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

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

European peer-to-peer IPTV network Babelgum launched its public beta. The angle here is full-screen, broadcast quality, personalized TV. TechDigest offers a hands-on review. Bottom line, right now the offerings are minor league.

Nokia is investing in Web video sharing site kyte.tv, joining Swisscom, German media company Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holzbrinck and Skype founder Niklas Zennström’s investment company Atomico Investment Holdings.

The number of websites offering video jumped this year from about 200 to over 300, according to a study by Baton Rouge, LA-based Rider Research, publisher of the digital media newsletter The Online Reporter. Quantity isn’t quality, of course. But where the audience is the quality will follow. Remember TV in the 1940s? There were probably plenty of media people then saying the poor quality pictures would never catch on.

Quick: The Apple iPhone is open to third party applicatiions? If you said “yes and no,” you’re right. Gizmodo thinks allowing third party “Web 2.0″ Apple iPhone applications — in other words, applications running via Safari — doesn’t make the much-hyped device open.

And BTW, now you can chat with AIM and MSN buddies via Gizmodo’s network.

SIP phone maker Snom’s North American visibility is going up with a new distribution agreement with GenTek.

Natural disasters these days tend be followed by a flurry of Satellite IP stories, which inevitably subside shortly after like a storm surge. Asevotech of Tampa, FL is taking aim at the as-yet unproven market potential of satellite IP communications with its Disaster Lease Program (DLP) for SMBs, giving these companies the disaster protection benefit of assured satellite IPO communications backup without the upfront cost. The key, for both customers and Asevotech’s business model, is that you buy it before you need it.

Apple iChat, the “next wave of VoIP?” I’m not sold, but Network World’s Greg Royal is and explains why here.

When you needed special equipment to do it, it was called video conferencing. When you did it on a futuristic gizmo with a handset and a dialpad, it was called video phone calling. Now that IP has made this a distinction without a difference, newly-launched ooVoo is calling it video conversation. Whatever you call it, ooVoo lets you do it for at a price that’s right: free. The service also offers video messaging and a directory that lets people ooVoo you from MySpace pages, websites, and emails. Currently the downloadable beta client is only available for Windows. Release of the Mac version is expected in a few weeks.

Hope on the horizon department: In the U.S. we might see personal broadband soon. DigitalBridge Communications is launching its BridgeMaxx WiMax service, with both fixed and mobile service. The only catch right now: it’s currently available only to 7,000 addresses in Rexberg Idaho. Cudos go to a forward-looking City for promoting the first U.S. commercial WiMax Internet service.

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.