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.

If you are concerned about losing your London UK 0207 number, we have them available for as low as $5.75 USD (2.77 GBP) per month.

You can have the number ring to your PC or to another fixed or mobile number (anywhere in the world). Sign up at PhoneGnome.com - it’s free - and after your account is setup, sign in and navigate to Features / Worldwide Personal Phone Numbers

PhoneGnome announces the release of our new PhoneGnome Mobile Web service with Visual Voicemail for any cell phone.

The focus of PhoneGnome Mobile Web is on support for as many phones as possible, with an efficient and practical user experience, providing powerful convenience on any phone. Rather than lot’s of noisy graphics, PhoneGnome Mobile Web is all about getting to the features people really use, quickly and easily, within the constraints of the mobile phones that people really have. You don’t need a Blackberry, Treo, iPhone or other high-end phone to use PhoneGnome Mobile Web and Visual Voicemail. And best of all, PhoneGnome Mobile Web is free with PhoneGnome service.

Here’s just a few of the things you can do with it:

Make calls on your cell phone using your home PhoneGnome service

• People see your home phone caller ID so it looks like you’re calling from home
• Call international PhoneGnome users free using local airtime

More convenient use of your mobile phone PhoneGnome account

• Make international calls free or at low PhoneGnome rates
• Make VoIP calls to SIP addresses, Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo! users, conveniently

Easy access to your PhoneGnome contacts

• All your My PhoneGnome contacts conveniently accessible from any phone, anywhere
• Call SIP contacts, Skype users, and other numbers not normally available on mobile phones
• Convenient one-click dialing of any contact without callback hassles

Visual Voicemail

• Shows your voicemail messages with caller details.
• Click to hear any individual message in any order you wish.
• Know what messages can wait and which ones need attention without listening to them all.

Point your mobile phone browser to mobile.phonegnome.com and sign in with your PhoneGnome phone number and PIN. Once you’re signed in, bookmark that page for quick access in the future.

Learn more

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’re thrilled that the LA Times included PhoneGnome as one of the three products discussed in their recent story Ready to hang up on telephone bills? There are a number of things the Times got wrong, however, that we need to clear up.

First, the story says PhoneGnome includes a “Free call area” of PhoneGnome members in U.S. and Canada. The truth is, PhoneGnome includes free calls to members in dozens of countries around the world, not just US/Canada.

The story also makes the following erroneous conclusion:

If you make long-distance calls to non-PhoneGnome numbers, you need a payment plan with monthly or pay-as-you-go charges.

So unless you are using the $100 device only to call local or designated PhoneGnome numbers, charges will mount up.

Did someone forget to take their medication? One of the other products featured in the story costs $300 more than PhoneGnome right out of the gate (the third product is in an entirely different category, requiring a phone hooked to a PC to make calls). That $300 will by over 14,000 minutes of calls to the US and about 18 additional countries. Based on the call patterns of real PhoneGnome users, that 14,000 minutes will last 70 months for the average PhoneGnome user! This is because, in real life, there are many ways to save with PhoneGnome, including the Reach Beyond service, getting the people you call most often on PhoneGnome, etc. Even assuming no free calls, and opting for the simple apples to apples comparison of the PhoneGnome $14.95 per month plan, it’s equivalent to 20 months of service, but without the risk of paying up front and hoping for a return down the road.

The author says with PhoneGnome “charges will mount up” but what the author misses is that in the competing case, $300 “mounts up” on day one, whether the person will ever use that much service or not. In the PhoneGnome case, the user has $300 to apply to non-free calls, including saving on calls outside the US (which will cost over and above the initial $300 in the competitors case), and a wide variety of ways to optimize the way they spend that money to match their real-world calling habits. We know from real PhoneGnome users that this money will last a lot longer in the PhoneGnome case - the vast majority of people will never come out ahead paying the extra $300 up front.