We have recently done a small piece of work for a company called Ooma. (I have had them in the top right hand corner of my site as a featured product for the past month.) They are purported to be the Vonage killer (if Vonage doesn’t implode first) and the VoIP space has recently become smaller with the demise of SunRocket. The Ooma product is inherently viral
which is to say that the hardware design and functionality promote themselves. The unit is very Mac-like and has been well received by those that have tested it. Much like Vonage you can access your voice mail via the web interface called the Ooma Lounge. The primary difference between Ooma and Vonage is that Ooma has no monthly subscription cost.
Fuser is a free service created by a Jared Polis team out of Boulder Colorado and will allow you to access your email and social networking messages all in one place. For those that have numerous email/social networking accounts, this is a great offering. The product has been in beta since this summer and will hopefully be launching soon.
It is my humble opinion that Ooma and Fuser should partner to create one online interface to get the majority of our communications; email, social networking and phone all in one location, accessible from anywhere.
This also brings up some interesting questions about the future of land-lines for telephony. People have been making the transition from home phones to mobile phones in record numbers and there is some question as to whether products like Ooma are apart of the change or going to be just another victim of it. The question is;
Are people replacing their home phones with mobile phones or are they replacing home phones with VoIP phones?
A comment from Karen (#2) sheds come light on why someone would have a VoIP phone and a mobile. And yet, it is logical to assume that over time this issue will be resolved. We will have to wait and see.
Now if I could just access the visual voice mail on my iPhone (or is it Klausner mail?) , via the web, and translate the messages using “voice to text” technology like SpinVox, I would be set! Could take a step further embed meebo functionality that would allow me to IM when logged in. Logged in where you ask? The Ooma Lounge of course!
