Red Pocket isn’t so much contracting with YouMail as it is removing the obstacles preventing third-party voicemail services from working on Red Pocket phones. Since MVNOs don’t run their own networks (Red Pocket buys minutes and megabytes from AT&T) they usually don’t support the call forwarding features that would allow a third-party voicemail platform to work. Red Pocket is lifting that call-forward restriction to let YouMail’s Android, iPhone and Windows Phone 7 apps work on its customers’ handsets.

It’s an ideal setup for Red Pocket since it’s primarily a SIM-card service provider, selling prepaid buckets of domestic and international minutes, text messages and data to customers who bring their own devices. Rather than keep investing in antiquated mailbox servers – or shell out the money for a new visual voicemail platform – it can simply let customers choose their own voicemail provider, just like they choose their own email providers and social networks.

YouMail’s free basic service gives customers a universal cloud mailbox that can be accessed from any mobile or PC browser, and its smartphone app can download voice messages, caller ID and caller photos into its mailbox. Its premium service not only provides more cloud storage, but has a speech-to-text function that will transcribe any message into a text file.

I would expect more MVNOs to follow in Red Pocket’s footsteps. In fact, it probably won’t be long before some MVNOs start abandoning their old voicemail services completely. Rural operator Viaero has started preloading YouMail on its Android handsets, and Pennsylvania’s Immix wireless has retired its old mailbox servers, relying solely on YouMail.

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YouMail CEO Alex Quilici said Viaero isn’t the first operator to see the value in an independent voicemail provider. Pennsylvania’s Immix Wireless has been using You Mail since 2008, offering its cloud mailbox service to all customers and distributing its more sophisticated Visual Voicemail Plus apps to its smartphone customers.

“Its old voicemail servers have basically just become plant holders,” Quilici said.

YouMail Android client

Viaero is still offering the usual dial-in, keypad-interface voicemail, but giving its customers the easy option to use YouMail’s more robust app. Opening the Android application allows customers to switch to YouMail, which intercepts all messages, downloads them as digital files to a client, where contact names, caller IDs and even avatars are displayed. Customers can save and sort them however they wish. Valero’s BlackBerry and unlocked-iPhone customers can also use the service, though they have to go to their respective app stores to download it manually.

Visual voicemail made a big splash when Apple launched it on the first iPhone with AT&T (then Cingular) in 2007. In the subsequent years, numerous third-party apps popped up, but the operators primarily stayed mum. Verizon Wireless offered its own version of visual voicemail – which was really a network-based mailbox with a graphical interface – in 2008, but it slapped a $3 a month fee on the service. Though some customers may have been willing to pay for that service then, any smartphone customer today would blanch at such fee; free and better applications are available in the apps stores or online. MetroPCS is really the only operator to embrace new voicemail technologies, using Silent Communications’ Android visual mailbox client to link directly into its legacy voicemail server.

Carriers have watched mobile services they once held practical monopolies over – phone navigation, email, IM, etc. – practically disappear off their decks completely. Operators certainly have benefited from the shift. They may not collect revenues from the service, but they’re taking the data carriage fees to the bank. It’s easy to see them throwing voicemail to the open market as well. It’s not like they can expect to make any more money by upgrading their tired voicemail systems; customers expect carriers to provide the service for free. But such a decision could wind up haunting them. Voicemail is one of those value-added services that operators are expected to provide part-and-parcel with any wireless plan. If they abandon it they take one more step to being dumb pipes.

Quilici said he doesn’t expect operators to ever pack up their voicemail servers completely. With the exception of smaller operators like Immix, carriers will always offer some kind of basic mailbox, he said. But for the more advanced, feature-rich visual services, they’ll increasingly look to third-party companies, which suits YouMail just fine, Quilici said. The small company has attracted a lot of interest of late.  YouMail raised $4 million in venture financing in July, as well as an additional $355,000 earlier this month, bringing its total to nearly $13 million. According to the company, its free visual mailbox app has been downloaded more than 3 million times across all smartphone platforms.

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The findings lead to the notion that American workers are focused on getting more done in 2011. With an estimated 247 billion emails sent daily (according to Pingdom), Americans are focused on how to become more productive in our post-recession economy and how to get more out of their business communications.

This survey was conducted online in December, 2010 by Harris Interactive on behalf of Intermedia. Respondents were employed US adults who have a New Year’s business communications resolution.

The survey also found that workers resolve to get organized, and respond more quickly to business communications. We’ll talk about these tomorrow and Thursday.

What are your New Year’s resolutions? How connected do you want to be while away from work in 2011?

Image by sxc.hu user ba1969

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1. Call 611 or 800-331-0500.
2. Press 1 to use existing number, or enter the wireless number starting with area code.
3. Tap the 3 key to “get help with voicemail.” (5 for enterprise customers)
4. Tap the 3 key to reset your VM password.
5. Enter the Billing Zip code for the account.
6. A temporary password will be sent via SMS
7. Access voicemail with this temporary password.

After performing the above steps, my voicemail was accessible once again, and I didn’t appear to have lost any prior voice mail messages.  AT&T’s support page has several other options available as well, but I found the above to be the quickest and easiest to execute directly from my iPhone.

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Apple iPhone users are still waiting for an official Google Voice app, but they don’t have to wait for transcribed voice mails, because Yap does that today. The free Yap Voicemail software is available in the iTunes App store for iPhones running iOS 4.1 or later and boasts the same voice-mail-to-text engine already in use by some carriers. Similar to the voicemail function in Google Voice, Yap can also play back recorded messages and supports forwarding and replying to voicemail through either email, SMS message or a return phone call.

Voice-to-text solutions such as Yap are starting to gain popularity with consumers. As smartphone adoption increases, people are getting bombarded with data from a growing number of services and apps. Yap estimates that a trillion “long dialogue” communications such as voice mail are created yearly.

Indeed, this trend for speech recognition solutions appeared at our Mobilize event last week; out of the 10 LaunchPad finalists, the audience chose AdelaVoice’s StartTalking software that enables hands-free texting for the event’s “People’s Choice” award. As a result, traditional voice mail retrieval is time-consuming and more of a pull activity. Solutions such as Yap turn the experience into a push activity while also transforming an audio activity into a visual one, much like email or messaging.

To be sure, there are similar, competing services, but Yap is quietly making a big name for itself as one of the few free voice-to-text voicemail solutions. Last year, Yap was chosen as the voicemail-to-text provider for Cincinnati Bell, and in May of this year, Microsoft began licensing Yap’s technology for its Talk-To-Text mobile application, which is used by Sprint. In April, MetroPCS began offering Yap’s service to customers as a $3-per month service.

Founded in May of 2006, Yap is based in Charlotte, N.C. and has raised $8 million in funding from SunBridge Partners, Harbert Venture Partners and several smaller investors.

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• Forward cell or landline numbers to Google Voice. It’s not yet possible to port existing numbers to Google Voice, but forwarding allows you to take advantage of its automated message transcription service and some of its other features. Not surprisingly, the quality of the transcriptions varies, but they’re generally good enough to save the hassle of calling your voicemail to listen to messages.
• Create a “voicemail-only” Google Voice number to use when you don’t want to give out your real phone number. When setting up such an account, you’ll need to forward it to an existing number in order to verify it, but you can then set the number to “Do Not Disturb, ” or delete the forwarding number entirely in the Google Voice web interface.
• Create numbers in area codes other than your own. The phone company used to charge huge fees for “foreign exchange” numbers; now, you can create a Google Voice number in any U.S. area code where numbers are available (and there are lots to choose from, except in Alaska and Hawaii).
• Create numbers that spell something memorable or fun. When searching for a new number, you can type in a word, and Google Voice will find numbers that spell what you’re looking for, or you can use a site like PhoneSpell.
• Set up Google Voice numbers to track marketing campaigns. Using multiple numbers is an easy and free way to find out how effective a particular advertising medium is.

Note that Google Voice only allows you to sign up for one number per email address. But email addresses don’t have to be Gmail accounts; any valid email address will do. Also, you can only forward one Google Voice number to a specific phone number, and you can’t forward one Google Voice number to another Google Voice number.

What creative ways have you found for using Google Voice?

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A mobile browser-based version of Google Voice already existed, but the new one is much more properly a web app than before, and is aimed squarely at providing a better Voice experience to users of Apple’s iPhone. Apple has staunchly refused to allow Google Voice dedicated apps into the App Store, despite earlier claims that Google’s own app had not been rejected, but was merely undergoing review.

That was in July. At this point, it’s fairly obvious that Apple doesn’t want the service on its device, and it’s looking more and more like AT&T isn’t even behind that particular decision, at least not completely. Apple and Google have been in the process of parting ways for quite some time now, as competition between the two industry leaders grows.

Short of reducing the capabilities of the iPhone’s mobile Safari browser, or actively blocking web-based content on the device, there’s little Apple can do to stop iPhone users from being able to access the new app. The app now shows transcribed calls in your inbox, and allows you to play them back. You can dial using a virtual keypad, and make either voice calls or send SMS that way. Google routes the call through your iPhone’s number first as a local connection, and people receiving the call will see your Google Voice number on their call display. Finally, you’ll receive notifications of new voicemail via SMS, including transcriptions of the calls.

There are a few things that the app cannot do, despite using the fancy magic of HTML5 for greater degrees of interactivity. It can’t pull from your iPhone’s contact list, as the original dedicated app could, but instead it provides contact management through a Google Voice address book that is cloud-based and can be accessed from whatever platform you happen to be using.

To access the new Google Voice web app, point your browser to http://m.google.com/voice. Due to Google Voice not yet being available in Canada, I haven’t been able to run this new web app through its paces yet, so chime in and let us know how it performs. Those of you who are using Voice might already be depending on VoiceCentral’s browser based solution for the iPhone. If so, let us know how the two services compare.

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In case you didn’t realize it, listening to voicemail is a colossal waste of time. Humans read much faster than they can listen, so AT&T’s entry into the Voicemail to Text field is welcome, but it’s a bit late to the party. Other services have been quietly providing this for years; some less expensive and some more expensive.

PhoneTag

Personally, I’ve been a PhoneTag (formerly Simulscribe) subscriber since June 2007 and love the service. PhoneTag replaces your carrier’s voicemail service with its own. PhoneTag will text and/or email you a transcription of your phone messages along with optionally attaching an electronic copy of the voicemail in a variety of formats.

iPhone users who use PhoneTag will lose the ability to use AT&T’s Visual Voicemail, since PhoneTag supersedes the built-in voicemail. Because I can read all my voicemails via email and text, I don’t really mind not having Visual Voicemail.

PhoneTag costs $30 a month (free 1 week trial and other pricing plans available) for unlimited transcriptions and you can forward any number of phones to their service for transcription and the transcriptions go to any number of phones you specify. For example, I have multiple phone numbers for my business and they all forward to that same unified voicemail. When I’m out of town or otherwise inaccessible, the transcriptions go to one of my technicians. Best of all, since the voicemails come in as attachments, I can save every voicemail I’ve ever received right to my computer for daily backup. The transcriptions are nearly flawless, especially if you upload your contacts to the system so you can help it recognize proper names.

Google Voice

On the other end of the spectrum is Google’s free Google Voice service. If you can get an invite, the entire service is free and it also provides transcription of voicemails. Similar to PhoneTag, you’ll need to forward your busy or no answer calls to Google’s phone number.

The transcriptions Google Voice provides border on the ridiculous and I found the service too unreliable for serious business use. Forwarding the messages to multiple phones was difficult and archiving the messages to my computer required manual download of each message. PhoneTag was simply a more elegant and scalable solution when compared to Google Voice. However being free, Google Voice makes a great way to find out if a voicemail to text service is right for you.

AT&T’s New Service

AT&T’s new service costs $9.99 per month — priced squarely in the middle between PhoneTag and Google Voice. Nuance, maker of well-known transcription software Dragon Naturally Speaking, provides the transcription services. Because Nuance is a well-known provider of voice to text services, I suspect it will be much better than Google Voice’s option. While I haven’t tried the service, AT&T claims you can still use your existing voicemail system and similar to PhoneTag and GoogleVoice, makes it easy to archive old messages. Obviously, the service will only work with your AT&T phone.

I’ll stick with PhoneTag due to the quality of its transcriptions and the flexbility of working with multiple phone systems. AT&T’s service is an attractive option for those that don’t need all of PhoneTag’s features.

Now iPhone customers have three options in three different price ranges to avoid listening to voicemail messages and get “true” visual voicemail; voicemails they can read and see without putting their phone up to their ear.

Why are you still actually listening to your voicemails?

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This time, let’s look at a business phone system that provides both incoming and outgoing service, plus actual phones. The folks at RingCentral have kindly set me up with one of their packages, the RingCentral Office. They also offer RingCentral Online, an inbound service similar to those listed above, but we’ll focus on the Office package for simplicity.

Options

RingCentral Office has three pricing levels, ranging from a one-line, 10-extension plan for $49.99 per month to an 8-line, unlimited extension plan for $179.99 per month. Each plan comes with various combinations of toll-free and local numbers, as well as toll-free or local dedicated fax numbers. You can also port your existing local or toll-free numbers to RingCentral.

All plans are advertised as having “unlimited minutes,” but (as is apparently the norm among VoIP providers) “unlimited” actually means 5,000 minutes per month; if you go over that, you’ll be charged 3.9 cents/minute. That works out to roughly 2.5 hours of talking per day. Are you and your colleagues on the phone that much? At my company, we aren’t, but some folks might need to be aware of this limit.

What You Get

RingCentral Office includes all of the features that have become standard for Internet phone services. They offer numbers in the U.S., Canada and the UK.

RingCentral offers two types of phones. The phone RingCentral provided to me is a Linksys (now owned by Cisco) SPA942. At first glance, it looks much like a modern business phone. But instead of plugging it into a phone jack, one connects it to the Internet using a standard RJ-45 network cable. If you only have one Internet connection, you can plug the phone into your internet connection, and then plug other devices into the phone. I was pleased with the phone. It’s relatively easy to operate, but strangely, it doesn’t support a headset, something I’ve gotten quite used to.

If you would prefer to use your existing phone equipment, RingCentral also offers an ATA adapter which connects the Internet to regular phones. Since most people aren’t technically-minded enough to want to fiddle with ATAs or configuration of phones, RingCentral ships their equipment pre-configured. All I had to do was plug in the power and the ethernet cable, and the phone was online and ready to use. RingCentral tells me that they provide their phones at or below wholesale cost; a little research confirmed that their equipment prices are quite low.

When you or your colleagues are out of the office, you can use the web site and Windows- or Mac-based softphone application to send, receive and manage calls and messages. One of the unusual features of the softphone app is the ability to view incoming calls and reply with a short message like “I’ll call you back in 10 minutes” without actually answering the phone call. There’s also integration with Outlook’s contact list.

For iPhone users, there’s a native application that provides easy access to voicemail (separate from the iPhone’s built-in voicemail) and faxes. You can also use the iPhone app to make calls showing the Caller ID from your business line — without displaying your iPhone’s telephone number. Similar native applications are being developed for other platforms; I gather that the BlackBerry is next on RingCentral’s list. I didn’t test RingCentral’s software, but I’ve gotten positive feedback from others who’ve used it.

Ordering

When ordering, you’ll be asked to specify the plan you want, the number of lines needed, as well as the number of local and toll-free numbers. You can create a plan that meets your specific needs, and you can change plans at will, since you don’t need to sign a contract. If you return the phones, the return will be subject to a restocking fee.

RingCentral boasts that its services can be priced and purchased directly from its web site without needing to call (although it does offer ordering by phone). While web ordering is certainly possible, I found the website to be less than clear in explaining the differences between the various plans and options. RingCentral tells me that a redesigned site is on the way.

Quality

Of course, in a business environment, call quality is key. In my tests, I (and the people I talked to) agreed that our conversations were clear, loud, and with none of the delay that sometimes plagues services like Google Voice. RingCentral tells me that the service is SIP-based, but that they’ve done significant signal processing so that anyone with a DSL, cable or faster Internet connection should hear excellent sound quality. Dialup connections aren’t recommended, for obvious reasons.

Reliability

RingCentral has been around for several years, but only started offering the Office product in early 2009. According to the company, it is now providing its Office service to over 3,000 organizations of various sizes, including some of over 50 users, with the four-line option is the most popular. They have multiple levels of redundancy and backups, but of course, if your local Internet connection or power goes out, you’ll be unable to use RingCentral, or any other Internet-based phone system.

If you are in the market for a virtual PBX system that provides phone hardware with incoming and outgoing service, you’ll want to look at a number of options, including Accessline Digital Business Phone System, FreedomIQ Hosted PBX, and Phone.com Business Phone, Whatever you choose, RingCentral Office is certainly a strong competitor.

Do you use RingCentral?

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