GigaOM

Regardless of what you believe about the current state of IP networks’ ability to handle online video, delivering video and voice over IP networks is a far less forgiving experience than routing data packets for email or documents. Brief glitches and network congestion don’t result in garbled email, but with voice or video they can lead to dropped words or jittery pictures. Enter New York-based startup Iptivia, maker of next-generation IP network management software, which as carriers and cable companies focus on the triple-play and quadruple-play offerings over IP networks, is crucial to delivering consistent quality of service.

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Ribbit, the Mountain View, Calif.-based startup aiming to help developers unite voice with web applications, is scheduled to announce its own voice-web entry Monday, a service called Amphibian that will give users the ability to blend traditional telephony services with a wide range of web-based options.

Due out in the second quarter of 2008, Amphibian is slated to be shown live at the Demo conference Tuesday morning, according to the Ribbit folks who gave us a quick heads-up before preparing for their moment in the startup sun. Amphibian’s promised features — which include the ability to redirect a cell call into Skype, Google Talk, MSN or into a web-based voice mail application — may not seem particularly groundbreaking to anyone familiar with other VoIP-based web services. But viewed as a loss leader for Ribbit’s API, Amphibian might be the first product evangelist who actually made the company some money to boot.

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Like finding a $20 bill in your coat pocket at the beginning of winter, Sprint has “found” a potential source of revenue in its patent portfolio. While it will certainly be harder than reaching into a coat pocket, the beleaguered wireless carrier probably sees patent litigation as easier than its corporate turnaround.

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Dell begins bundling Fonality’s open-source software with its enterprise servers today, its latest gambit to compete in the already-crowded VoIP market — this time targeting companies with 125 employees or fewer.

This is fertile ground: Analyst Alan Weckel of research firm Dell ‘Oro Group estimates annual PBX revenues, including those from VoIP phone systems, will exceed $7.5 billion by 2011. Much of this growth could come from small- to medium-sized businesses. Weckel told The Wall Street Journal in August that he thinks 35 million small businesses will adopt IP phone service before 2010 (about 11 million currently use it), a number that’s likely to ramp up if the economic situation worsens.

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Champions of a more open Internet could take a small bit of cheer from Yahoo’s plans, unveiled today, to open up its mobile platform to third-party developers. But the lack of a service-provider partner to endorse the idea is one clear sign that chief Yahoo Jerry Yang and all the other exclamation-pointers have a long way to go before they can expect to have a major impact on the growing market of the mobile web.

To be sure, plans like Yahoo’s Go or Google’s Android, which aim to bring the power of the open Internet to your handheld device, seem a preferable future than locked-in services like Verizon’s VCast. But without a service-provider partner to watch its back, Yahoo (YHOO) seems unable to answer a big looming question for open-Internet apps accessed via a cellular phone: How fast will the app perform, and how much will it cost to download the data?

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Earlier this year we wrote about Gaboogie, a web-based conference call service started by Erik Lagerway. The service didn’t quite work out, and the company reconfigured its business focus to offering instant group calls from mobiles, and is now called Lypp.

Another web-based conferencing service, Foonz might be going down that route. Randy Corke, President & CMO of Foonz’s parent company, RPM Communications was in town last week to bring me upto speed on their new offering, Utterz, which is sort of like blogging-via-voice-calls from your cellphone. The Maynard, MA-based, RPM recently raised $4 million in Series A funding from Morgenthaler Ventures.

During our chat, Corke said he was focusing all his energies on their recently launched service, Utterz. he pointed out that the audio-centric advertising has been a bit of a non-starter. On top of that the opportunity to make money from terminating calls is dwindling fast, and that is why he has shifted focus from Foonz to Utterz.

Of course, there is also this little fact: the pre-Web 2.0 conference call services such as FreeConference.com are good enough for people to not muck around with new concepts.

Update: Randy got in touch this morning, and wanted to point out that Foonz isn’t ready for the next world just yet.

Based on your posting, I’m concerned that I didn’t articulate a couple of points very well. First, with regards to audio-centric advertising, my point was that it is still a nascent market, while online advertising is well established. I did not mean to in any way insinuate that audio advertising is a non-starter – in fact we are quite bullish about it.

The other point I obviously wasn’t clear about was foonz. While you are right that we are focusing our marketing on Utterz right now, foonz continues to grow at an average of 50% per month over the past six months, and people love the unique ability to start a group call on-the-fly and group messaging capabilities of foonz. In particular, we have seen strong growth and use by faith based groups, small businesses and families.

That last comment prompted me to ask him how can he not focus on a service that is growing 50% every month? (Of course, not knowing what is the Foonz user base, the 50% monthly growth is a meaningless metric, at lease from my perspective.)

As a startup, we like to focus to make an impact. Since foonz is able to grow now on its own without a lot of effort from us and we believe Utterz has tremendous upside, it’s a simple matter of focusing our efforts and resources on Utterz now to make sure it gets off to a good start.

Much as I would like to buy into that argument, I can’t. As I had said earlier, the so called group calling and conference services are a bit of a non starter. Consumers’ have to be completely fed-up and experience extreme frustration before embracing a new technology. Anyway, Corke’s point about focus is well taken.

Related Article: 27 tips for teleconferencing.

VoIP startup Jaxtr said today that it has attracted 5 million registered members, up from 500,000 users 140 day ago, making the company “the fastest-growing Internet communications service in history — ahead of Skype, Hotmail and ICQ,” according to its press release.

But where is the money?

You might think that scaling to meet the needs of these millions of users represents Jaxtr’s biggest challenge. Indeed, Jaxtr expresses concern in its announcement over its ability to meet user demand. To that end, it recently hired Taneli Otala, former CTO of MySQL, as VP of engineering.

But Jaxtr has bigger problems than scaling and tuning their systems for millions of users. To make Jaxtr a real business, they need to convert sign-ups into satisfied users, and from there, transform those users into customers who pay.

Even then, there are no guarantees Jaxtr will succeed. If the promise is cheap calling, it’s just the same old VoIP thing.

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