When I made those initial Skype for iPhone calls last weekend, not only did I gain a quick appreciation of the voice quality but I also realized that the forthcoming multi-tasking feature of iPhone OS4 could offer new possibilities. Yes, multi-tasking would facilitate Skype’s Instant Messaging in an “always-on” mode but there could also be an even richer experience for business users.  Having attended eComm 2010 a couple of months ago, I recalled that Ringio, who introduced their offering at that event, may have that business-savvy application.

Basically think of Ringio as providing a “lite” customer relationship manager for businesses relying heavily on mobile communications. When you either call a contact or receive a call from a “known” contact, Ringio can bring up contextual information that provides background information that may assist both your conversation and team productivity. In fact, they recently demonstrated this concept with their announcement of Ringio Mobile PBX for Android. Fellow Voyces.com blogger Larry Lisser positions Ringio in All hail the Mobile PBX. Ringio calls it like it is:

To be clear, Ringio’s not expecting you to have desk phone. The focus of their innovation is to drive context into phone conversations, leveraging the information we already store about a given inbound caller (ie. when they called last, who they spoke to, what they bought last, when they were last served, and so on). Ringio is one amongst many moving quickly to bring far more context, than simply Caller ID, to a phone call.

With its aggregation of background notes, conversation outcomes, voice mail messages, online presence status and call logs, Ringio appears to bring elements of enterprise level computer-telephone integration to the small business entrepreneur. While only launched six weeks ago, according to a recent interview with Ringio CEO Sam Aparicio, they are already gaining traction with consultants as well as small business sales and tech support teams. Joining Google Market Place, with integration into Google Contacts and GMail, certainly assists in building awareness.

Sam went on to explain that Ringio can bring a unique form of team building and collaboration for a small business. When job descriptions and responsibilities can have a lot of gray areas as the business builds its revenues and customer base and any team member could be answering the phones, with Ringio any member answering a contact’s call can readily be aware of previous conversations with other team members.

While they have delivered an application for Android, Ringio needs to consider offering not only an iPhone application, potentially supporting Skype for iPhone (and iPad?), but also a BlackBerry Super App to support the largest North American business smartphone vendor today.

Here’s the other challenge for these applications – whether it’s the iPhone, BlackBerry or one of many Android offerings, holding the phone up to the ear of course makes it impossible to see this information during a voice conversation. Aside from using the speakerphone mode, would this be an ideal application for having a full headset (mic plus speakers) for the various smartphones?

Bottom line: Ringio should provide a good gage on how readily the Voice 2.0 Manifesto, with its focus on “applications as the value creators”, will be implemented into the mobile smartphone market space. Where generating awareness can be a larger challenge than delivering the appropriate technology, users in the broad small business market space need to see user interfaces and to have user experiences that encourage adoption. Calling a product a mobile PBX and actually delivering with a broadly accepted solution is the execution challenge for Ringio.

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Since its version 1.0 launch in late 2007, PamFax has provided an easy-to-use web-based fax service, that allows you to send faxes worldwide without any hardware requirements. Initially a fax sending service, PamFax 2.0 introduced features such as a Windows print driver, support for Mac and Linux and inbound faxing to a local number in your area code in 25 countries.

Over the past week Scendix, producer of the cloud-based PamFax service launched PamFax 3.0 with a focus on improving delivery speed, scalability, robustness and access. But to meet these goals they had to start over from scratch, building a newly architected back end that also incorporated new hardware to meet the growing demand for the service.

New features include:

• Faster fax delivery – in my recent experience, the new service was delivering faxes in one to three minutes as opposed to 15 to 30 minutes under the previous setup
• More registration/login options: Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn and several others
• Two plans for fax-in numbers:
  • Basic: provides fax-in number for 12 months that allows you to receive an unlimited number of faxes
  • Professional: provides fax-in number for twelve months, 20 fax pages to Zone 1 recipients per month and 33% discount for additional pages, unlimited storage of send and received faxes and “My Company” PamFax Manager to sign up employees and delegate PamFax credits as well as report on company fax activities.
• Three free fax pages upon sign-up to check out the service
• Every new registrant will receive a free Basic Plan for three months, including a fax-in number
• Free faxing from PamFax to a PamFax fax-in number.
• PamFax API’s – allows you to fully embed the PamFax functionality easily and quickly into your application or device

PamFax continues to offer:

• A simple, straight forward five or six step process for sending a fax
• Fax from a Windows/Mac/Linux client or online via a web browser
• Operation from any web browser worldwide with no additional hardware requirement.
• A portal to manage your fax activity
• Fax status messages to e-mail, SMS and/or Skype chat
• No minimum commitments
• Support for over 100 file formats
• Payment either pay-as-you-go or via PamFax Credit packs
• No contracts or ongoing obligations

Often my posts on PamFax bring up the question of “who’s using faxes today”? With various alternatives for exchanging documents electronically, one would think that faxing is becoming passé. However, with billions of fax machines still attached to phone lines and the ongoing need for “recognized originals”, such as contract execution signatures, Scendix reports that their monthly page volumes continues to grow at a significant pace. And, were the market not still a significant one, Scendix would not have invested their resources since last summer in the  very extensive development of the PamFax 3.0 platform.

Yet, with PamFax, fax activity can become paperless and “totally green”. Sending documents involves simply attaching a document (in over 100 formats) during the fax set up process unless it is one that has to be scanned in. While there are options for printing received faxes, they can also simply be read on the user’s PamFax portal and printed only when absolutely necessary.

The Scendix team has prepared an “office drama” introductory video about how PamFax brings relief to the frustrations of faxing:

An introduction to PamFax from PamFax on Vimeo.

Voice On The Web posts about PamFax

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Skype has always been challenged with respect to making its growing feature set available on the most popular operating systems: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The major ongoing complaint from Skype users has been features on a new release for one OS that don’t appear on the other OS’s clients that may not be updated for up to a year later. With respect to Skype’s developer platform, a major complaint of third party developers has been the lack of any web services tools to embed Skype into web-based applications.

But maybe Scendix, publisher of PamFax and Pamela, is showing us how to make applications OS-agnostic such that all versions of an application get new features concurrently.

Since its launch in December 2007, although it was not obvious to the end users at the time, PamFax has been largely a web-based application, starting with PamFax for Windows. For the next sixteen months, the Scendix PamFax team worked not only to release PamFax 2.0 but also put resources into building a more robust back end, adding support of Fax-in numbers in 26 countries and extending their OS support to make available PamFax for Mac OS X. And subsequent upgrades have made it a more robust, lower cost and multi-lingual service.

Earlier this week Scendix announced the release of PamFax for Linux, bringing low cost, worldwide faxing to all those rabid Linux users who espouse the virtues of a very robust, yet open and feature rich operating system. In so doing, Scendix has, in practice, demonstrated how to make an application OS-agnostic, essentially by building a single website dedicated to the application.

So what did Scendix need to do to make their application run under Linux? After all, they had a core web-based engine supporting the entire feature set. Three steps:

• Build an installer package for each version of Linux supported
• test PamFax’s operation in each operating system environment, and
• perform integration with Skype for Linux (there is an option to send notifications to a Skype chat session)

But there was no need to build a new application or backend – as shown on the left, even the user interface is the same. Its web-services architecture simply needed the modifications described above. Bottom line: PamFax is basically an OS-agnostic “Software as a Service” (“SaaS”) application. And limited developer resources are required to migrate support between OS’s. Effectively the operating system becomes secondary to the more universal web browser.

As their next step, the experience of bringing PamFax to this level has led Scendix to start work on PamFax 3.0, due for release later this spring. The major change here will be to migrate the PamFax web-based infrastructure to an API-based architecture such that PamFax can be readily embedded into third party applications – for instance, a WordPress plug-in that puts a “Fax This” icon on a web page would be one such potential application.

Bottom line: As we await Skype’s new developer platform, PamFax serves as a proxy for demonstrating why a web-services architecture would be an ideal transformation into providing Skype client access not only from Skype-specific clients but also from Skype embedded into a third party’s offering that incorporates Skype access without the need for opening a separate Skype client. In other words, another key link towards building “Skype Everywhere”.

Note: Skype CEO Josh Silverman talks about this topic towards the end of the first half of our recent CES conversation.

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Last fall Phil Wolff at Skype Journal mused on the topic of “Why Collaboration is Strategic for Skype”. His conclusion – collaboration is a competitive edge:

Skype could advance the best collaboration practices and technology. And with Skype’s distribution (one billion accounts by 2013), could easily become the tool of choice for producing results, enjoying your job, and building economic security.

While I am not holding out any hope for the full collaboration amongst Skype, Facebook, MySpace and other social networking platforms that many would like to see, I have long seen the potential for a product that supports Skype voice, chat and video conversations, presence, persistent file transfer and document management along with desktop or screen sharing – all managed from a single client. Of course with any collaboration a degree of enhanced Contact management also helps simplify a worker’s daily activities.

My original exposure to online collaboration goes back to my Quarterdeck days when they had developed VoIP software and whiteboarding services. (The latter later became the foundation technology for Webex.) In the early 2000’s I did some work with a desktop sharing service; more recently, over my four years of covering Skype, I have seen a few collaboration services come and go. Unyte has become integrated into IBM’s LotusLive while a couple of Skype-enabled offerings have gone out of business (not for lack of support from Skype). Citrix “Go To” services (Go To Meeting, Go To Assist) have become popular collaboration services at $49.95 per month per host (in fact, last year Citrix Online acquired HiDef Conferencing to have a consistent audio component for these services).

Yet, business’s appetites for collaboration services continues to grow, probably accelerated by not only the cost of travel but also the security issues surrounding air travel today. And they are certainly looking at cost versus value-add in the feature set as one component of their decision making.

A year ago January InnerPass launched their collaboration offering that integrated Skype with basic business-class hosted document management services targeted at business and work teams. In one sense InnerPass could be considered a persistent version of Skype’s file transfer feature; recipient users do not have to be present when files are added, modified or downloaded. They can readily be accessed at any time by any of the designated participants in a Room. The service provides more value-add through the ability to manage multi-party team calls via Skype and/or the PSTN complemented by the ready availability of the team’s documents during the call.

The recently launched InnerPass 2.1 expanded on these services with:

• a new user interface that improves navigation, especially when it comes to working with document “rooms”, their associated user groups and screen sharing
• contact import integration with Skype, Outlook and 50 other services such as GMail, Hotmail, LinkedIn and MySpace.
• call scheduling and management, incorporating the ability to access a multi-party conference call via Skype or a conference bridge

But the launch of InnerPass 2.0 last fall appears to have accelerated growth of the user base; last week InnerPass passed above the 2 million downloads mark, about one year after launching their service. While initially attracting many downloads via the Skype Extras program, viral adoption as users invite participants into rooms and meetings now has taken over as the leading source of new users.

While there is a free “Personal” service, any serious user will easily pass its 2 room, 5 guests per room limit; this service basically serves as a trial offering. In fact, I purchased a $4.95 per month Professional plan some time ago and quickly ran my usage up to its limits. As result any serious user should expect to quickly get to the $14.95 per month Business plan where business teams have more flexibility for both managing and operating both their dynamic and ongoing collaboration activities.

Bottom line: InnerPass provides a low cost collaboration service for work teams who need to be persistently in contact across team members via shared documents, text chat and voice. Definitely a tool to consider when it comes to increasing team productivity while keeping sharing costs under control.

Click here to download InnerPass for either Windows or Mac.

While the FREETALK Connect all encompassing PBX announced at IT Expo last Wednesday changes the economics of small business communications, it also provides a platform around which third party applications can readily be built and integrated.

Thursday saw the announcement of the FREETALK Connect Alliance, comprising thirteen charter members plus FREETALK that covers applications from conference calling to communications enhanced business processes.

Charter members include:

• AbbeyNet/Sitofono (Italy)
• Cloudvox (USA)
• FlatPlanet Phone Company (Israel)
• FREETALK (Spain)
• IfByPhone (USA)
• In Store Solutions (Hong Kong)
• Iotum/Calliflower (Canada)
• Jazinga (Canada)
• Skype (Luxembourg)
• Tatung (Taiwan)
• Thomas Howe’s Light and Electric (USA)
• Voxeo (US)
• Voxygen (UK)
• Voxbone (Belgium)

What stands out amongst all these members is their previous experience either contributing to, or developing, applications envisioned by Alec Saunders’ Voice 2.0 Manifesto more than three years ago. IVR infrastructure, conference calling, worldwide DID number provisioning, voice broadcasting and other hosted services are amongst the strengths brought into the consortium. FREETALK is continuing to recruit additional members whose bottom line is to deliver innovative applications that deliver new business opportunities to their customers.

Expect to see an entire ecosystem of products evolve around the FREETALK Connect with its inherent support of Asterisk, SIP, Skype and Skype for SIP working with the members’ existing API sets.

Full disclosure: In Store Solutions, producer of the FREETALK line of Skype hardware, has become a client of Denali InterConneXions, publisher of Voice On The Web, building on the author’s previous business development experience with establishing partnerships that can assist with the promotion of a primary vendor’s offerings. A more complete statement will follow shortly.

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Since its launch about two years ago, I have blogged several times about iotum’s CalliFlower Conference Calling service. More significantly I have used it for several conference calls of up to 25 people, including a couple that ran for over two hours. While permitting up to several hundred participants into a conference call, Calliflower’s primary unique feature is the “portal” created for each call along with the long term archiving of a call and its associated “portal”. Other features include:

• access via the PSTN in over 100 cities in 30 countries (using phone numbers supplied by Voxbone)
• ability to display (and share) documents supporting the conference call’s agenda
• a common chat window, often used to share URL’s, provide information complementary to the primary discussion or even ensure all participants have correct spellings of key words used in the discussion
• a complete service that supports the entire conference call process from initial invitations to the final archiving of the call
• an iPhone client for setting up and accessing a CalliFlower session
• sessions can be either private requiring invitations or public; the archived content of public sessions is searchable

Today iotum has announced the addition of Skype as a way to access Calliflower conference calls; from the press release:

Previously, participants could only dial into Calliflower conferences through PSTN access numbers, potentially incurring local charges.  In regions or countries where no such access numbers are available, customers would incur long-distance and even international charges, or use up Skype-out minutes calling access numbers overseas.  Now callers can access Calliflower through a Skype ID – CalliflowerSkype – or via a web button in the Calliflower UI, overcoming this disadvantage.

“We’ve had many requests from potential Calliflower customers who had no local access numbers, especially from  parts of Africa, India, China and the Middle East,” said Alec Saunders, iotum CEO. “Now, as long as they have Skype, that doesn’t matter anymore.”

In addition, users gain from the better audio quality they will enjoy through direct Skype access¹, as well as from all the visual information, documents and presentations that are shared through Calliflower’s interactive dashboard. These tools go a long way toward improving understanding on international conference calls.

Available on PC, Mac and iPhone, Calliflower makes organizing and participating in multi-party calls simple and engaging.  It allows participants to see the status of other callers and raise hands to request the floor, while also providing interactive chat, document sharing, intuitive conference controls, call recording, invitations and reminders, integration with calendars, and more.

On your initial access to a CalliFlower call you will need to add CalliFlowerSkype as a Skype Contact. But then recall that Skype allows you the option of using your Skype Online number or a designated mobile phone number as your caller ID for SkypeOut calls. When accessing a CalliFlower conference call on Skype, CalliFlower will look at your callerID in place of entering a PIN number to provide authentication for your access. iotum is looking at adding the ability to use your SkypeID as a participant identifier.

As with access in over 30 countries via the PSTN, Skype Access in CalliFlower is included in the monthly Premium service with a monthly charge of $50 for the first two moderators or organizers within a company and $25 per additional organizer.

Bottom line: Skype Access opens up lower cost access for participation in a CalliFlower conference call in every country where Skype is available. Incorporation of Skype access also fits into Skype’s “Skype Everywhere” goal. In this case calls can be accessed not only via Skype on a PC but also from any Skype offering on a mobile platform. This is enhanced for iPhone users where they will also find an iPhone client for setting up and managing a CalliFlower conference call.

¹I asked iotum CEO Alec Saunders to clarify the statement re improved auido quality; his response:

1. Better quality hardware. Skype users tend to be using better quality equipment than POTS callers.  In particular most PC headsets have a better microphone than the cheap microphones in telephone handsets.
2. 2. Fewer transcoding losses. Internally, Calliflower is VoIP.  When a user calls Calliflower from the PSTN, those calls transit a media gateway where the media is transcoded and presented as G.711.  Prior to the direct connection we’ve initiated, media coming from Skype would be transcoded at least twice – from Skype to the PSTN, and then PSTN to G.711.  The result was a noticeable degradation in quality.  Now Skype presents the media to us directly as G.711.

Other posts:

Check out Tom Keating’s post over at his VoIP and Gadgets blog on TMCNet where he interviews iotum CEO Alec Saunders about how CalliFlower implemented its Skype access via Skype for SIP, involving Skype for SIP’s addition of IP address authentication.

Full disclosure: the author has followed the evolution of CalliFlower over its three year development process, and was a frequent participant in iotum’s SquawkBox calls where not only did we discuss technology news of the day but also contributed ideas and suggestions for improvements and enhancements to the CalliFlower service. You can access the archive of the SquawkBox call discussing the FREETALK Everyman headset at the time of its launch here.

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It’s almost two years since the launch of PamFax as a fax sending service that allows anyone with a PC and an Internet connection to send faxes to any fax terminal worldwide at low per page rates. With a simple fax setup and no subscription requirements, PamFax has become a very popular and robust PC-based communications service delivering documents worldwide. They like to call it “no strings attached faxing”. Over time we have seen:

• addition of PamFax inbound numbers in 28 countries
• implementation of Mac support
• participation in McAfee Secure Sites program
• improvements to the PamFax portal that records and reports PamFax activity
• reduced pricing (as well as bringing several countries into the lowest level “Zone 1”)
• overall performance and stability improvements
• a distribution partnership with Fusion Network Services in Japan
• seamless integration of the PamFax portal into FaceBook and Salesforce.com

At the beginning of December PamFax introduced major upgrades to both the server and the thin client resulting in a significant improvement in both the responsiveness of the client and the speed with which faxes could be sent from the PamFax client. While some improvements are visible via the PamFax client, most of them are transparent to the user as they involve changes to the backend infrastructure critical to the PamFax operation.

However, as many businesses have adopted PamFax, a need has arisen for a Business Control  Panel to facilitate faxing within a business operation. Introduced with this latest upgrade, the PamFax Business Control Panel allows a business to use one central PamFax fax-in number company-wide by giving selected and/or all people in the BCP group access to the inbox. Effectively a company or business unit can replace its fax machine (and the associated overhead of ink and paper) with a “cloud-based” fax service that allows any employee to send and view faxes to/from anywhere worldwide.

In a world where one would think that faxes are dying off, the growth and acceptance of PamFax is demonstrating that (i) users want an easy way to send a fax and (ii) there are hard copy document exchange applications, such as in legal activities and real estate, where faxes are still critical to business operations. It is their ongoing increase in usage volumes that has driven Scendix, publishers of PamFax, to put additional resources into improving the overall user faxing experience. As an example, while currently available for Windows and Mac PC’s, expect to see a Linux client in the near future.

Previous Posts:

• PamFax Evolves: Building a World Class Service Offering
• PamFax 2.0: An Obligation-Free On Demand Fax Service on Your PC
• PamFax – Adding Click-to-Fax
• PamFax Receive Skype Certification, Grows Usage
• Mashup Champion PamFax Becomes a Full Fax Sending Solution

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In two separate press releases over the past two days, OnState Communications has broadened the scope of its call center offering and made it more readily accessible to businesses without internal IT and communications support.

In the first press release Monday, OnState announced the addition of the Yuuguu screen sharing service that provides call center agents with a tool that facilitates both visual presentations and resolution of customer support issues. Yuuguu’s screen sharing allows a call center agent to have a real time collaboration tool with:

• on demand screen sharing
• moderator control of adding/removing participants
• sharing of keyboard and mouse control amongst participants
• easy escalation of a chat session to desktop sharing
• no download requirement for callers to participate

One significant point: recall that OnState’s chat service, while originating from an agent’s Skype or GTalk account, can be accessed by any caller with a web browser. Once again, using Yuuguu’s screen sharing, an agent can have a screen sharing session with any caller with access to a web browser. Yuuguu’s service is cross-platform, supporting both Windows and Mac PC’s with Linux support to come soon.

From the press release, OnState Partnership with Yuuguu Provides Total Customer Collaboration For Virtual Workforces:

OnState is the first and only provider to include integrated voice, text chat and screen sharing as part of a cost-effective, on-demand virtual communications service. The addition of Yuuguu into OnState’s solution enables sales and support staff and all virtual workers to collaborate with customers by sharing screens or even keyboard and mouse control to help demonstrate solutions or solve problems.

“With Yuuguu screen sharing capabilities, OnState users can now conduct virtual sales calls – from anywhere in the world – with visual presentations, product demonstrations, and interactive communications,” said Pat Kelly, CEO of OnState. “And using real-time screen, keyboard and mouse sharing, support staff can resolve issues, answer questions, and assist customers more efficiently. Best of all, the combined solution is delivered as a secure, device-independent, cloud-based service that requires no installation or embedded applications on the customer side.”

In a second announcement yesterday, OnState announced a partnership with Bandwidth.com as a complete end-to-end IP-based communications service over which a business can operate its entire OnState call center operation “in the cloud”. Basically, if an end user can plug an RJ-45 jack into an Internet service modem or connection, and plug IP-based phones into a router, they can have all the communications infrastructure required for using the OnState service. And  inherently the network supports additional communications modes such as chat and screen sharing, as well as Skype conversations.

Once again call center agents can be located anywhere geographically and access the service via a phone, softphone on a PC, including Skype or GTalk, or mobile phone. While Bandwidth.com is U.S.-based they provide international access with support for international numbers via Voxbone’s service. From the press release, OnState and Bandwidth.com Deliver the Cloud Call Center:

For companies that rely on call centers for sales or customer support, reliability and quality-of-service are key. Bandwidth’s FlexNetwork is architected with full geographic redundancy, with separate signalling and audio facilities for reliability and flexibility. When this is combined with OnState’s cost-effective virtual communications, the resulting solution is one that is highly available, easily scalable, and encourages customer collaboration through multi-modal interfaces like voice, chat, and web.

OnState’s core competence is call center functionality; having come from a legacy call center operation that was acquired by Cisco, it’s in their genes. But as for the underlying communications services, they are becoming more and more agnostic by giving their customers options to select the underlying service provider as well as the communications clients, whether they be a traditional phone set, a mobile phone or a software-based communications client, such as available from Skype or GTalk. It’s a case of the customer defining its requirements and OnState can provide a solution from a buffet of options while delivering on the economic advantages of IP-based communications.

But OnState’s ultimate advantage comes from making it possible for their customers’ customers to access a call center via a simple call from a phone, mobile phone, Skype, GTalk or a Click-to-Call button on a website. And, where the caller has PC access, adding modalities such as chat or screen sharing requires no customer downloads; it just happens via the browser. As highlighted at this fall’s eComm Europe, the value-add comes in minimizing user friction with intelligent decision making tools that value a customer’s time.

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Citrix Audio Services Group (formerly VAPPS, Inc.) has repackaged its “stand alone” HiDef Conferencing offerings to provide clearer, more predictable charges while relaunching its website to be more consistent with the Citrix Online brand. ASG is also about to become the preferred supplier of voice services for Citrix Online collaboration services such as GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar.

While Skype has always featured the ability to support multi-party voice calls, now with up to 25 participants provided one has a recent generation PC, it has never been a managed conferencing service, complete with moderator support and web-based call participant portals other than the Skype client itself. Hosting a Skype multi-party call also relies on the host’s PC resources (processor speed, audio hardware, Internet upload speed amongst others). However, two players have emerged to offer hosted and managed conferencing services over the past few years: VAPPS with its HiDef Conferencing service and iotum’s CalliFlower service.

Having developed over the past few years a unique conferencing server that could handle HD Voice where supported at any user’s endpoint, last fall VAPPS was acquired by Citrix, a veteran of remote computer services, and is emerging now as the Audio Services Group of its Citrix Online business unit. The two primary services for ASG are:

• HiDef Conferencing – moderator managed audio conferencing with flat rate packages for up to 150 participants
• HiDef Corporate – an enterprise grade, moderator managed audio conferencing service supporting meetings with up to 1000 participants

HiDef Conferencing can complement any collaboration service that incorporates desktop sharing. However, it is also becoming the preferred voice service that complements Citrix Online’s GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar online meeting services.

HiDef Conferencing is offered via four bundling plans that support 10, 25, 50 and 150 call participants. As in the past, HiDef Conferencing features include:

• Unlimited “local” or “Tolled” access via numbers in 14 countries
• Free unlimited access via Skype
• Toll –free calling minutes (500, 1000, 2000 and 3750 monthly minutes respectively)
  • Minutes shown are for all callers, both organizers and participants.
• High Definition Voice where end points support HD Voice; for instance Skype call participants will more clearly hear other Skype call participants due to Skype’s support of high bandwidth (8 KHz) audio
• Call recording
• Hand raising
• A Moderator call management portal, shown above, encompasses caller invitations, call recording activation, participant muting, call locking/unlocking (to allow or not allow additional participants) and caller disconnect.

Summarizing the relaunch:

• HiDef Conferencing’s value-add comes with it caller management services (including moderator panels), HD Voice support and packages that bundle a mélange of fixed cost call access options.
• By year end, HiDef Conferencing will be the sole recommended supplier of voice services for Citrix Online’s GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar meeting services that incorporate desktop sharing and some chat features. Bringing the higher voice quality of HD Voice to these meetings could actually shorten the meetings.
• HiDef Conferencing has brought its website into line with Citrix Online branding.

Bottom Line: Joining Citrix has brought to HiDef Conferencing the infrastructure and market reach it could never have hoped to have achieved so rapidly on its own. As a hosted service with HD Voice support, it sets a standard for enterprise grade voice conference calling. And with free calling for Skype participants, it will be interesting to see if this feature helps drive Skype adoption as one other high profile service within the Skype for Business ecosystem.

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PamFax adds a Japanese partner, lowers rates to 13 destination countries and enhances its infrastructure

Back in April Scendix launched PamFax 2.0 with many new features outlined in a post at that time. To address some reader feedback and summarize PamNews announcements, it’s appropriate to do an update summary of PamFax’s evolution.

First, and most important, is that the launch of PamFax 2.0 with its feature set has triggered accelerated user adoption. While not at liberty to reveal numbers, its acceptance says that, if you provide an  easy-to-use service, the customers will come. Adding Mac support and fax-in numbers brought instant credibility as a fully featured fax service.

A more robust, stable service: With user experience PamFax has required some infrastructure improvements. Issues involving the individual fax-in numbers were resolved during the first week of this new service. Fax-in numbers for Mexico have been added; as result fax-in numbers are available in 22 countries. And as their fax volume grows, the PamFax servers have required improvements to increase the stability and reliability of the service. Probably sounds “boring” but servicing PamFax’s “back office” infrastructure is probably more critical to sustainable reliability at this point than any modifications to the user interface.

Adding a Japanese version: But the PamFax team has not stopped with simply technology improvements. Earlier this week they announced a strategic partnership with Fusion Network Services in Japan who are  offering a Japanese version of the service:

We have jointly worked hard to prepare the launch by localizing the entire PamFax system in Japanese. Fusion is also a Skype partner and provide Skype with the local Skype-In numbers in Japan.

Fusion plan several marketing activities over the next months to introduce the PamFax solution to the market.

Reducing costs: While there were significant price reductions with the launch of PamFax 2.0, there were still some challenges out there. Recently I was going to send a four-page fax to Estonia but when I found out there was a $0.89 per page charge via PamFax, I scanned the document to a pdf file and sent it as an email attachment. However, as of this week, Estonia has been moved to the PamFax Zone 1 list of countries served with a base rate of €0,09/$0.12 per page (or €0,06/$0.08 for PamFax Pro subscribers). In total, thirteen fax destination countries were moved to the lowest Zone 1 rates: Singapore, Israel, Aland Islands, Malaysia, Finland, Chile, China, Czech Republic, Hungary, Venezuela, Cyprus, Argentina, Estonia. (As a side benefit it now becomes a reasonable cost to use PamFax to send faxes to Skype’s developer team in Tallinn.)

Bottom line: Launching any service has its hiccups, but the PamFax team is there for the long run. If you encounter difficulties they have a support program where you can seek assistance and/or voice your issues for a response. The PamFax team wants to ensure a sustainable, reliable, seamless service and is listening.

Most amazing has been the response in terms of user adoption; while certainly email and other Internet services provide the means to send/receive documents, there’s still a large market for sending hard copy fax to all those dedicated fax terminals and “All-in-One” printers still sitting in offices worldwide. Offering a secure, low cost, yet easy-to-use, worldwide service was really the key to unlocking this business opportunity.

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• PamFax launches in Japan; lowers rates to China and 12 other countries (skypejournal.com)
• Calliflower Update: Reaching Out to 30 Countries and 100 Cities. (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Calliflower expands: Flat Rate International Conference Calls now available from 30 Countries. (saunderslog.com)
• PamFax updates, adds FaxIn, distances from Skype (skypejournal.com)

Over the past eighteen months I have often reported on iotum’s Calliflower voice conferencing service as it has evolved and matured. For the first time in a few months I had occasion to use it once again yesterday evening. Connecting  11 participants in the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto triangle, New York and Virginia, I can report on an excellent quality, two hour and ten minute call with no interruptions where everyone was clearly understood. (Even the dogs co-operated by not barking in the background although someone’s cell phone did ring at one point.) And it’s archived for access by all members of the group, including those who could not participate in the call.

However, not only has the overall consistency of call quality improved but calls hosted by a Premium Service subscriber ($50/month for two organizers, unlimited calling and participants) can now be accessed “locally” from over 100 cities in 30 countries:

Calliflower flat-rate conferencing services are now available in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

If there was one improvement that could be made it would be to make it more obvious on the invitation emails that a participant should RSVP whether they will/may/will not attend. As demonstrated with recent enhancements to Tungle, the meeting scheduling service, invitation emails must clearly explain all the steps to be taken to respond to the invitation appropriately. In my case yesterday, I was sending invitation emails to “newbies” unfamiliar with the service; some did not know how to respond. As a result I had to send separate emails to non-responding participants to ensure they knew how to access the service.  The issue has been reported to iotum personnel who now have this issue as a “ToDo” item on their action list.

And how much of a value is this service? Ten years ago, using Bell Canada conferencing service, the 11-party call I mentioned in the introduction would have cost $787.00 with additional minutes at a cost of $0.55 per minute per participant just for the voice service. How business models change! But with Calliflower you can also see who is on the call, manage participation through muting and hand raising, share documents, augment the conversation through a chat window and record/archive the call.

Bottom line: with a rewording of their email invitations, Calliflower certainly delivers on its offering of unlimited calling from over 100 cities worldwide along with tools that enhance the conversation. During last night’s call, Calliflower went into the background and was transparent to the discussion; we accomplished our meeting agenda and objectives uninterrupted by the technology.

Overlooked: Calliflower conference calls can also be scheduled, accessed and moderated via their iPhone application.

Click here for more details about the Calliflower service

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In a story on VoIP Planet, Gerry Blackwell provides a case study of the implementation of OnState’s Virtual Call Center at CyberDefender Corp., an Internet security software and services firm.

CyberDefender’s new director of customer service, Jose Martinez, investigated a few solutions, including traditional Panasonic and Nortel automatic call distribution (ACD) systems. But in the end, Martinez chose a radical on-demand service from start-up OnState Communications, and coupled it with VoIP service from Skype.

“OnState was very competitive,” he says. “But not only was it priced right—and this was very important to us—they were able to implement very quickly.” It took barely a week to get agents up and running and trained.

Gerry goes on to talk about the cost savings over traditional premise-based and hosted call center solutions, the visibility and transparency of the call center activity in real time and the ability to rapidly scale the service as they add more staff. He then quotes OnState CEO Pat Kelly:

“Conversation management and knowing about people are the most important elements in our application,” says OnState CEO Pat Kelly. “We’re interested in phones, but the problems our customers come to us with are not really about phones.”

“We’re more concerned with understanding the business presence of employees. What can they do—what skills do they have, what kinds of calls can they answer? And what are they doing at this moment. Are they at work today? Are they free? Are they involved in a chat? Are they on a phone call?”

Read the entire article to learn more about how OnState handles calls, its integration with Skype and Google Talk, the competition (such as it is), costs and OnState’s DNA that underlies its legitimacy as a call center solution.

Bottom Line: A win for CyberDefender and a win for their customers with improved customer service and an ability to scale appropriately as demand varies over time. And a a Voice 2.0 world application where Skype is contributing to business model disruption.

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• Skype’s Stefan Öberg @ Interop: Stealthing Skype Into Business, But Cover the Entire Skype Ecosystem (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Stealthing Skype into Larger Businesses (voiceontheweb.biz)
• Business Long Distance: Death by 1,000,000 PBX’s (voiceontheweb.biz)
• OnState Upgrades On Demand Call Center and Virtual PBX (voiceontheweb.biz)

Voxeo has as its tagline “the fastest growing voice platform company”; however, with today’s acquisition of IMified, “the world’s largest hosted instant messaging application development and deployment platform”, Voxeo has become a more encompassing, “fastest growing” conversation platform company. Complementing Voxeo’s widely respected provisioning and support of hosted voice applications, this acquisition recognizes the increasing importance of Instant Messaging as both a personal and business conversation medium, especially when it comes to issues such as presence and asynchronous conversations where the conversing parties may not simultaneously be available.

Certainly Instant Messaging’s ability to combine presence and text chat has become not simply a more useful tool for personal conversations but is a more “immediate” productivity tool for informal business conversations with its ability to:

• carry on asynchronous conversations – all participants are not always available but messages are persistent
• deliver real time presence information
• in many cases, archive conversations for later reference (especially useful for URL’s, email addresses and contact information)
• eliminate the etiquette need for a courtesy “how are you?”, “how’s the weather” overhead that usually accompanies the start of any voice conversation

From the press release:

The acquisition of IMified is part of Voxeo’s strategy to enable Unified Self-Service and live Unified Communications applications that work across voice, video, SMS, USSD, IM and the mobile web. As consumer preferences drive interaction trends, IM has become a preferred communication mode, moving outside the personal realm to include business interactions. Businesses have found IM to be a low-cost, in-demand method to facilitate both customer-facing and internal communications. On average, an IM interaction is 1/10 the cost of Interactive Voice Response (IVR), and 1/100 the cost of a live agent phone calls.

I asked Voxeo’s Director of Conversations, Dan York, about whether IMified was analogous to Voxeo’s recent Tropo announcement for voice application development. He pointed out that, whereas Tropo applications are hosted on Voxeo servers, IMified applications need to be hosted on “premise-based” servers. Otherwise, with respect to issues such as programming languages supported, yes, IMified does for IM what Tropo provides for voice. Note that anyone can develop applications for free using Voxeo’s developer platforms.

Bottom Line: Combining IMified’s platform with Voxeo’s experience in supporting voice application development opens new opportunities for innovation in self-service applications. Will we see IIMR (or ICR) as an acronym parallel to IVR, for which Voxeo has built its reputation?

Other Posts:

• IMified Blog Post: Voxeo Acquires IMified
• Voxilla: Voxeo Buys IMified, Opening New Channels for Self-Service Interactivity

When it comes to organizing and following my Twitter activity, I have found that SocialScope – currently in a closed beta and only available on BlackBerry – provides the most complete and most satisfying Twitter user experience. A recent interview with Ubiquitous Systems CEO Amit Kumar provided some additional background on how SocialScope evolved and their plans going forward.

Twitter started out as a way to broadcast messages of up to 140 characters via SMS to “approved” followers; however, its popularity has driven it to become a key social media tool whose messages can be followed on a desktop PC, via a web browser or on a mobile device such as smartphones. When one starts following several hundred Twitter users the challenge for the individual has become one of “how can I effectively manage my Twitter activities to my benefit?”. An ecosystem of Twitter clients has evolved in an attempt not only to provide access to Twitter on multiple platforms but also to bring some order and prioritization to one’s Twitter experiences.

Over the past few months I have been experimenting with various Twitter clients on PC’s (TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop), iPhone (Twitterific) and the BlackBerry (TwitterBerry, SocialScope). I came to the conclusion that I wanted a client that:

• allows me to see all my Twitter messages as one viewing option
  • with minimum delay after sent
• is available on a mobile platform
• receives messages while using other applications on the platform
• supports multiple Twitter accounts
• supports Facebook status messages
• is capable of organizing my “Following” Twitter contacts into groups
• provides a search capability
  • including searches for #hashtags
• has a tabbed UI for accessing:
  • all messages, direct messages, @ replies,
  • individual Twitter and Facebook account messages
  • user-defined groups, search results
• provides a complete Profile of a Twitter User:
  • user description and website
  • view all the user’s recent messages
  • select Twitter accounts on which to follow/unfollow
  • search for all Tweets referencing the user
  • see who the user is Following
  • see who is Following the user (Followers)
• allows easy insertion of pictures (via Twitpic) and URL’s into Status Updates
• quickly moves amongst the various tabs, user profiles and searches

About three weeks ago SocialScope delivered a major upgrade to their beta version that built it out to include all the features described above. While attending a social networking workshop two weeks ago I suddenly found myself using SocialScope on my BlackBerry Bold to track all my Twitter activity as I made new acquaintances, followed the event’s hashtag and did searches on various speakers and related topics. It handled both my Twitter accounts, allowed me to organize those I was following, had a neat Search capability, provided a complete user profile for any Twitter user and eliminated the tediousness of performing key operations on a PC.

I then realized that, considering all the Twitter clients I had trialed, SocialScope provided the most complete, yet user friendly, experience. Social media messages basically have the same “immediacy” as a phone call or an email received on the BlackBerry.The convenience of having it on a a QWERTY-keyboard mobile platform with a vibrant half-VGA display had become a significant factor in coming to this conclusion.

Most importantly, however, recall that Twitter’s original ambition was to drive messages through SMS messaging; thus, the 140 character limit. This had become a huge cost factor for Twitter to the point where, for instance, SMS messaging to Canadian users was cut off until Twitter made special arrangements with at least one local carrier. (And now all Canadian wireless carriers plan to charge for inbound SMS messages.) However, SocialScope provides a much more user friendly user interface than dealing with SMS messages; a major benefit is that it eliminates the need for any SMS subscription (but will make “light” use of your wireless data plan) to access Twitter or FaceBook messaging activity on a BlackBerry.

SocialScope was the evolution of the founders’ goal to provide a client that aggregated, yet organized, a user’s social networking activity. Founder Amit Kumar and his colleagues (today they still only have a team of four plus an intern) saw lots of web-based social networking activity on the web but felt that browsers put too much overhead on the overall Twitter (and Facebook) user experience as well as on mobile device resources.

While their original prototypes were developed for the iPhone, they quickly realized they needed the full background processing capability of the BlackBerry (8xxx or 9xxx) to handle social media messaging seriously. Key to their overall design approach was the recognition that, while they are delivering a dedicated client, Twitter itself is a dynamically evolving web page which requires special handling on mobile platforms. To this end they have developed compression algorithms and are working on battery consumption issues. (More details on “SocialScope: Why BlackBerry”will be the subject of a second post.)

SocialScope alpha launched in December 2007; the Ubiquitous team suddenly found they had to limit their alpha subscribers while they dealt with initial scaling and usability issues. Their most important feedback for user interface design came from looking at usage patterns. The most common feedback they obtained was the need for messages to be delivered “immediately”. In response they dealt not only with scaling issues but also latency and connectivity issues.

At the same time they have been developing deeper links into BlackBerry features such as the address book from which one can view a Contact’s most recent Twitter and Facebook updates. When viewing a web page in the BlackBerry browser, a “Send to SocialScope” command is available to insert the web page’s URL into a Twitter Status Update window.

Currently they are working on improving group management, de-duping messages (such that messages sent to multiple accounts only show up once) and deeper integration with Facebook. They also want to add support for showing Twitter “trends” information.

SocialScope is still in closed beta with, apparently, a very long waiting list. However, the wait should not be too long; they expect to release a publicly available version at some time during the summer.

Bottom line: SocialScope sets the bar for all Twitter clients in terms of feature set and performance. It demonstrates that social media messaging and message management is best handled, from a user experience perspective, on a mobile platform. It also demonstrates the importance of having background processing for messaging activities on a mobile handset (did I say their next platform of choice would probably be Android?).

To follow: SocialScope: Why BlackBerry?

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In a recent post, I provided some examples where Skype is being used by small businesses to build relationships with a worldwide supplier and customer base. In the same post I provided a couple of examples where current economic conditions are helping to stealth Skype into enterprises in the medium to large business category. Skype itself claims that about 30% of its use is by businesses. At a blogging for business workshop a week ago and a local WordCamp this past weekend I again encountered several entrepreneurs for whom Skype was a key tool for conversations.

It seems that Skype wants to build up a repository of case studies involving business use of Skype. Last week Skype asked businesses to share their experiences with Skype as a business tool.

We’re looking for businesses like yours to share their experiences with us at Skype. We’re looking for creativity and originality – companies which use Skype in innovative ways around the world to save time, save money or stay ahead, and preferably a combination of the three.

The contest will be judged with three prizes to be  awarded involving Skype credits using Skype’s Business Control Panel along with Skype certified hardware products. More details are available at Peter Parkes post announcing the competition.

While the application form encourages the use of photos and video to support entries, it would also be useful to learn about how Skype not only reduces costs but also how Skype’s services impact business processes, customer/supplier relationships and team building across a geographically disbursed operation. And it’s not simply about voice conversations but are you using Skype chat for virtual water cooler conversations and Skype video to enhance conversations? Or do your activities involve one or more of Skype’s partner’s products for conferencing sessions, call center operations or document management?

Do you have a story to share?

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Legion are the stories of small and medium businesses who are using Skype for their worldwide communications operations.

• Skype is the cornerstone for keeping Toronto-based  b5media’s worldwide staff of bloggers, editors, developers and executives in touch via both informal and formal conversations.
• SeeWorthy gets an assist from Skype when communicating with their Taiwanese supplier (via an Alberta-based translator), North American and Caribbean agents, and prospective European distributors as well as their customers.
• A Canadian-headquartered resource company is using Skype voice and IM for communications with their operations in Asia; their biggest challenge involves time-zone issues. Skype chat’s inherent asynchronous nature helps to address that issue.

Skype itself claims that about 30% of all its user activity is business related. I often encounter small businesses who have a wealth of stories about how Skype contributes to their business success.

But during a recent conversation with OnState CEO Pat Kelly I learned about how Skype is stealthing its way into medium to large enterprises. Pat discussed two examples (who will remain generic until case studies are available):

• OnState received an enquiry from a major North American parts distributor whose operations involve agents, resellers and business customers spread out across North America. While this company has an internal IT team, the CFO was focused on significant cost reductions for their call center operations. He has now contracted OnState to provide voice, chat and other customer relationship communications activities that do not simply save money but provide additional communications processes such as IM with its inherent presence and chat features. Once the contract was signed, the CFO mentioned he would guide his IT personnel with their role in the implementation.
• A European country manager for a worldwide, US-headquartered business found that he was getting charge-backs for “corporate” communications services that did not meet his particular needs. He had enough autonomy that he investigated OnState’s services, went through not only the technical specifications but also the legal reviews and business process requirements. He is now meeting the communications needs of his business ecosystem using Skype and OnState’s other auxiliary services for call center and virtual PBX requirements. Subsequently other European subsidiaries of the same company are implementing OnState’s services. Yet this is a situation where the U.S. head office has yet to be contacted about what additional opportunities for Skype and OnState may exist within their business.

Pat’s key point is that, in today’s economically stressed environments, there’s a trend where CFO’s and business unit managers are making the key communications services decisions in larger enterprises in order to meet their financial goals. IT personnel are playing little or no role in the decision making although they may be involved to a limited degree in the implementation. What are Pat’s key observations?

• The consumer experience with Skype is stealthing its way into business implementations, not only with prosumers and small businesses but also at the business unit level within larger enterprises.
• Why? Skype just plain works. There are no firewall issues; OnState’s SaaS model eliminates capital investment for PBX’s and related infrastructure.
• It’s relatively easy to implement.
• Economic pressures are driving adoption.
• Where a business partner or customer has Skype also, HD Voice, incorporating SILK, provide for more productive voice conversations.
• It’s not simply about using a technical mashup across multiple services (Skype, Google, and Voxbone, for example) involved in OnState implementations; it’s a “business mashup” involving business processes and employee acceptance.

It’s a repeat of a trend that drove personal computers into larger enterprises twenty-five years ago. I recall one story where a Canadian bank Vice President found an employee with a PC that had a modem attached (with, at best, a 1200 kbps speed). The modem was ordered disconnected! Bank security was going to be upheld despite technology progress. Four years later that same bank ordered over 10,000 PC cards from my employer of the day for inclusion in their new, at the time, teller terminal system.

Bottom Line: Even if it’s not totally free it’s the raw cost savings that are driving Skype adoption, sometimes in co-operation with their business software partners. It’s about not only lower calling costs but also the elimination of capital asset costs. For some business markets Skype is stealthing its way into business communications infrastructure.

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OnState Communications provides hosted communications services that allow any size of business to operate a call center or PBX with low cost worldwide access via Skype, Skype Online numbers or the PSTN, including toll-free and DID numbers. Low monthly fees and service charges (covering inbound numbers and outbound PSTN calling) along with zero capital expenditures are the selling points that have driven evaluation and adoption across a range of businesses.

During early May OnState will be upgrading their services to add:

• a “My Account” dashboard that tracks credits and charges for services such as toll-free numbers and SkypeOut charges in real time
• OnState Mobile allows employees to use their mobile phones (such as iPhone and BlackBerry) to participate as part of a call center operation, either directly receiving customer calls, transferring to another employee in the company, or acting as a secondary support resource to a business’s core sales and support teams
• Warm Transfer and Conferencing for OnState Anywhere — A warm transfer allows an agent to speak with a new caller before transferring the original caller to provide a better calling experience.
• Outbound calling with Caller ID in OnState Anywhere. Enables calling from any device (Skype, SIP soft phone, etc) with a unique Caller ID displayed to your customers.
• Support for SIP Phones. While most calls are handled via softphones, such as the Skype client, OnState services now support selected Polycomm and Grandstream SIP phone sets.
• Several other service tweeks and modifications; check out the OnState blog post for the details.

OnState will be upgrading services to all their current clients over the first ten days of May. As with many other players in the economically challenged Voice 2.0 world, I confirmed in a recent interview with OnState CEO Pat Kelly that they are finding increasing demand in the small-to-medium business market for their SaaS-based services. The key selling point remains offering a disruptively cost effective way to communicate across an enterprise ecosystem comprising employees, customers and suppliers.

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Recently launched PamFax 2.0 had three key new features:

• Mac OSX compatible (in addition to Windows)
• Lower “per page” pricing by up to 40%, and
• Fax-In numbers in 27 countries

Signing up for a one year subscription to acquire a fax-in number is about a five minute process when you subscribe to PamFax Professional. What makes it possible to so easily obtain a “local” number in any of over one hundred cities in 27 countries? Short answer: Voxbone.

I first learned about Voxbone’s services when they were a major sponsor of eComm 2008 a year ago March. At the time CEO Rod Ullens told us how Voxbone was able to provision DID numbers in over 4000 cities in 47 countries worldwide at minimum cost. Last fall Voxbone launched their iNum service which creates “universal worldwide ‘local’ numbers” via the +883 country code. Customers for their basic DID services, who have been covered on Voice On The Web, include iSkoot, Calliflower, Mobivox,Truphone, OnState, Evoca and Voxeo.

When PamConsult CEO Dick Schiferli told me about their plans to add a receiving service to PamFax, they were looking for a way to easily provision and manage fax-in number subscriptions. At the time I introduced him to Voxbone’s Rod Ullens and the rest is history. But Voxbone does not simply provide fax-in numbers in 27 countries; according to a press release issued today:

Voxbone was uniquely equipped to bring several critical elements to Pamfax’s 2.0 offering:

• An inventory of direct-inward dial numbers (DIDs) in 4,000 cities and 47 countries, out of which 27 will initially be available to PamFax subscribers to use as their personal fax numbers;
• An IP interface to the telephone network that enables fax documents to be translated into TIFF or PDF data files;
• An API for the automated delivery of these faxes to any software or Web site.

In other words, Voxbone is equipped not simply to “make the connections” involved in receiving a fax but also to ensure that formatting and delivery automation is appropriately handled when receiving a fax via PamFax.

Bottom line: Through Voxbone, documents faxed to PamFax Fax-In customers are delivered as PDF files which can then be printed, sent as email attachments, archived or otherwise viewed and transferred at the recipient’s discretion.

PamConsult launches PamFax 2.0 as an obligation-free hosted fax service that supports sending and receiving faxes worldwide with no capital expenses, no usage contract requirements and lower “per page” costs.

The process of sending and receiving faxes involves:

• a document source: whether physical or a computer file
• physical document scanning
• a cover page
• transmission of the fax (originally over a phone line)
  • often at expensive long distance rates and/or hotel service charges
• receipt of the fax (over a phone line)
• printing the received document
• logging the transmission and archiving the document

In the early 80’s the original fax machines were huge (at least the size of a bulky floor model photocopier), expensive and rare. However, a former medical practitioner customer was impressed that he could fax electrocardiograms to obtain diagnosis assistance with, say, a remote cardiology specialist, providing an initial level of value in time-critical circumstances.

As we moved through the 80’s fax devices became less expensive, more pervasive and somewhat smaller such that they fit on a table top; the biggest issue was finding or installing a nearby fax-dedicated phone line. In 1985 GammaLink introduced the first Fax PC board; a fax modem became common in PC’s throughout the subsequent 15 years. In the early 90’s there were various attempts to develop fax software for PC’s; the most widely remembered program was WinFax, which was sold to Symantec in 1995 and discontinued by Symantec at the end of 2006. But, while WinFax certainly could send and receive faxes, it did not exactly provide the simplest user experience for sending and managing faxes. Over this period several Internet-hosted fax services became available and contributed to the demise of WinFax.

Certainly, with Internet email and various file transfer services the volume of faxes has dropped off. However, they are still essential for (i) convenience of sending and receiving faxes via a dedicated device and (ii) exchanging executed legal documents, real estate papers and other business requirements which are suited to having a hard copy.

In many circumstances recipients still simply like to have a piece of hardcopy paper in their hands. As a result the real challenge for any new service is to offer a simple, easy-to-understand and easy-to-use fax services experience at lower costs yet that take advantage of the Internet’s cloud infrastructure and worldwide accessibility.

Fast forward to late 2007 when Ethernet ports had replaced modems on PC’s; PamConsult launched PamFax 1.0, a fax sending service that significantly simplified sending a fax from your desktop or laptop PC to any fax number worldwide. PamFax 1.0 was solely a Windows application that featured:

• sourcing documents from either a computer file or a scanned image
  • compatible with all recent scanners, including multi-function printers
• five or six steps to send a document:
  • select the document source
  • (optionally) scan in a paper document
  • enter the destination recipient and fax number
  • (optionally) add a cover page
  • pay via Skype Credits or PayPal
  • send the document
• integration with Skype for fax confirmation notification and payment using Skype Credits
• an infrastructure that handled the payment transaction and sent the fax to any destination worldwide
• a Windows printer driver capability
• a minimum cost of ~$0.20/€0.14 per page
• a web-based PamFax portal to report on usage and archive sent faxes

But PamFax 1.0 lacked the ability to receive faxes and was not available for Mac PC’s. Yet PamFax usage has grown constantly; this past weekend PamFax 1.0 downloads passed the 200,000 mark, confirming the demand for easy-to-use fax services available wherever one finds a PC and Internet connection. It sure came in handy when on the road in a hotel room – at a much lower cost and no need to go to the front desk to send a fax.

According to PamConsult CEO Dick Schiferli, 58% of PamFax 1.0 downloads resulted in at least one additional paid page being sent; the average paying customer sends 6.5 pages. Overall month-to-month volume growth is currently running at 10% per month.

Today PamConsult is launching PamFax 2.0, elevating PamFax to a complete send/receive fax service on both Windows and Mac PC’s at lower costs. PamFax 2.0 features:

• Support for both Windows and Mac OSX
• Fax-in numbers available in 27 countries
• A complete redesign incorporating new user interface
• “Per page” pricing reduced by ~40% to $0.12/€0.09 page for on-demand service and $0.08/€0.06 page for volume subscriptions
• Several additional destination countries moved into the lowest cost zone 1.
• No requirement for Skype although Skype integration adds notification and payment options
• Ongoing support for Facebook and Salesforce.com integration
• A Vista sidebar widget

Much like Calliflower which takes a user through the entire conference call business process from invitations to archiving, PamFax 2.0 is a complete service that takes you through the entire fax generation and transmission process from the initial document sourcing requirement through to logging and archiving your fax activity.

The ground rules for pricing include:

• On Demand/Pay-as-You-Go or Prepaid?
• destination country (seven zones covering the world)?
• Fax-in number required?
• currency (select from 15 options)?

While PamFax can be used as an obligation-free “On Demand” service for sending faxes (at €0.09/£0.085/US$0.125 per page to Zone 1 countries) , PamConsult is offering volume bundles that reduce per page costs even further. For receiving faxes a monthly or annual subscription is required for the associated fax-in number.

PamFax Professional, a monthly or annual subscription, includes:

• Fax-in number for the subscription period (select one of 27 countries)
• Unlimited fax reception
• 33% discount on “per page” prices, starting at €0.06/£0.06/US$0.08 to Zone 1 countries
• Monthly: €3,95/£3.75/US$5.50 (subject to fluctuation with exchange rates)
• Annual: €47,40/£45.00/US$66.00 (subject to fluctuation with exchange rates)

PamFax Credit Packs add credits to your account at the €10, €30, €50 (with 5% bonus credit), €100 (10% bonus credit) and higher levels with increasing bonus credits.]

PamFax also offers a “business control panel” from which a business’s administrator can create a group account, assign and manage PamFax credit and track employee fax activity.

I have used PamFax 1.0 successfully on many occasions over the past 18 months and have tested PamFax 2.0 with success on both a MacBook and a Dell Inspiron laptop.

As a next step, address book integration and scheduled sending would be useful features to incorporate into future releases of PamFax.

Bottom line: PamFax 2.0 is another disruptive service within the Skype ecosystem as it eliminates several costs associated with faxing documents:

• country and international long distance charges
• hotel and airport kiosk fax service charges
• charges associated with having a fax-dedicated physical phone line
• cost and overhead of a dedicated fax machine

and results in turning your desktop or laptop PC into a fully featured fax machine. Laptop users have the convenience of being able to take their PamFax-enabled “fax machine” anywhere they may travel and find Internet access. Basically PamFax 2.0 allows you to disconnect your fax-dedicated phone line and to throw away your dedicated fax machine while having fax services available not only at the home office but also on the road.

Give it a try and report on your experience in the Comments.

Update: Alec Saunders: PamFax – no strings attached PC FAX

Previous PamFax posts:

• PamFax: Sending Faxes via Skype
• The Dawn of the Mashup World II: And the European Mashup Competition Winner Is…
• Mashup Champion PamFax Becomes a Full Fax Sending Solution
• PamFax Receive Skype Certification, Grows Usage
• PamFax – Adding Click-to-Fax
• PamFax Update: Lower Rates, Volume Plans and Improved Perfomance

Following a link from Dan York’s update to his post outlining technical details of Skype for SIP, I found a link to this post from IfByPhone’s Irv Shapiro: Why Skype for Asterisk is more important than Skype for SIP.

First, Irv has done perhaps the best articulation yet differentiating Skype for Asterisk from Skype for SIP:

Skype for Asterisk, which is still in closed beta, is a true Asterisk channel driver. This allows Asterisk based solutions to make, receive and transfer Skype calls. A significant capability of the SFA solution is its support for terminating a call to a Skype user name, for example a PC based user of the Skype client.

Skype for SIP is a very different animal. This service provides VOIP trunk support for existing SIP based PBX systems, which may include Asterisk. Unlike SFA where calls may be placed to any Skype user, SFS calls may only be terminated to PSTN end points.

Irv goes on to provide his view on how this plays in the Voice/Telco 2.0 marketplace. Then he provides an example of where he sees the benefit of SFA for hosted services:

From our perspective as a cloud telephony company, providing hosted telephone applications, SFA is much more interesting. While either service would allow us to provide IVR services to Skype users, the SFA Asterisk channel driver architecture allows us to terminate calls into call centers with no PSTN transport. Each call center Agent would just utilize a headset connected to a computer running the traditional Skype application. Customers calls would be able to originate from either a PSTN device or a Skype client, then route through the Ifbyphone IVR infrastructure and terminate to a call center via Skype’s computer to computer transport. This has the potential to change the cost structure associated with supporting call centers. A Skype based call center would not require a PBX or for even any centralized telephony components. The call center agents could be virtually located anywhere in the world on high quality Internet connections.

Keep in mind that calls terminated on Skype, as demonstrated on the 3 Skypehone service, have no associated termination charges. Long time Skype-based call center provider OnState has already demonstrated this business model; their hosted OnState Call Center service eliminates the need for a call center PBX. While a (prospective) customer can call in via several modes (Skype Online number, DID numbers, 800 numbers, Skype or click-to-call from a website), all the calls are terminated on Skype via their agent client.

Andy Abramson at VoIP Watch has, in a reverse manner, demonstrated this cost advantage also in his post, All Google Voice Needs Is a Little More SIP and Skype’s Game Changes, where he points out that, if Skype for SIP did terminate calls on a Skype client (i.e. – supported SIP—>Skype), then one could terminate Google Voice calls at a Skype client. But, as I have commented on that post and included in Skype for SIP: Sorting Through the Issues, Skype for SIP supports three types of connections and “SIP—>Skype” is not one of them.

Irv demonstrates that Skype for Asterisk has some interesting potential; it’s simply going to require more creative innovation that goes beyond simply making call connections through a SIP interface. It’s a matter of invoking Alec Saunders Voice 2.0 Manifesto which points out that the value lies in the applications.