of a Sipgate user, which is only free within the Sipgate network or for calls from their spare peering partners.

The hottest discussion about the PBX blocking I found in Voxalot’s forum. Sipgate clients are disgruntled that they cannot use the service with Voxalot anymore and give tips about alternative providers. One user even threatened the Sipgate support to cancel his account and got surprised that they did not try to hold him back, but explained in a polite way how to do it.

Originally Posted by sipgate
You can delete your account under "Settings" -> "Contract".
Best regards,
Frederik van Koningshoven

Sipgate’s official explication is the following:

login details must not be given to 3rd parties. the provider mentioned above (note: voxalot is ment) attracted attention due to nonserious business practices. for our customers safety we try to remedy potential abuse through this corporation.

Other Voxalot clients got a clearer answer from the Sipgate support:

Originally Posted by sipgate
we block Voxalot and similar services, because our customer has to give them the login details.
This is a security problem.
Best regards,
Frederik van Koningshoven

Later it got more personally against Voxalot:

Originally Posted by sipgate
Unfortunately, we don’t consider them as trustworthy.
This decision will not be changed in near future.
Best regards,
Frederik van Koningshoven

Poor Voxalot! What did they do? How should the company behave in this situation?

Voxalot’s support worker Martin says that he "would be interested to know if this is an across the board "security rule" or if simply Voxalot was "singled out"…..". An interesting question, because Fring seems to work very well with Sipgate, although Fring also requires the user to give his Sipgate login details to a 3rd party.

Why isn’t Sipgate blocking Fring as well?

In fact this is a general problem: With every time more services moving into the web people have to provide every time more secret login data to 3rd parties. It reminds me of a former post that I wrote in april in Voxalot’s forum, "Theoretically Voxalot could steal all our VoIP minutes".

But it’s not only Voxalot. It’s also PBXes.com, simplyConnect, Fring, Barablu, Nimbuzz, Talkster, Mobivox, Iskoot, Skip2PBX,… Dozens of companies are in the same situation. There has to be a more intelligent solution than just blocking Voxalot. What’s missing is a secure way to share login data.

Maybe OpenID is the answer?

CORRECTION: Sipgate now at least seems to work OK with PBXes.

Source: goebel.net

Thomas Anglero is one of the big VoIP experts. He was a senior executive adviser with Telenor AS, CEO of Free World Dialup, VP of Vocaltec Communications and CEO of TrulyGlobal. So we might expect from him only a positive view on the the VoIP industry. Also because he is still attached to it as CEO of Nuclei Networks, a VoIP service provider in emerging Balkan markets.

But his latest blog entry sounds more than depressed to me. Under the emblematic title VoIP’s tragedy was foretold by Hamlet he writes:

VoIP is a 1/3 of penny numbers game with margins so low that micro-credits used in Malaysia by mobile operators have higher margins then VoIP. Think about this…

At Fall VON last year, the head of Yahoos! VoIP service told a story about how the head of accounting called him into a meeting to question his reasons for continuing its VoIP business. She informed him that the average margins for Yahoos! services are around 80% and his VoIP business was almost impossible to calculate…she asked, "why are we in ‘this’ business?"

Sad words. But only from a company’s standpoint. The clients might think differently.

I suppose this actual development is just the way it goes and we are on the verge of a big paradigm shift. Phone calls aren’t meant to cost anymore. They will be free. Like emails disappeared the written letter and the payment for the postage stamp. I would love to see it and already realize it on a smaller scale, by convincing my friends to use VoIP so that we can make free on net calls.

And there is more to come: If you use the SIP standard cleverly every phone call can be free, even mobile calls. One way to achieve this is the fwdOUT Phone Sharing Network.

The fwdOUT Network is a system that matches callers with other users that can complete the call for them at no charge. The only catch is that to make some calls, you have to let others use your phone. fwdOUTis free and not to be used for commercial purposes.

For Instance, Erik lives in New York City, and he gets free local phone service, his family is in Holland. Joe is an expatriate from New York living in Holland that calls New York on a regular basis. Using the Free World Dialup Phone Sharing Service, Erik shares his number. Joe also shares his number. When Joe calls New York, he uses Eriks line and Erik uses Joes Line. The sharing is not done on a one-on-one basis, members share with the entire community and accumulate credits when their line is used. These credits can be used to place calls through other members phones. Free World Dialup maintains the tallies so that no line is used more than the owner has permitted.

Critcs said that fwdOUT doesn’t work good. There are too many dead routes, because only few people know it. But the idea is brilliant and with a little grassroots marketing it can become bigger. I think that it’s no big problem that you need an Asterisk server to become a member of this free call fraternity. Asterisk is every time easier to install and there are pre-configurated packages. Also you don’t need a full fledged personal computer anymore to run it. Asterisk can run on small, fanless, quiet industrial PCs that spend few energy. There was even a competition to install it on an Apple TV. Another way is install Asterisk on your web server, which you can get fr 3 Dollars a month. But the most elegant way seems to me to use the web based Asterisk PBX that you can get for free at PBXes.com.

Other companies, like 4S newcom, are working on the mobile edge. For costumers they can equip their IP PBX with SIM cards of all German mobile phone providers. Of course with flat rate tariffs, so you can ring the PBX and it calls you back for free. Once connected you can, theoretically, use the fwdOUT service or every other VoIP provider which connects you to the world for free. For instance Voipstunt, which offers free calls to 40 countries and the rest of its destinations very cheap. Voipstunt is one of the many brands of the German company Betamax. Their prices are so cheap that people from all over the world use them. I recently read comments in a forum by a Brazilian who does all his local calls with Lowratevoip, another Betamax company. Having compared lots of VoIP providers in the last time I suppose that they are a real menace to the industry, undercutting nearly every other offer.

So what will this all lead to?

I would no be surprised to see some kind of war start very soon. It’s the big incumbents and the mobile operators against the thousands of small VoIP companies. First signs are how Vonage gets pushed out of business with a lawsuit by Verizon and the crippled Nokia N95 which Vodafone and Orange sell to their costumers in the UK. People where quite surprised to see that they cannot use VoIP on their branded N95, which normally can.

But to me this mutilation seems quite reasoned. From april 2007 the City of London will become the biggest wireless Internet hotspot in Europe. This means that in Europe’s most important finance and economy center the people can call for free or very cheap by using VoIP on their cell phones, circumventing the traditional mobile networks.

The big winners will be SIP phone companies like Truphone or Sipgate. Where there is bandwith there you can make calls. It seems that the standardization of VoIP in SIP has opened a Pandora’s box for all telecommunication companies: With SIP you can tie every phone system together, as you see in fwdOUT and 4S newcom’s IP PBX. More and more bridges are being built to make free phone calls. The people like it and companies can soon only charge modest prices for the bandwith. Voice will become "just another application", as techies use to say. Or, as a comment on Gigaom states:

Its becoming a tired catchphrase, but its no less true for its repetition: All voice is converging towards free. Its just another service on your dumb pipe: It makes no more sense to pay a per-voice call charge than it does a per-website visit or a per-email fee. I dont regard myself as a bleeding edge adopter, but these days about 85% of my calling is on-net (Either Skype or one of the zillion SIP networks that operate here in Oz). Its a bit cumbersome (Prefix dialling for the SIP network, then the users own 86 digit SIP phone number), but Im viewing that as a temporary aberration.

Id say the days of PSTN arbitrage (which is really what the VOIP providers are) are coming to an end. Im cheering FON and others on too, so that soon enough the days of GSM arbitrage will be over too.

LG

Paying a phone bill is so 80ies style!

(Read my next blog posts More tricks for free phone callsand Tpad to involuntarily offer free phone calls worldwide? to learn more.)

Source: goebel.net

I don’t want to be nagging always in this blog. But in the last time I read some news that at first sight sight sounded great and then are just bubbles or false labelings. I just found a new example in a press release from the British VoIP provider Tpad:

The popular internet telephone provider Tpad (www.tpad.com) is shunning the approach shown by its competitors by providing a unique incoming SIP number to every customer free of charge.

While most other VoIP companies charge yearly for this number, Tpad are offering this service for free and will provide as many as the customer wants at no extra charge.

Many blogs and news media - like TMCnet, VoIP Monitor the Telecommunications Magazine, the VoiP Weblog or SnapVoIP - presented this news and didn’t realize that the so called "free incoming SIP number" from Tpad is in fact not a phone number but something else, by far not as good as the the press release wants us to believe.

In fact Tpad’s new numbers are just another calltrough service as we already know it from Rebtel or Sparruf. Tpad has access numbers in several countries. You call them and a computer voice asks you to type in the 7 digit Tpad number of the person you want to talk to. Every Tpad account gets such a 7 digit number.

Often this service doesn’t even work, as I experienced with my friends from Peru. They call the Tpad call in number in Lima and then want to type in my Tpad number. But already after the fourth number the computer voice says "this option is invalid" and asks them to put in the number again. When they try it for another time, they hear the same answer and then the computer hangs up. Sometimes it also says "we have problems". The Tpad support told me that "it may seem that there is a problem with the peru number, our network team are looking into the problem". I really hope so.

But that does not take a away that they don’t give real incoming numbers. They even acknowledge it on their website:

Give your unique Tpad number to all your relatives and contacts abroad. Example: your Tpad number is 1124139, you are in the UK and your relatives are in Pakistan (where the local Tpad Break In Number is 0217019753 - shown on Receice Calls page).

Your unique Tpad Number for ALL your relatives / contacts in Pakistan is :- 0217019753p1124139. This means that when they dial from a normal phone or mobile they first have to dial 0217019753 and when prompted enter your Tpad Number 1124139.

Sorry, but "p" is no number! What Tpad gives to their clients are no free SIP phone numbers, like for instance FWD, Gizmo Project or Sipgate really do. They just have some dozens of access numbers and a network that needs improvement.

(But it seems that they are really working on the Peru issue. When they get it up and runnig, it will be at least it’s some kind of "number" that my Peruvian friends can call from a coin-operated telephone at local rates. But still no real Peruvian VoiP phone number, as I need yet for some years.)

Source: voipcentral.org

FWD customers now can enjoy iotums Relevance Engine as an application on all the FWD Platforms.

Benefits:

iotum Relevance Engine can intelligently judge a calls relevance and route it to the most appropriate device across the network. Now FWD can easily deploy this application over its network to help its users get an enhanced communication experience. FWD also supports communication over other providers services.

User trials of iotum and FWD integration will start from early next year. Jeff pulver who has been voicing Voice 2.0 for a long time now will be expanding its market.

“As the value of network minutes decreases,” said FWD Founder and IP Communications Entrepreneur Jeff Pulver, “Voice 2.0 applications like the iotum Relevance Engine will become the new drivers of value in the communications industry.”

About FWD:

FWD is a Pulver.com company, founded by IP Communications entrepreneur, Jeff Pulver. It provides an open and innovative standards-based IP platform enabling people to have a better communications experience and enhance their control. The FWD platform allows users to communicate using VoIP, video, IM etc and supports the ability to communicate with other providers’ services.

About iotum

iotum is a Voice 2.0 company founded in 2003. iotum is setting out to shape a world where devices and services work seamlessly together to let people communicate with who they want, when they want and on the device they want.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

Jeff and his FWD team have been hard at work revamping FWD. I’m expecting great things from this effort as I’m hearing some smart companies are beginning to line up with Jeff and his crew.

When you think about it, many of the so called innovations in Skype were pre-dated by FWD (then called Free World Dialup).

My only rub is the lack of a Mac client.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

The Jeff Pulver Blog: The fwdOUT Network now offers free Phone Calls into 34 Countries!

The organic growth that fwdOUT is seeing is very impressive. While the business model remains an issue to some, I find the idea of a user’s helping users network rather interesting and useful. Given I used to be a two way radio user in the 70s and knew the value of the relay concept it is no surprise that there is growth and acceptance.

Not everything has to be about money.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

Aswath Weblog: Bellster fwdOUT Revisited

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

Jeff Pulver always does the right thing. His Free World Dialup service is offering Free Holiday Calling on the FWD Network: Sponsored by LibreTel

I’ve used FWD and find it works well enough for calling those who you would IM. Give it a try if you haven’t downloaded it yet.