Dialpad–Life For Old iPads

  Like many of us, I have an iPad Air2 and an iPad Mini in storage. My current iPad is the 9.7 inch iPad Pro, with the keyboard and I find that in many situations I can do most of what I do on my MacBook with it, especially while traveling or sipping an espresso at … Read more

Time To Switch To Switch

Take a little bit of GoogleVoice, throw in some Bandwidth.com, hook in some UberConference as the spice and you get—>SWITCH. perhaps the UBERphone for businesses of all sizes and the service that in my mind will wreck havoc with the likes of 8×8 and RingCentral to name a few. Right now it's in private beta and … Read more

Are Skype’s Days Numbered?

Every day I see Yet Another WebRTC based service come to life. Today its "ROOM" which has a very simple beta list signup going on where if you tweet their existence you get immediate access to the beta. Services like Slack, Hall, HipChat, Vobi and many others are offering what I'm calling Skype Takeaway Service (STS) often for free, often even richer in experience … Read more

Google Voice API Shutdown Saddens Me

Here's the untold story that dates back to 2006 or so when I was working on the social media aspects of GrandCentral, now Google Voice. Back then, I was traveling a lot to the UK and France and wanted to have access in both directions to my incoming calls and voice mail messages, as well … Read more

Are We About To Enter The World Of Really Free Calling?

Image via CrunchBase There's a lot of rumors swirling around that GoogleVoice is going to basically disappear and be fully merged into Hangouts. You can likely thank the likes of Gizmo Voice founder Michaeal Robertson and the now Uber UberConference team of Vincent Paquet and Craig Walker for all their pioneering work years back. Basically … Read more

Thoughts on Standards Call Centers, Call Routing, VoIP Codecs, Port Blocking and Transit of Voice

Let's face it. We live in a very connected, always on world where being reached is essential. As a global nomad of the nth degree i rely on my various communications providers like SimpleSignal and a string of services ranging from GoogleVoice, Skype, Calliflower, WebEx, GoToMeeting, UberConference, Voxeet, Truphone and various mobile operators to keep … Read more

Redux of Jangl and TalkPlus But With A Twist

Image via CrunchBase Image via CrunchBase Back in the heydey of VoIP, circa 2006/2007 GrandCentral was the "buzz and da bomb" quickly gaining likely some hundreds of thousands of users before getting snapped up by Google and turned into GoogleVoice. But they had rivals, not direct competition, but services that did different things. Two of … Read more

WhatApp Rumors with Google and What May Happen

I love WhatsApp. I use it daily, especially to stay in touch with friends in Europe and elsewhere to avoid the costs of SMS. Sure, I can use GoogleVoice, but if those across the water don't have a US based GoogleVoice number it means an international SMS. Whatsapp helps me avoid that. Recently rumors of … Read more

Has Google Given Up On GoogleVoice?

googlevoice fluid app icon (Photo credit: benlundquist) When one thinks about GoogleVoice one has to wonder if the team at Google has given up on it. Let's face the facts, not much is really new with it, and what has been new has been more iterative post GrandCentral (my agency was one of two agencies … Read more

Should Google Voice Open Up?

Image via CrunchBase I was around just after Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet created and launched GrandCentral, which became post acquistion by Google, GoogleVoice. We worked with the two and helped make it a known qualtity, and to this day, my GV number is the number that makes me so easily reachable. But in over … Read more