Voip News & Articles

 Number crunchers Juniper (news, site) and other research firms estimate big numbers as Internet use switches from the desktop to the smartphone.

Your website has become a critical component of how you interact with customers. However, in most cases its use and the team that manages it have both grown organically. Additionally, it's often the IT department running the show.

As a result of this pattern, many websites do not meet the customer experience bar that modern marketing requires. They are not usable enough. They are not accessible enough. And they are not persuasive enough. There are also too many bits and pieces stapled together to create the feedback loops.

On the Ground: A Growing Problem

Recent Forrester research data found that improving customer experience via the website was at the top of many organizations' priority list. Other hot items included improving online usability (important for 78% of respondents), improving support for the brand online (64%) and improving cross-channel interactions (58%).

The problem, according to Forrester, is that the gap has grown too large between the business people who want these things and the technical and organizational realities on the ground.

In Demand: Better Powers of Persuasion

There are a number of elements that go into creating the optimal customer experience including rich media, social media and community, and analytics. But it's not as simple as finding a single vendor to support all your needs -- in fact, there is no single vendor.

With the number of Web CMS vendors, marketing vendors and new breed experience management vendors offering solutions to help you meet your challenges, it's hard to know which way to run.

Forrester and Siteworx are in turn analyzing and tackling the problem. You can join the conversation this Thursday, Dec 10th at 1pm EST. During a 1 hour webinar they will look specifically at how -- given the lack of a single vendor solution -- you can bridge the customer experience gap. 

During the free event analyst Stephen Powers will cover:

• The components of an ideal customer experience
• Tools to uncover how your content is being consumed
• The various vendors in the interactive marketing landscape
• Steps to develop your own persuasive content strategy
• Technology convergence patterns

Sound intriguing? You can register here.

Naturally, as the increasingly remote nature of our interactions becomes more apparent, the number of vehicles that enable it grows exponentially. One such tool is video conferencing, and the latest to add it to their bucket of desktop communication solutions is TeamViewer GmbH (news, site).

Well guys, it’s safe to say that we’re finally in the clear.

For awhile there things looked pretty bad for Skype (news, site), as eBay and the platform’s original co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis battled it out over legal issues.

The whole sitch started looking up a couple weeks ago when the opposing sides finally came to an agreement, granting Skype ownership of critical software. The settlement opened up some doors, and last Thursday eBay sold a 70 percent stake in the company for somewhere around US$ 1.9 billion up front with another US$ 125 million on the way. The remaining 30 percent stays with eBay. 

Zennstrom and Friis now have a substantial hold on their creation through Joltid, part of the investor group that purchased the large chunk from the auction king. 

Among the relieved is Skype CEO Josh Silverman, who says, “You’ll see Skype become a lot more ubiquitous in a lot more places, both mobile devices as well as embedded devices,” he says, adding “expect to see us on a lot more platforms.”

Follow them here, and let's see how things fare in 2010. 

Voice over IP is an ever-growing feature for phones, and is now a lot easier to implement thanks to Global IP Solutions (news, site).

With summer interns on the case, Google added functionality to Google Docs supposedly aimed at students, but we'd say actually aimed at MS Word, among others.

Yes, the back to school with Google Docs is a catchy theme song isn't it -- but it's really more about the enterprise, as you know. Some of these features are just the ticket to get you one step further from your desktop apps.

Well kids, it looks like it’s come down to official legal charges. Again. That is to say, Skype (news, site) founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström are suing eBay for what they claim is a violation of their license agreement and copyright infringement.

Though Friis and Zennstrom insist they are not seeking to halt it, we’re guessing that this new development doesn’t exactly help eBay’s recent arrangement to sell the Internet telephony platform.

If we can trust Jakob Nielsen and his latest report studying social networking on intranets, then next year is going to be interesting.

Nielsen went straight to various companies -- from Sprint to IBM to Johnson & Johnson -- to see how they are dealing with the increasing expectation that Web 2.0 will drive Enterprise 2.0. The quick answer, they’re not.

Joomla! (news, site) is great. A charming little exclamation mark here, a name we can barely (if at all) pronounce there, and most recently a low-level security fix.  

Wojmamni ana naiki, A.K.A. Joomla! 1.5.14 was released a mere eight days after the announcement of version 1.5.13, rather than the typical 6-8 weeks the open source CMS team usually waits for a follow up. The release fixes a total of 3 errors, two of which were small bugs introduced in 1.5.13, and a low-level security issue:

• Security: In com_mailto, it was possible to bypass timeout protection against sending automated emails.
• Components: Fixed error message in Media Manager
• Plugins: Fixed callback error message in TinyMCE editor

Are you feeling all enchanted by prominent punctuation marks and fanciful names? Head on over this way to download the full package, or, if you already on the Joomla! boat, here to update. 

We’ve exhausted our clever browser wars word play, so we’ll just come right out and say it: Firefox 3.5 was released for download today. 

The anticipated release comes one year after the launch of Firefox 3, and is being described by its creators as “the best performing browser Mozilla has ever released.” While that may be true—and has certainly got us geeks excited—those seeking one single rock-your-socks feature will be sorely disappointed. It appears that Firefox 3 isn’t about pulling ahead with fancy new functionality, rather, it’s about catching up.

Code and Visual hits all the right keywords with its new web content management solution. Rainbow Live offers the ability to manage XML content for Flash-based websites. It's a simple Web CMS, supported by their Rainbow XML editor, for those who don't want to be weighed down by hefty back-end systems.

Many consider the Adobe Flash Platform to be the defacto standard for delivering interactive content, video and other media applications on the web today. But even with their market lead, Adobe continues to work hard to improve their Flash Platform. Which is why Adobe has announced the latest installment of their Flash Media Servers.

Skype has released a new version of a VoIP client for the Apple Macintosh platform that adds some new and unique features. Version 2.8, which was released in beta, adds two major new features including the ability to share your screen with other Skype users and access Boingo's global hotspot network on a per-minute basis.

The Skype user community was surprised by the new, unique features to the Mac client. In the past, the Mac client has lagged behind the more widely used Windows client in functionality.

Norwegian Web Content Management providers eZ Systems have beefed up their Board of Directors by hiring three new members, each bringing a wealth of experience to the table.

Here at the cmf2007 conference in Arhus, Demark, we’re listening to Lisa Welchman discuss Web Governance and Web Operations Management (WOM).

Web Governance has little to do with information governance and records management. The exception to this is that — as one might imagine — the principles of good Web Operations Management can reference and/or learn from the principles found in other, more developed areas of organizational operations.