The VOIP Provider Guide

For those that have jumped on board the VoIP revolution, it’s a revelation to find that you can easily add functionality and new features to your service with a quick download. There are VoIP startups littered throughout the internet trying to carve out a niche of their own by offering specialized features for maps, blogs, cell phones and stores. Therefore, there are a few features on the market now that you can download and utilize in conjunction with your VoIP service to enhance your overall service.

Web Conferencing
For a long time it was a pay only service, but with the advent of services like Yugma, it’s possible to access and utilize web conferencing services for free. Yugma’s service allows you to have up to 10 people in a conference at any given time, viewing a single document or program in use. The program works between different platforms, connecting PCs and Macs and combining numerous other technologies such as Linux. Yugma is amazing because it can be used and installed on blogs, stores and student web pages for instant collaboration.

Microblogging and Text Blasting
It’s a tiny niche, but it’s proven to be ridiculously popular thus far. Services such as Twitter allow you to easily and quickly send a text message through their site to dozens of friends, your Myspace page or to a blog widget with up to 140 characters describing what you’re up to. It’s a very simple service that basically allows people to inform all of their friends of what they’re doing without calling them or texting them individually. Look for this kind of service to expand in the future as well.

Click to Call Plugins and Widgets
In the last two or three years, the internet has exploded into a massive network of connections and constant communication. However, it’s been all text up until now. With the advent of simple, click to call widgets on your blog page or social network, it’s easier than ever to view someone’s profile, talk to them directly or leave a voice comment with the click of a mouse. It’s a burgeoning technology but new services such as Jaxtr and Direct CallBack are offering features that are far ahead of their time.

The ability to offer a call location on your computer to a blog or shopping site without actually giving out your home phone number or to have a widget that users can click on and call directly through to a cell phone are extremely popular and spreading rapidly.

Digital Switchboards
With the use of existing VoIP technology and programming, companies like GrandCentral are making it possible to actually control which phone and phone number a call rings through to when you receive a call. The program first accepts a call and shows you who is calling. You’re given one of three choices; take the call, send it to voicemail or use one of the special GrandCentral features.

These features include the ability to record the call while taking it or to listen to a voicemail as it is being left, providing the ability to screen calls in real time. During the listening in you can choose to take the call as well. Think of it like an old tape recording answering machine, only digital.

Along with advanced voice mail organization options, GrandCentral offers numerous features that take full advantage of the hybrid features of telecommunications and internet access.

The Cell Phone
The cell phone is the next step in the evolution of VoIP. Along with Mobile VoIP access, which we’ve covered at length in the past, cellular phones and WiFi access will make it possible utilize IP technology to send text messages, take calls from a web page, make free international phone calls through call back services and who knows what other features they’re currently dreaming up.

While the VoIP market continues to grow and boom, it’s the applications you can attach to that service that make it truly amazing. With the kind of functions that we could only have dreamt of 3 years ago, the worlds of communications are colliding at record pace. Soon enough, everything will run through the same lines and be fully integrated. It’s just a matter of how they decide to do it.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 10:25 am and is filed under VOIP Product Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.