I’m a Mac user and a Palm Treo user. I love both of these devices. But an ongoing frustration has been the inability of these devices to sync up properly together. I work around the problem simply by not using the calendar on my Mac.

So I was pretty excited today when I read about New York-based Transmedia’s
Glide Sync and Glide Mobile services for Mac.

The free service supports about 30 cell phones — including my Treo 650. It automatically synchs photos, music, videos, documents, iCal calendars, Mac Address Book contacts, and Safari, Camino and Firefox bookmarks from your Mac via the Internet, according to today’s press release. You can sign up on your phone or your Mac.

Transmedia’s Glide OS2 — currently in beta — is a Web-based application environment that the company promises will replace the plethora of stand-alone applications running on our PCs today.

I hate writing about something that we sell through the Voxilla Store, but news is news (and no-news is no-news) and our friend Andy Abramson gave us the opening.

A German company, 4S newcom, is pitching an IP PBX that is loaded on an Apple iPod Shuffle (news?) and runs on a Mac Mini (no-news).

The system, called iBlue, will begin shipping on November 6th, to coincide with the VON Europe conference in Berlin.

An entry level system will be priced at 2,999 Euros (about US$3,750) and consists of a Mac Mini (version not disclosed), an iPod Shuffle, and five snom300 IP telephones. The low-end offering licenses up to 250 users and allows 30 concurrent calls.

It’s an interesting enough idea to get some notice from VoIP bloggers like Abramson and Rich Tehrani. But as Abramson points out, a Mac Mini based PBX is not new.

For the past year, we (meaning Voxilla) have been working with the folks at Communigate Systems (based across the Golden Gate from us in Marin County) to get the company’s full-featured cross-platfom internet communications server into the business marketplace. You can read about the product here, (please pardon the shameful internal linking).

The Comunigate Pro server runs on dozens of platforms, including Mac OSX, and comes with a SIP-based PBX, full switch, session border controller, an email server (like Microsoft Exchange, but it actually works) and an XMPP-based IM server. We run Communigate in our offices.

When five of us went to Boston for the VON show last month, we set up Communigate Pro on a Mac Mini to provide telephone service for all of us at the booth. Though the spotty internet connectivity at the Boston Convention Center provided a challenge, Voxilla Director of Engineering Eric Chamberlain got the system up and running with relative ease. The total cost for hardware and software for the system Eric set up is less than US$1,800.

The set-up was definitely a big hit at the booth. Quite a few people were startled to see a full-fledged communications server on such a small (and Mac-elegant) footprint.

We don’t sell the Mac Mini and I prefer to use the iPod as it was intended. But the Communigate Pro-Mac Mini system is slick and easy to set up by the Mac-savvy, and doesn’t have to cost a pretty Euro.

Mac users are like cats - famously contrarian about following the herd. And with the herds rushing to Skype, your typical Mac user will start heading off into some other direction.

London-based Woize (pronounced woy-zee) is targeting this herd of cats with its SIP-based, peer-to-peer VoIP client for Mac OSX, announced yesterday. The company says that the beta version of the software will be released sometime before the end of the year.

The features are pretty comparable to Skype. Calls between Woize users are free, with charges for calls to landline and mobile phones. The company already offers VoIP clients for Windows - including Windows Mobile - and an ATA that lets you use your telephone to make Woize calls.

The main advantage of Woize’s approach is, because it’s SIP-based, Woize users can connect with other SIP users.

“SIP is the not only the future of communications. it is quickly becoming the cornerstone of IP communications as we know it today,” says Erik Lagerway, author of the SIP That and CTO of Shift Networks. “Proprietary solutions are not a viable long term solution and will not impact the future of SIP.”

But Woize is hardly the first one out of the box with a solution to compete with Skype. TelTel of Santa Clara, CA has been offering its SIP-based softphone for over a year now. TelTel claims about two million registered users and is adding about 100,000 users a month, according to CEO Jack Chang.

The BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP of propane forklifts aggravated my mood for most of the day today, as hundreds of Teamsters and employees of many of the world’s most important IP Communications companies banged and whirred and taped and hammered together display booths and tradeshow paraphernalia on the cavernous exhibit floor of the Boston Convention Center.

Now, a little less than an hour from the VON Conference’s Opening Reception, the fork lifts are in clean-up mode at the far reaches of the hall’s rear corridors, and just the buzz of the occasional power screwdriver can be heard as I roam up and down the Exhibit floor’s 16 aisles, surveying the advance mood of perhaps the industry’s most important conference.

And the mood seems one of decided maturity. Almost everyone has been here and done this for the past several years running and the atmosphere strikes me as more “carny” than “rock show,” despite the new play being given to companies and concepts focused on video, as opposed to the conference’s former fealty to voice.

Tomorrow is another day, however, and until the big glass doors of the convention center’s mezzanine open to the paying attendees, it’s probably not fair to start pinning labels on the personality of this year’s show.

As for Martha, Eric, and I in the Voxilla booth, we’ve got our network up and running, our booth display erected, the CommunigatePro Mini Mac server registering a Polycom IP601 and a brand new Linksys SPA962. I’ve also got my cell phone hooked up to a PhoneLabs Dock n Talk and we are ready to talk the talk for the next three days.

I’ve already had a very interesting conversation with a service provider who claims to have the SIP WiFi puzzle solved and operational on some high quality hardware I’ll be able to identify after I get my test units, so maybe there will be some new and good news out of this conference after all…