TheVOIPGirl.com’s had another nice welcome from PhoneBoy (no, we’re not related), a prolific VOIP, telecom and technology blogger with an affable writing style. He explains things…

Check out his review of GotVoice and you’ll see what I mean. GotVoice is an interesting service that takes voicemail messages from different voicemail services (including VOIP ones) and sends them to your email inbox. You get convenient access to all your voice messages in one place. He also points out a few shortcomings of TheVoipGirl.com that I hasten to address. Thanks PhoneBoy!

Well, I started Guide to all those Skype icon things…part 1, as a cheat sheet for myself. Here’s a few more.

Click the History tab to see:

 Outgoing calls

 Answered incoming calls

 Missed calls (unanswered incoming calls)

Chats

New voice messages (unplayed)

Voice messages (played)

 Transferred files

 SMS messages sent

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today BridgePort Networks announced the commercial availability of MobileSTICK, a USB device that transforms your PC or laptop into an extension of your cell phone. When you plug MobileSTICK into a PC or laptop with a fixed line or Wi-Fi broadband connection, the device launches a PC softphone, secured by a SIM card that utilizes the your existing mobile phone number to make and receive phone calls, SMS messages and multimedia (MMS) messages. Your existing mobile remains active and continues to utilize its existing SIM.

Ken Camp had the opportunity a few months ago to do a podcast with BridgPort’s Sanjay Jhawar that explains the MobileSTICK technology in detail. It’s really good and worth a listen.

GrandCentral works like a charm forwarding to my Gizmo number. I am also lucky enough to be one of the first to beta test a Canadian GrandCentral number, which means this service will be even more practical for me to use. I’ve been wanting a local number for awhile; Gizmo only offers Canadian area codes in Manitoba and Ontario. Skype offers none at all.

So when you call my GrandCentral number (778-785-6755), I’ve set up GC to forward to Gizmo. What I haven’t quite figured out yet is the voicemail. My Gizmo calls that are ignored/unanswered are bumping to GrandCentral voicemail, which is fine. However, I also have Gizmo voicemail activated, so I get an email and WAV file from Gizmo with nothing “in” it so to speak.

I think this a little bit of the untidiness you see when one app is not fully intergrated with another. See Alec’s post. For more reviews on GrandCentral and Gizmo, see Andy, Garrett Smith, Ken Camp, and Paul Kaputska.

From: www.quickstartvoip.com

Free Internet phone service lets you to make free long distance calls over the Internet in three different flavors. The first enables you to make calls from one phone to another as long as both are connected to broadband lines. The second allows you to make calls from one computer to another and the third makes calls possible from a computer to a traditional phone.

But, there are limitations to free services. Let’s take a look.

Phone-to-phone service providers require that you purchase their telephone adaptor (or ATA). As long as you are calling other people who have purchased the same equipment, the call is free. PhoneGnome is one such service. The PhoneGnome adaptor costs about $119. You literally plug it in to your broadband connection and to your regular phone, it configures itself, and you are good to go. You can start calling other PhoneGnome users anywhere for free. You don’t have to switch phone numbers or change telephone companies. Vonage, Packet8, AT&T CallVantage, and others you may have heard of follow the same model.

PC-to-PC service providers allow users to make free calls from one PC to another. Both parties need a PC with an Internet connection and some software easily downloaded from the Net. However, for a call to ring through, both parties have to be online at the same time and have the same, or at least compatible, software. By adding voicemail to a PC-to-PC service though, callers can leave messages even when you’re not online. Unfortunately, voicemail may or may not be free.  Skype, Gizmo Project, and FWD are three typical PC-to-PC services.

PC-to-phone services let you to call a regular phone numbers for free. However, you may be restricted to the locations that you can call or the length of the call. VoipBuster, for example, provides free calls from your PC to landline phones in about 30 countries. The restrictions are a little bit complex, but free is free…Lucky for us, the bigger software-based phone companies are trying hard to entice users so there’s also a current wave of promotions trumpeting free calls to landline phones. Skype for example offers free calls to any phone within North America until the end of the year. Gizmo offers free calls to phones in 60 countries as long as both parties maintain an active Gizmo Project account.

In all of these cases, free Internet telephone services make money by selling credits for calling minutes to landline phones or mobiles, long distance destinations, or phone numbers not on the same VOIP service. Rates are low, however, and you can expect to save significantly over traditional long distance companies. For regular phone users to call you on your free Internet phone account, you must “buy” or subscribe to a conventional phone number. Most services allow you to buy a phone number in different locations, so if your family is in the UK and wants to phone you regularly, you can buy a local UK number that they can call for free or inexpensively.

The good news is that hovering your mouse over just about anything in the Skype window will display a tool tip (a little one-sentence definition or status report).

However, I found that almost right away I needed a cheat sheet for the online status icons, those green or gray clouds beside each contact. If you have anything to add or change, please do.

 Online: the person can receive calls or chats. If you set your status to , you can receive calls/chats from other Skypers. Depending on your privacy settings, you can receive calls from anyone, from people in your contact list, or from people who you’ve authorized to see your online details. To set privacy settings, go to Tools ->Options->Privacy.

 SkypeMe: the person is in SkypeMe mode, which means that everyone on Skype knows he/she is available and interested in talking or chatting, including contacts they don’t know. If you set your status to SkypeMe, you are allowing calls and chats with other Skypers who can find you by searching the Skype directory. To turn SkypeMe mode ON or OFF, go to File –> Change Online Status (Windows) or Account -> Change Status (Mac OS X).

 Invisible: the person appears to you as  offline, which means you can’t call or chat with them. If you set your status to invisible, you will appear as  to everyone else. Use invisible if you want to be able to make your own calls or chats, but don’t want to receive them. You’ll also be able to see the online status of everyone else in your contact list, even though you’ll appear to them to be offline.

 Away: the person temporarily can’t be reached–out to lunch, away from computer, in a meeting or whatever. If you set your status to Away, you are still notified of incoming calls or chats. Skype automatically switches your online status to Away if you have been inactive for a certain number of minutes. Go to Tools ->Options ->General to change this setting.

 Not available: the person can’t be reached. Sounds a bit more long term than Away. If you set your status to Not Available, you are still notified of incoming calls or chats. Skype automatically switches your online status to Not Available if you have been inactive for a certain number of minutes. Go to Tools ->Options ->General to change this setting.

 Do not disturb: the person doesn’t want to be bugged. Calls or messages are queued for you to check later. If you set your status to Do Not Disturb, you won’t be notified of incoming calls or chats (no pop-ups or ringtones).

 Not sharing: the person does not give you permission to see if he/she is online, offline, away, and so on. It’s probably nothing personal. When adding the contact you may have decided not to request their details, or they may have dismissed your request. To ask again if they’d like to share details, right-click the contact name and select Request Contact Details.

 Offline: the person is not available through Skype. They may have set their status to offline or invisible, or they may have logged off. If you set your status to Offline, you can’t make or receive calls/chats with other Skypers. But, if you have a voicemail account, people can leave you messages. You can also call forward your calls when offline to another number (either a regular number or Skype name), and you can still make SkypeOut calls (calls to regular numbers). 

 Skypeout contact: a person with a regular landline/mobile number. Not a Skype number.

I’ve been chatting with Craig Walker of GrandCentral over the last little while mostly about new GrandCentral features and the Canadian phone numbers coming soon (yeah!), but I also asked him about Project CARE (Communications and Respect for Everybody). It is a social program they started right out of the gate aimed at helping homeless people more easily communicate with family, employers, social services, doctors, and so on. Using GrandCentral, individuals  in need receive a free local phone number and voicemail box for life. The program is currently offered in the San Francisco area but there are plans to go nationwide.

What impresses me about Project CARE is that GrandCentral saw how their technology and services could really benefit people in need, right from the inception of the company.

“We always wanted to use our services to help the community around us” says Craig, “and we strongly feel that private companies can be very effective when deploying new and enhanced technologies to help social problems.  We focused on the homeless because we realized that without a local phone number of voicemail system there is virtually no way to get out of the cycle of homelessness.  How do you get a job if there’s no way to reach you?  Housing?  Health Care?  We also started working with a number of battered women’s shelters who have similar issues of needing an ability to communicate with the outside world when everything else is lost.”

We had a recent dump of snow in our area, enough to close schools for a day and wreak havoc on commuter traffic, and my son asked me about what the homeless do in weather like this. Well, what do they do? I think it’s an unfortunate fact that we don’t generally think of people in desparate situations until our own situation turns a little upside down. Indeed, living on the street in winter is something my kids can’t comprehend. Kudos to GrandCentral for putting their great product to greater use.

I’ve been wondering about the GrandCentral “One number for life” mantra, and TalkPlus‘ second number for your mobile phone. While I understand these products target different markets, I find it hard to keep them distinct in my mind. It dawned on me that this could be a problem that consumers have as well.

There’s a lot of chatter about Voice 2.0 applications–the user in control not the network–but that is the VOIP blogosphere talking. Me, I think okay, I get another number, it’s free for now, and it’s solving what problem exactly? 

GrandCentral:

Provides a phone number not tied to a device or location. When people call this number, the phones you have “attached” to it ring, like your cell phone, home phone, and office phone. Up to six phones can be linked to your GrandCentral number. The service is all about giving you control over how people reach you (inbound calling) as opposed to how you place calls. Callers can leave voice messages that can be checked by phone, email or online. You’re notified of a voice mail via email or text message to a cell phone. And you can flag unwanted callers as spam. It’s also free.

You need it if people have a hard time tracking you down. You find yourself playing telephone tag. You WANT to be found but heck, you’re always bouncing between work, home, and on the road.

TalkPlus:

Provides a second number for your cell phone so you can separate personal life and work life. The number can be used as a second line for business, dating, classified ads, online auctions, social groups, or a second residence. Like GrandCentral, unwanted callers can be blocked while priority numbers ring through. When making outbound calls, you can specify which caller ID to use so that the person you are calling doesn’t know how or where you’re calling from.

You need it if your mobile phone is your primary means of communication but the  separation of work and play is important to you. You want people to know that you’re calling from the office (the caller ID says this is a work-related call) even though you’re calling from home or the beach in Maui. You are also concerned about personal privacy and want to make sure that your personal number is only available to the people you want to have it.

***

In talking with Craig Walker, GrandCentral CEO, he tells me they couldn’t be more different than TalkPlus.

“Our philosophy is that we don’t need MORE numbers for people to reach us at…we need less.  As long as I have the control over my inbound calling that GrandCentral gives me, there’s no reason that I would want to juggle different personas. I don’t want phone numbers that identify me as being located at a certain place or doing a certain thing, I want a phone number that is personal to me.  If you want to reach me, call my ONE NUMBER.  I’ll be able to answer it wherever I want…I will be able to know who’s calling every time, and I’ll even be able to listen in on the voicemail as its being left if I’m still unsure whether I want to take the call.  When somebody calls me, they shouldn’t be able to “figure out” or know where I am based on the number…if I’m in the office, working from home or on the beach, that’s my business.” 

Obviously there’s more to both GrandCentral and TalkPlus than what I describe here, and the enthusiasm voiced by many in the VOIP blogging community seems to be not so much what these services are doing today, but what we can expect from them in the future.

To set up a free GrandCentral account, click here. To sign up for a TalkPlus sneak peak beta (for Cingular, T-Mobile, and Sprint customers in select U.S. states only), click here. TalkPlus won’t be a free service like GrandCentral and pricing is to be determined.

Today, GrandCentral announced a new community-wide service designed to fight annoying telemarketers and other phone spam agents. The PhoneSpam filter lets both visitors and GrandCentral users report unwanted callers to a community list at http://www.grandcentral.com/stopphonespam. Once the number is confirmed, it is added to the PhoneSpam filter. For GrandCentral users who have the spam filter enabled, calls from any of these numbers are automatically sent to the spam voicemail folder.

To avoid malicious abuse, I’m assume that “confirming” the number means GrandCentral does a manual check to make sure the number is a legitimately annoying one.

Bloggers like Andy and Phoneboy have made mention of Gizmo Project growing pains and bugs. Sometimes timing is everything because I was just thinking that. Well, maybe I’m feeling a little cranky today. I haven’t seen the problems Andy and Phoneboy have, but I do see other Gizmo-related errors and general “not responding” messages regularly, and it’s getting me down.

I’ve also never been able to get GizmoCall to work for me at all despite numerous pleas to tech support and the forums. I reported on it’s launch but was waiting to give a user opinion. Never happened. I really think that Gizmo is going in the right direction with the additional services like SMS, web calling, integration with other IM networks. I recently decided to use Gizmo as my primary chat interface since I can integrate with MSN,Yahoo, Google, and others. A new features lets you import your MSN contact list into Gizmo at one shot instead of laboriously one by one. And Gizmo is SO easy to set up with the Nokia N95 which means I can use it to make mobile internet calls.  I also use Gizmo to handle all my incoming calls through GrandCentral. Another big plus.

When the sun is shining you can overlook application not responding and other weirdness. But you can also get tired of making excuses. Sigh. I feel it’s kind of like a great outfit, love the color, the style, looks good on me, perfect for the occasion, but it doesn’t quite fit right.