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.

Everybody knows that Verizon won its patent suit against Vonage. But how many people understand the patents that were the basis of the case? Robert Green at Briefing.com has laid it all out in a helpful chart format describing each of the patents. Plus, a discussion of the how the court ruling is highly likely to have an impact on cable companies’ VoIP offerings. Here.

By 2010 46 million of us are going to be watching some kind of video on our phone, according to Infonetics. Here.

Skype released updated Macintosh software today, debuting a new call transfer feature that’s not available on Windows yet. Here.

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.

There are lots of services out there these days that let you make VoIP calls on your cell phone. But how about video IP calls? That’s what Latvian startup Tivi is showing at VON.

Founded by three high school buddies, Tivi’s SIP software client turns smart phones running Symbian and Windows Mobile into VoIP and IP video phones. The video client lets users make video calls from a mobile phone to a PC. Tivi also offers a free softphone client that can be downloaded from the company’s website.

Calls are carried over a 3G cellular network. The software also supports WiFi, provided the phone is dual mode.

Tivi sells their software to carriers, so don’t expect to see any Tivi-branded handsets. The company is also planning Linux and Mac versions of its softphone.

I passed an unmistakable milestone on the road to irrelevance the other day. One of my son’s friends’s paused as he passed our three-foot shelf of record albums and asked, “What are those?”

“Those are vinyl records,” I explained helpfully. “It’s how we listened to music when I was young.”

“Oh!” the sixteen year-old said, as if he had just penetrated the secrets of the Jurassic Age.

It underscored for me how the YouTube generation has a fundamentally different notion about how entertainment works.

When I was young, we played “records” on a “record player” located in someone’s house. For my son and his friends, entertainment comes to you on any device you happen to be using at the moment.

And the new frontier in mobile entertainment at the moment is video.

Now, there’s no shortage of players elbowing their way to the front of the line to deliver the entertainment-on-the-go that they’re sure you want. But just as the YouTube generation makes their own decisions about what they listen to and watch on the Internet, they’re unlikely to let Viacom or Sprint decide what video content they’re going to be watching on the phone.

That’s the thinking at mywaves of Sunnyvale, CA, which launched its free-form mobile video service last December. The company has brought together a diverse set of talents, including Naptser’s chief architect. Relying primarily on viral marketing for its growth, the company claims to be adding about 40,000 users a week around the world.

“What we are doing is becoming the mobile video company,” explains mywaves founder and CEO Rajeev Raman. “Anything that’s on the Web we want to make it possible to get it on your phone.”

The video industry is at a crossroads, according to Raman. “Record labels and studios are looking for ways to go direct to users. The new technology companies like Apple and Napster say, ‘users will come to us.’ Content sellers will want to do something themselves. Kids are consuming a new genre of videos: content that they create.”

Raman sees the opportunity in being the place where these paths converge on your mobile phone.

“The crowd that’s watching on the Web is the mobile crowd,” says Raman. “If they could get this content on the mobile phone, they would.”

The mywaves experience starts on the website where you create a profile and subscribe to the channels you want – there are about 20,000 currently. You can also use the “autochannels” search feature and let mywaves find content based on your interests and store it in your own custom channel. The service also lets you share your channels or keep them private.

You can choose from Web videos, RSS video podcast feeds, personal videos, popular viral clips, and content from more conventional outlets like Comedy Central, CNN and MTV.

When there’s new content in the channels you’re interested in, mywaves sends a text message to your phone. Click on the embedded URL and mywaves downloads the content and you watch it when you want to.

Unlike some other services, mywaves is carrier agnostic. The company’s “secret sauce” is the server that optimizes the content on the fly for your phone. “We offer businesses a way to reach users on the phone without having the carriers involved or building a technology infrastructure and expertise,” explains Raman.

The service is free. But you need a data service on your phone and you’re going to be charged for those text messages.

Since I have a member of the YouTube generation living in my house, I thought I would have him earn his electronic keep by evaluating mywaves. I’m sorry to tell the folks over there at mywaves headquarters that he wasn’t much excited.

He checked out the skateboarding content. “I’ve pretty much seen all of those videos,” was his judgment, although he perked up at the idea of having them on his phone.

Which brings us to another problem: minor but annoying usability glitches. The mechanism for sending the videos to your phone isn’t immediately evident. It took us a while to figure out that “take it on the go” means “send this to my phone.”

The other problem that ultimately stymied our evaluation was that my son couldn’t figure out what version Motorola Razr phone he had. We tried all the possibilities, but kept seeing error messages rather than skateboarding clips. After exhausting my son’s attention span, we left mywaves for another day.

Okay, maybe we’re slow. But this isn’t, after all, something targeting a technical audience.

However, I’m not going to knock it too hard because mywaves has only been out there a few months. And I can see some interesting business applications.

Employees can watch the company’s video “newsletter” while standing in lines. Technicians can have video instructions in front of them while they’re at customer calls and salesman can review the newest product updates when they’re sitting in an airport.

The mywaves model opens up a whole world of video ’snacking’ whether to amuse or inform yourself while you’re waiting at the dentist’s office. For example, one of mywave’s offerings is the CNN news roundup channel that provides a five-minute daily digest of world events. Far preferable to those year-old copies of Time.

So what’s Rajeev Raman’s favorite channel? “Hands down, my daughter’s channel, Nikki’s channel.”