Image via CrunchBase |
Skype already has great sound quality over long (read international) distances. A number would be nice to have unpaid for.
Image via CrunchBase |
the Motorola Defy XT, an Android 2.3 device with a 3.7-inch display, 1GHz CPU, 1650 mAh battery, 5MP camera / VGA front camera, 1GB of ROM and microSD slot. It can be your for $249Republic Wireless Outs The Defy XT, Reopens Beta For $19/Month Unlimited Wireless Service
For just $19 a month customers get truly unlimited data, voice and text messages. Plus, this is offered free of a contract. .... The Defy XT .. won’t topple any of today’s flagship phones .... But thanks to a deal with Sprint, the phones also work wherever there is a cellular signal. ..... the company is going to be a disruptive force in the wireless industry. Republic Wireless isn’t a scrappy startup either. It’s a division of the Cary, North Carolina-based Bandwidth.com, the VoIP company responsible at least in part for Google Voice, Skype, Pandora and many more data services.Republic Wireless reopens $19 service, sells Motorola Defy XT
It’s a great phone, and it’s incredibly durable. ..... With the DEFY XT, you don’t have to worry about expensive replacements and insurance policies. This phone is the real deal, with Corning Gorilla Glass and an IP67 Rating for solid particle and water resistance. .... at a time when Big Cell is busy making more money at higher prices, with more restrictions and continued confusing business practices.Republic Wireless now brings Motorola Defy XT to its $19 unlimited monthly plans
Republic Wireless is an unusual carrier.
Winrumors: Microsoft slams post-PC idea, claims “PC isn’t even middle aged yet”: even their most ardent admirers will not assert that they are as good as PCs at the first two verbs, create and collaborate. And that’s why one should take any reports of the death of the PC with a rather large grain of salt. Because creating and collaborating are two of the most basic human drives, and are central to the idea of the PC. They move our culture, economy and world forward. You see their fingerprints in every laboratory, startup, classroom, and community.I am in agreement with Microsoft on this one. But let me clarify. A laptop is PC. The Macbook Air is PC. The Chromebook is PC.
TechCrunch: The Phone Call Is Dead: Text is just easier.I have a few different phone numbers. I think I have three. Does that mean I am a huge fan of the telephone? Hardly. The opposite is true.
CNet: Chrome could preload pages for 'wicked-fast' Web: Google has begun work on a feature to let Chrome load pages before they're needed, the latest instance of the company's relentless focus on Web performance..... scheduled to arrive in the browser's code base in February .... When a person clicks on a preloaded Web page, the browser could simply activate the page rather than load it..... Google has many other fast-Web projects under way, including a technology called False Start to speed encrypted Web pages, rewiring Web server communications with the SPDY protocol, support for the WebP image format as an alternative to JPEG, and switching to the libjpeg-turbo library for when JPEG images need to be drawn.Maybe Google is a software company and it is coming from a coding angle, but the road to the wicked fast web I would like to travel is one where competition is introduced into the broadband sector and prices come down, speeds go up, like in some other countries. It is one of those People-People-Rise issues.
David Pogue: New York Times: Google Shakes It Up Again With Free Phone Calls: Google .. shook up Web searching and advertising. It shook up free, Web-based e-mail services .... shook up the way companies go public. .... Calls to American and Canadian phone numbers are free ..... Calls to other countries are very cheap ...... If you have a free Google Voice account too, then you can get incoming calls, too. ..... it’s increasingly clear that one day, the Internet, not the outrageous cellphone companies, will connect our calls. The ultimate, of course, would be free calls from a phone, to a phone ...... even closer to the “free calls from a phone, to a phone” ideal. Now it’s free calls “from a computer, to a phone.” .... What if Google released an app like that for Android phones, or the iPhone? .... for the first time in history, make unlimited free phone-to-phone calls.... It would completely change the game .... the Internet-as-phone-company paradise that almost certainly awaits us.Paying for phone calls was always ridiculous. And it still is. Now that we have computer to phone free calls, Google should go ahead and stop pretending, and I know it already has the technology. Get this ported to the smartphones, and we already have it.
With Open VBX you get free software to build telephony services and a web based telephony cloud to provision the numbers, calls, text messages, and way more. ...... We believe that free and open software opens up markets and new capabilities much more quickly than closed and expensive software products. ........ there are a number of ways to make money with open source software. The most obvious one is the "Red Hat" model of building a services and support business on top of the open source software. Red Hat has revenues of almost $600mm per year and boasts a public market valuation of over $5bn. MySQL, which also used that approach, sold to Sun for $1bn. .......The Wordpress software is available open source. But they also operate a hosted version at Wordpress.com that is a commercial effort.Al Wenger: Twilio Announces OpenVBX
Twilio has done it again: taken something that was previously complicated and made it super simple. This time they set their sights on business telephone systems ...... Like Wordpress, OpenVBX has a plug-in architecture that makes it super easy to extend functionality and to integrate other systems. ...... how many times have you punched in a bunch of information to an automated system only to then have to repeat all the information when you get an operator on the line? ...... I can’t wait to get rid of the existing PBX at Union Square Ventures and replace it with an instance of OpenVBX. I can then connect the foursquare plugin to let people now which city and time zone I am in!Twilio: OpenVBX
Using Twilio's Cloud Communications platform, you never have to worry about scalability, reliability, hardware investments, or long-term contracts. You just pay as you go, and a free $30 trial gets you up and running without a credit card...... As developers, we've built websites, skinned blogs, and integrated CRMs for customers. But phone systems, that was somebody else's problem.OpenVBX.org
OpenVBX is for companies and collaboration.TechCrunch: Twilio Releases OpenVBX, An Open Source Google Voice For Businesses
Ever since it launched in late 2008, Twiliohas a knack for making cool products. ...... has the potential to disrupt business-oriented call routing services in a big way — Twilio is describing it as a sort of Google Voice for businesses, with more flexibility ...... integrated services, like text to speech, voice transcription, voicemail forwarding, and SMS messaging. ....... One plugin Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson showed me hooked into 37signals’ Highrise, a web-based contact manager. Using this, you could automatically check to see if the phone number of an incoming call was already in your contact database, and route the call to a certain sales rep accordingly. A second plugin (which was actually created by a third-party developer) hooks into Foursquare, allowing you to change your telephony settings depending on where you’re located........ When you use OpenVBX you’re charged Twilio’s normal rates, which run $1 per phone line per month ($2 for a toll-free number) with usage charges of 3 cents per minute (or SMS). ........ an enterprising developer could tweak OpenVBX so that it’s perfect for restaurants, and then resell it as their own service. Twilio still gets paid through their per-minute and phone line charges, and the developer can charge a hefty premium on top of it.GigaOm: Twilio Launches Roll-Your-Own Google Voice
Twilio, a San Francisco-based startup whose platform and services marry voice to the web world, is launching OpenVBX, an open-source web application that is in essence a roll-your-own Google Voice. With it, you get toll-free and local phone numbers, which can in turn be used to route calls to existing cellphones and landlines. ..... I’m still playing around with a demo version Twilio shared with us — I’ll update the post when I’m done.GleepLog: Virtual Telephony Changed Today
Twilio flew me out to San Francisco in March to get a look at an early version and I was very impressed. We had a weekend hackathon and created plugins for it… but more about that later. ....... It didn’t make sense for us to continue building OtherNum anymore. Instead I chose to pursue some sub-niches instead of primary PBX-like functionality and to work on plugins for VBX. ..... VBX is an open source web application that interacts with Twilio’s API to implement advanced telephony functions normally found in expensive equipment. It’s exactly the right solution for businesses with virtual offices, remote personnel and startups. ...... If the power goes it in your office your $10,000 PBX is going to go offline. ...... you’ll never have to shell out cash to add extensions or voicemail boxes...... pull it up in a browser and enter your Twilio credentials..... You want to have your PBX interact with your Twitter or FourSquare account or change its behavior based on time of day. You want your PBX to interact with Chirbit, MyCaption.com or BART. If you had a hardware PBX it would NEVER happen. ...... I wrote the plugins for Chirbit, FourSquare and MyCaption during that weekend in San Francisco. The FourSquare plugin caught the attention of a bunch of people including TechCrunch, GigaOM, Albert Wenger and Fred Wilson. My head was spinning all morning! ..... Mark Condon wrote a plugin that allowed you to define prompts in English and used Google APIs to translate your text into French, German and other languages and then speak it to the caller. ..... Jonathan Kressaty wrote multiple plugins, one of which allows you to change the behavior of your phone system depending on the time of the day. ..... I think it’s a great product in a really cool space and it’s going to push the virtual telephony world forward a few notches and in a hurry.Jonathan Kressaty: A Warm And Long Anticipated Welcome To OpenVBX!
Ladies and gentlemen, the way you perceive a phone "system" is about to change..... OpenVBX, an unbelievably killer, deployable, web-based application that allows you to setup an unlimited number of phone call and SMS "flows", allowing individuals and businesses to have an easy to use, manageable virtual phone system. ...... "Like Google Voice has done for consumers, OpenVBX lets business users control when and how they are reached. It also provides a modern web user interface for managing voicemails, sending and receiving text messages and managing phone calls from the browser. Users can drag-and- drop custom business phone applications, such as automated attendants, menus, team dialing, and shared voicemail inboxes for their company phone numbers." ....... I was first introduced to OpenVBX in March, and even when it was in a still-pretty-rough state, it was one of the most impressive apps I've ever seen. You could do nearly anything with a phone call - setup menus, prompts, voicemail with transcriptions and email/text notifications to recipients, and what you couldn't do you could build with an extremely extensible applet and plugin architecture that requires minimal knowledge of PHP. ....... As of today, I have five applets/plugins available for OpenVBX that I've worked on in the last few months: a "scheduler" applet that lets you dictate a call or SMS flow based on the time of day, an applet called "curling" that will perform an HTTP GET request to any URL and say back the contents of the page to the caller, a "restart" applet that will send your flow back to the beginning, a "call log" plugin that shows all call activity for your entire Twilio account, and an "installer" plugin that lets you easily upload a zip file of a plugin so you can avoid using FTP in order to install new applets. ..... We've been using OpenVBX on and off at Ripstyles for a couple weeks now, and it's been amazing. Being able to have a multi-thousand dollar phone system for pennies per call makes perfect business sense, and it's honestly quite enjoyable to use.Fred Wilson, October 2009: Business Model Jujutsu
The big moment in the history of TACODA (a company we invested in early this decade that was sold to AOL in 2007) was when they went from charging customers to paying customers.
The Truth: What’s Really Going On With Apple, Google, AT&T And The FCC TechCrunch how the Google Voice application hurts “the iPhone’s distinctive user experience.” ..... over the last few months Apple expressed dismay at the number of core iPhone apps that are powered by Google. Search, maps, YouTube, and other key popular apps are powered by Google. Other than the browser, Apple has little else to call its own other than the core phone, contacts and calendar features. The Google Voice App takes things one step further, by giving users an incentive to abandon their iPhone phone number and use their Google Voice phone number instead (transcription of voicemails is reason enough alone). Apple was afraid, say our sources, that Google was gaining too much power on the iPhoneThis is a generational conflict. Apple and Google belong to two different generations of tech. This small iPhone app conflict is symbolic. The larger conflict between the two brands is to be seen in the smartphone arena where Apple sees the phone as a smaller desktop, and Google suggests there is nothing much to download, all apps should be web-based.
The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
Biz Stone | ||||
comedycentral.com | ||||
|