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Content Tagged with skype + gizmo
SIPphone Makes The Call To Jajah
Jajah, in its effort to become a backend platform for VoIP services, has started offering call termination, billing and other such services to one and all comers. They got a big boost when they signed up Yahoo! Now, the Sequoia Capital-backed company has signed up SIPphone, the company behind Gizmo and will handle their call termination. Does this mean Gizmo’s call quality will increase? I certainly hope so - I have stopped using the service because of poor quality of voice.
Instead, I have opted for RingCentral, which recently introduced a Mac OS X soft client (in addition to a PC version) and it is doing a might fine job for me. I was highly skeptical of RingCentral in the past but they have won me over with their high quality service. (Full review, pending!)
Soft phones - whether they are from RingCentral, Vonage, Gizmo or Skype extremely useful. I almost never am close to a landline, but an internet connection is always handy. Using soft phone, I can make quick calls without really breaking away from the computer screen. I am not alone in professing a liking for Softphones. A Frost & Sullivan report says that as a percentage of total IP-telephone market soft phones share will increase from 5 percent to 20 percent by 2014. Softphone sales rose to 416,000 units, worth $18.9 million in 2007, up 30% over 2006.
Gizmo – A free phone for your computer
Gizmo Gets MySpace IM Support, More IM Platform Than Skype These Days
When Michael profiled the Gizmo Project in July 2005, he noted that it had more features than Skype, but lacked instant messaging. The one time Skype competitor has become the Jaiku to Twitter, having pretty much dropped off the radar as Skype was acquired by eBay and went on to become the leading desktop VOIP/ IM solution.
The open source SIPphone owned Gizmo has continued to be developed, and this week added MySpace IM support on top of support for MSN, Yahoo, AIM and Jabber (including Google Talk). Today’s Gizmo is more IM platform than predominantly VOIP platform, and it makes for a fairly decent product.
Gizmo offers an attractive feature set. On top of the wide IM support that makes it a competitor to Adium and Trillian, the VOIP side offers competitively priced calls to external numbers, as well as free calls to those using the SIPphone platform. Services such as file transfer are supported, although video calling is only supported between Gizmo users, and not with users on other services. Cross platform voice chat is supported however.
Notably Gizmo 5 can be installed on a range of mobile phones and run locally, complete with VOIP calling, a decent value add if you’re on an unlimited data plan with your mobile phone. Unfortunately there isn’t a version (site or download) for the iPhone yet so I was unable to test it.
Gizmo has long since lost the battle against Skype to become the dominant VOIP service, however if you’re looking for a fully featured mobile IM client that also offers cheap calls it might be worth a look again.
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Jaiku | Any way to have an Irish SIP number on my N95 so I can divert incoming GSM calls to it when bad coverage? Fring? Blueface? Truphone? What?
Gizmo – A free phone for your computer
Nokia - Gizmo
Does your house VoIP?
The looming VoIP patent mess not withstanding, In-Stat, a market research firm says that 9% of US households were using VoIP at the end of 2006, up by one percent at the end of September 2006. By In-Stat’s estimate, there were about 10.6 million households where at least one member was using some form of VoIP-service at the end of 2006.
If you add up 5 million-plus cable subscribers, 2 million Vonage subscribers and a few of the other independents, you are still left with a few million households that I guess are Skypers and a few hundred thousand Gizmo Project users.
Apparently 61% of residential VoIP users have switched from PSTN, which explains why Verizon & Co., want folks want to put the keibash on Vonage and its kind. It threatens PSTN’s core bread-and-butter business: voice. Or as guest columnist Daniel Berninger would say, the telco battle of mice and incumbents.
The In-Stat survey shows that lower international call prices are the primary reason for the VoIP adoption, especially amongst those of us who use Gizmo Project and Skype. You might remember my rant about poor PSTN quality - I checked my phone bill - holy shit… that 13 minute call cost me about $11, which is about the same amount I spend on Truphone calls to India.
Regardless, time to ask the community what kind of a VoIP users are you? Cable kind, or someone who uses soft clients or do have still doing the Vonage styled ATA-based VoIP calling?