SocComm and MICE … Remember these “words”

By: Ari Last week I wrote about the SocComm event we were attending. Now it is time to summarize it. The event took place Tuesday at a great facility downtown New York City and was planned and produced by Jeff Pulver. Right after the event I left on vacation so I just got an opportunity to post this now. 48 hours delay is still ok, no? SocComm was a great and energizing event. It was different than most conferences or seminars one usually attends and it really did live up to our expectations bringing together experts, professionals in the space

By: Ari Well, this term may not be a wide spread acronym – yet – but given that the guy that came up with it also came up with several other well known industry terms it will probably catch up during 2009! On Tuesday VoIP industry pioneer and promoter Jeff Pulver, founder of Pulver.com, the VON conferences and also founder of numerous VoIP related companies (including Vonage) is hosting SocComm in New York City. Alon Cohen , Phone.com’s Executive VP and CTO who will also be speaking at SocComm, was (directly or indirectly) the reason Jeff entered the VoIP space

By: Alon Phone.com is now using Twitter. Twitter is a free service that lets you keep in touch with people news, blog posts and promotions through the exchange of quick short messages. Join us today to start receiving Phone.com updates. You can choose to receive a short SMS whenever we add a new news item or blog post. To follow us go to https://twitter.com/phonedotcom and press the “follow” button on the left top corner.

By: Ari Congratulations America! With Barack Obama swearing in as the 44th President of the United States the White House website also went through an overhaul and has been updated 12:01 EST to reflect the new President, his strong technology agenda and the era we are in. The Whitehouse now also has a blog with an RSS feed. Communications, Transparency and Participation are the three priorities the new white house media activity will focus on. Read the first blog post to learn more. As President Obama declared throughout his campaign we should expect a lot of focus in the coming

Yesterday we blogged about Bloomberg News and the Los Angeles Times quoting a Verizon executive saying the company will shift all its lines from copper (presumably to fiber optics and VoIP technology). However, today XchangeMag, a well-read industry publication, had a report quoting a Verizon spokesperson saying such a shift will not be happening that quickly. As we mentioned yesterday, we also doubted Verizon could do so (or would want to do so) in just 7 years, but the direction is clear as also mentioned by the Verizon spokesperson.

By: Ari This weekend, the Los Angeles Times and Blumberg News reported that Verizon plans to stop selling copper line phone service by the year 2016 (that is 7 years from now). Copper lines are (were?) the backbone of the phone network for over 100 years. Well… cell phones changed that but land lines remained copper based until the emergence of VoIP phone service in the late 90s. The shift that Verizon is in the process of, and their FiOS service, as well as AT&Ts U-Verse service and most of the cable companies phone services are all based on VoIP

Some of the favorite features about Phone.com Virtual Office are a) the phone greetings, b) the menus that can be created and c) obtaining a toll free number (and in many cases your own vanity number) along side your local area code number. With these basic features a business as small as a part time- work from home business can feel as big as a multi location, national business! So many small business owners and other sole proprietors still use their cell phone or home phone as their main business line. But by obtaining a “virtual number” with Phone.com and

By: Ari The end of every year is always a time when lots of predictions for the new year appear in various publications. Today I wanted to comment on NetworkWorld and the Top 10 predictions for VoIP and convergence for 2009. I agree with the authors, Steve Taylor and Larry Hettick with most (if not all) of their thoughts as I have also stated in some of my predictions. First, as I wrote in my previous blog, i do think that we need to NOT generalize and call it “Predictions for VoIP” as Voip is to general. Any replacements are

By: Ari Today, Phone.com announced a new service called Phone.com Global Numbers. Phone.com now offers all its Virtual Office customers the ability to obtain a phone number over 40 countries. If you have a business in the US but have customers or clients in France (see complete list of countries here) you can get a local phone number with say a Paris area code and give it to your clients. They now can dial that number and reach you in the US. Simple. They only pay a price of a local Paris call. You only pay for a US minute

People don’t like to give out their passwords. That is understandable of course. When Phone.com gets customer service calls we, like any service provider, need to verify and authenticate the customer is who he/she say they are. We try to balance between making it as easy as possible for a customer to get their questions answered and solve any problems and ensuring their privacy and security. Asking for a password or pin is something service providers must do. Well, Phone.com has now implemented a “Password Bypass”. When logging into their account customers get a unique key (Express Service Code) that

Phone.com “officially” kicked off the holiday season! We are now offering 2 months of free service for our Virtual Office service. More details on the Phone.com home page.

By: Ari On Monday we wrote about the New York Times Small Business Summit. Yesterday I attended the NY Expo for Small Business at the Javits Convention Center. There have always been many shows for small business owners and entrepreneurs to choose from, but, perhaps these days there is more interest than in “regular” years. With the economy as it is and also with so much change in the way we do business these days in general, there is more room for small and very small businesses to flourish. Small businesses typically do well during recession times and we already

Check out this blog link to read Ari Rabban’s guest opinion feature on IPConvergencetc.com, Edited by Jon Arnold. We wrote about SaaS and telephony in the past as well and expect this trend to grow much more in the years to come. For your viewing pleasure, the review is also posted below: or all the acronyms we are used to in the VoIP industry, the term SaaS, or Software as a Service is not one I heard much over the years. This term was used much more for other data and software products: From Wikipedia : “… where an application

By: Ari Last night I participated in a great event for small business owners in NYC. Ramon ray hosted this event at the “Samsung Experience”, Samsung’s great showcase store at the Time Warner Building in Manhattan. The event was moderated by Robert Levin, the Publisher of the New York Report and addressed some fundamental questions all small business owners have: how do I get some (good) PR? The panel of experts provided good suggestions of what a small business can do without spending the big bucks on a public relations firm. Ramon summarized it nicely, see below (with my edits): 1.

By: Alon Cohen NEW Phone.Com online forum lets customers and office managers collaborate, ask questions about product features and share ideas. PHONE.COM LABS is home to new technologies and “ideas-in-progress” developed by Phone.Com programmers and engineers. Brian Scott, our COO explains how “Phone.Com Labs” works to form a link from traditional product development cycles to a more user-centric innovation. What does Phone.Com Labs do? Phone.Com Labs was launched as a forum for sharing new technologies, concepts and ideas with potential users and customers. Our purpose is to offer previews so our developers, engineers and users can have a discussion about