Source: www.voip-news.com

Tom Keating from the VoIP & Gadgets Blog is up first today with the latest news from the gang at iBasis, along with some thoughts on Skype and their future.  “iBasis today introduced Pingo Business, an on-demand VoIP service targeting SMBs to offer low cost calling for up to 999 employees. The most interesting aspects are that employees can use their own fixed-line and mobile phones and administrators can set individual spending limits, easily monitor usage and manage billing through a single, centralized account.  In addition, you can also choose the amount of funds you wish to place in your master account, with no additional commitment required. No more single or even multi-year lock-in contracts! Boy I remember years ago being one of the decision makers in a 4-year lock-in corporate phone contract. Thankfully, those days are gone. VoIP certainly has given us much more freedom of choice and the ability to choose the best phone provider. So if you try iBasis’s new Pingo Business and don’t like it or found something cheaper, then don’t replenish the funds. The ability to track employee usage is a nice value-add.  It’s features like these, plus the fact that iBasis uses the open SIP standard, that still make me believe that Skype will never truly take off in the enterprise. The SIP standard has already cracked the proprietary digital phone market - even Cisco is on-board, supporting SIP as well as Skinny. Polycom, Snom, Aastra, and others are selling SIP phones like hot cakes to many different kinds of IP-PBXs. SIP also has opened the door for enterprise SIP trunking applications and hosted providers, such as iBasis, but also residential SIP trunking providers such as Vonage and Packet8. Skype unfortunately doesn’t support SIP, so you have to buy proprietary gateway hardware or software from companies like ActionTec, Skip2PBX, PSGW, and others. I hate locking into a single hardware provider, especially in telecom now that standards exist.”

Rich Tehrani from the VoIP Blog gives us the low-down on a new twist from the folks at VooDooDox.  “VooDooVox however has a new twist on telephony and will now allow people on hold to listen to ad-supported news and sports scores.  In addition the technology allows radio stations to actually answer the thousands of many unanswered calls they can receive each day. You can now easily poll these callers and/or you can get personal information and build an e-mail list.  In short, VooDooVox has a great idea in taking inefficiency in the telecom space and eliminating it.  I know the question you are likely asking – Rich, do they have a prayer at being successful (pun intended).  Are they guaranteed to be successful – no. But the company could do well in a few niches in my opinion. Over time they may become a ubiquitous company we all expect to hear from when we call the cable or electric company.”

Robert Poe from VoIP-News takes on the issue of how to best control your hosted VoIP via SMS.  “The problem is that yours is a small company. You don’t have one of those fancy in-house IP PBXes (Internet Protocol Private Branch Exchanges) with sophisticated FMC (Fixed Mobile Convergence) technology. That means there’s no client software on your handset that lets you access all your system’s features through a classy GUI or even a touch-tone menu. If you’re using hosted VoIP, you might be able to do the necessary setup via the Web from your laptop or an Internet café. Good thing Paris is working on city-wide wifi service. Otherwise, you’re out of luck. If you use hosted VoIP delivered by VoIP Logic LLC, though, your luck is about to change. The Williamstown, Mass., hosted-services wholesaler has developed a way for you to control your IP PBX functions via cellular SMS messages. For example, you might send a “CC” code followed by the names of two or three colleagues from your address book. Your hosted IP PBX would ring you and those individuals and connect you all in a conference call. Seven or eight other codes let you do everything from resetting your forwarding numbers to managing your address book.”  You can read the rest of what Robert had to say right here.