VoIP Evolution

Wi-Fi Aware opens door to new kinds of location-aware business apps

At FierceEnterpriseCommunications:

Wi-Fi Aware opens door to new kinds of location-aware business apps

8x8 Cloud VoIP Assessment

At VoIP News:

8x8 Cloud VoIP Assessment

Hosted VoIP industry weighs security verification

At Dell's Tech Page One:

Hosted VoIP industry weighs security verification

Polycom's ViVu Acquisition Boosts Availability, Flexibility of Video Conferencing

Polycom's acquisition of ViVu, Inc. adds an important tool to the video conferencing vendor's arsenal, by letting it extend video collaboration capabilities to everyone with a PC. Video conferencing has traditionally operated through dedicated endpoints, including hardware such as room system or desktop video phones and client software. ViVu makes software that makes it possible to embed video communication capabilities in Web applications. The move is particularly important because Polycom technology serves as the foundation for a number of prominent commercial video conferencing services. These include 8x8's Virtual Room, BroadSoft's BroadCloud hosted cloud video conferencing platform and Telesphere's VideoConnect, which runs on BroadCloud.

VoIP Evolution Report Dispels SMB Video Conferencing Hype

Serious excitement surrounds the SMB (small to medium-size business) video conferencing space these days. In June and July alone, no fewer than eight companies – 8x8, Blue Jeans Network, BroadSoft, InFocus, LifeSize, Polycom, Telesphere and Vidtel – announced new hardware, services, tie-ups or some combination thereof. All of the announcements represented significant investments of time, effort and resources. And together, they indicated a widespread optimism that the market is about to take off.

Even in pre-takeoff mode, though, the market has already spawned a hefty body of conventional wisdom. Most of it takes the form of ardent convictions surrounding clouds and interoperability. One of these is the belief that cloud solutions are the ideal way to meet almost every SMB video conferencing need. A related one is faith that providing interoperability is the surest route to success for cloud providers. A new VoIP Evolution report, SMB Video Conferencing: Getting Beyond Clouds & Interoperability, both explains why it's necessary to get beyond such conventional wisdom, and provides a method for doing so.

XConnect's HD Voice Peering Trial: Focusing on Who Rather Than How

XConnect's recently announced plan for a trial HD voice peering federation marks a significant advance in the move to HD communication. The trial, to take place between April and June of this year, will directly connect providers offering HD voice services. That will let them pass HD calls, which provide audio quality superior to that of conventional PSTN phone calls, to one another rather than just among their own customers. The trial thus represents an effort to start building a critical mass of HD-capable voice subscribers. As such, it is as much a commercial effort as a technical one.

Vonage iPhone, BlackBerry Mobile VoIP Apps: Better Late Than Never?

More than eight years after signing up its first residential phone customer, Vonage is finally becoming a real VoIP company. Despite being the name most associated in the public mind with VoIP, Vonage actually has spent most of its time pretending to be a conventional phone company. It offered little that AT&T didn't, except a slightly lower price. Recently, however, it has belatedly begun adding other ways to use its service which take advantage of VoIP's unique capabilities. The latest additions are applications for iPhone and BlackBerry phones.

Sprint Expands SIP Trunking Availability

SIP trunking services deliver voice calls from telecom providers to companies over IP data connections. Feeding their traffic directly into IP PBXes on the companies' premises, such services can bring considerable benefits. Sprint began offering SIP trunking to companies using Microsoft's Office Communications Server 2007 R2, an IP PBX software package that runs on Office servers, in February of this year. Now it's making the service generally available to business customers.