To those of you who made it by the new Voxilla online store for some year-end shopping, we’ve been glad to see you! And we hope you’ve been pleased to see our fresh paint and the new goodies on our shelves. We are still working out some distribution logistics, but look forward to a year of new growth in 2007.

For you with no idea what I’m going on about, we quietly changed a week or so ago from the old-stand-by shopping cart with the groovy orange graphics to a brand-new platform sporting fresh design that integrates well with the rest of Voxilla’s on-line properties. In the process, we’ve made the experience of shopping at Voxilla faster, clearer, and more consistent, in addition to nearly tripling our inventory of products — hello Digium users, hello Netgear fans — and launching new partnerships with Talkswitch and Vegastream.

We’ve also added International shipping via U.S. Postal Service and secured new distribution alliances that should improve all facets of our approach to helping you find the right product for your IP communications needs.

Returning customers should find your old log-in credentials work on the new store, and your order history is preserved and accessible on the new site. New users will find registration a snap and our secure online ordering process easy to navigate. As always, your privacy and satisfaction remain our highest priorities.

We are very excited about this step forward in Voxilla’s evolution; it’s something we’ve been working toward much of the last quarter of this year and we’re happy to have it finally in place. We hope you find our changes useful and pleasing as well.

As the father of a six year-old, I am currently wired to join in any game, participate in any role-play, or accede to any request that I drop whatever I am doing and have a little fun, whenever such might come my way. Since Carolyn Schuk made me it in a game of Blog Tag yesterday — a little diversion brought to the IP Communications blogosphere over the weekend by Jeff Pulver — I’ll bite.

The nature of these viral things is that they tend to waft and warp a bit from their original forms, so if my participation varies from the rules and parameters set forth by Mr. Pulver, I feel confident of being excused.

Five things one might not know about me before arriving at the cocktail party:

1. I am blind in my left eye, having lost it to a ruptured vitreous membrane in a bar-fight in 1992. After three heroic surgical attempts to save my sight by renowned Bay Area eye-doc Richard MacDonald (who my friends and I dubbed Air Mac at the time), I threw in the towel. Now you could strip naked right next to me on my left side and I wouldn’t even notice.

2. I was adopted at the age of one week and raised by wharf rats on the banks of the Mississippi River. Not really. I was actually raised by loving human parents in Memphis, Tennessee, which is not the same at all, but close. To the river, that is. I found and met my birth parents at the age of 35. My father was the youngest of eleven children born to a working-class Irish family in Philadelphia; my mother was a sixteen year-old immigrant from Lithuania. After I met him, my father swore to me she looked eighteen at the time. All I can say now, having seen the pictures, is: she was in fact a hottie, and (given the courses of their lives subsequent to my birth in August 1960) they made a great decision to put me up for adoption. I’ve been lucky from Day One (or Week One), apparently.

3. I am a writer/songsinger who has produced two full-length records of original music and I have performed live with bands on three continents.

4. I was alone for half an hour in the sauna at Trump Palace in Atlantic City with Joe Dimaggio at Muhammed Ali’s birthday party in 1988. It was actually a serendipitous moment, because my adoptive father had recently passed away, and he and the Yankee Clipper had been running buds in New York back in the day. So I had a reason to strike up a conversation with Mr. Dimaggio, and we ended up having a pleasant chat.

5. For my birthday one year, Paulina Porizkova showed me some secrets of runway modeling in her kitchen in New York City.

I’ll tag PhoneBoy, Paul Burke, and Jeseppi Trade Wildfeather — You’re it, boys!

If there’s anyone doing a better job of making it easier or cheaper to use IP telephony than the folks at Televolution, I’d like to meet them.

The PhoneGnome came on the scene last year as the brainchild of David Beckemeyer, who cut his IP teeth co-founding Earthlink. The PhoneGnome promised free point-to-point calling between anyone with a PhoneGnome unit (actually a pre-configured Sipura SPA3000 ATA), and offered a number of ITSP choices for reduced rate long distance calling.

By providing a SPA3000, PhoneGnome gave its customers one of the most versatile, reliable adapters on the market and allowed them to keep their landline (so long to any worries about 911 or what do I do if the Internet is down), to use the same telephone number they may have had for umpteen thousand years, and still take advantage of potentially free, definitely inexpensive long distance calling over the Internet.

It was perhaps the first really plug ‘n play play. You took it out of the box, plugged it in, and you were making phone calls in under five minutes.

Ahh, but at $119.00 people balked. Some ITSPs didn’t support it. To get the free point-to-point calling you had to get two of them, one for your family here, and another for the family back in the old country. Some people were put off that the box was locked and couldn’t be tweaked to their specifications. For whatever reasons, the PhoneGnome didn’t set the world on fire like David and we at Voxilla (among others) thought it might.

This week, David and his team lowered the bar to entry even further with the introduction of PhoneGnome 2.0. Now, you don’t even need the ATA. No software to download. You can make and receive free telephone calls using your regular telephone just by signing up for a free PhoneGnome account at the website. Any call you ever make to anyone with a PhoneGnome account will be free, no matter where you or they live. You can even register your cell phone number and your friends and family will always be able to reach you with a free phone call.

The no device/no software option requires the initiator of a call to be online. Through any web browser you go to your PhoneGnome account page and click on the number in your contacts that you would like to call. Your phone rings and when you pick it up, your call is in progress. Your called party answers, you talk, it’s free. The called party can be in rural outer East Booniesville, where there’s no internet service at all, but as long as they too have a PhoneGnome account, it’s a free call.

PhoneGnome 2.0 also offers a free downloadable softphone for doing all this through the computer, if that’s your bag. I haven’t tried the softphone yet, but it’s packed with features that those who use the computer as a communication device love to have, and it expands the free calling capability to any of the 25 million SIP devices in use throughout the world today. When David’s tech team makes it compatible with the Mac, I’m sure to give it a try (hint hint).

And finally, the device that launched this enterprise in the first place is still available, now for a limited time at $60. The PhoneGnome Box, as it’s called, is still the best way to take advantage of all the features the PhoneGnome has to offer, like voicemail to email, on-line call logs, contact list with click-to-dial, telemarketer screening, and more. PhoneGnome 2.0 even offers a free configuration wizard to let existing owners of SPA3000 ATAs upgrade their units to the PhoneGnome standard.

It’s clear the direction of telecommunications is toward greater use of the Internet to carry the traffic. Pure VoIP installations may not be quite there for business quality clarity and reliability, but the technology definitely supports point-to-point communication that is indistinguishable from old-school telco service. At this point in the evolutionary cycle, the greatest impediment to wider adoption of the technology remains the difficulty most non-technically oriented people have with understanding how devices work and how to set them up so they work properly. That, and the fact that the vast majority of options still require a monthly fee to use the service.

PhoneGnome got in the game by trying to address those obstacles. With 2.0, I believe they have succeeded completely. Easy. Free. What more do you want?

I’ve been feeling guilty for having little to get on my Soap Vox about of late.

The truth is we’ve been engaged in deep discussions internally regarding the focus and future direction of our efforts here at Voxilla, something probably encouraged in equal measure by the revamping of the news site and forum, together with what we perceive as possible tectonic shifts in the marketplace for IP communications.

To those ends, I’d like to reach out to Voxilla’s membership and readerbase to solitcit your hopefully constructive, but unvarnished feedback about where YOU see Voxilla as a company today, how we do whatever it is you think we do, and how you think we might do it better, given your understanding of IP communications and where it’s heading.

I’ve created a mailbox for suggestion_box@voxilla.com, where you can drop us a line on any subject you feel we should be aware of as we continue to develop with our industry. Your mail will remain completely private and no list of senders will be compiled for purposes of further solicitation of any kind.

We simply value your input into our processes, and appreciate your willingness to help us become a better, and more successful company.

This has been a tough year at Voxilla. We are not a large company, so everyone here has to wear a number of hats in order to make it all work. Because 2005 was a year of explosive growth for us, we realized in the middle of the 1st quarter this year all of the systems and much of the architecture we had in place needed to be revamped, replaced, and in a few cases jettisoned entirely if we were to meet the sales and growth goals we set for ourselves.

As a result, we’ve all been busy behind the scenes working on stuff that doesn’t normally make it into the public eye. And this has been true for no one moreso than for our founder, Marcelo Rodriguez.

With his attention sucked away by things peripheral and tangential, Marcelo got away from his true love and the thing that gave birth to Voxilla — writing. For months there was nothing on voxilla.com with Marcelo’s byline and I could see around the office that taking a toll on him. I could see, too, by our site traffic, it was taking a toll on the business as well.

But things are rebounding now that we’ve got some new systems in place and rolled out the new content site and user forum. And today Marcelo posted an article in his SoapVox column that shows me he’s on the comeback, too.

His SIP ‘n Skype analysis is just the sort of thing that put Voxilla on the map and I’m encouraged to see our jefe back to sharpening his pencil, so to speak.