Two for "Hmm"

Two different product announcements this week have made me stop and think. Are they way cool or a little bit off-track?

SimplyMobile, by SimpleSignal, is a new hosted service enabling users to listen to their emails (OK, no biggie there) and manage calendar items in Microsoft Outlook using voice commands. Sooo, if you’re on your phone or smart phone, you can “verbalize” appointments to your calendar on the fly, change around appointments to your calendar via voice, get Outlook to notify attendees of a schedule change by email (OK, it normally does, but you don’t have to get out a keyboard to do it), and even use voice commands to call back email senders.

If you’re a mobile worker or fast-moving SMB with lots of travel and a charged-up Bluetooth headset, it sounds like it could be pretty cool. It would be more cool if it had some “virtual receptionist” bells and whistles on it, like WildFire.

VoSKY has been plugging together gizmos and hardware to make Skype more business-friendly for quite a while. The company’s latest box (Linux 1U rack-mountable server) is a PBX-to-Skype gateway, using a T1 or E1 PRI interface to plug into a stock PBX. You can put up to 23 phone calls on a U.S. PRI. 

It’s a neat application, but is it too proprietary? Moving to SIP opens up a lot more options for unified communications, gee-wiz features on IP phones, and just a lot more seamless value-added features when you can go buy some more software. Not too many people linking up to write UC apps for Skype.

So what have you seen in the IP communications that has made you go “hmmm?” I’m going to have to start looking at some for the VoIP Fierce15 sometime in November.

- Doug