VoIP is one of the exciting dark horses of the new Internet landscape -- and as broadband penetration grows, quality improves and costs come down to the $20/month range, it will emerge as one of the recovery drivers in the communications services industry.
Also, people are now finally understanding that "Voice" is just an "application on the Internet", rather than it's own whole infrastructure universe. But just the same, "voice" is just a feature of broadband communications and collaboration. Adding presence to voice is also interesting, with services such as Skype and some specialized SIP implementations doing this -- and of course consumer IM clients have gradually been adding more voice and video communications to their services, though are still somewhat dogged by quality issues, lack of cross platform or cross IM communications, and often firewall issues.
Further, it's all great that we now have a dozen end-points where we can be contacted by text and voice, asynchronously and in real-time, but we still haven't solved the problem of gathering the right people, when they are needed. The problem of convocation management is central to Convoq's ASAP online service (in free public trial). It flexibly supports multi-mode (text/audio/video) multi-party (1:1, groups of several people, or 1:100 seminar format) communications and conferencing, but with great tools for handling the process of getting people together.
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