I have on a few occasions been referring to Zoom as the runaway train in the collaboration as a service market. Judging by two stories in UCToday this week surrounding the layoffs at BlueJeans and Fuze, the Zoom effect is clearly obvious. While the BlueJeans layoffs were not as expected, Fuze has been very hit … Read more
SMS has become a way many users communicate and in lots of use cases, such as multi-factor authentication, it becomes the way various businesses and services validate you to use another mode of communications, like a mobile app. Unfortunately, just as how Robocalling has infected our telephone world, where calls come in looking like they're … Read more
Salesforce wants call centers to be as easy as using their CRM solution that has millions of businesses around the world using it. Yesterday they launched Service Cloud Voice. On the surface it's a very complete offering with one key missing piece. The telephony stack. But that missing piece is what makes it so interesting. … Read more
I don't normally write product reviews and even though I've been a gadget guy and app experimenter for years, my experience with the POLY Voyager 620 Headset has been about as easy as anything from set up to usage. It's one of the products that came along with the Plantronics merger so whether it's Polycom … Read more
Like many, my home and office internet comes from one of the leading cable companies, aka as a MSO. Over the past decade the cable giants in the USA have rolled out public hotspots, and also embedded their own "Wi-Fi" roaming capabilities so anyone who is a subscriber can easily log onto the "public" or … Read more
The other day, long time gadget blogger, and VoIP fan, Jason Harris of Techcraver and I had a call using the new 8×8 Free Meetings app. At first blush it reminded me of many other WebRTC based video calling services. But the more I look under the hood, the more I am seeing how disruptive … Read more
8×8 has long been a pioneer in the video calling world. Back in the day their Packet8 service was pushing video calling in their earliest of desktop phone iterations. Well as a result of their Jitsi acquisition,and how stable WebRTC has gotten, 8×8 is launching a free video conferencing service, 8×8 Video Meetings. This is … Read more
When it comes to Microsoft and their voice offerings, it is starting to again get confusing. First we had Lync. Then Skype for Business. Along came Teams, and now we have Business Voice 365, but only in the UK and Canada for now. All this appears to be a move to take more money out … Read more
Vonage held their analyst and user group meeting this past week in San Francisco at the Four Seasons Hotel and made some moves that foreshadow what's to come. Beyond putting on a new brand look, one that is designed to move their business efforts more squarely into the enterprise market, they also are clearly breaking … Read more
There's a new 25% tariff on products coming to the USA from Europe. Let's call it the Trump Tax. For importers of European wine they will have to now pay more for each bottle they import, and of course those costs will be passed onto the distributors, retailers and ultimately the consumer. For European winemakers, … Read more
