TalkPlus CEO Jeff Black’s resume demands a new cliché: uncontrollable entrepreneur.

Black loves being at the leading, bleeding edge. His history includes launching the first U.S. retail computer store (Tandy Radio Shack), the Alta Vista search engine, and the first Internet maps, just to name a few.

And he’s been dabbling in VoIP for two decades.

At DEC in the 1980s, he worked on an early DECnet phone. “The problem was, there wasn’t enough DECnet in the world to ship one,” Black recalls. “About 10 years later it was resurrected as a broadband phone by Cisco.” Black also experimented in the 1980s with putting multiple inbound numbers on a single pager.

So it’s no surprise that Black’s latest venture, San Mateo, CA-based TalkPlus, is a forward-looking marriage of VoIP and mobile phones to unify personal communications.

TalkPlus began as an IP-PBX company in 2004. But after looking at the dynamics of the business, Black had second thoughts. To launch the product, an extensive customer support organization was needed.

Taking a fresh look at customer needs, Black decided that what people want isn’t a PBX. What they want is to unify communications - for example, different local operations of a single company - without losing local presence. “We set out to build Voice 2.0,” Black says.

The choice of where to deliver that service was simple. Mobile carriers already have coverage, a customer support infrastructure, and their devices are already in everybody’s pocket.

Last month, TalkPlus launched a free trial version of its unified phone communications on mobile phones. This week the company premiered TalkPlus Pro, which includes features aimed at businesses like built-in conference calling.

While plenty of other services can forward calls from other numbers to different phones, TalkPlus is different because it lets you create entire virtual identity for each number.

For example, take a plumbing company serving several communities. It’s important to have local presence in each of those communities. No one wants to call the Bangalore call center when the drain backs up on Christmas Eve. But you don’t necessarily need to have physical operations everywhere.

With TalkPlus, you can create a unique number and listing for each community you serve. Not only do calls come into your primary number, you also see which operation is being called. And when you call back, your customer will see the name and number of the local operation. (However, TalkPlus can’t help you with the accents of foreign call center employees. You’re on your own there).

While you can achieve the same thing by getting local landlines, the cost for each business line is about $60 a month. TalkPlus gives you the same results for less than $5 for each line.

TalkPlus also solves the problem of deciding whom to share your phone number with — for example, the guy you met last Friday night at a bar. You create an identity for your dating persona and give out that number. When a call comes in, you’ll see immediately that it’s a social call and not your boss or customer.

If you decide that you don’t want to hear from this guy again, no need to make up a story about having to sit by the bedside of an ailing grandmother. You can “blacklist” the caller and he’ll get a standard “out of service” message. Or if you get married, you can easily shut down the number entirely.

TalkPlus also has put a lot of thought into the technology side as well.

In addition to calls to mobile and landline phones, the service also supports SIP and Skype calls that are completely VoIP. “I think we are the only player in the world with true SIP dialing from a mobile phone over a voice channel,” he adds.

TalkPlus can also ring calls over to another number without connecting a second call. When asked about this technology, Black winks and calls it “auto-magic. That’s a technical term.”

Another distinctive feature of TalkPlus’ technology lets subscribers make long distance voice calls at low VoIP rates without using the cellular data channel.

Calls go through TalkPlus’ server, which uses a least-cost engine to determine the routing for calls in realtime. “We don’t compress voice calls, but we drop the cost by 90 percent,” Black says. “We offer broadband rates over a carrier-grade network. And you get cheap calls both inbound and outbound.”

The service also allows callers to place calls through a company telephone network, to present a professional “face” for remote workers.

Black is also thinking about the needs of international travelers and will be offering SIM card management. “You register all SIM cards and TalkPlus rings them all,” he explains. You pick up the call with whatever SIM card you’re using at the time.”

TalkPlus works with Cingular, Sprint and T-Mobile on about 70 cell phones currently. Black expects to double the number of phones supported by February of next year. Support for PDAs is also coming in January. In 2007 he plans to expand service into Asia, Europe and Latin America.

In addition to selling direct, Black is promoting the service through other channels including carriers and broadband service providers.

Signing up with TalkPlus is easy. Just sign up on the website, create your identities, download the software to your phone (TalkPlus calls you), and start making calls.

TalkPlus’ pricing structure is about $4 a month for the basic service, with a $3 per month charge for each virtual number. Usage is about two cents a minute.

The company offers several calling plans. It’s important to note that only TalkPlus Pro plans include dial-out identities. The service includes unified voicemail, available from any phone as well as online and via email. The free trial comes with 250 minutes of free calls until January.

One of the biggest gripes about cellular service in the US is that the carriers’ year-long and longer contracts give the customer no way out if the service is less than adequate — say, as is often the case, beset by frequent outages.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) can go a long way to helping consumers make an educated decision before they agree to a long-term contract. But it refuses to do so.

MSNBC’s Bob Sullivan reports that the FCC has maintained a detailed database of cell phone service provider outages since 2004, but the agency refuses to make the data public.

MSNBC’s Freedom of Information Act request for the data was rejected by the FCC, Sullivan reports, because “(r)elease of the information could help terrorists plan attacks against the United States, and it would harm the companies involved.”

Let’s look at each of these.

Sullivan writes that the “aiding terrorist” line comes to the FCC from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which decided that the “same outage data that can be so useful … to identify and remedy critical vulnerabilities and make the network infrastructure stronger can, in hostile hands, be used to exploit those vulnerabilities to undermine or attack networks.”

To the DHS, it appears, allowing consumers to know whether their cell phone will work when they need it is a greater terrorist threat than potential attacks on America’s public transportation systems and its ports, neither of which the agency has done much to secure. Terrorism analysts quoted by Sullivan think the DHS’ concern is bunk, and couldn’t come up with a single scenario where service outage reports would be useful to terrorists.

The second reason stated by the FCC, about harming the companies involved, is, in fact, an ironic and honest description of the FCC today — which is little more than a virtual rubber stamp for the nation’s major telecommunications providers.

The FCC’s argument boils down to this: Truth hurts.

A customer who knows that a certain cell provider experiences significant service outages is less likely to sign up, which, of course, would “harm the companies involved.”

Yes, truth hurts. And the truth is that it’s time to show the FCC’s Martin and his toadies the door.

It took almost a century for the telephone to become a platform for doing things that Alexander Graham Bell never dreamed of when he uttered those history-making words, “Mr. Watson come here, I need you.”

But it’s taken a mere decade for Internet telephony to become the mechanism driving a myriad of applications that were unheard of not too long ago.

Most of the time we drive new technology by what we want to do with it. Recently, I allowed a new technology to drive me. And it was well worth it.

That technology, by start-up TeleNav of Santa Clara, CA is an application that — as someone who gets lost driving home — I’ve been waiting for a long, long time: A navigation system on a mobile phone. And like so many recent developments, it marries cell phone technology and VoIP.

Like on-board navigation and stand-alone GPS systems, TeleNav gives you audible turn-by-turn directions. It also provides am easy-to-read, full color 3-D map display. But TeleNav eliminates the extra gizmo — always a plus in my book. Directions are downloaded to your phone in realtime, so it doesn’t get out-of-date like OnStar. And it uses cellular data systems and a smart phone, so it doesn’t ring up a big air time bill.

It does some things that GPS devices don’t - like providing a gas station guide by price and restaurant lists by type. TeleNav can route you around accidents and roadwork and includes a pedestrian mode. The “yellow pages on your phone,” is how TeleNav Director of Communications Mary Beth Lowell describes it.

Right now, TeleNav is in an enviable position, sharing this market space with only one other player, Motorola’s VIAMOTO.

You can use TeleNav two ways. You can go to the company’s website and program your destination, which is downloaded to your phone. Or you get directions over the phone by speaking or typing the address.

TeleNav does all this far more inexpensively than other navigation systems — $9.99 a month plus the cell carrier’s data service. The application has run with Sprint Nextel service for a while and last week the company added Cingular — including the new iPAQ device — Boost Mobile and SouthernLINC Wireless. The application runs on any smart phone, including PDAs, and uses the GPS chip that is in most phones today.

For devices without a GPS chip, TeleNav sells a GPS add-on for $119. The company also offers NavTrack, an integrated system for fleet management that provides dispatching, tracking and reporting as well as real-time directions.

You simply download the application to the phone by making a call. “TeleNav is one of the most popular applications for Sprint Nextel users,” reports Ms. Lowell.

It all sounds great. But the devil, as they say, is in the details. So I’ve been taking TeleNav on a test drive for the last month.

The one thing that I worried about — moving out of range of a Sprint signal — only happened once. Not an issue, I decided.

But what I did have a continuous problem with was the system’s speech recognition. If you load the instructions online, this isn’t a problem. But my principal interest in TeleNav is as something I can use on the fly when I’m lost.

On my maiden voyage, instead of taking me a few blocks away in Santa Clara to my yoga class, TeleNav was all ready to navigate me to the town of Santa Clarita — about 400 miles south.

The way the voice menu works is that you tell TeleNav to “go back” if the place name or address isn’t correct. I found myself screaming, “go back” repeatedly in complete exasperation. The application also uses a lot of power, too, so be prepared with your charger.

After a few weeks, I was ready to say that TeleNav isn’t truly ready for prime time. That is, until I used it for a drive from the Southern Tier of New York State to northeastern Pennsylvania. It’s a drive that I have made many, many times over the past three decades.

It’s the drive I made as a college student, heading to my parents’ for holidays.

It’s the drive I made on a Wednesday morning in August 1981 when I was called at work with news that my father had died suddenly.

It’s the drive I made in 2002 when I was forced to acknowledge my mother’s cascading mental decline.

It’s the drive I made last July when my mother was dying. And the drive I made on my way back to California three weeks later, after her death.

So last week I decided to trust this fraught excursion to TeleNav, expecting confirmation of the route I had used for 35 years.

I was nothing short of astonished when the pleasant TeleNav voice told me to turn around and take another road.

At first I was ready to call the whole thing off. This thing is useless, I said to myself.

But then another impulse said, See where it takes you.

So I did, figuring I’d know if I was headed seriously wrong before I got too far off track.

It turned out that my intuition - unlike my sense of direction - was on track.

TeleNav drove me through Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains region. Perhaps not as well known as the Pocono or Lehigh Mountain regions, it’s an area of breath-taking vistas and picture-book rural farm towns. Even the region’s forlorn vacation destinations of yesteryear possess a certain charm.

It was the happiest trip I had made that way in many, many years. And, to make the whole thing sweeter, TeleNav took about 20 minutes off my trip.

Now, I could have gotten the same result from any other navigation system, including an old-fashioned road map — assuming I had enough spatial reasoning ability to read one correctly, which I don’t. But there’s a message here.

We hear a lot about how technology keeps us working 24/7 and militates against surprise and serendipity in our lives. But maybe that’s superficial - good for selling magazines and TV news shows, but one that doesn’t hold up if you think about it.

Like anything else — from the wheel to algebra to the printing press to the telephone — Internet technology is just one more tool in our portfolio of human-ness.

I’m sure that back in the 15th century there were many social scientists bemoaning the fact that the printing press took the “magic” and skill out of story-telling; failing to imagine a world where literally anybody, even English Language Learner George W. Bush, can read Hamlet anywhere, anytime.

More recently — last Wednesday, in fact — New York Times columnist Thomas Freidman updated the perenial complaint by describing a taxi ride where the driver was talking on his phone and watching a video, while the columnist was writing on his laptop and listening to an iPod. Technology, Friedman concluded, was hogging our attention and cutting off the human connection.

As I was reminded last week, technology isn’t just for doing things faster or smarter — or avoiding conversation with chatty cab drivers. It can just as easily be an avenue for the magic always waiting for us if we would just follow its prompting.

Sprint Nextel has a secret. You can use Sprint’s high speed wireless data service to make VoIP calls at a fraction of the cost of traditional cell phone calls. But the company isn’t going out of its way to tell you about it.

PeerMe hopes to change that with its new, free service that lets subscribers to Sprint’s mobile broadband make unlimited free VoIP calls between PeerMe users.

And PeerMe isn’t the only player promoting the cellphone as the center of the VoIP universe. This week Cambridge, MA-based iSkoot and UK-based Woize also announced free services for VoIP calling over cell networks.

PeerMe works on any Internet-enabled device from a PC to a mobile phone or PDA – just download the software from the company’s website. The company will also offer a low cost dial-out service, which will be rolled out in the next few weeks. Sprint’s mobile broadband service is $60/month for all-you-can-eat access.

It makes sense to piggyback on the device that’s already in everyone’s pocket.

“If you’re going to use something as your communication hub, you need to have it with you all the time,” says PeerMe founder and CEO Tom Lasater. That role is already filled by cellphones.

Building on the cellphone network also makes sense because WiFi isn’t really ready for prime time, Lassater contends.

Ubiquitous WiFi is “at least three years out,” he says. “Sprint has a few years’ head start.” With Sprint’s network, launched in 2005, subscribers can get high-speed Internet access anywhere. “It’s here, it’s now,” adds Lasater.

The cell phone industry business model is changing, according to Lasater. “The big break was Windows Mobile 5 [operating system for mobile devices],” he says. “This allows anybody to put any software on the mobile phones. Consumers can now download any software. Now you really do have a useful device in your hands.”

While cell carriers worry about cannibalizing their customer base with VoIP services, Lasater thinks they’re short-sighted. VoIP opens up whole new marketing opportunities for selling high-end devices and a one-stop shop for high speed Interent service.

“With unlimited broadband access, you can justify paying for the service,” he explains. “You can justify buying a high-end phone. There are lots of reasons why it would improve [carrier] business. The software is available, anyone can use it, so why not take advantage of it?”