Looking to emulate the highly successful Asterisk ecosystem business model, IP-PBX pioneer ShoreTel has launched a partner program to extend the choice of integrated solutions available to customers.

Skype Inside: First, an agreement between Toshiba and Skype will build Skype into Toshiba notebooks. Second, German mobile software company Shape Services has launched beta versions of IM+ for Skype software for Java phones, Symbian S60 and Palm OS.

Home networking pioneer Netgear announced a new collaboration with British Ubiquisys to build a residential gateway that integrates a DSL modem, Wi-Fi, VoIP and a femtocell 3G access point. (Femtocells are being promoted for fixed-mobile convergence.) It seems like a natural progression for the company that first made it possible for the average Joe to connect to the Internet. A side benefit is that your cell phone will also work better at home.

For those of you who wish you could take your VoIP service with you when you leave home or office, Chinese manufacturer ATCOM announced a new Mini ATA AG110 that fits in your packet. The company’s website is less than helpful to the English speaker, with howlers like this: “With the powerful R&D capability, ATCOM will keep lunching all kinds of VoIP terminals and devices….” Sounds like Godzilla.

When you take your VoIP service on the road, you’re going to need a broadband connection. Boingo is helping road warriors escape being nickeled-and-dimed to death by WiFi service providers with its global, flat rate, unlimited use service. The company claims to have about 100,000 hot spots. U.S. price is about $40 a month. Earthlink and Nokia are also aiming to let travelers roam free by equipping the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet with Earthlink’s WiFi service at no charge.

Polycom’s Spectralink WiFi phones now comply with the federal government’s security specifications for ’sensitive’ — but not classified — communications. This is the first WiFi phone to achieve this, according to the press release. But it is secure enough for Vice President Strangelove?

If you’ve ever wished you had that great picture of your Maui vacation right there on your cell phone, wish no more. Glide Mobile lets you bring all your files to your phone — even documents. All for free. You’d never guess this from parent company TransMedia’s description of its business: “TransMedia is leading the emergence of rights and identity based, compatible and integrated multipurpose software and services for corporations and consumers.” Huh? Anyway, you can read Glide Mobile’s press release here. (It’s not on the website — go figure.)

With only 2 days left until “i” Day, Ajax software company Backbase is prepping its Ajax framework and developers kit for the Apple Safari 3 browser, Apple’s chosen avenue for value-added applications. Backbase says that its framework will run on the Apple iPhone without modification. You can give it a test run here.

And speaking of tech’s Cabbage Patch Kid, how many people are actually planning to buy one? Not many, according to an online survey at the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal. As of this writing, only five percent of the people taking the survey say they’re going to buy one “immediately.” At the other end of the spectrum, 16 percent say they will “never” buy one, 11 percent say “not as long as it’s tied to AT&T for service,” and 27 percent — the largest cohort — say “not while it’s so much more expensive than other options.” You can weigh in here.

P.S. Gartner says the iPhone doesn’t belong in the enterprise.

In life it’s often the small stuff that makes the biggest difference. Virtual Hold Technology has taken on a gripe we all have – waiting on hold. While the company’s eponymous system can’t eliminate the wait, it makes it easier by holding your place in line while you hang up and get on with your life. When you’re at the head of the list, the system calls you up. The company sells the technology to contact centers, promoting its ability to increase customer satisfaction and reducing costs.

Working on the theory that all of us together are smarter than each of us alone, yesterday Polycom announced the Polycom ARENA “ecosystem,” a collaboration platform that will let partners develop, test and certify interoperability between their solutions and the Polycom voice, video and content collaborative solutions.

AT&T is getting into the mobile video game with AT&T Video Share, which lets users to share live video concurrently with voice calls. The service sounds like a true Age of IP service. But the billing is strictly Ma Bell. AT&T is offering Video Share for $4.99 per month for 25 minutes of usage, or $9.99 for 60 minutes. Not so bad, you say. Well every minute after that is 35 cents.

Unlike baseball, in IPTV the three strikes rule doesn’t hold apparently, with Microsoft debuting its fourth — or is it sixth? — IPTV brand, Mediaroom. Scott Fulton of BetaNews offers an analysis.

Be afraid, be very afraid is the message of Sipera VIPER Lab’s threat advisory for SIP-based soft phones from AOL(R), Avaya, MSN(R) and Nortel(TM), and Avaya SIP-based hard phones.

Sun Microsystems and Mitel are getting cozy with an agreement to integrate Mitel’s call management software into Sun servers. One objective is to make it easier to converge voice and data applications.

It’s Mother’s Day and what’s Mother’s Day about except communication?

All those phone calls and cards, not to mention all those flowers and chocolates. That must be why Microsoft chose this week to unveil a budding ecosystem of new devices designed to work seamlessly with its unified communications suite, Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, which debuted last March.

OK, maybe the announcement was really timed for WinHEC this week. But if Mom has a computer and makes phone calls, chances are she’s going to think Office Communicator 2007 is a swell present – longer lasting than flowers and less fattening than candy.

Last week, Microsoft brought its Office Communicator 2007 demo to San Francisco, where I got to try out the software and see some of the new hardware at work.

“Today all forms of communication are separate, especially voice,” says Chris Cullin, Director Product Management Microsoft Unified Communications Group. “When you’re working and have to make a call, you have to go to the phone system. The phone is moving away from the mainstream of communications. Email and IM are starting to replace the phone. A recent Harris study reports that 60 percent of people use PCs for primary communications instead of the phone.”

With Office Communicator, Microsoft aims to do for communications what it did for PCs in the 80s: Separate the hardware from the software.

“In the 80s, software changed the industry dynamics,” explains Cullin. “We’re taking the core software of business communications, using open APIs and standards to build an open platform and build an ecosystem of partners to provide devices like handsets and headsets.”

This week’s announcement brings the telephone back into the mainstream, according to Cullin.

“The timing is right to provide convergence by moving voice to the PC,” he says. “It’s time to move voice to software, and then voice is just an extension of the software stack.”

At the center of the ecosystem is, of course, Microsoft’s software: Office Communications Server 2007 and the Office Communicator 2007 client for the desktop. With Communicator, Microsoft seems so far to be avoiding the feature “bloat” of other Office applications, delivering a simple and elegant solution that works naturally and unobtrusively.

Pick up the phone and automatically your Outlook contact list pops up, with rich presence indicators; for example, if you’re not at your desk but are available on your mobile phone. It also keeps a record of recent contacts and, if you’re looking for a number, makes a best guess about the person you want based on recent contacts.

When you receive a call, Communicator shows you who’s calling and answers over the speakerphone by default.

If you’re reading an email and it seems like a conversation is needed, click on the phone icon in the email header and pick up the phone. Not only does Communicator place the call for you, your name and the subject of the email pops up on your party’s screen.

Want to make a video call, click on the camera icon. Video is just an extension of the communication.

You can also click to transfer a call, say to your mobile phone, as you’re running out of the office. No more, “let me call you back on my cell phone.”

“It has to be dead simple for the user,” observes Cullin.

Currently, there are 15 devices that are in beta with Communicator, including IP phones, USB phones, wired and wireless headsets, conferencing phones, LCD monitors and laptops. All the devices are plug-and-play – no drivers needed — and have wideband audio, which improves sound quality. The reference designs were developed with the input of LG Nortel and Polycom. Communicator is service provider agnostic.

The most basic devices in the group are the desk phones – the LG-Nortel USB model IP8501 and Polycom CX200 Desktop Phone – which have a familiar handset. But instead of a keypad, the devices have four buttons.

If you just can’t give up the keypad on your desk, there are the ViTELiX Unified Communications Phone and the NEC UC USB phone.

Both are bare-bones phones with the familiar form factor. If you want to be more upscale, there are the LG-Nortel IP Phone 8450 and the Polycom CX700 IP Phone. These add large touch-screen displays with presence status and dial-by-name, simple conference call setup, and a fingerprint scanner (so everyone will know for sure who made those calls).

For the road warrior, there’s the ASUS S7F laptop with built-in 1.3-mega-pixel webcam and microphone and Communicator integration. If you don’t want to buy a new laptop, you can use the Polycom CX100 Speakerphone. About the size of a PDA, the USB device also doubles as a portable speaker for CD-quality music.

Of course, the most elegant solution is no phone at all. The Samsung SyncMaster 225UW fits the bill. The sleek all-black 22-inch high-resolution monitor includes a 2.0-mega-pixel webcam and dual-array microphone and speakers.

The interoperability spec for Office Communicator is available to partners so that the software can be integrated into existing PBXs and phone systems, letting customers avoid wholesale replacement.

Currently Microsoft is offering Office Communicator and Communicator devices in a public beta. You can download the beta and see the complete list of devices here.

The fly in the ointment? Office Communicator 2007 isn’t available yet for the Mac. However, Cullin says that’s in the works. But this first entry is a promising start and us Mac users can only hope that we’re not too far behind.

“Customers have choices,” concludes Cullin. “Device partners can tap into the growth of unified communications that will provide diversity and a broad portfolio of devices.”

So now you have no excuse for not calling Mom. Just click on “Mom” and you’re in business. Add in Gaboogie, and the call will be scheduled for you.

VON was an opportunity for Polycom to show off the newest members of its IP phone family, with new entry level phones and a new high end HD phone.

The Soundpoint IP 330 and IP 320 deliver two new entry-level IP desk phone choices. Both offer integrated power over Ethernet (PoE) that eliminate the AC power adapter. The 330 offers two Ethernet ports while the 320 provides only one, providing a simpler device for uses like lobby phones where the phone doesn’t have connect to a PC. The 320 and 330 retail for $139 and $179 respectively.

The crown jewel in the Polycom VoIP crown is the company’s HD voice, which debuted last fall and which the company is starting to deploy throughout its products. The newest HD phone is the Soundpoint 550 SIP phone, which is a four-line version of the 560 introduced last fall.

In addition to a wideband codec, used in other HD phones, Polycom adds two additional technical improvements that the company claims further enhance the sound quality: proprietary acoustic clarity technology, and physical design changes to accentuate voice quality.

In the VON booth, Polycom has demo “phone booth” to let you hear the difference in sound fidelity. The test plays four famous movie lines. Suffice to say that Arnold the Terminator saying “I’ll be back” was clear as day on the 550 but sounded like an impersonator on the non-HD phone. The 550 retails for $379.

As air travel becomes increasingly inconvenient and time-consuming, it stands to reason that more people are going to substitute conference calls and Web conferences for face-to-face meetings. And when they do, the next thing many might want to do is connect via Skype and save the cost of a phone call - especially if it’s an overseas call.

At least, that’s what Scotts Valley, CA-based Convenos thinks. The company, which provides on-demand collaboration applications, this week announced a partnership with VoIP audio conferencing supplier Vapps to integrate Skype callers into conference calls through Convenos Meeting Center. The Standard Edition of the product supports 20 connections and Professional Edition, 99.

And Convenos isn’t the only company that thinks people want to use Skype for conference calls. Pleasanton CA-based Polycom recently announced the Skype certified Polycom VoiceStation(tm) 500 conference phone.

I’d love to tell you more about all this, but neither Convenos nor Polycom returned my calls. Maybe their phone systems were down.

And is ‘to Skype’ a verb?