Skype, with its spinout from eBay complete and its legal troubles with founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis settled, is looking to the future, where it wants to become a ubiquitous real-time communications platform. And that means thinking about the next-generation Skype architecture and hiring a lot of smart people, CEO Josh Silverman said in a conversation earlier today. “We are looking to hire engineers,” he said. “Especially those who want to live in Estonia.” In addition, the company is planning to ramp up its Stockholm (Sweden) office. “We are going to be ramping our presence in the Bay Area as well,” Silverman said. Skype currently has 700 employees and wants to hire engineers and product managers to help it expand as it seeks to transform itself from just a voice-based service to a multi-feature real-time communications platform.

“While Europe is going to remain our base, California is going to be a big presence for us,” Silverman said. Skype recently added SIP Guru Jonathan Rosenberg as its chief technology strategist, and he is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company had built up a substantial team in the Bay Area over the past few months as it was trying to build a route around the JoltID technology. With that need gone, the company now has enough engineering talent to start transforming itself into a platform.

“We want Skype to be embedded in more and more devices, and we want to offer our APIs for developers to embed into their applications,” Silverman said. That is going to be a tough sell considering the company’s history of throwing its developers under the bus, the most recent example being the Skype Extras disaster. Silverman was candid enough to admit that the Skype Extras program wasn’t working. “APIs were hard and the extras-software uptake was low, and it is important for us to have a great platform that is built for success,” he said. “So starting off a bad platform wasn’t a good idea.”

When I pressed Silverman on the embedded ambitions, he outlined a future where Skype would be embedded in connected game consoles, televisions and video phones. Skype could be embedded into different software offerings as well. The company wants to be a big player in the enterprise, but knows that it can’t do it all by itself. “We need to open up our platform in order to expand it,” he said, “Our aspiration is ubiquity.”

Silverman declined to offer any specific dates (and details) on when Skype will launch a platform for others to leverage. One thing is for sure, Skype can pose a serious challenge to some of the upstarts such as Ribbit, TringMe and Twilio that are all trying to make it easy for application developers to embed voice-related functionality into their offerings. Skype’s ubiquity — over 500 million subscribers — makes it a fearsome agent of change in the Internet-based communications arena. (Related post: “How Skype Can Quickly and Easily Become a Social Network (and Clean Facebook’s Clock))

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Silverman about the next generation of Skype architecture, and he said the company was working on it. “It will work with SIP; it will have P2P, but we won’t come to it with a religion,” he said. And that includes offering Skype via a browser and making it even more savvy about video conferencing.

Photo of Josh Silverman courtesy of Phil Wolf via Flickr. Skype desktop photo courtesy of IPVEO.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  10 Comments
Tags: Janus Friis, Josh Silverman, Niklas Zennstrom, VoIP

Fring, the mobile messaging and social communication tool that works on many smartphone platforms, is now available on the Android platform. Users of Android phones can get the client software from the Android Market or from Fring’s WAP site.

Fring for Android works over 3G, GPRS or Wi-Fi connections. According to the company’s blog announcement:

“Android device users can now get onto fring (we know you’ve been missing us since some of you recently switched to Android devices) with (the first) free VoIP calls over Skype, MSN and GoogleTalk and via hundreds of SIP providers. As always you can see real-time presence and live chat with your ICQ, Yahoo! And AIM buddies too. You can also use Twitter there, as part of  your integrated contact list.”

The “we know you’ve been missing us” snippet in the announcement belongs there, as competitive applications such as Nimbuzz have already been available for Android for some time. Still, free VoIP calls over Skype with Fring will probably be pretty attractive to many users of Android phones, and Fring offers a number of options for keeping up with Twitter.

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Posted by Sebastian Rupley on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  3 Comments
Tags: Android, Fring, LTE, smartphones, VoIP

First Cisco Systems decided to buy Norwegian video conferencing equipment maker Tandberg for about $3 billion. This week, Logitech, a Swiss computer peripherals maker, acquired LifeSize, an Austin, Texas-based private company, for about $405 million in cash. The two deals have brought the fast-growing but often-overlooked video conferencing market into sharp focus. And that is good news for Polycom, a Pleasanton, Calif.-based conferencing equipment maker, CEO Bob Hagerty boasts. Here is why:

Hagerty said he thinks his company’s independent status will make it a preferred partner for giants such as Microsoft, IBM, Avaya and Hewlett-Packard, as they duke it out with Cisco and Logitech. The stock market seems to agree with him: Polycom stock is up 9 percent this month and up 77 percent for the year to date. When I asked Hagerty if this makes him takeover bait, he predictably dodged my question.

The simultaneous growth of pervasive broadband, improved compression codecs, distributed work forces, and shrinking travel budgets are brewing a perfect storm for the video conferencing market. “Bandwidth today is adequate, and we will soon be able to make HD video calls on a 500kbps connection,” he said. Hagerty believes that is going to help the use of video conferencing explode.

For a company like Polycom, the future might involve offering cloud-based services that could handle video originating from multiple locations using a central service. From low-cost end points to high-end telepresence systems, video-based collaboration is going to be a standard, he argued. And this is good news, not just for him but also for his rivals.

Hagerty didn’t pull any punches in his comments about Cisco. “Cisco [uses] a lot of words, but [there] is not much clarity on what products they will focus on,” he said in an interview. While Tandberg’s offerings are more standards-based, Cisco’s flagship telepresence products are proprietary in nature, Hagerty said.

“In the collaboration space, we are a great brand,” he said. “Frankly, it is great to be us…We are the last standing independent company of scale.” He is betting his close relationships with Avaya, Microsoft and others such as IBM — all enemies of Cisco — are going to help his company. In addition, Polycom thinks working with service providers, including phone companies, is a good way to make video conferencing available as a service.

Despite his bravado, Hagerty needs to worry about both Cisco and Logitech. These are two companies with deep pockets and deeper sales forces. They are desperate to make a splash in this market and are going to aggressively compete with Polycom. As I am one of those folks who always expects the worst — it must be my age — I believe that when there are multiple parties competing for domination of the same market, someone is left bleeding. Polycom is betting that the company’s friends will prevent it from being laid out on the mat.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  2 Comments
Tags: Cisco, CSCO, HPQ, IBM, lifesize, Logitech, msft, Polycom, tandberg, video conferencing, VoIP

Meg Whitman, former chief executive officer of eBay,  defended her decision to buy Skype in a radio interview with KTKZ’s Capitol Hour featuring Eric Hogue. Whitman is running for the office of the Governor of California on a Republican ticket, and is currently leading in the Republican primaries. Here is what she had to say on the show.

Hogue noted that “one of your opponents, Steve Poizner, referred to the fact that it was you as CEO of eBay that spent $2.1 billion on Skype, and that didn’t work, and he’s drawing the comparison here. Is that a fair or unfair comparison here, Meg?” She answered:

You know, we made so many acquisitions at eBay, so many of which were absolutely terrific. PayPal, a lot of our classified sites. And actually I think Skype will prove to be a good acquisition for eBay. You probably read that the company just sold about two-thirds of the interest in Skype to an investor group, kept a portion, and got almost all the money back, and I think Skype will be very effective. So I am very proud of my tenure at eBay. You know we took eBay from 30 individuals, 30 employees to 15,000, from $4.7 million in revenues to nearly $8 billion in revenues. So I’m very proud of the record and proud of the acquisition record.

I commend her for riding the eBay rocket ship, but when it comes to Skype, we all know she blew it. And once again, she dodged the question. How can she defend overlooking and not buying the JoltID technology from Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis? That decision cost eBay another 5 percent of Skype when the auction giant had to settle with the two co-founders.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  12 Comments
Tags: eBay, meg whitman, skype, VoIP

Broadcom is hoping to lower the price of high-definition VoIP services by taking its BroadVoice codecs open source. But even if this move lowers the price for HD voice, will consumers pay even a marginal premium for a better quality call?

The Irvine, Calif.-based company’s BroadVoice family of voice codecs comprises two variants: BroadVoice32 for wideband speech sampled at 16 kHz, and BroadVoice16 for narrowband telephone-bandwidth speech sampled at 8 kHz. Both will be made available as C source code in an effort to lower the price for broadband operators looking to upgrade the audio quality of subscribers’ calls.

Higher-quality calls are a good thing, of course, and may be a selling point for service providers looking to stand out from the crowd. (Whether they can actually save wireline is far from certain, though.) But quality has often been a less-important feature for consumers, as cell phones (with their mobility) and VoIP (with their lower cost) have demonstrated. Broadcom’s move to open source may result in cheaper HD voice services, but until those prices are nearly indistinguishable from traditional services HD is likely to remain a small market.

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Posted by Colin Gibbs on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  8 Comments
Tags: Broadcom, VoIP

Gizmo5 founder Michael Robertson

Given that most of Google’s customers are also likely Skype users (aka web workers), it makes perfect sense for it to buy Gizmo5. The San Diego-based company recently developed OpenSky, a gateway that allows you to call Skype from any VoIP-based phone/application. As founder Michael Robertson told us at the time:

What we’ve done is create a SIP alias for every Skype user. So if you want to call a Skype user named echo123 you simply dial echo123@opensky.gizmo5.com from any SIP-aware device (which is just about every piece of VOIP equipment). Users can even have any SIP call forwarded to their Skype address using my.gizmo5.com.

This application could come in handy for Google to capture some of the Skype magic as it tries to expand into the enterprise and increase its collaboration offerings. Gizmo5 could also help Google extend its reach on mobiles and bring much-needed expertise for soft clients for voice calls.

Gizmo5 says it has 6 million users; that number is unverified. If the deal is indeed true, Robertson, who been desperately looking for an encore since his first company, MP3.com, must be thrilled. Gizmo5 has raised closed to $20 million, a majority of it coming from Robertson.

P.S.: I want to apologize to readers for writing the original post outlining that Skype had bought Gizmo5. I guess the rumors of Skype buying Gizmo5 were still swirling in my head.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  26 Comments
Tags: gizmo5, google, skype, VoIP

Skype has hired well-known VoIP expert Jonathan Rosenberg as its chief technology strategist, the company announced today. Rosenberg was highlighted as one of the Cisco executives Index Ventures’ Michael Volpi would bring over to Skype in order to help the company figure out a way around the JoltId stranglehold. As you might know, Skype and Joltid, the company that owns the technology used by Skype (and controlled by founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis), settled with the company last week.

Rosenberg is well-regarded in SIP circles and his hiring means that Skype is making a stronger push into the enterprise. Rosenberg was a Cisco Fellow at Cisco Systems, where he directed technology strategy for its enterprise voice product portfolio. When I last spoke to Skype CEO Josh Silverman, he was pretty clear about his desire to turn Skype into a major enterprise voice and collaboration player. Rosenberg’s hiring is a smart step by Skype. (Related post: How Skype Plans to Dominate Business Telephony.)

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  4 Comments
Tags: skype, VoIP

Earlier today in response to my post about Nimbuzz, a good pal emailed to find out why the service didn’t work over the iPhone’s 3G connection. After all, a few weeks ago AT&T announced support for VoIP over 3G with much fanfare, a move that was widely applauded, including kudos from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

A month has passed since the decision was announced, and there is still no support for VoIP over 3G. “Apple actually did not approve the 3G calling — so they completely broke their promise of allowing VoIP calls on 3G,” a Nimbuzz spokesperson said.

Even Skype doesn’t work over 3G (see attached screenshot). Truphone is not working either, much like Fring. I am not sure if these services work over 3G data connections in Europe and other parts of the world, but it looks like Apple is the one putting in the roadblock here.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  41 Comments
Tags: Apple, iPhone, nimbuzz, skype, VoIP

Nimbuzz, a Netherlands-based VoIP and messaging startup, is introducing a premium calling service called NimbuzzOut. This service is available via an upgrade of its mobile client, which is currently available from the iPhone’s iTunes Apps Store, the Ovi Store and GetJar. So far, Nimbuzz has offered a meta-client that works on PCs, Macs, Symbian, Android and the iPhone and allows you to sign into any IM service including Skype. NimbuzzOut is the first step toward revenue for the company, which has pulled in an undisclosed amount of funding from Mangrove Capital Partners, original backers of Skype. In addition to Skype, Truphone and Fring are two other competitors for this fast-growing service. Nimbuzz has been adding about 40,000 users a day, or about a million new registrations every month, and now has a total of over 10 million registered consumers. The company says nearly 30 percent of those registered are regular users.

Nimbuzz has certainly come a long way. At the time of its launch, almost three years ago, we were pretty critical of the VoIP-on-mobile service because it was a me-too offering that was quite a pain to use. A year-and-a-half later, Nimbuzz introduced a new meta client for the Symbian phones. It allowed you to sign into various IM clients. In addition, it allowed some basic VoIP calling, but it wasn’t really until they introduced the new iPhone client that Nimbuzz started to see some serious traction. My previous post gives a good overview of the Nimbuzz feature set.

The company just announced a super communication client for the iPhone that allows you to communicate in many different ways. For instance, you can make free calls over Wi-Fi to your IM buddies. You can also call folks on their landlines and mobile phones with SkypeOut using any one of Nimbuzz’s 10 VoIP partners including Gizmo5, Vyke, sipgate and A1 and, of course, Skype. This is a new feature in the service, and makes Skype In/Out Services more valuable. These services also work over 3G and are described as “Nimbuzz Dial-Up VoIP” which essentially makes it possible to call others by dialing a local access number which then connects to anywhere in the world via Nimbuzz VoIP servers.

For the past month, I have been using the pre-release of NimbuzzOut on the iPhone to place calls to my far-flung group of friends and family. The calling prices are pretty good– about 8 cents a minute to India, 2 cents to the U.S., and 3 cents to the UK. If you look around, that is pretty much what you pay with most services — Skype is a bit more expensive.

The voice call quality is on par with Skype, which is still my communication method of choice for work-related calls. NimbuzzOut is dead simple to place calls: Just hit the call button, and you are good to go. You can, of course, use other calling services, but I don’t see any reason why considering Nimbuzz is offering good rates.

NimbuzzOut has a few features I personally like — you can natively use the phone client to buy additional minutes. I also like the fact that the client uses the native address book and doesn’t create a duplicate contact list. The Symbian client actually lets you edit, add and delete contacts from your address book.

There are a few things I don’t like: If you leave the notifications on, the client will run down your battery and leave the phone pretty useless. If you are using it on an iPhone, then you have to use the Wi-Fi connection, which makes me a tad upset because you can make Skype calls over 3G. You can make NimbuzzOut calls via 3G on Symbian phones, however.

Bottom line: If you are looking for a well-designed, easy-to-use, all-in-one messaging client that also makes cheap long-distance calls, then you don’t need to look any further than Nimbuzz. I have no qualms in recommending NimbuzzOut.

P.S. There is a reward for those who read the complete post. If you are among the first 50 people who send their name and Nimbuzz username to gigaom@nimbuzz.com, the company will give you a $25 NimbuzzOut credit.

Update: This offer is now closed. Thanks for participating.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  16 Comments
Tags: Fring, nimbuzz, nimbuzzout, skype, Truphone, VoIP

Earlier this decade, when cable companies started their foray into the phone business, not many gave them much of a chance to succeed. Sure, they could sell a lot of broadband connections, but no one thought they would be players in telecom services such as voice. Fast-forward to today, and the situation is entirely different. During the first half of 2009, cable companies across the globe generated about $30 billion in telecom service revenues, according to Telegeography, a market research company. Voice, in fact, has become the secret weapon for cable companies around the world.

Those revenues come from 49 million voice subscribers and 82 million broadband customers worldwide. Cable companies’ revenues have grown 28 percent every year since 2003 vs. overall wireline business growth of 4 percent. CableCos now account for 29 percent of broadband subscribers and 9 percent of voice subscribers in countries where they are allowed to compete with the phone companies. That works out to about 15 percent of residential telecom revenues in countries where cable and telecoms are allowed to compete.

The reason we are seeing this growth is primarily because of North America. The presence of highly competitive players such as Time Warner Cable and Comcast is a major reason why telecoms are on weak footing in the U.S. And there is no sign that U.S. CableCos are easing up the pressure on phone companies.

For instance, during the third quarter (ending Sept. 30), Time Warner added 117,000 new residential high-speed Internet customers (up 32 percent from second-quarter net additions of 88,000 subscribers) and 62,000 voice subscribers (down 39 percent from 103,000 new voice customers added during the second quarter). Comcast, on the other hand, added another 361,000 broadband subscribers (up 455 percent from 65,000 new additions during the second quarter)  and 375,000 voice customers, up 61 percent from 233,000 subscribers added during the second quarter.

Even in the highly competitive and mature markets of North America and Western Europe, the leading cablecos have grown their telecoms revenue by almost 10 percent relative to the third quarter of 2008. Despite the added pressure of a deep recession, these leading cablecos have seen their broadband Internet subscriber bases grow by 7 percent and their telephony subscriber bases by 13 percent over the last 12 months. “Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Liberty Global all now feature in the top 15 ranking of broadband Internet service providers, and telecoms remains an engine for growth for many cablecos around the world,” added TeleGeography’s John Dinsdalee.(Telegeography)

CableCos are likely to have a major impact in Eastern Europe and Latin America. In Asia, the role of cable is being viewed as limited. In places like China and India, cable is not allowed to compete with phone companies.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  10 Comments
Tags: CableCos, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, VoIP

There is a good likelihood that Skype; its founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis; and a group of private equity investors led by Silver Lake Partners are close to settling their legal disputes, allowing eBay to sell 65 percent of Skype for about $2 billion. I had first reported the news this past weekend. As part of the settlement, Zennstrom and Friis are likely to get a board representation, and there is some talk of Index Ventures being out of the deal as well.

Zennstrom and Friis have been locked in a bitter dispute over the use of the Global Index, a key technology owned by JoltID, a company jointly controlled by the Skype founders. eBay, in a stunning breach of fiduciary duty, didn’t buy this technology when it acquired Skype four years ago.

From the way it is understood, Zennstrom and Friis will have a board seat on the newly independent Skype, which would be allowed to use JoltID’s technology. In addition, there is a good chance that Index Ventures, one of the primary architects of the buyout, will not be part of the new deal. Mike Volpi, former CEO of Joost, isn’t likely to be part of the new enterprise.

I am not surprised that Index and Volpi have been left out in the cold. There’s no love lost between Skype co-founders and the Index group. If you read through some of the emails that were submitted along with legal documents filed in support of Joost’s case against Volpi and Index, then you know why.

Some details of the story were reported by the New York Times today. Please check out my previous report on the Skype’s legal fracas, as well, which includes a timeline of events.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  14 Comments
Tags: eBay, Index Ventures, Mike Volpi, skype, VoIP

When BT, formerly known as British Telecom, splurged and bought Mountain View, Calif.,-based Ribbit for $105 million some 15 months ago, I dismissed it as an attempt by an aging incumbent carrier to reinvent itself as a web-savvy, next-generation communications provider that was unlikely to succeed. “BT has always been long on promise, but short on execution of its grand vision,” I wrote.

Fast-forward to today and BT has fully embraced the new communications reality, one that goes beyond mere voice calls. And to show how serious it is, the company has made Ribbit founder Ted Griggs the chief technology officer of BT Voice.

When I caught up with him on the phone last week, I asked him about the bold move by BT to put someone like him in charge. To some insiders, that might seem like letting the inmates run the asylum, Griggs quipped. Ribbit, if you remember, was started about three years ago with the promise of bringing together web and voice using a new kind of a platform, one that was able to take inputs from different communication tools — XMPP, Skype, Yahoo Messenger, MSN and Flash Media Server –- and make them talk to their “switch.”

More Than Just Voice

JP Rangaswami, managing director of service design at BT who was recently named BT’s chief of digital communications, has championed Griggs’s ascension to his new role. Griggs has always believed that when it comes to service providers, thinking about communications as just voice doesn’t cut it, which is why Ribbit’s products merge traditional notions of communications with web applications and extend them. In other words, voice is viewed as just another API that can be used to enhance a user’s experience. Ribbit for Salesforce and Ribbit for Oracle are two examples of voice and the web coming together, said Griggs.

BT’s big bet is good news for like-minded startups such as TringMe and Twilio, which are also seeking that elusive pot of gold based on the voice-web marriage premise. Now might be their time. Why? Because the very notion of communications is changing. As Alec Saunders, CEO of iotum, writes:

Let’s instead change the conversation –- acknowledge that the carrier network is a platform, and that the carrier has a need for an application community, and begin the dialog between network partners and developers about the ability for those operators to help us get to market.

The New Dial Tone

Indeed, people are increasingly using different modes of communication, from Facebook to Skype to Twitter to SMS, and carriers need to embrace such a change. That means they need to offer new kinds of services, such as voice-to-text, asynchronous messaging, asymmetric voice and low-cost dialing.

In other words, carriers will have to stop thinking like resellers of boxes and more like software-based network operators. Juniper Networks CEO Kevin Johnson recently started talking about how the next evolution of the Internet is going to be less about router and switches and more about software. His company has made its money selling routers to operators, so he does have an idea as to how operators are thinking.

Carriers Do It Best

Large carriers have many things going for them: global infrastructure, deep pockets and the ability to sell to larger companies. Innovative VoIP startups, on the other hand, have the right ideas, but don’t have the footprint or the resources to grow, Griggs said. To that end, he added, “We are doing what we were doing at Ribbit at a much larger scale at BT.” Carriers provide the nuts and bolts including the software platform, and developers do the rest, he said. (Related post: Is There Money in Voice APIs?)

But again, in order to do that, carriers need to change their thinking –- much in the same way that Salesforce.com did with CRM, Skype with voice and Google with advertising. For BT, Ribbit is trying its best. Will it succeed? Let’s wait and see!

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  19 Comments
Tags: Ribbit, Ted Griggs, VoIP

Can you believe that VoIP-based telephony services brought in nearly $20.7 billion in revenues during the first six months of 2009? Incredible as it might sound, it is indeed true, according to data reported by market research firm Infonetics Research.

I fondly remember the early part of this decade when folks dismissed VoIP as little more than an idle curiosity. There was a lot of continued belief in PSTN voice services and the money they brought in for the phone companies. But even as some of the early proponents fell victim to hard times, VoIP-based telephony kept growing, thanks to U.S. cable companies and a new generation of low-cost PBXs that used Internet technologies.

“Residential VoIP services remain healthy, comprising the majority of worldwide VoIP services revenue, and subscribers are up 14% from the end of 2008,” writes Diane Myers, VoIP analyst for Infonetics. And those numbers will continue to grow, she predicts, topping 225 million residential/SOHO VoIP subscribers by 2013. During the first six months of 2009, Japan’s NTT, France Telecom and Comcast in North America were the world’s largest residential VoIP service providers, accounting for nearly 20 percent of subscribers.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  8 Comments
Tags: Comcast, PSTN, VoIP

VoIP and messaging application provider BroadSoft, in conjunction with its BroadSoft Connections conference, today introduced a new app store, BroadSoft Marketplace, where users can browse and purchase VoIP and communications applications. In addition, through an “Xtended” program, Broadsoft-partnered operators and app developers can offer their own custom-branded app stores, and share in revenues.

Comporium, SimpleSignal, Telesphere and WorldxChange are among the first wave of operators that intend to introduce satellite application stores as 2010 begins. Although BroadSoft Marketplace is still in beta testing, it has a good selection of categorized offerings, but the Xtended program could be yet more evidence that we’re headed for a world of very fragmented app stores.

As you can see in the screenshot below, BroadSoft Marketplace offers a mix of messaging- and VoIP-oriented applications such as voicemail-to-text conversion programs and messaging extensions for platforms such as Facebook and Salesforce:

“Starting with RESTful Web services to attract the mainstream developer, we created a vibrant community of developers, which can now be sustained through commerce through the Marketplace,” Leslie Ferry, VP of marketing at BroadSoft, said in a statement. “Service providers can immediately capitalize on and monetize the creative innovation of this developer community.”

BroadSoft’s Xtended program will usher in satellite app stores, which is part of a trend toward fragmentation in all kinds of app store offerings. For example, ARCHOS has launched its own AppsLib app store for Android, which is completely separate from the Android Market.

Many critics of fragmented app stores point to Apple’s success with its very focused and centralized one for the iPhone. Proponents, though, say that more app stores give developers opportunities to submit their applications to multiple stores. IBM’s Savio Rodrigues points out in this post that open app store standards could be the wave of the future, and that “an [open] App Store standard would be less about lock-in, since the ISV isn’t locked into any of the App Stores they’ve submitted their application to.”

From that perspective, it will be interesting to see how BroadSoft’s effort to give rise to satellite app stores plays out.  It’s likely to attract developers, but is it best for application users?

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Posted by Sebastian Rupley on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  0 Comments
Tags: App Store, BroadSoft Marketplace, VoIP

About two years ago, I signed up for a service called GotVoice, which allowed me to aggregate voicemails from my residential, VoIP, PBX and wireless numbers in one place. It transcribed the voicemails for a small fee, and it delivered them as attachments to my email or as SMS messages. In short, it’s a nifty little service that almost always does the job.

It’s not cheap — but then you get what you pay for. If you don’t want to pay anything and want to contribute to the continued education of the Google borg, then you can use Google Voice to get access to your mobile voicemails, in addition to other features.

Google Voice is slimming down and offering a new service that doesn’t need you to choose a new number. From the Google blog:

Up until now, if you wanted to use Google Voice, you needed to choose a new number (a “Google number”). Taking calls through your Google number allows us to offer features like call recording, call screening and getting text messages via email. But we know not everyone wants to switch to a new phone number, so it made sense for us to create a lighter version of Google Voice for people who are willing to trade some features for the ability to use their existing numbers.

This video explains it all.

While this is interesting, if Google really wants to disrupt, it should release a service that automatically forwards all our SMS messages to a Google Voice inbox. Then we really don’t need the phone company.

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  20 Comments
Tags: google, Google Voice, GotVoice, VoIP

I just learned that Apple has approved yet another VoIP application, this time from Stockholm-based company Rebtel. You can download it from the iTunes Store. The service also works over AT&T’s 3G network, making it less necessary to have a Wi-Fi connection. But in my experience, WiFi-based calling is always better. AT&T announced earlier this year that it was going to permit VoIP calls over its 3G data network.

Rebtel joins a growing rank of Internet telephony applications including Skype, Truphone, Nimbuzz, Fring and Vonage. Given that Apple and AT&T are giving the nod to almost all VoIP applications, I wonder why exactly Google Voice isn’t getting the go-ahead? Any theories, people? (Press release from Rebtel below the fold.)

It took nine months but Rebtel’s iPhone application for making ultra-cheap or free international calls around the world is finally out of AT&T jail. “We’ve been waiting on this one a long time – but as they say, the best things in life are worth waiting for,” said Andreas Bernström, CEO of Rebtel, which pioneered mobile VoIP calling in 2006. “We were thrilled when we got the email from the iTunes Store with the subject: Your Application is Ready for Sale. Our app is free, of course, but we couldn’t be happier.” On October 6, AT&T reversed course and said that it will allow Internet phone software applications on the iPhone. AT&T had previously prevented iPhone Internet phone apps from using its wireless network. Rebtel’s app allows iPhone owners to make calls to anywhere in the world for just pennies per minute without having to search for a WiFi hot spot. And free calls are possible between any of the 50 countries where Rebtel is available. Using the new Rebtel iPhone app is super easy and fast. Just open the app, select the phone number of an international friend from the onboard address book or type in their number, tap the Call with Rebtel button, and Rebtel takes over from there to connect the call straight away. “The lowest calling rates in the world, no cards, PINs or hassles, you only pay for the time you talk, and great sound quality – it doesn’t get any better than Rebtel for international calling,” said Bernström. “Try it. You’ll like it. Everybody gets a free test call to get started.”

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Posted by Om Malik on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  20 Comments
Tags: Apple, AT&T, Google Voice, iPhone, Rebtel, skype, VoIP