Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

Om reports that OOMA is not dead yet and has hired a new Chief Marketing Officer.

What I love is the comment from Om about PhoneGnome, a company which I helped launch and remain an advisor to.

The continual comparisons, rightly so speak to the smarts and insight that TelEvolution founder, and PhoneGnome creator David (Mr. Blog) Beckemeyer has when it comes to the Voice over IP market.

PhoneGnome was developed for far less, cost less to produce and has likely sold more with a significantly smaller marketing and PR spend.

Beyond that, what’s interesting is it sounds like OOMA is going away from their "Hollywood" star spokesperson approach, and starting to realize that its a retail game. Now lets see how much hey have to pay to the retailers to get onto the big box store floor. Given how every VoIP company from Vonage, to Earthlink’s TruVoice to AT&T’s CallVantage has paid the retail piper, and not really seen heavy return that makes them a profit, a retail play seems like someone has an uphill battle.

Source: gigaom.com

Source: www.voip-news.com

Ooma is huge news around the blogosphere this week. First, Valleywag (think National Enquirer meets DrudgeReport) dishes about speculation that the company is failing … in an aptly tagged piece — Deathwatch. The blogosphere has caught on quickly and the rumor is flying like hot fire. What do you think? Is Ooma a goner?

In less grave news, the Voip Weblog is talking about technology that could help you have a phone call without speaking . . . all you’d need to do is think that you want to say. K, it’s April and I figured I might have missed this on, oh, the first . . . but nope, this is for real. Kinda eerie, no?

And just when I thought I had seen enough for the day . . . Human VoIP shows a new product that could bring smell-o-vision to life.  Ew.

Source: goebel.net

Mr. Blog, PhoneGnome’s CEO David Beckemeyer, says he considers to stop writing about VoIP because I called his blog a business tool.

Markus Gbel says this blog is a business tool. That means I have failed. I have let too much from that world creep over to this world.

Sorry everybody. I guess this means I have to blog less about VoIP, or anything related to ventures I’m involved in. Perhaps I shouldn’t talk about VoIP here at all.

Please stop him from doing that! Leave a comment on his blog post and tell him that he should go on. I like his VoIP posts in this private blog very much. He makes us think when he says that Jaxtr math doesn’t add up or that the Ooma business model could be considered a Toll Fraud. These are brilliant thoughts and he brought them up first. I don’t want him to stop that.

Of course he also encouraged his readers to leave PhoneGnome favourable comments under an article from FierceVoIP. That’s OK! It was only self defense against the Ooma fanboys who were dissing the PhoneGnome there. In this case he used his private blog as a business tool, something I would never criticize at an entrepreneur.

Source: voipcentral.org

Free VoIP calls are not free in a strict sense. The customers are charged directly or indirectly. First of all, they need to bear the hardware costs. If not, the membership fees which may be very inexpensive.

Viewed so, it would be more appropriate to discuss Oomas free offer. The Palo Alto, California-based startup has just extended call-routing devices dubbed as Ooma Hub and Ooma Scout devices using which the customers can enjoy unlimited free calls anywhere in the USA.

The introductory price for Ooma Hub is $399 and $39.95 for Ooma Scout. These devices are available from companys website. With this expenditure, the customer can enjoy life-time free VoIP services and other Ooma services such as ooma Instant Second Line and the ooma Broadband Answering Machine.

It seems that Ooma is taking a different approach to lure residential customers. Instead of spending money in marketing and advertisements like Vonage, it simply markets the devices for unlimited home calling.

Mark Sullivan has raised an interesting question regarding the survival of this new startup.

He asks,

So the key questions in Ooma’s future are these: Can it grow its network of local Hubs fast enough to dramatically reduce the connection fees it’s paying to connect calls outside its network? And will mainstream consumers lay down $400 for a piece of hardware and a promise of free calls forever?

He adds,

If the answer to either is no, Ooma might quickly burn through its venture capital and disappear like so many other VoIP upstarts.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

Check out Ed Baig’s review in USA Today of Ooma.

Jonathan Greene’s evaluation continues.

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

As we reported a while ago, the Ooma peer to peer VoIP service and unique device is slated to go on sale today for $399. The device plugs into your broadband connection and uses a peer-to-peer architecture to dodge termination fees and offer free voice calls. Users can buy $39 "Scout" devices that extend the system to each phone jack.
May be because of the co founder and movie star Aston Kutcher’s involvement service might get a jump if there is any connection between actors and VoIP. But slated YouTube (utube) promotion will certainly help.
Just like Skype, OOma is based on peer to peer technology and the success of the service vastly depends on the number of devices out on the wild. So far there is about 2250 devices are out there. If the service needs supernodes!, like skype, we are not sure of who is handling the supernode service, Ooma or the users them selves.
More information could be found at Ooma site.
Just to remind you that if you do not care about actors and want to save $300, you might want to look at PhoneGnome, a similar service.

Source: goebel.net

Do you remember PhoneGnome’s "Build Your Own Ooma" challenge which they started at July 19th, 2007?

We invite any company that sees promise in Oomas recently announced peer to peer VoIP model to consider rolling such a service out on the PhoneGnome platform and see how it flies.

It seems that they have succeeded, as you can tell from the latest post in the PhoneGnome blog. The company does not declare a winner of the challenge, so they probably developed the new "Directed Calling / Remote POTS Access" feature of PhoneGnome by themselves. It resembles quite exactly what Ooma already does:

This feature enables remote access to your POTS phone service (the telephone service connected to the PhoneGnome box LINE port). A user with the PhoneGnome box can grant access to other PhoneGnome accounts. Such an authorized user can then use their PhoneGnome account to direct a call to a specific POTS telephone service.

With the new Directed Calling / Remote POTS Access feature, friends and family members in one area can place calls to local numbers in another area. One PhoneGnome box can serve any number of accounts whether those accounts have the PhoneGnome box or not.

That’s also the Ooma model: Phone calls are delivered over the internet and terminated for free to the PSTN over an Ooma or PhoneGnome box, since people in the US usually have free local calls. But other than Ooma the PhoneGnome feature can also work internationally. If I had a PhoneGnome at home I could directly allow other users to make free calls to Germany by sharing my phone line. Ooma restricts its free calls only to the USA.

Another big difference is that with PhoneGnome you know at least who is sharing your phone line, while Ooma just accomplishes other people’s phone calls over your fixed phone line whithout even telling you. You can find the implications of this in my former blog post "Why Ooma is a security risk". In contrast the "Directed Calling / Remote POTS Access" feature of PhoneGnome adds a sumbenu called "PhoneGnome Users Permitted to Use your Phone Line". That gives a sense of security if people grant that permission only to friends and family members. But I guess that we will soon hear about PhoneGnome users who grant free calls to anyone unknown who gives them free calls in his area in exchange. One PhoneGnome box can serve any number of accounts and so it’s theoretically possible to build a network for worldwide free phone calls. Yet there are PhoneGnome users in over 100 countries.

So it seems that the PhoneGnome is now slightly ahead in the funny feature fight with Ooma.

But what about the Toll Fraud?

Only one month ago PhoneGnome’s CEO David Beckemeyer reasoned in his blog and in a conversation with The VoIP weblog that the way Ooma operates could be construed as Toll Fraud, or at the very least, against the terms of service of your phone company. He quoted an AT&T web page that says:

You would never allow a stranger to walk into your place of business and walk off with your companys products or services. And yet, an individual who perpetrates toll fraud on an unsuspecting business is doing just that.

Simply put, remote toll fraud is the fraudulent, illegal use of a companys telecommunications system by a third party from a remote location.

Very diplomatically he concluded in his blog post that it was "probably just a coincidence that we receive this notice at the same time that Ooma is launching a service that permits strangers remote access to one’s telecommunications system (specifically our AT&T landline)".

Now the PhoneGnome does the same.

Source: goebel.net

The website ooma-revealed.info had a very short live. It was set up at the end of August and yet had to close only some days later. Webmaster Mike Pierce, a techie who started the website where he dissected the Ooma service, says in a comment to a blog post:

The web site ooma-revealed.info was taken offline under threat of legal action by ooma, claiming that it contained many untruths and was slanderous. They would not detail what they thought was untrue or try to provide corrections.

September 6, 2007 2:54 PM

ooma-revealed.info lived such a short time that there isn’t even a copy in the cache of Google or MSN. You can find only some regarding blog posts or comments in other blogs where Mike advertized his site.

I have been told that at first Ooma approached Mike, indicating that they were trying to "reach out" to him. They alledgedly offered him a White Rabbit, which he refused, and told him Ooma technical people would look at the site and get in contact with Mike about issues that they think are wrong. However, instead, a few days later, Tom Cronan, Ooma CFO and counsel, supposedly called and threatened legal action so Mike took the site down.

That’s just what I have been told in a private message. I never had the chance to see the website. You would think a company launching a new product would have better things to do. Please use the comments section if you know more or want to correct the information.

Source: goebel.net

After the Funny fight between Ooma and PhoneGnome on FierceVoIP don’t forget to read today the answer from PhoneGnome’s CEO David Beckemeyer!

Last week an interview with Andrew Frame, founder and CEO of Ooma, caused furor among the PhoneGnome users when he answered the question "How is ooma different from PhoneGnome, aside from the physical aspect?". David Beckemeyer immediately demanded his right to answer and comes up with this comparison:

The key distinguishing aspects of the two products, as we see it, are:

Ooma:
- Prepay for hardware plus a bundle of services/features up front
- Service options defined by ooma
- Proprietary, closed, architecture
- Available to users in the United States
- International calls at ooma rates

PhoneGnome:
- A la carte model, with lower up-front costs
- Customers pay less up front and pay for the services/features they want
- Open, expandable and interconnects with other VoIP services/systems
- Embraces open-standards, interoperability, and industry standards
- Available to users anywhere in the world
- Free software extends PhoneGnome-enabled service to a PC or mobile phone
- PhoneGnome box works with VoIP, cable and landline phone service
- Compatible with a variety of international and domestic plans

Also we learn from the article what a tiny company stands behind the PhoneGnome. "We are a typical early stage startup, running very lean and mean. We don’t have any Hollywood actors and we don’t have a big pile of VC cash to burn", says Beckemeyer with a side blow to Ooma’s Ashton Kutcher. They have only ten people working full time and "many terrific folks who work with us, outsourced and under other arrangements to allow us to operate without large capital requirements as we strive to expand and grow organically".

Too sad that Beckemeyer didn’t tell the actual status of PhoneGnome’s Build Your Own Ooma challenge where they try to roll out a similar peer-to-peer service on the PhoneGnome platform.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

Jonathan Greene seems to be dismayed about ooma. Seems my original reservations are coming to life.

Source: goebel.net

FierceVoIP has an interview with Andrew Frame, founder and CEO of Ooma. We can learn something, but it’s mostly PR blabla for Ooma. Much more interesting are, again, the comments to this article.

Maybe Andrew shouldn’t have answered the question "How is ooma different from PhoneGnome, aside from the physical aspect?". It causes an outrage of devoted PhoneGnome users, calling his answer "completely misleading" and presuming that he didn’t understand how PhoneGnome works.

In steps Dennis Peng, director product management at Ooma, making an even more comprehensive comparation of the two devices. He asserts that PhoneGnome doesn’t have two phone lines, like Ooma does, but just "one and a half". What does that mean? Maybe a half phone line is shorter than a full line? Peng gets it worse from the next commentator who says "Dennis, with all due respect to your position at Ooma, you need to do a little more homework", before he strips down his argumentation.

Too sad that most comments are anonymous, because they give pretty much insight and are funny to read. I hope that Mr. Blog himself, PhoneGnome’s CEO David Beckemeyer, will find this article soon and also leave a comment.

I was personally shocked to read that poor Americans pay $65-70 monthly just to get two phone lines from AT&T and PhoneGnome. With the necessary broadband connection it sums up to $100 every month.

I just pay $40 monthly for broadband and VoIP, of course having two phones lines. Two people can call my Sipgate number at the same time. If the first phone is already in use the other rings. Also twofold dial out is possible. Betamax’ SparVoIP allows this without hassle, using my Sipgate number as caller ID and letting me call my favourite countries for free for just $3 per month. On top of that I can use 10 different VoIP providers on my Fritz!Box, having lots of inbound numbers from different countries and arbitrating for the best price on outgoing calls. At Voxalot I can install 30 more providers.

I can switch easily if one provider goes belly up or messes with their rates, without getting a new box or changing anything hardware-wise. Ooma guarantees only three years of free service and nobody knows what happens to the box if they go bankrupt.

UPDATE:

David Beckemeyer, designer and proprietor of PhoneGnome, aka "Mr. Blog," aka former chief technology officer and co-founder of EarthLink, has officially requested the opportunity to respond to Andrew Frame’s comparison of Ooma and PhoneGnome.

You can read more about that in today’s FierceVoIP article "ooma versus PhoneGnome". But his response will not be featured untile the Monday, Sept. 10 edition of FierceVoIP.

Too sad we have to wait so long.