When all the cool kids were raving about
Skype, I went and signed up for an
account. I haven’t used it much. I think I got maybe two calls on it, and
both times I didn’t have a microphone handy to actually take the call.
Something about Skype always made me a little uneasy. Maybe it was the
fact that they didn’t reveal just how it worked. What encryption was in
use? Could they drop in on your calls? Well, now that eBay bought Skype, I don’t think I’ll use them much anymore.
eBay is known for not being a very privacy friendly company, and let’s face
it, their customer support sucks.
So what’s a guy like me to do? Well, luckily Michael Robertson (the same
guy behind MP3.com and Linspire), has
started a cool toy called Gizmo,
which is based on standard SIP technology. That’s nice. They also have clients
available for Windows, Mac, and Linux (linspire based debs, but whatever, it
works fine on Ubuntu).
What makes this really nice is that first, you get a free quarter to make
phone calls. At 1.8 cents a minute to the US this won’t go really far, but
it should be enough for me to make a phone call or two. Second, because it’s
SIP based, you can dial into your client from any regular phone. There’s a
list of access
numbers for a large number of cities. Just pick an access number, press 1, and then
type the SIP Phone number you’d like to dial (my SIP number is 1-747-617-4120). With free long distance dialing
on cell phones, this means that it’s no problem to call my computer from
your cell phone. That’s cool.
They’ve also got a slew of other nifty features, mainly made possible by using
a real standard. For example, if I get a voice mail, it gets emailed to my
GMail account as a wav file. Then I can download the file and listen to the
message at my leisure. I would also think that in theory that it should be
compatable with MythPhone, so you can easily integrate a phone into your MythTV box. I’m just
in a state of wow right now. Maybe one of these days I’ll need to find a way
to hook up Asterisk too.
