2600 Hz is the frequency that the phone companies used back in the day and was hacked by those seeking to make free long distance phone calls. In order to do so, one needed a device that generated the 2600 Hz tone, called the blue box. The new venture is an homage to that heritage.

From what I understand, the new company was formed after some disagreements between the FreePBX developers and the original backers of the project. FreePBX is a graphical user interface that sits on top of open-source telephony software such as Asterisk. FreePBX was promoted by Bandwidth.com.

Apparently, disagreements emerged when the forthcoming FreePBX v3 project announced support for FreeSwitch, a competitor to Asterisk. FreePBX was formerly known as Asterisk Management Portal. Frustrated by the pace of development and lack of resources, some of the core developers of FreePBX, especially those working on the new version of the software, decided to break away from Bandwidth.com’s version of FreePBX. In an email, Schreiber outlined:

In 2010, I got together with the core developers of the FreePBX v3 project and we collectively decided we would be better served operating independently. Together, we launched the 2600hz project – a collection of open-source Telephony Applications and Libraries that we expect to grow dramatically over the coming months. The project is designed to be an open-source foundation, focusing specifically on telephony projects. We are even exploring ideas around legal status as a non-profit foundation.

Tomorrow, we will release the first project under the 2600hz umbrella. Our first release will be blue.box – a significantly reworked version of FreePBX v3. For the record, this is now an independent project that has not been endorsed nor sponsored by bandwidth.com. Some of the original code from the FreePBX v3 project is still there, but much of it has been replaced. Bandwidth.com still owns the FreePBX name, but FreePBX v3 never made it out of beta. We expect to incrementally improve (and effectively replace) the entire stack, at which point we will transfer rights of the code to the open-source foundation/organization.

The blue.box is essentially a free, open-source system that works with any SIP-compliant device or service (including desk and mobile phones) and supports a multitude of features, such as auto-configuring of phone services, unlimited free conference calling, and auto-attendants. It’s been released under the Mozilla Public License. “We still hope to utilize, promote and work with Bandwidth.com, as they have one of the largest nationwide telephony networks out there,” Schreiber said.

The move gives Ifbyphone a scalable back end for its voice applications that’s accessible via an open API. Cloudvox offers “phone building blocks” that provide basic telephony functions such as making and receiving calls and presenting interactive voice response menus as well as performing more advanced tasks. Ifbyphone, which automates traditional and Internet phone calls through pre-built apps, plans to use the acquisition to enable businesses to leverage their existing Asterisk apps and bring them to scale through Ifbyphone’s infrastructure.

Ifbyphone aims to help developers create the kinds of mobile apps that will serve as differentiators in telephony as voice marches toward its all-IP future. A handful of landline operators have adopted that strategy, as witnessed by the recent acquisitions of Ribbit by BT and Jajah by O2/Telefonica. As Ifbyphone CEO Irv Shapiro told me:

I think we are facing a dramatic paradigm change in the world of telephony. Whether you’re a business or an individual you now have a choice about what causes your phone to ring, and that choice ranges from traditional phone companies to Skype. Because there’s so much choice on transport, the price of transport is racing toward zero. When you have a price of zero, you can’t make up (declining margins) with volume.

As we move increasingly toward VoIP, then, a key question to answer will be which of the entrenched players — from landline operators to cable companies to mobile carriers — are best equipped to handle the transition. And that will depend largely on which of the VoIP startups they join forces with.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

Birthing Voice Mashups — Jaduka, which has been an influential young company in the VoIP arena, offers open APIs that facilitate many of the “voice mashups” — voice, data and applications that are combined to create new services — appearing on the web. You can find out more about Jaduka here.

Android On the Desktop — Check out Cloud Telecomputers’ desktop VoIP phone based on the open-source Android OS. The touchscreen device runs on an open development platform called Glass, which former Motorola CEO Ed Zander has said “all business phones will look like” in 3-5 years — with Android at the core. Cloud Telecomputers is targeting OEMs that want to design around its hardware and software platform.

Central Communications Hub — Asterisk is an extremely powerful open-source telephony engine and platform that is especially popular with small businesses trying to keep communication costs down. It’s a full-blown PBX that includes call waiting, caller ID, distinctive ring, text-to-speech recognition and more. Businesses can also get subscription support for it.

Skype Meets Asterisk — Speaking of Asterisk, Digium, the company behind it, recently announced the availability of Skype for Asterisk. With the new download, Asterisk users can call landlines, cellular devices and other Skype users, right from any Asterisk-based phone. Cool, and another example of Skype’s focus on all aspects of business telephony.

See Me, Hear Me — Linphone is a free VoIP app for Windows and Linux that includes instant messaging capabilities and works with almost any web camera for either audio or video conferencing. It complies with the SIP protocol, an open standard for online telephony, and interoperates with most SIP-compatible phones and proxies.

Kissing Cousins — Open-Xchange and Racksoft recently announced a partnership that combines Open-Xchange’s open-source groupware with Racksoft’s telephony products. The combined solutions they’re working on could make conference calls, desktop calendars and mobile calendars work together seamlessly.

A Small Fox — Fennec, Mozilla’s mobile version of the open-source browser Firefox , is now out in an advanced beta that works on several platforms, and is native in Nokia’s new N900 device. Fennec is loaded with numerous imaginative user interface implementations, and is slated to work with many of the more useful Firefox extensions. Download it for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux here.

No Name, No Trail — Many people use the open-source application Tor on the desktop for anonymous browsing sessions. Thanks to a grant from the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center Mobile Challenge and the people behind The Guardian Project, now Android mobile phone owners can use it to do the same.  You can find the links you need to get going here.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• A 2011 Connected Consumer Forecast
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

Details on how this service will work are still fuzzy — Skype, continuing its habit of playing favorites in the press, hasn’t really bothered to get in touch with those likely to ask tough questions. The Journal story talks a lot of about the market and competition, without getting into the specifics, except that it will be targeted at small and medium-sized businesses.

How is this new effort supposed to work? As Skype Journal explains, this is a simplified version of another PBX-centric product, Skype for Asterisk. A speech by Digium founder and CTO Mark Spencer, the creator of Asterisk, at the recently concluded eComm conference gives us a glimpse of what this new effort might be. Spencer announced that Skype was now going to work with Asterisk and that produce will be called Skype for Asterisk.

It supports, of course, the usernames, encryption, end points, and it supports both talking to regular Skype names, any arbitrary Skype name, as well as talking to the SkypeIn, SkypeOut services. It’s really, the first practical Skype gateway from a PBX platform. It allows you to connect this really broad user base of people that are already using Skype, with Asterisk. If you think about Asterisk as a very pragmatic and practical platform for telephony, for business phone systems, Skype has been incredibly successful in the Voice over IP space because it’s been a very pragmatic solution for customers to be able to use.

As Spencer points out, this is really a marriage made in heaven. This product is called Skype for Asterisk. Spencer in his speech said that Skype is going to release “something called the Business Control Panel.”

Although it’s not implemented in the current Beta, Skype is requiring that the usernames you use to register your device with Skype, in other words, the ones you use with the Skype for Asterisk, will all have to be business control panel accounts, which I believe means you are not going to be able to use existing accounts unless you are somehow able to make them part of the business control panel.

A typical boneheaded move, making people sign up for yet another account.

Nevertheless, both Skype for SIP and Skype for Asterisk are a Maybe it’s a way to give an illusion of growth, making it easier for the company to be sold to a gullible buyer. WSJ reports that Skype had $550 million in revenues last year. It needs to grow that number fast, otherwise eBay won’t be able to get rid of the service. The megabillion-dollar purchase of Skype was a worse decision than the New York Yankees’ signing of never-playing pitcher Carl Pavano.

Update: Since posting about Skype on Business, in addition to some clarifications, there are some additional thoughts and comments from our readers:

Updated#2: SkypeJournal has done a good comparison of Skype for SIP and Skype for Asterisk, pointing out that they are two distinct business products that will help the company grow its revenue base.

Skype For SIP is barren of everything that makes Skype meaningful and invaluable in the workplace.

Skype is selling cheap, convenient minutes to enterprise plumbers. Legacy audio quality. No audio, video, conferencing, buddy lists, file sharing, presence, or software extensions. SFS is the commoditized low end of VoIP.

With SFS, Skype defines itself to the channel and to its business customers as a “value” provider, helping companies shave pennies, competing with the “minute stealer” industry. While there’s money to be had, Skype For SIP

This abandons Skype’s central tenets

I couldn’t agree with SkypeJournal more. You shuld really read the full analysis by them.

Related Post: Who Killed the VoIP Revolution?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Report: Google’s Voice Possibilities
• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Stacey Reineccius founded Quicknet in the early 1990s. It was initially started to commercialize a technology called isosynchronous Ethernet, which carries voice calls using a special signaling method much the same way ISDN-based phone systems operated. The technical details aren’t so important now, as isosynchronous Ethernet is obsolete, but the idea of interleaving voice and data on a common wire was, for it led to the development of the first commercially useful VoIP product, the Internet PhoneJACK.

The PhoneJACK was a PC card designed expressly for Internet telephony; it solved problems with quality that plagued early software-based systems (dropped audio, echo, poor performance, etc). It was cheap, too, just $100-$200 in the mid 90s. That might look pricey today, but it was a deal back then, particularly since you could use it to avoid international tolls, which often ran $2-$3 per minute. My company at the time, PhoneZone, was one of the first resellers of the card, and we sold them like hotcakes to customers all over the world. The product line grew to include more and more sophisticated, but still very inexpensive, VoIP cards and gateways. (Full disclosure: After seeing how popular their cards were, after I sold PhoneZone I also made a small investment in Quicknet.)

Above and beyond selling peripheral cards, however, Reineccius had a vision of how these inexpensive devices could be networked to create a global, peer-to-peer VoIP network, with free Net calls, and cheap inbound and outbound PSTN calls (like Skype Out). The concept was called Micro Telco. It was similar to Jeff Pulver’s Free World Dialup, except that it was designed as a commercial service, where independent gateway operators (micro telcos) would set their wholesale rates, and would be paid out for terminating traffic from other users. It was a simple but very powerful idea, especially in 1998-2000, when phone calls were still expensive in much of the world. In the meantime, Internet connectivity was getting faster and cheaper every year, so it was clear that the trends were headed in the right direction.

Micro Telco, alas, was never to be, at least not in its envisioned form. Quicknet was just months away from launching a peer-to-peer version of the service when the dot-com crash put an abrupt end to startup funding, and the company found itself mired in protracted legal battles with one of its investments funds, making it all but impossible to raise cash from anyone else. And that meant it couldn’t invest in new products, such as USB hubs and standalone handsets. So Quicknet was left to die on the vine as the device business became a commodity market, and as purely software-based services improved.

Had things been different, Quicknet would have created something like Skype — and we would have had a worldwide dial tone a few years sooner. Importantly, Quicknet was a big supporter of open standards, such as Open H323, so Micro Telco could have even become a platform in of itself, sort of like Asterisk for long distance, whereas Skype is a largely closed system.

The lesson of this story is that the technology industry is full of both unintended discoveries and missed opportunities. A lot of it is luck, for being in the right place with the right product is often an accident of timing. So many things can go wrong, while in order to be successful, so many things have to go right.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

I found myself at the master’s thesis of Fred Benenson — a VoIP-based program called Cause Caller that mixes IP telephony and activism. At the site you can enter your telephone number and Cause Caller makes a VoIP call to one of a randomized list of Congressional reps. So far 11 people have made calls on behalf of the Google campaign, which is exactly where things stood on Tuesday when Google provided the link. On the site Benenson said he funds the project himself, so I wondered if an influx of Google calls might bankrupt him, or if Google had volunteered to help offset costs.

Apparently the answer to both is no, and since few calls have been made so far, Benenson may not have to worry. So far Benenson says his most expensive cause has been an effort to impeach President George W. Bush that generated 1,000 calls, but also says he pays less than 3 cents a minute for VoIP and uses Amazon’s EC2 for his servers and Asterisk for the PBX. The EC2 is the most expensive part of the project, which in total has cost him about $500 so far. Benenson has a day job at Creative Commons, so he’s not looking for a revenue model, and says he doesn’t mind footing the bill so far.

“I keep it alive because it’s a fun hobby,” Benenson says. “I basically did the whole site by myself from the design to the VoIP programming, so I kind of took a long hiatus, but now I’m ramping up and starting to blog about it again. The Google notice is like a shot in the arm.”

Cause Caller strikes me as one of the more interesting ways that technology can intersect with politics, with the potential to make a greater impact than emailing petitions and encouraging voter engagement by texting a candidate’s running-mate announcement.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Report: Google’s Voice Possibilities
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

This was one of the trends I talked about when the now-defunct Business 2.0 launched its Next Net series in 2006. The idea behind the series was that as broadband became all-pervasive, everything from the web to mobile to video to voice became part of the next evolution of the Internet. (It has been a guiding principle of my coverage here on GigaOM.)

Fonality was one of the companies we picked for the list, because even at the time, Chris Lyman, Fonality’s CEO, was talking about adding voice to apps. He made a key move today, acquiring Insightful, one of SugarCRM’s largest resellers. The new offering from Fonality, called FonalityCRM, integrates the CRM suite with PBX and offers click-to-call dialing, agent screen pops and several other features.

Others are also experimenting with similar VoIP-app mashups. Iperia, for example, is building an app for real estate agents. Ike Elliott , formerly of Level 3 (LVLT) points out that voice-data-applications have been around for a while, especially in call center applications.

However, as open-source telephony tools (such as Asterisk) become even more sophisticated, and the web 2.0 community finally comes to grips with the importance of voice, we are going to see some clever mashups come to the forefront. Companies like Lypp are making it relatively easy to add voice to web apps through their APIs.

The Lypp API enables rapid VoIP feature implementation, including: click-to-call and click-to-conference; virtual phone booth calling features; and the integration of basic and advanced telephony, such as embedded email and profile call links for Facebook, MySpace and other web-based applications and services.

Have you seen a VoIP-Web 2.0 mashup you like? Drop us a note, or leave a comment.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce