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.

Digium advanced its make-it-easy-for-the-customer strategy with a SMB VoIP provider Bandwidth.com partnership announced today. Bottom line is that Bandwidth.com will be rolled into in the AsteriskGUI graphical user interface as a service provider option, making implementation even more turnkey. The two also plan to cooperate in developing new services.

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.

Raketu’s press release announcing its new peer-to-peer VoIP service is a sterling example of how not to write a press release headline.

It passed by me yesterday: “Raketu Now Offers Combined Features Of Skype And JaJah Tied To A Single RakOut Dial Out VoIP Account.” I confess, I yawned. Skype and JAJAH are interesting because they were first. More choices are nice, but they’re not necessarily news. If Marcelo hadn’t emailed me about it, I wouldn’t have taken a second look.

But I digress.

What’s interesting about Raketu is not even in the release; namely that Raketu offers Web-based converged communications that works on your computer and your smartphone. You don’t even have to install the Raketu desktop client.

It reminds me of something from the early days of the Web: a portal. Portals were supposed to be the single place where users connected to everything they wanted. So I might call Raketu a Web 2.0 communications portal.

Making phone calls is only the beginning — although the company consolidates the Skype and JAHJAH approaches nicely. You can also make conference calls with up to five people for free.

You can connect with Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, ICQ, Skype, Jabber and Google buddies without loading any of those clients. You can also conference across services and send offline messages. (This last one, I confess, perplexes me. Isn’t that called email?)

You can send emails and low-price SMS text messages from the RakWeb site to anyone on your contact list. You can also send them files.

And that’s just the communications piece.

Raketu also offers the framework for IP entertainment, including an integrated media player, online gaming, IPTV and Video on Demand. I say “framework” because there’s not much content; I doubt that the Czech outdoor channel on offer will draw too many viewers. Like kyte.tv, Raketu has incorporated social networking into the viewing experience.

The service also integrates RSS feeds and podcasts, and even a travel planner.

Raketu has a good concept. But it’s pretty obvious from the spotty website operation that this is still rough — and not just around the edges.

But it’s a promising development and one that encourages me that, someday soon, unifying communications won’t require changing or installing software or devices. It will just be a matter of signing up.

For more, the VoIP Service Blog has a detailed evaluation of Raketu’s service.

Postscript: So, how should Raketu have made its announcement? Here are a couple of suggestions:

Raketu Adds Web-Based VoIP — Building One-Stop Shop for VoIP, IM/SMS, Conferencing, Email, VoD, IPTV

New Web-based VoIP Makes Raketu an Express Route to Communications: VoIP, IM/SMS, Conferencing, Email, VoD, IPTV

When you’re the only national DSL network in the U.S. what do you do for your next act?

You “disintermediate” the copper wire. In plain English, you take it out of the equation. And the way you take it out is with fixed WiMax technology. That’s the idea right now at Covad, according to Director of Marketing Simon McIver.

The SMB market is ripe for a new connection, according to McIver. Small and mid-size businesses are “waking up” to the fact that consumer broadband services don’t cut it for business applications like POS systems, Web servers, or even office email.

“The problem with cable and DSL is that it’s a shared line.” That means that things may work smoothly at 9:00 a.m. when kids are in school, but slow down at 3:00 p.m. when they get out and hit the MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games).

A traditional solution is “a good old fashioned T1 line with 1.5 megabytes locked in,” explains McIver. “It’s consistent, it’s always there.” But for small businesses, it’s a prohibitively costly solution.

That’s where fixed WiMax comes in. Unlike WiFi, WiMax can deliver the assured bandwidth and higher reliability of a T1 with a lot less infrastructure. WiMax also has wider range and better coverage than WiFi — especially indoors.

“You have full independence for the last mile,” McIver says. “You don’t have to deal with a CLEC — you can set up a customer within hours. The on-premises antenna connects to a base station like a standard T1, but wirelessly.”

Businesses aren’t the only customers that will find Covad WiMax broadband attractive. “There are plenty of people who want a big pipe to the house,” McIver explains. “They don’t care how you deliver it. ”

But Covad doesn’t plan to sell directly to consumers. “We want to enable brands like Earthlink and AOL to be successful,” McIver adds. “Covad will continue to be the small business brand.

Covad is currently running a “pre-WiMax” version of its service in four metro areas: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Chicago. “Standards are being finalized and we expect the first true WiMax network in Q3 – Q4,” McIver explains.