Happy New Year!

This is to wish all our readers and contributors a Happy and Prosperous year 2009. We are extremely grateful to everybody who has contributed to making this blog one of the best in the voip ecosystem. We a committed to bringing you the best in News, Information, Reviews, Rankings of voip products and services in the the new year.

Alibaba.com Chooses NICE SmartCenter

China's largest e-commerce company, Alibaba.com has placed an initial order for NICE SmartCenter solutions for two of its VoIP contact centers. The NICE solution will provide Alibaba.com with a comprehensive quality management solution for improving customer service agent performance, training effectiveness, and customer satisfaction.

NICE SmartCenter will provide Alibaba.com contact center supervisors with precision quality management to ensure customer satisfaction and foster customer loyalty. It will enable supervisors to proactively evaluate and improve the quality of service provided to customers calling about Alibaba.com's services and for technical support.

Andy Li, Vice-President of Alibaba.com said, "NICE SmartCenter will provide us the ability to enhance customer satisfaction and drive comprehensive business performance improvements. We are committed to providing outstanding customer service, and believe that with the NICE solution we will be able to better understand and satisfy the expectations and requirements of our customers, while improving operational efficiency."

Alibaba.com offers business-to-business service that connects millions of buyers and suppliers from around the world, and recently expanded its business to markets in India, Japan, and Korea. The Alibaba Group also includes Taobao -- China's largest consumer e-commerce company, Alipay -- Safe and secure online payment, Yahoo! Koubei -- Online classified listings for local services and search, and Alisoft -- Internet-based business management software.

FreeSWITCH Open Source Platform to Boost VoIP Quality with CELT

In a move designed to bolster VoIP quality, an open source telephony platform reportedly is now supporting a Web-based development group's low-delay audio codec.

Officials at FreeSWITCH say their platform supports Xiph.Org's so-called "Constrained Energy Lapped Transform," or "CELT" codec, a technology used for low-delay speech and audio communication.

According to Anthony Minessale II of FreeSWITCH, the implementation of the CELT codec allows any other device that can use CELT to send ultra-high-definition audio in a very small package.

"The bandwidth rate of 48kps in the FreeSWITCH implementation is actually less data per stream than the audio format that traditional telephones use," Minessale said.

It's also higher than CD quality, the company says – a feature that could bring even more businesses and consumers to VoIP communications.

As TMCnet has reported, some experts say that VoIP forms the basis for all Unified Communications (News - Alert), so that ensuring a high quality of Internet telephony is critical.

Though the market hype is around unified communications, it's most important to get IP telephony right first, "before they would ever consider moving toward a unified messaging environment," Joe Frost, vice president of marketing for Psytechnics told TMCnet in an interview.

Free voicemail service available courtesy VMTag

VMTag has announced a new service that allows allows anyone anywhere in the world to receive free voicemails in their mailbox whenever someone calls up a phone number. This service is a value added one from VMTag to its subscribers and therefore it free, the company believes it will go a long way to ease the way people communicate especially on the internet without compromising security which it claims most users value a lot.
Users need only to enter the email address to which Voicemail should be delivered and once the email address has been entered and submitted, VMTag will assign a Mailbox number to the email id and gives you a phone number to call. In addition, when you dial that phone number and enter mailbox number, you can drop a voicemail for that Id. This voicemail will then be forwarded to the email address. You can use VMTAG to create an audio newsletter for your business, record audio for a marketing campaign, and host of other customized applications.

Sky|Wi Telecom Partners with Taqua for VoIP Termination

US-based Sky|Wi Telecommunications has selected Taqua to deploy multiple Taqua 7000 switching systems to provide enhanced VoIP call termination in Mexico for carriers in the US and abroad. According to Taqua, the Taqua 7000 (T7000) will allow Sky|Wi Telecommunications to provide better rates to carrier customers while leveraging the reliability inherent with the T7000's blade-based carrier class architecture. The system is claimed to support a variety of protocols including SS7, SIP, MGCP, GR-303, CAS, NCS, PRI, GSM/CDMA, 2G, 3G, and 4G.
Scott Weidenfeller, chief marketing officer at Taqua, said: "The use of the T7000 will allow Sky|Wi to cost-effectively achieve its business objectives, and enable them the flexibility to branch out in the future to provide a host of other TDM and/or IP-based services to their customers." Also speaking on this new development, Adam Botbyl, chief information officer of Sky|Wi Telecommunications Holdings said "We evaluated several potential platforms for our expansion efforts but felt that the T7000 was the easiest and most cost effective solution for scaling our business. After our initial evaluations, we talked with many existing T7000 customers and ultimately chose Taqua based on the company's excellent customer service reputation and their focus on service providers like Sky|Wi."

MorphVOX Pro - The Voice Changing Software from Screaming Bee

There has been lots of voice changing software out there that can do sophisticated things with your voice but they generally cost lot of money but now you have a really cheap application in MorphVox Pro that enables you to do lot of interesting things with the way you sound and it costs just $39.95.
MorphVOX Pro let you change your voice and sound like whoever you want online and in-game. Its has superior voice-learning technology, background cancellation and sound quality. You can download lots of free voice and sound packs to MorphVOX thereby adding new voices and sounds to it. You can tweak any of these voices whichever way you like and generate many voice combination.
One other really interesting feature of MorphVOX is the Backgrounds feature. You can add any background sound you like while you talk. This way you can fool people to believe you are in soccer stadium, middle of a traffic jam or shopping in the mall while talking to them from the comfort of your office desk, couch or even your bed
MorphVOX could be used to create voice-overs for video or audio project and gamers can sound like the character they are playing adding to the fun. This amazing software works with Skype and other SIP based voip applications such as voipbuster, voipcheap etc. I have personally used it with Skype and voipbuster and it works great. Its available fully functional for a free 7 day trial at http://www.screamingbee.com/product/morphvox.aspx.

Terrorist Employed VoIP in Mumbai Attacks

The Mumbai terrorists' most powerful weapon appears not to have been guns or grenades, but instead their handheld VoIP phones, which allowed them to get detailed, live instructions from handlers on how to evade police, and where to attack next, while the police were powerless to detect them.
It was reported that the handlers were communicating with the attackers using VoIP phones that made it difficult, if not impossible, for the Indian authorities to intercept the calls, or even know they were taking place. Indian security forces surrounding the buildings were able to monitor the terrorists' outgoing calls by intercepting their cellphone signals. But Indian police officials said those directing the attacks, who are believed to be from Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant group based in Pakistan, were using a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone service, which has complicated efforts to determine their whereabouts and identities.
The biggest problem wasn't in determining the whereabouts or identities of those directing the attack, but in being able to intercept their communications. If the authorities could intercept the communications, they could know the terrorists' next actions, said a source from the police department. There is a little bit of good news here, though. The (security) experts said that VoIP calls left a far richer data trail for investigators to mine than someone calling from an old-fashioned pay phone. Maybe the terrorist plan of using voip technology for their evil deeds and go unditected might just have backfired and now authorities now have more information about their activities than they envisaged.

Truphone Brings Cheap International Calls to iPhone

With a view to introducing cheap international calls to the iPhone users, Truphone is set to launch a set of new applications to this effect. This new application is called Tuphone Anywhere and it affords users to make international calls across the internet for as little as £0.03/$0.06 [UK/Rest of World] per minute even when they're not connected to the internet. Inbound Truphone calling on the iPhone is also added for the first time, making it possible to enjoy completely free Truphone calls between two iPhones.
Truphone Anywhere works in 33 countries around the world, saving iPhone users from those countries money on international calls made from their home country when not in Wi-Fi. The easy-to-use service works alongside domestic service providers, but reduces international call costs to as little as £0.03/$0.06 [UK/RoW] per minute. The second new key feature - inbound calling for Truphone on the iPhone - works in all countries. Using the new 'presence' feature, iPhone users can see which of their other Truphone-using contacts are online, including contacts who also have Truphone on their iPhone. This makes it possible to place, for the first time, a free iPhone-to-iPhone Truphone call. The new inbound call capability means that iPhone users can avoid inbound call charges – for example, when abroad – provided they are connected to a Wi-Fi network, enabling significant cost savings.