VoIP Evolution

Cloudvox Provides Access to Ifbyphone Conferencing App, Global Infrastructure

Ifbyphone's acquisition of Cloudvox in January brought together two distinct approaches to commercial telephony platform services. Ifbyphone offered sophisticated ready-built apps that companies could access on a per-minute or per-port basis. Cloudvox offered a set of building blocks that let developers create their own apps using common open-source programming languages. Now Cloudvox has taken a significant step towards integrating the two approaches. A newly announced upgrade of its platform allows developers to write their own apps that also access some of Ifbyphone's powerful capabilities. It has also lowered and simplified pricing for the Cloudvox service.

Ifbyphone's Cloudvox Buy Highlights Questions About Platforms' Future

Ifbyphone's acquisition of Cloudvox brought together two approaches to the hosted platform services business. One involves selling access to ready-to-use applications developed by the platform provider itself. That's what Ifbyphone has done from the start. The other involves providing the basic building blocks that allow developers to create their own apps. That's what Cloudvox was invented to do. The acquisition will allow Ifbyphone to do both. The question is which approach, if either, will predominate in the future.

The Top 25 VoIP Advances of 2009

There were more advances than true innovations in the VoIP world in 2009. That's because some of the most important developments had more to do with commercial and political maneuvers than with technical creativity. Still, such maneuvers often helped spread the benefits of VoIP as much as did technical innovation. And collectively, the advances brought some already-evident trends into clearer focus. A key such trend is the increasing integration of voice with other applications and services. Another is the intensifying interest in HD voice. A third is the growing interconnection of VoIP services, in part in response to the possibilities that end-to-end HD voice offers. With such trends as background, here, in no particular order, are our top 25 VoIP advances of 2009.

Seven Scale Enters Cloudvox in Cloud Telephony Race

Providing voice phone services is getting easier all the time. Developers need merely write a few lines of code in a familiar programming language and pay a few bucks a month for a phone number. The code, running in a Web or other application, tells a hosted service to do things like making, receiving or otherwise handling calls. The developer's company pays a few cents a minute for every call that the service handles for its customers. The availability of such hosted services moves telephony out of the realm of telecom specialists and into the hands of ordinary Web companies. The latest entry in the field is Cloudvox, offered by Seattle-based Seven Scale.