DEMO Gets An Earful Of VoIP Add-Ons

Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) isn't new. But the service is gaining momentum as more companies are introducing add-ons to complement the basic voice offerings from companies, such as Skype and Vonage.

VoIP vendors took the stage at Demo 2006 on Wednesday. "It's not the cheap long distance that will make the difference in service. That's easy," said Chris Shipley, Demo executive producer, during opening remarks. "It's the services that lay on top of VoIP that will make the difference."

IP telephone carrier market revenues are forecasted to grow from $1.6 billion in 2004 to $4.7 billion in 2010, according to the research firm Dell'Oro Group.

Alan Creighton, president and chief executive officer at My People LLC, a next-generation residential broadband telephone service, took the stage to roll out a speech-enabled tools and Internet content delivery service to help people stay better connected and organized.

Simply, My People will aggregate and organize voicemails, e-mails, call logs and Internet content preferences into one dashboard. "My People offers voice automated services from wakeup calls to weather, and the system will send the message to any phone number you choose," said Creighton. "You can also set a reminder call to pick up dry cleaning or when you have a doctor's appointment."Creighton demonstrated a call to London for 4 cents a minute vs. $1.49 a minute for conventional telephone service, and said the combined services would cost about $400 annually. The cost for service is $25 monthly with unlimited calling.

EQO Communications Inc. extends online communities with real-time communications to mobile phones. Skype has more than 227 million downloads and tens of millions of active users, according to my people.Bill Tam, chief executive officer for the company, introduced EQO Mobile Internet Phone Service for Skype, a new offering that enables subscribers to take their Skype buddy lists with them on their wireless phones.

It lets Skype users view the presence and the availability of their buddies on the list, and initiate and receive Skype calls from their mobile phone. Tam suggested the service could replace e-mail.

Using a combination of a phone-resident J2ME client and a carrier-grade signaling network, EQO bridges Skype to more than 150 million J2ME-capable mobile phones worldwide.

ZinkKat LLC introduced Chili, a wearable device to access telephone calls from anywhere in the home. It also operates as an MP3 player, or allows the user to access podcasts blogs and Web-casts through real simple syndication (RSS) feeds.Features include push-to-talk audio alerts, voice mail and audio e-mail. Chili connects through a radio frequency to a base station in the home. Everything is managed through headphones.

From the Chili device, users can access music remotely from anywhere in the home or access a telephone call as it comes in, access podcasts, as well as find articles and create a-text-to-speak conversion to hear articles found on Web.