As might be expected, even before the Apple iPhone hits retailer shelves, its sexy features are showing up on other handsets. Like visual voicemail. German company SimulScribe just announced a “downloadable visual voicemail application” — SimulSays Beta — for the BlackBerry 8800 series, BlackBerry Pearl, BlackBerry Curve and Windows Mobile. The service normally starts at $10 a month, but the beta is free. However, in its rush to get the news out, SimulScribe appears to have forgotten to put the info on the website.

Dual mode phones just might be crossing the chasm and T-Mobile may be positioning itself for a spot at the head of the pack. This week the company launched the T-Mobile(R) HotSpot @HomeSM service. And coming along for the ride is the Nokia 6086 dual mode phone, also announced today. At home and in hotspots, calls are made over the WiFi network. Leave the hotspot, and calls automatically go through T-Mobile’s GSM/GPRS/EDGE wireless network. The press release lets you infer that the handoff is seamless, but I’m dubious because it doesn’t say it directly.

And speaking of WiFi, Mountain View, CA-based startup WeFi is opening up the beta of its WiFi community. WeFi helps you find and connect to free WiFi hotspots as well as keeping track of keys for locked and for-fee services.

If your idea of meal planning is ordering Chinese takeout, this isn’t for you. But for those of us who have wished we could look up a recipe for an item that’s on sale, Allrecipe.com’s new mobile service is just the ticket. Just type “Mobile.Allrecipes.com” into the phone’s Web browser.

Packet8 is sweetening the pot for customers, especially Virtual Office business customers, with “digital courier service” from YouSendIt.com, that makes it easy to send very large files electronically. It’s designed for files like video that can’t be sent via email, but it also works well for sending photos and large documents. I use it to send audio files of interviews to the archivist at my local library, and can attest to the ease of use.

It had to happen: iPlayboy widget for your Apple iPhone. Now do you want to buy one?

Santa Monica-based WiFiMobile today debuted its Enterprise Solution, which marries selected Nokia phones with any SIP-compliant PBX. The software lets you use a mobile phones as a PBX extension and access the company’s WLAN for both data and telephony. More in the press release. Right now the software can be downloaded for free.

OceanLake Commerce’s memo mobile email service is now available in the US to Alltel, AT&T (Formerly Cingular), Sprint/Nextel, and Verizon Wireless customers. The service works on any Internet-enabled mobile phone and costs $6.99/month (plus your data service).

More than $1 billion will be spent on residential video phone services this year, according to a new report from Boonton, NJ-based Insight Research.

IBM and Nortel have paired up to deliver a VoIP package for the System i platform that targets 3Com’s System i combo. The new offering is aimed at 150-500 users.

Presence: Killer app for VoIP or the app that kills us? Network World’s Denise Donohue weighs in.

Had-to-look-twice department: Having read bedtime stories to small children in recent history, this headline from the Bagladeshi newspaper, The Weekly Blitz, caught my eye: Babar discloses Voip mystery. One wonders, is the beloved elephant Skyping his Parisian tailor to order a new green suit? Actually, the story is about unlicensed VoIP services run by corrupt officials that siphoned off revenues from the impoverished country’s government-run telecom services.

Voice-on-the-Go is endangering a species: that galvanizing stock figure of our times, the driver yakking on the cell phone. You’ve seen him, you may even be her. If so, Voice-On-The-Go wants to render you extinct.

The first time I waited behind a car with an AM I LATE vanity plate, watching its power-suited driver cradle her cell to her ear in the now familiar gesture, was also my first and only road rage incident. The second the light turned green, I goosed my horn, an act of automotive aggression unprecedented in thirty years of timid driving. I’m a nice person — really — but she brought something out in me I never suspected was there.

And not just in me but in legislatures. Hands-free and eyes-free driving laws prevail in over 50 countries—the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, India, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand—and the number of US states and cities includes New York, New Jersey, California and Washington DC. Many more states have legislation pending and recently, DWTM, Driving While Text Messaging, was banned.

The Toronto-based mobile voice solutions provider takes care of all that by taking your driving hands and eyes completely out of the picture. Voice-On-The-Go lets you receive calls and search your contacts to place calls — look officer, no cell phone!

Then you can listen to your e-mail in-box summary, delete the spam and messages from ex-wives, open the e-mails you want to hear, and compose your replies thoughtfully before deciding whether to send them or not — look, no BlackBerry! Oh, and because you can also review and add to your calendar, you can change that vanity plate to NEVERL8.

“Although we used some off-the-shelf things like Nuance,” says company president Arnison, “our implementation is unique. People call into a central hosted or ASP that ensures high recognition. It works for individual consumers, and there’s a secure full enterprise system for businesses as well.”

Since 2001, Voice-On-The-Go has worked out on many of Internet voice technology’s problematic aspects — difficult voice recognition, for example — and on making their products extremely user-friendly.

Voice-on-the-Go’s secret sauce is its use of technology that enables rich applications. “It has rich techniques for making perfect connections on voice calls very fast even if the user has 10,000 e-mails or contacts,” according to Arnison.

For the tech-at-heart, these include VXML2.0, which enables very rich applications with context jumping, inlying and external grammars, and ECMA scripts. From an application point of view, VXML provides realtime access to corporate e-mail systems and to PIMs.

Hooking up requires no voice training or special hardware or software downloads. You just use a local access number in North America. And because of its two billion-plus global market, it can talk to you in English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and German, not to mention it uses for the physically disabled and visually impaired. Right now, they’re offering a thirty-day free trial.

What’s more to the betterment of life as we know it, however, is that you can use it without drawing the attention of the law or the random hatred of people who see you. You’ll just look like any other person talking to himself in the car.

http://www.voiceonthego.com

Televolution’s PhoneGnome has come a long way since it was introduced nearly two years ago.

Now company founder David Beckmeyer is aiming to be the “eBay for voice applications” by opening the platform to developers through Web Services APIs and distribution through the PhoneGnome website. Think of it as a voice application bazaar.

“People keep saying they want to build these Web 2.0 applications,” says Beckmeyer. “Now they have the platform. Developers can get feedback from hundreds of customers. We have an iterative development process and a platform that makes it easy to do. With a modest investment, you can get real world feedback.”

Beckmeyer knows what he’s talking about. Back in the early 1990s he co-founded Earthlink and he’s looking to reproduce that model.

“Who would have thought of most of the cool things [Internet applications] in 1992,” he says. “It didn’t take too many resources to make a new Internet application.”

The PhoneGnome bazaar lets users select services they want — for example, a PhoneGnome plug-in for Skype or IOTUM’s relevance call screening — and activate them directly from the PhoneGnome site. Some services are free, others have a fee. But you can pay for them all through the PhoneGnome site.

Another area of focus for Beckmeyer is taking PhoneGnome mobile, delivering a unified communications experience to mobile devices from the PhoneGnome platform. A downloadable Java client synchs up a smartphone with your PhoneGnome account and downloads your phonebook to the phone.

“It will be taking a prominent position in the PhoneGnome messaging and website, where PhoneGnome for the mobile phone becomes the focus prospectively,” says Beckmeyer, “including pure mobile and fixed/mobile convergence applications and solutions.”

Using PhoneGnome’s mobile incarnation, you simply make calls from your cell phone and they appear to be coming from your home or office phone. Likewise, inbound calls can ring through to the mobile phone transparently. The service will also work with a “dumb” mobile phone, but it’s a two-stage process.

The ultimate, however, are the dual mode phones coming on the market, like the Nokia N95. “Those will offer full VoIP capability,” says Beckmeyer. He’s also promoting mobile PhoneGnome as a minute-saving solution for people who’ve decided to completely cut the phone company cord and use mobile phones as their home phones.

“The platform is key,” says Beckmeyer. “I’m not smart enough to think of all those applications.” I think he underestimates himself.

You can try out a preliminary versions of mobile PhoneGnome here.

Unified communications just got more interesting today. Mill Valley, CA-based CommuniGate today launched the Pronto! client interface, based on Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex 2. Targeting both businesses and service providers, Pronto! unifies all Internet communications — from e-mail and IM, to chat, rich media, and groupware — in a single client interface. Later today I’m going to get a demo. More to follow.

VoIP pioneer Packet8 is also getting on the unified communications train, integrating Microsoft Outlook into its Virtual Office hosted PBX.

Shoretel is making it easier for customers to buy with its no-down, 100 percent financing Managed Services Program. Costs stay fixed for 10 years.

No download, no software, no computer. That’s the promise of Rebtel’s new mobile phone VoIP calling service. Try the beta here.

And speaking of mobile VoIP, Mark Ismach recently filed a patent for a method of allowing any mobile phone to place VOIP calls directly. Back in the 1990s, Ismach registered the trademark BIOS (basic input/output system). At the time, manufacturer Phoenix Technologies’ BIOS systems were used in just about every computer made and Phoenix was forced to remove the word “BIOS” from its products. The effect of Ismach’s latest move could be chilling for the mobile VoIP market.

From the lemonade-from-lemons department: Milford, CT telecom equipment company AbleComm has been sitting on a warehouse full of old rotary phones for the past 30 years. Now retro is in and the company is doing a land office business in “New Old Stock” phones, refurbished phones, and reproductions of Western Electric phones from the 1930s through the 1960s. I’m getting a red rotary dial model for my kitchen — the same one my in-laws got in 1955.