RTX is rolling out a new cordless Skype phone that doesn't require a user to be physically connected to a PC to make a VoIP call.

The DUALphone 4088 simply requires a broadband connection to its base station in order to make Skype calls.

The Danish company said its DUALphone 4088 simply requires a broadband connection to its base station in order to make Skype calls free of charge to other Skype users or have the choice of conventional paid-for landline calls worldwide.

The company's CEO, Jesper Mailind, said the phone "offers consumers a unique way to use Skype."

"We believe there is a growing demand for dual phones from the existing 170 million Skype account holders," he said, adding that the phone also will provide a business opportunity for resellers.

Telecom market research firm TeleGeography recently said international use of Skype was increasing, growing 48 percent in 2011, to 145 billion minutes.

The RTX features a color TFT screen and uses of high definition audio. The phone system can switch between two separate Skype accounts and can be extended to four handsets per household. Standard features including call waiting, voicemail and a phone contact list of 200 numbers that have been enhanced by software to show the Skype status of the user and all contacts.

For more:
- see this release

Related articles:
Skype's international use growing
Research: Home video calling is set to boom; better technology is making it happen
Skype to integrate with Windows Phone 'soon...' maybe

• "Cell phone as an extension": The snom ONE allows cell phones to act as truly integrated extensions, incorporating call transfers, conferencing, internal extension dialling and other features.
• Broad SIP client support: The snom ONE now supports mobile SIP clients, running on popular platforms such as Android and the iPhone.
• Enhanced management features: The web-based interface has been enhanced to make administering the system even easier and more productive.
• Enhanced remote phone security: snom ONE provides WAN-based authentication for plug and play with snom 7xx and snom 8xx series phones, alleviating the need for users to enter password information and increasing simplicity and security for remote workers.
• Plug and play deployment: The snom ONE is optimized for all snom phones, enabling plug-and-play deployment and provisioning for the snom 3xx, snom 8xx and newly released snom 7xx series desktop phones, as well as other endpoints, including the snom M9 DECT phone, the snom PA1 public address system and the snom MeetingPoint conference phone.
• Virtual appliance: snom ONE is available as virtual appliances for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V via a .vhd file. This addresses the demand for hardware failover without dropping calls.
• Enhanced Software Update Mechanism: The system can be updated easily via the web interface, alleviating the need to connect to the operating system to perform upgrades.

If you haven't read pal Martin Geddes latest post on the Future of Communications entitled Peak Telecom, you are missing something that is likely either something you have likely said, thought, heard someone say in private or really wished you had. It's a stunningly brilliant piece of writing that leads you to wonder, "what is Martin going to say next" as you read through it.

This post is every bit as important as Alec Saunders 2005 post entitled The Voice 2.0 Manifesto in my opinion as far as laying things out or the famed Pulver Purple Minutes post. It is worthy of your time as it may impact your work or livelihood.

So everyone knows it was Martin who first suggested me and my agency to Nokia back in 2005 to help them decipher "social media" long before many knew what "social media" and blogging was really all about. That led to my development of the Nokia Blogger Relations program, and in turn gave birth to Nokia's Social Media efforts, something I'm now finally allowed to admit after getting permission recently.

It was Martin's clear cut thinking back then that foresaw the changing landscape of how media would impact the mobile world. Now in his post he's laid it all out pinpointing where the changes are coming from, and further pinning the operators into the dumb pipe corner.

I just learned that Fonality, a company that has been very silent and off the radar for months has named a new CEO. He David Scult and came from Microsoft, where he served as GM, of Office 365, Microsoft's cloud implementation of it's market leading productivity suite.

Fonality seems to be taking a page out of so many other telcos and making a claim to embrace the cloud, much like client  Telesphere which really has with their approach to overall cloud based unified communications.

Image via CrunchBase

I was around just after Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet created and launched GrandCentral, which became post acquistion by Google, GoogleVoice. We worked with the two and helped make it a known qualtity, and to this day, my GV number is the number that makes me so easily reachable. But in over four years since Google snagged the service, not much has really happened on the services side, while most of the work has been done to keep it scaling and integrating into the Google way of doing things.

Basically, I have no complaints, as the service works. Every once in a while mobile calls sound bad, as latency seems to occur, especially when both parties are using Google Voice, but a lot of that is the carriers capacity issues, not GVs.

But one area they have not moved very quickly is being "open" and working with other services that could make GoogleVoice even more a part of more people's lives. Over at ZDNet, Jason Perlow has brought up faxing as a service he'd like to see. I know a few more, and if Google Voice did add them, I'd be able to eliminate a few other services. 

Image via CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

A rumor is making the rounds about Microsoft buying Nokia and long time mobile industry watchers over at the Yankee Group are biting. 

To be fully transparent, as a former agency to Nokia (I devised and my agency managed their groundbreaking and highly successful Nokia Blogger Relations program in 2005 and ran it through 2009) I was well aware of their strengths--solid product design, lower cost of manufacturing, widescale distribution around the world and weaknesses, poor USA distribution, an overly matixed management style, inherently corporate vs. country rivalries and a silo'd approach to management and implementation.

The reason we succeeded was our mandate came from outside the normal chain of command with the original intent of selling smartphones to consumers well before something called the iPhone came along. The goal, which helped build non-carrier specific oriented distribution worked and our work did just that, something the Washington Post recognized.

Fast forward. Nokia went into a tizzy about 2010. Major reorgs, defections, departures of leaders. A crappy economy world wide and of course Android and Apple. At the same time, Windows Mobile is going nowhere fast. Windows staunchest supporters HTC, Dell, Motorola all now are Android Fan Boys (for a bit) and HP buys Palm. MSFT is left without real handset partners and the Windows Mobile App Market, despite it's size isn't even thought of when you talk about developer programs.

So. Why does Microsoft want Nokia? To design and build handsets for the OEMs. Microsoft is a licensing company. They don't really "retail" anything. They sell through channels and are really bolstering their efforts with the big mobile operators around the globe, starting here in the USA with AT&T and Verizon, while working in Europe and Latin America with the likes of DT, Vodafone, Telefonica, Orange before going wider later in 2012. That would coincide with the rumor Yankee Group is running with.

By taking on Nokia as an asset, Microsoft can buy them with cash sitting offshore. With the Euro declining it becomes a cheaper buy on a dollars basis. That asset then becomes a design (i.e. reference designs for the OEMs), manufacturing (again for the OEMs) and technology (software for the OEMs) division, but none of the handsets will say Nokia or Microsoft. They become ultimately, DELL, HP, HTC, ASUS, SAMSUNG, etc. Add in the carriers who a) hate Apple - only because Apple beat them six ways to Sunday and b) don't trust Google at all-feeling that Google looks at them (the mobile operators) as the next layer of the dumb pipe. On the other hand, Microsoft looks at them the other way. Sell MSFT Kinnects, XBoxes, Live365 to consumers, more of Lync, Exchange, servers, SQL to the Enterprise, connect those OEM'd laptops, tablets (there will be a bunch shown at CES) running Windows 8, the same version of an OS that will be tweaked to work on smartphones and tablets and you have a full eco-system.

By buying the Nokia's handset manufacturing and distribution business Microsoft gets a global powerhouse that when combined with their sales teams, and an already installed customer base at enterprise and SMB, you have a very strong combination for growth.

On the day that Bloomberg reports client CounterPath announcing video being added to Bria for the iPhone, Slashgear is reporting the demise of Cisco's Umi. Umi was going to be a $600 set up that would deliver Telepresence.

There didn't seem to be a lot of takers for Umi, as single purpose hardware is pretty much on the decline due to the growth of apps on tablets like the iPad and Android. Based on testing I've done in the beta trial, the Bria for iPhone client can provide high quality audio and video on the go, which is why this is SIP standards based is so timely. 

Reports are however swirling that Cisco, which acquired Tandberg a few years ago, will also be moving more deeply into the video softphone market with a updated verison of Movi and possible expansion into the iOS and Android markets. Polycom has also previously announced, RealPresence, their software for the iPad, and Android that connects to their video conferencing hardware. 

Like Umi was, and Movi is, the Polycom solutions are geared to work with primarily each companies branded platforms much the same way that Vidyo's Mobile software for iPhones and iPads does, albeit in a  cloud server environment. Bria, on the other hand works with SIP based providers.

I've been testing the iPhone client for a few weeks and have been making calls into client Vidtel's MeetMe cloud managed conferencing bridge to talk to multiple people, and point to point calls using OnSip, fiding the portable experience to be a worthy rival to a Cisco E20  which I use when at my desk. The MeetMe service is the result of former Broadsoft VP of Marketing Scott Wharton's foresight. Wharton, looked at the video conferencing market and decided there was a better way to do things and along with his wife, Mariette Johnson Wharton launched Meet Me. The standards based video bridge now provides me with the opportunity to have people on my team, and clients as well as friends, connect via Skype, GoogleTalk, Bria on Mac's and PCs as well as room and desk based hardware from Polycom, Lifesize and Cisco, without any hassle. This agnostic, come one, come all approach, when combined with the portability of a mobile client makes life on the go for people like me far more video friendly. 

Given one of my New Year's resolutions is to see more friends and clients face to face, while another is to travel less, video calling and video conferencing is helping me keep that resolution as I'm seeing video as the new voice.

E911 for emergency calls and VoIP have had a love/hate relatiobship for many years, but as Intenet based calling becomes more and more the norm, and as LTE will bring IP based calling (i.e. VoIP) to the mobile world for real, E911 and the problems associated with it will come to the forefront more and more.

Today's Government Technology piece on the subject provides good background and helps build the case for more migration to IP based E911. In my view the PSAP technology has to go IP. When that happens, expect Skype to become E911 capable.

Image via Wikipedia

The Japanese are very inventive and now they're dispensing WiFi via vending machines. And the price, well it's free. 

What this really is all about is the data in the machines being sent back to the distribution centers over an Internet connection, but the machine at the location can do more than dispense candy, soda or other items. Give how companies like Best Buy have installed vending machines in airports this could be a meaningful proposition to get people closer to them.