Am IÂ missing something in the latest announcements from SipPhone?Â
I know I must be. You see, the new Gizmo project business offering with All Calls Free for Business looks to me like nothing more than centralized billing – an announcement about accounting. If it’s really an announcement about accounting that’s snooze… not news.Â
From the press release, here are the key features:
- All Calls Free calling plan – Announced July 20th, 2006Â right?
- Asterisk PBX support – Announced May 23rd, 2006.Â
- Centralized Billing – This is new.
- Direct Dial “Call In” numbers – Area 775, their free phone number service, was announced February 16, 2006.
- Free Voicemail – This was in from the beginning, right?
- Free Call Forwarding – You’ve been able to do this for a while too, right?
- Free Conference Calling – And Gizmo has had a deal with FreeConference.com for a while too, right?
- Online Presence – There from the beginning.
- Instant Messaging -Â Also there from the beginning, with interop to Google announced January 18th, 2006.
Don’t get me wrong. I use Gizmo, and I’m a big fan of their service. This latest announcement generated a pile of coverage from a bunch of really well known blogs too, like: VoIP & Gadgets Blog, GigaOM, VoIP Watch, Webtown, VoIP Blog and 21talks.Â
I just must have missed something in the newsworthiness of this latest release, right? What do you guys know that I don’t?
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree with you, Alec, this seems like a whole lot of non-news to me, or at least it was news three months ago when the All Calls Free plan was announced.
Oh, but it is news.
Because, last time they made the same piece-meal announcements no-one took notice (except maybe for the Google interop thing)
Now, it's plastered all over the internet and its higher up on google search for those wishing to find information on their own. Now, we've given them one more reason to get sent to the Gizmo project.
I bought four ATAs from them and am happy for the reason I bought my ATAs (paid their investment cost a year back already)