The best kept secret in VoIP with overseas relatives and friends is Ooma. For about $200 you can set your overseas loved ones up with some hot VoIP action, giving them a local telephone number they can use to call you and you can use to call them. If you travel then its great.

That said, Ooma has just released the Telo system, an improvement to its current firmware that includes iPhone/Touch support, Bluetooth support, Google Voice connectivity and voice transcription. Not an upgrade per se but an improvement.

Pure Voice improves the call audio and the additional features – Bluetooth, for example – allows you to connect to cellphones. Here’s the Google Voice juice:

Google Voice Extensions

Ooma simplifies the Google Voice user experience, enabling consumers to take advantage of the complementary capabilities found in both offerings, for a truly integrated and seamless phone experience. Google Voice users can integrate the Call Presentation, Listen In, and caller-ID features with their Ooma system as well as access Google Voice voicemail at a touch of a button.

Voicemail Transcription

Ooma customers can have inbound voicemail transcribed into text and sent as an email or text message. Users can now enjoy the convenience of reading their voicemail quickly and silently whether they are at home or on the road. Ooma voicemail transcription is human-aided to ensure the delivery of accurate and reliable messages.

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Ooma – the $250 VoIP box that lets you make free calls in the US (and that lets you call the US for free from international locales, an undocumented perk to be sure) – is getting more and more popular thanks to the downturn.

With a new Chief Marketing Officer, Rich Buchanan, and a new price the system is now selling like cakes that are hot. The boxes are now sold at 1,300 stores and a new version is coming this year so we can expect great things from this little company. Great things!
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Ooma, everyone’s favorite box that offers free phone calls and looks cool, isn’t failing, at least according to a tip by Pat Phelan of Cubic Telecom. Trying to get further info. The company, backed by Ashton Kutcher, looked like it was going under last week according to a post by Valleywag. I’ve tried the service and it works well enough. It basically offers seamless free VoIP for about $400 a pop.

Cheapskates that we are, people are always trying to find deals, like, say, being able to make phone calls for free. Yes, that works. Over at the Times, David Pogue bravely looked at several services that offer, in one way or another, free phone calls. Skype we already know, so who cares. But there’s three other services that seem neat: Jajah.com, T-Mobile’s HotSpot@Home and Ooma.

Jajah lets you make calls from your regular telephone, but you need to initiate the conversation with a Web browser. Jajah then calls both numbers and connects them, sorta like an operator.

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While we’re spending our time pushing our Destroy Your Landline Contest, wherein you the readers are implored to destroy your traditional landline phones, something comes up that makes us want to perhaps hold on to ours. Ooma is a new Vonage-like VoIP service that tweaks the formula just enough to perhaps survive where companies like SunRocket have failed.

The VoIP ideal has been around, and VoIP to VoIP calls are almost always free. Calling to a traditional landline, though, has some costs associated with it (per-call or monthly). It’s these costs that have added up and made problems for other VoIP providers. Ooma has come up with a fairly innovative way to literally skirt these costs, and it could make all the difference. Read More