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A lot of us – 85% of US households – end up keeping a landline, at least for now, for reasons similar to those expressed by Dan York in Four reasons I am choosing NOT to cut the landline cord.

Once you’ve decided to keep landline service for whatever reason, the PhoneGnome box is a terrific way to make that old landline useful and keep the cost down.

1. Enjoy all those calling features without high telephone company costs – Get the absolute cheapest landline service, and still have Three-way Calling, Call Forwarding, Call Transfer, Speed Dial, Telemarketer Screen, Do Not Disturb, and more, free with no monthly fees.
2. VoIP for long-distance – Use VoIP for long-distance calls seamlessly and automatically. Lowest possible rates – as low as free for many calls. Nothing to learn. Save on all calls made in the household. No computer needed and no software to install. No special phone or training of the household required – they won’t even know it’s VoIP.
3. Internet features – Make your phone work with your email, web, etc. Free voicemail to email. Web phone book with click-to-dial. On-line call logs. Record phone calls to WAV files. Web APIs and widgets. Make calls from your iGoogle page. And much more.
4. Mobile integration – Sling your home POTS phone jack to your mobile phone. Make local POTS calls using your mobile phone from anywhere. No special phone required. Just use m.phonegnome.com on your cell phone – free.
5. Get your geek on – Despite being easy to use, PhoneGnome still has a lot to offer power-users too. SIP credentials for use with any softphone, ATA, Asterisk etc.. Give your home phone a Public SIP address for interop with SIPphone, Gizmoproject, Free World Dialup, Asterisk, Trixbox, PBX integration etc. Free calls to Gtalk, MSN, and Yahoo! IM users. ENUM and SIPbroker support, and more.

You’re paying for that landline, you might as well be getting something out of it besides 911 and power-outage fail over. The $99 PhoneGnome box lets you get the benefits of VoIP without giving up the reliability of a POTS landline – and lower the amount you spend on that landline to the bare minimum at the same time.

Lee Dryburgh was a key proponent behind the O’Reilly ETel conference. When that conference was dropped by O’Reilly for the 2008 calendar, Lee pressed on with a new conference in its wake: eCommMedia conference or eCom 2008.

The conference will be held March 12-14 in Silicon Valley and is shaping up to be an invigorating event, with speakers from Google, Yahoo!, Twitter, and Skype to name a few. Representatives of PhoneGnome will be in attendance – be sure to look us up!

Special: you can get 15% off the already discounted early bird price by using discount code ’phonegnome’ during the registration process. Early bird registration ends January 31 so get over to the site and register today.

Joe gets it when it comes to open-standards and VoIP. In his post Why I hate Vonage he bemoans the fact that commercial VoIP providers don’t support SIP addresses, ENUM, and other VoIP open-standards that would allow users to make more free calls.

He compares the situation to email:

Can you imagine if you were charged every time you emailed someone using a different email provider, because your provider printed out the message, put a stamp on it, and mailed it to the other provider? Of course not! Yet we allow VOIP providers to take our call, run it over an analog phone line, to send it to another VOIP provider, and charge us for it. And why would they do otherwise? Comcast Digital Voice charges 27 cents a minute to make a call to Argentina. If you and your other party were both using a provider that used an open SIP system, you could connect directly, through SIP; instead, they’re collecting quite a bit of money for not a whole lot of effort.

He correctly notes that:

ENUM allows completely seamless integration of VOIP and POTS: if you’re calling someone still using a regular telephone, your provider connects for you and you’re charged accordingly; if you’re calling someone whose also using SIP, it’s completely free.

Sound familiar? That’s exactly how PhoneGnome works. You simply lift the handset and dial real phone numbers. If the call can be sent free via VoIP, it will be. Otherwise, it is placed to the traditional phone network (at discounted rates). As Joe says: “As more people switch to the new system, the system runs even better.”

PhoneGnome is the only user-friendly, mainstream consumer focused commercial VoIP service that fully embraces the open standards Joe refers to, including SIP interoperability, ENUM, ITAD/ISN, and free WEB 2.0 XML-RPC APIs

We invite any company that sees promise in Ooma’s recently announced “peer to peer” VoIP model to consider rolling such a service out on the PhoneGnome platform and see how it flies.

An Ooma-like service could be developed and deployed on the open PhoneGnome platform in a matter of weeks (if not days) using our patent-pending technology. Using the PhoneGnome platform removes many barriers over starting from scratch, including:

1. No hardware R&D or fab costs.
2. Zero hardware time-to-market factor
3. Minimal software development – by leveraging existing PhoneGnome technology your efforts can focus on the “peer to peer termination” routing portion and get everything else free.
4. An existing “seeded” market and hardware footprint
5. Be in market in days or weeks, perhaps even before Ooma itself goes live in September
6. Very low capital requirements: low risk, quickly evolve toward viability

We look forward to hearing from you: bizdev@televolution.com

If someone wants to challenge us as to whether deploying such a service this quickly is possible on the PhoneGnome platform, propose your stakes, and we’ll take that bet.

PhoneGnome will be exhibiting at next week’s Communications Developer Conference (formerly VoIP Developer Conference) in Santa Clara. See us at booth 124 Wednesday, May 16 5:45 pm to 8:00 pm and Thursday, May 17 11:30 am – 4:00 pm.

PhoneGnome provides a VoIP service platform that can be controlled via web services APIs. Our telephony web services make it practical to deliver new Voice 2.0 services to traditional, VoIP, or Cable Phone subscribers worldwide with rapid time to market and low-capex pay as you grow economics. Our transparent commercial terms, well-defined operational and technical interfaces, and light-weight certification requirements make PhoneGnome the platform of choice for next-generation telephony service roll-outs.

For more information see: http://www.phonegnome.com/developers.html