Check out the story in VoIP News which begs the question “what is Voice 2.0?”
First I have been using the following to define voice services as I give interviews:
Voice 1.0–> The phone service you get from your local phone company (i.e. PSTN) or mobile phone operator (i.e circuit switched cellular)
Voice 1.5–> This is what Earthlink, Vonage, Packet8, Broadvoice, VoicePulse, SunRocket and the service you get from your cable or DSL provider. Basically two things change from 1.0. Who bills you and the switching of the wire from an RJ-11 to an RJ-45.
Voice 2.0–>This is the space that Free World Dialup (the original Purple 2.0 player), Gizmo Project, Skype, SightSpeed, Wengo, Yahoo Messenger with Voice, AIM PhoneLine, Earthlink’s MindSpring, etc. are playing in. Soft client or next generation handset that is WiFi based, provides the ability for new applications which are 2.0 in nature such as GrandCentral, Sitofono, iotum, TalkPlus, BridgePort Networks etc. which reside in varying ways on the cloud.
The key to all of this is they can call the PSTN world without any special “codes” and don’t require any “retraining” of the user. Devices and software function just like a regular phone, using DTMF touch tones.
In essence I think we are headed to Voice 3.0, which as pal Jeff Bonforte at Yahoo likes to say, brings 2.0 approaches to a 1.0 world. In my interpretation that’s taking Yahoo Voice or AIM PhoneLine and all they have to offer and applying them to a 1.0 world. That’s where friend and client David Beckemeyer’s PhoneGnome falls in my book. I would have previously thought of them as a 2.0 solution but really PhoneGnome is in the space of bridging both worlds and providing the first and true Voice 3.0 solution even before 2.0 was fully baked.