It’s not every day I get to dine with the CEO of a public company worth $5 billion. Last month I sat down with Andy Ory, founder and chief exec at Bedford, MA-based Acme Packet (NASDAQ: APKT), for an in-depth chat about his company’s strategy and outlook in the area of networking technology.

The setting was The Friendly Toast in Cambridge, MA. Ory has a soft spot in his heart for the Kendall Square area—back in the late ‘80s, he worked at Boston Technology, the voice-mail pioneer whose office was next to where Friendly Toast sits today. (If you ever get a chance, ask him about the story of using the local pay phone for product testing.)

Over a BLT and huevos rancheros (if I recall correctly), we talked about everything from Ory’s startup lessons to big-company concerns and business regulations, from Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype to how Acme Packet is like Cisco back in 1993. (Ory is speaking tonight at a Boston-area event with Founder Collective’s Eric Paley; he will talk about Acme Packet’s story and his broader experiences in building companies.)

Ory is a leading light in the tech entrepreneurship scene. Before founding Acme Packet in 2000, he cut his teeth at Boston Technology and then founded Priority Call Management, which sold to LHS Group for over $160 million in 1999. Over the past decade, he and his team have built Acme Packet into a leader in session border control—technology that helps telecom network operators and big companies manage voice-over-IP (VoIP) and other communications and services over the Internet in an efficient and secure manner.

Yet things have not always been rosy for Acme Packet, which went public in 2006 and now has roughly 700 employees (about 450 in Bedford). The company’s stock fell below $4 in late 2008, before rebounding and rising strongly in the past year and a half, to around $70 in recent months. I wanted to hear about that dramatic comeback too.

Ory didn’t disappoint as either a lunch companion or an interview subject. It helps that he is a charmer and a natural-born storyteller. Consider how he explains where Acme Packet sits today:

“Imagine you were visiting a company back in 1993 called Cisco Network Systems. ‘What do you guys do?’ We make a router. You might say, ‘what’s a router?’ It’s a piece of hardware and software. The reason is enterprises are converting their infrastructure to IP [Internet protocol] because of e-mail. If enterprise A wants to send e-mail to enterprise B, they need a router between them. Well, you might say, ‘what percentage of enterprises are going to do e-mail?’ And they’d say, every single one on the planet. ‘And how many e-mail messages fill up a router?’ To figure out how many routers you’re going to sell. What was really interesting is, when you connect all these networks together, a network effect ensues. Of course I couldn’t say to you, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Napster—I wish I could have,” Ory says.

“Now let’s fast forward 18 years and you’re visiting my company,” he says. “We make a session border controller. Enterprises and service providers are converting their service infrastructure to IP so they can do voice over IP. When they want to make a VoIP call from one enterprise to another, they need a session border controller to connect those two enterprises. So you’d say, ‘what percentage of enterprises and service providers are going to do VoIP?’ And of course my answer is, every single one. … Next Page »

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I had the pleasure of sitting down with David Hauser recently to talk about his Boston-area company, the Grasshopper Group.

David is the CTO of the company and co-founded it with Siamak Taghaddos in 2003 when they were both students at Babson College. From its beginnings as a virtual phone system, the Grasshopper Group is now the parent company of multiple Web-based products all focused around the company’s core purpose of empowering entrepreneurs. Grasshopper employs about 50 people, continues to grow, and has never raised any capital from VCs.

The first part of our conversation (see video on YouTube) was focused on the origins of the company. How did two college students decide to start a telecom company out of their dorm room? As is often the case, it originated from an authentic need that the founders encountered through their own experiences as entrepreneurs.

We also talked about mentorship and role models. Grasshopper was started in the tech doldrums. David and Siamak admit to having very few role models in the ecosystem to look up to. During this part of the talk, David gives excellent advice on being bold and resourceful about seeking people out and sharing your story to get people (partners, customers, and mentors) to become advocates of your cause.

But the real magic of the Grasshopper story is the way the entire company is anchored around a core purpose and core values. As David says, “We are not just selling some stupid phone system.” Everyone in the company and everything they do is anchored by a vision of supporting 1 million entrepreneurs with products they love that help them achieve their passion, he says.

Vision and values are pretty soft stuff. Many great companies have value statements that don’t mean much (most employees couldn’t recite them if asked) and many startups want to stand for something, but fail in the process. What you hear from David is the way the vision and values of the company permeate through all aspects of the company. For example:

• Establishing culture and maintaining culture as a company scales
• Raising (or not raising) money
• Sending dead insects to 5000 thought leaders
• Staying creative in PR and Marketing
• Searching for companies to start

The whole interview is really meaty, but if you only have 5-10 minutes, watch the second segment, below, where this is all discussed. Also, you can keep up with David by following him on Twitter or checking out some of his presentations on entrepreneurship and Culture, Purpose, and Values.

Thanks to Xconomy for helping to make this interview happen, and to Sean O’Connor who helped me significantly upgrade the production quality of these videos.

[Editor's note: Rob Go blogs at www.robgo.org.]

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San Diego-based VoxOx, which provides a free communications service based on voice over Internet (VoIP) technology, hopes to make a big splash today with the release of its VoxOx Call for iPhone—the startup’s first mobile app.

When VoxOx debuted three years ago, users could download a free application to their desktop, enabling consumers to combine their voice, text messaging, social media, chat, email, fax, and content sharing into a unified service with a single user interface. VoxOx has added some new features since then, such as a low-cost technique for placing international calls and a “translator in the cloud” for translating things like text messages and emails. The company introduced a fully redesigned version of its desktop software in January at the Consumer Electronics Show that was intended to simplify its user interface and main messaging window.

Now, with the launch of its iPhone app, VoxOx is looking to capitalize on the “call connect” feature of its VoIP service to enable iPhone users to make low-cost long-distance calls from anywhere in the world. As I explained last year, the technology uses SMS (text messaging) technology to access an automated, cloud-based system that connects the caller and receiver without incurring international charges for placing the call.

VoxOx boasts that its mobile app does the same thing—without drawing heavily on a user’s mobile data plan—and includes a digital recording and transcription service, two-way worldwide text messaging, automated call forwarding, and other features.

The iPhone market has become so huge that it’s kind of a no-brainer for telephony companies to address the iOS market sooner or later. Because the iOS accounts for something like 16 percent of the smartphone operating system market and close to 60 percent of mobile web consumption in North America, it’s something that VoxOx needs to do to stay relevant. It’s also not the only mobile app that VoxOx has in the works.

“We will definitely have something new for our Android users; we just don’t have one today,” says Matt Howell, the VoxOx director of product management.

VoxOx is operated by San Diego’s Telcentris, which apparently altered its name from TelCentris last year, as a free service for … Next Page »

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When you think about it, the experience of talking on the phone hasn’t changed all that much since the world’s first telephone call in 1876 (Alexander Graham Bell’s famous “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you”). The underlying technology is completely different, of course, and today we can make calls from almost anywhere thanks to wireless networks. But at its root, a phone call is still just a two-way audio transmission.

Now Thrutu, a Sequoia Capital-backed startup in Palo Alto, CA, is trying to shake up that tradition a bit. The company has created a new application for Android phones—soon to be available on iPhones and BlackBerry devices as well—that lets users share data during a voice call without switching between apps. In its first release, the app can handle three types of information: photos, contact details, and the sender’s location on a map. But in future releases, according to the company, users will also be able to share live video, play games, and exchange other data such as social media updates.

“We have this vision that for voice to stay relevant, it has to be much more tightly integrated with other communications experiences,” says Chris Mairs, Thrutu’s chief technology officer. The startup is a subsidiary of Metaswitch, a London, UK-based maker of hardware and software for wireless carriers that Mairs co-founded in 1981. “There has been this barrier between the voice aspects of telephony and the data aspects, and we now have devices that will do both, but they’re still in two halves. We are bringing the two halves together.”

The Thrutu app consists of a small group of buttons that slide onto an Android phone’s screen during a phone call; they look as if they’re layered on top of the phone’s regular dialer app. By clicking the photo button during a call, you can snap a photo with your smartphone’s camera, and the shot will be instantly transmitted to the other caller’s screen and saved in the device’s photo gallery, all without interrupting the voice connection. Sending a saved photo, address-book contact details, or map coordinates works similarly. You could do some of these things via e-mail or SMS on an iPhone, but it would mean bringing up other apps while the person you’re talking to waits.

Both parties on a call need to have the Thrutu app installed and running in the background for the service to work—which gives users a strong reason to recommend the app to their friends. Bump, another app now used by more than 25 million iPhone and Android users to share data between devices, benefited from the same sort of viral distribution. And in fact, Mairs says “Bump is like Thrutu without voice.”

Thrutu obviously isn’t the first mobile app to mix audio with other media in real time. Skype’s apps allow two-way video calls on iPhones and Android phones, as does the FaceTime feature on the iPhone 4 (and, soon, the iPad 2). But the Thrutu experience is different. First off, Thrutu really is the first app that lets users send data while they’re conducting a call over a wireless carrier’s traditional voice network. On GSM-based networks like AT&T’s, the app does this by accessing a 3G data channel; on CDMA-based networks like Verizon’s or Sprint’s, which don’t allow simultaneous voice and data transmissions, users have to be within range of a Wi-Fi network.

In addition, Thrutu is intended for more casual situations than video calling apps. “The contexts where people are really happy doing video calls are few and far between; they’re rarely spontaneous,” says Thrutu vice president Liz Rice, who formerly worked at Skype. “It’s much more of a prepared thing, like a Thursday evening call with the grandkids. People worry about … Next Page »

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Redwood City, CA-based Qik, which makes software for live two-way video calls that runs on 200 models of smartphones, will be purchased by Luxembourg-based Skype for an undisclosed sum, the two companies announced today. Skype itself been busy extending the two-way video calling capabilities familiar from its Web service to mobile platforms such as the iPhone, and the company said that the Qik acquisition would assist by adding recording, sharing, and storage capabilities, as well as bandwidth optimization techniques for wireless streaming. “Together, Skype and Qik will focus on providing a richer, more integrated experience that will allow people globally to share experiences in real-time video across different platforms, as well as store those moments so they can be viewed anytime later,” said the announcement from Skype, which is still partially owned by eBay. Qik was founded in 2006 and has 60 employees.

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C2Call, a Dortmund, Germany-based Internet telephony company whose CEO, Martin Feuerhahn, operates from the startup’s Mountain View, CA, office, said today that it has raised $2 million in Series A venture funding. Taking part in the round were Draper Investment Company, High-Tech Gründerfonds, and angel investor Klaus Wecken. Using C2Call’s software, Internet users can embed click-to-call links in websites, e-mails, instant messages, blog posts, Tweets, or Facebook status updates. The links open voice connections over C2Call’s FriendCaller network; Internet calls are free and land-line and mobile calls cost 2 cents per minute. The company said it will use the funds to expand into international markets.

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Seattle-based Cloudvox, an online service that bridges Web applications with phone services for developers, has been acquired by Ifbyphone, an Internet telephony company based in Chicago. Terms of the deal were not given. Cloudvox was developed by Seven Scale, a startup led by Troy Davis, a former Loudeye and RealNetworks employee.

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Today at 4:30 at the Media Lab’s Bartos Theatre, the FCC will hold a public workshop to discuss net neutrality policy. What is the importance of net neutrality to the innovation community?

We can learn a great deal about this by examining the stories of the seven pipes going into most American homes. Most homes are connected to pipes that carry water, electricity, telephony, cable TV, sewer, gas and Internet. (You can think of the Internet as a separate pipe, anyway, even though it usually comes in over the cable or telephone line.) Yet only one of these pipes has historically offered everyone the chance to innovate on top of it. We should be able to learn something about the importance of open innovation by examining the “innovation histories” of these seven pipes.

Lets start with water, gas, and sewer. Perhaps Xconomy readers can point out some innovation in the last couple of decades in these areas. There sure aren’t many.

How about electricity, telephony and cable TV? These sectors often sport a degree of competition, usually with two to three players offering alternatives in each geographic market. But competition is not the same as open innovation. Electric utilities, for example, have struggled for years to broadly adopt a single modest innovation: the ability to pour power back into the grid. Telephony saw some minor innovations about 20 years ago—things like caller ID and *69—but nothing since. Cable TV saw the addition of a few more channels, and a few more pixels, but nothing that fundamentally expands what it does for us.

And then there is the Internet. Open competition on the Internet “pipe” has spawned so much innovation that industries are being turned upside down. Ask folks in the music, news, broadcast media, and telephony industries, to name a few. Have you been to a travel agency recently? How often do you physically walk into a bank? Many people believe the Internet changed the course of the most recent Presidential election. Oh, and it has placed the greater part of all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips. Enough said.

Some might say this comparison is unfair—that the other pipes could never have had this kind of impact. Of course, we’ll never know. But if you think that this level of innovation could have been achieved if the Internet were, like the other pipes, managed by a single large, benevolent service provider, one need look no farther than AOL to see what that really did look like.

In the early days, AOL was the Internet, except that it was under the aegis of a single, large, benevolent service provider. And AOL was great. We all remember chat rooms. But there is no comparison between the innovation AOL spawned and what the “open Internet” would later bring.

Companies providing Internet service would like to be able to control what flows on our Internet pipes, giving preference to their own services, and squelching others’ offerings. That would be a recipe for turning the Internet back into AOL. Recently, the FCC has started to put in place policies to prevent that. Let’s support this move. We don’t want a future in which the Internet pipe works like the other pipes.

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You’re an unfunded early-stage startup and your sole venture backer sends you a check for millions of dollars. Unfortunately, it’s made out to the wrong company name, so you can’t deposit it. What do you do? You change your name, of course.

That’s how Primary Networks became Acme Packet. The Burlington, MA, maker of Internet switching equipment and software was founded in 2000 and went public in 2006—today you’ll find it on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticker symbol APKT. But when it got its first capital infusion from Menlo Ventures in Menlo Park, CA, says co-founder and CEO Andy Ory, it was still so new that it hadn’t even printed business cards.

“We’d been using the name Acme Packet in all our presentations, because we thought it was funny, but [Menlo] actually took the name seriously,” says Ory. “They sent us a $12 million check made out to Acme Packet. We changed our name that day.”

In a way, the company’s whole history is about adapting to change. The Acme part of the name may or may not refer to the fictional company that supplied Wile E. Coyote with the rockets, anvils, and other gear he used to pursue the Road Runner. (Ory won’t say, perhaps out of concern for treading on Warner Bros. trademarks.) But the “packet” part definitely refers to the packets into which all data is divided before it can cross the Internet—and Ory and his co-founder Patrick MeLampy saw early on that if the Internet were ever to become a medium for real-time communications such as voice calls and video conferencing, the way these packets travel would have to be rethought. Their big idea: If Acme could come up with faster, more reliable way to shepherd high-priority packets through the existing Internet, telecom providers would beat a path to their door.

[Editor's Note: Every startup has a "big idea" that it thinks will catapult it to success. With this story, we continue an occasional column highlighting the big ideas---and the resulting challenges---at companies in Xconomy's home cities.]

Traditionally, Ory explains, the thousands of Internet Protocol (IP) packets that may comprise a file such as an e-mail message, a photo, or a spreadsheet are dispersed and sent across the net along unpredictable paths before being reassembled at the destination address. Packets often get lost along the way, meaning replacements have to be sent. Engineers call this approach “best-effort” networking.

Meeting with me at the company’s headquarters last week, Ory held up a piece of paper. “If I dip this document in liquid nitrogen and break it into 10,000 packets and put them into the network like little pachinko balls, it doesn’t matter what order they arrive in—eventually the sequence gets completed, and you’ve got your e-mail. That’s great, and it usually takes less than 500 milliseconds. But now imagine you and I are doing a voice-and-video-over-IP call, and 24 times every second, a visual of me is being dipped in liquid nitrogen and shipped as packets. They can’t arrive out of order, or with more than 200 milliseconds of delay.”

Best-effort networking just isn’t good enough to handle unidirectional communication with that kind of alacrity, let alone bidirectional communications, Ory explains. So if Voice-over-IP (VoIP) telephony were every to be a reality—and back in 2000, that was still an open question—something new would be needed.

Ory and MeLampy came up with the idea of installing special boxes at the boundaries between the hundreds of privately owned networks that together make up the Internet. These boxes would act as way stations. The packets in a voice or video stream—what Ory calls “signaled media”—could still travel dispersed paths through the cores of the local networks. But at the edges, the way stations would reconstitute them, like regiments of infantry forming up for battle, before handing them off to the next network.

“What emerged was an infrastructure where … Next Page »

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Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN), the Burlington, MA-based voice technology juggernaut that has already absorbed most of its East Coast competitors, reached west today, announcing that it has acquired Seattle-based Jott.

Jott, founded in 2006 by ex-Microsoft employees, started out as a free voice-to-text service that allowed users to record messages via telephone that were then transcribed into e-mails. Over time, the company transitioned to a paid business model, and expanded the capabilities of its service to let users create text messages, blog posts, appointments, reminders, and notes. The service has proved popular among mobile professionals, gaining hundreds of thousands of users, according to the company.

Nuance’s acquisition of Jott gives it a credible product in the area of phone-based voice-to-text services, where other companies such as Google, with its Google Voice service, and UK-based Spinvox have begun to encroach.

“Jott’s voice-to-text offerings have experienced a groundswell of adoption and positive industry recognition since the company’s inception, and we’re thrilled about the opportunity to expand our market reach and our voice services portfolio,” Nuance senior vice president Michael Thompson said in an announcement. “Together we will deliver a range of new services to our mobile operator and enterprise customers.”

Nuance isn’t saying how much it shelled out for Jott. The startup was funded by Bain Capital Ventures, Draper Richards, Ackerley Partners, and UK-based Atomico Investments; its last publicly divulged funding round, in 2007, amounted to $5.4 million. Jott may have needed a larger partner like Nuance in order to compete in its sector, given that competitor Spinvox, with some $200 million in venture cash, had far outpaced it in fundraising efforts.

Nuance and Jott said that Jott’s services, including Jott Assistant, Jott Voicemail, and Jott for Salesforce, will keep working as usual, with no interruptions in service. But as a result of the acquisition, Jott-like capabilities may come to many more consumers—Nuance says it plans to package Jott Assistant as part of the voice services it provides to wireless operators.

“Our combined expertise will bring innovative and differentiated voice services to a variety of markets with tremendous scale,” Jott co-founder John Pollard said in a statement.

One area where Nuance’s technology may help Jott is in automated speech-to-text software. While the basic user interface that Jott users encounter when they call the service is driven by speech recognition software, users’ recordings are actually transcribed by humans working in large processing centers. Replacing those humans with advanced speech-to-text software, similar to Nuance’s Dragon Naturally Speaking line of dictation software, would be an obvious way to make Jott’s service more efficient and scalable.

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Google Voice, a phone line unification and voice mail transcription service created by Grand Central and being revamped by Google, is gradually being opened up to people on its extensive waiting list, according to Twitter posts this week from the Google Voice team. “Still sending invites, many more today, but the list is long. Thx for your patience,” a post tonight read. Google began sending invitations to people on its reservations list on June 25. Xconomy reviewed Google Voice in March and published reviews from beta users in late June.

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Back in March, I wrote a column about Google Voice, the reincarnated version of a voicemail unification service that Google acquired from Grand Central back in 2007. The free service gives you a single phone number for life that isn’t tied to any particular land line or cellular device—instead, calls ring through to whichever phones you specify. Voicemails get stored online and (if you want) transcribed into text e-mails. In my column, I called Google Voice “the end of the phone as we know it,” since a Google Voice number resembles an e-mail address more than an old-fashioned phone line. It goes with you everywhere, can be managed entirely through the Web, and literally turns your voicemails into e-mails.

Google Voice was, and still is, in a private, invitation-only, beta testing phase. When I checked with Google early last week, employees were still saying the service will be available to the general public “soon”—which is the same thing they were saying back in March. But the big day may be approaching. While rumors circulating last week about the service’s impending launch turned out to be false, Google Voice product manager Craig Walker did state, via his public Twitter stream, that “We’re cranking 24/7 to get there.”

In conjunction with my March column, Google kindly provided 100 Google Voice beta invitations for Xconomy readers—and not surprisingly, all of the invitations were snapped up within an hour after we publicized the offer. So in anticipation of the public launch of Google Voice, I decided to ping the lucky 100 beta account winners last Friday to find out how the service has been working out for them, and whether they’d recommend it to others.

The readers who’ve written back so far have been lavish with their praise—at least, the ones who have actually been using their accounts. Several have admitted that they never signed up, or that they signed up but found that Google Voice wasn’t what they expected, or that, as one reader put it, “I would have liked to [use it] but then work (life?) got in the way.” More about the potentially high barriers to adoption below.

Readers who’ve used Google Voice seem to like the way it lets them give out a single phone number to everyone, rather than separate office, home, and cell numbers. Several readers said they like the (somewhat sneaky) feature that lets users listen to callers as they’re leaving a voicemail, and break in if they want to talk to that person directly. And if there’s one feature everyone loves, it’s the automatic transcription of voicemail messages into e-mails—a Google invention that wasn’t part of the original Grand Central service. While Google’s speech-to-text technology is far from perfect, readers say it’s good enough to get the gist of a message across, and that it saves them from the universally dreaded task of actually listening to all their voicemail. (You can browse readers’ detailed comments below.) Xconomy’s CEO and editor-in-chief, Bob Buderi, has been using Google Voice since March, and he also cites voicemail transcription as his favorite feature.

Readers report surprisingly few technical glitches or other difficulties using Google Voice. The problems they do cite tend to be ones that are baked into the service’s design. Most people said it’s too much trouble to make outgoing calls through Google Voice, since users must either call their own Google Voice number first, or go to the Google Voice website. Which leads to another frequent complaint—the caller ID problem. Unless you place all your outgoing calls through Google Voice, then the people you call will see the number of the device you’re calling from, rather than your Google Voice number. That means you have to train everyone not to store your device’s number in their contact list, but to call you back on your Google Voice number instead. That’s plain confusing for everyone.

Asked to say whether they’d recommend Google Voice to a friend or a family member, quite a few readers said “Yes, but…” The “but” was that they’d only recommend it to people who are technically adept—”power users,” in one reader’s phrase. As another reader put it: “The person who is going to use [it] needs to be a bit of a techie (not super technical, but my wife who is not technical would get lost in the concept)…[there are] lots of configuration options which I enjoyed learning and setting up.”

How much have Xconomy readers actually used their Google Voice accounts, in the end? That varies. Some say they’ve made their Google Voice number into their main phone number, and that they use the service extensively every day. Others say … Next Page »

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[Update 12:00 pm 3/20/09: We were swamped with hundreds of e-mails in response to our offer of 100 free Google Voice beta accounts this morning. Thanks everyone! We'll be in touch with the winners as soon as possible with details about their new accounts.]

Brace for impact, again. Google is about to change the way you think about telephones.

The information giant has a pattern of setting its sights on an existing technology, moving in with overwhelming software-engineering force, and upending all of our old expectations. We didn’t know we needed ads alongside our search results, and Google turned keyword-based advertising into a multi-billion-dollar industry. We all thought e-mail was something we could only access and manage using desktop programs like Outlook, then along came Gmail. We thought we had to go to libraries to find out-of-print books, then Google went and created Google Book Search. We imagined cell phone platforms would always be controlled by a few elite carriers and handset makers, then Google started Android.

To be clear about it, Google didn’t invent keyword-based advertising, Web mail, book scanning, or open-source software. It just figured out how to apply such technologies more cleverly and pervasively than anyone else. And that’s what it has done once more with Google Voice—the renovated version of Grand Central, the phone-number-unification service it bought in 2007.

Grand Central was a startup that allowed users to sign up for a single phone number for life. A call to that number would automatically ring through to any or all of the other phones the user designated, meaning they no longer had to give their acquaintances separate home, office, and mobile numbers. Google paid somewhere north of $50 million for the technology, then spent more than a year and a half rebuilding it to work with its own infrastructure. Starting March 12, Google upgraded old Grand Central’s existing users to Google Voice accounts, and started inviting in a few beta testers. It plans to open up the free service to anyone in the U.S. starting “soon“—in a few weeks, by all accounts.

I’ve been testing Google Voice for the last couple of days, and I’m impressed. I think the service will mark a kind of tipping point in public perceptions of telephony. Before this, it was still possible to think of the phone system as something predating the Internet and therefore distinct from it, surrounded by its own set of customs and usage patterns. After this, we’ll think of phone calls more as if they were audio e-mails—finding their way through the uber-network to their intended recipients wherever those recipients may be located, and leaving a digital record that can be stored, searched, and manipulated on the Web.

There are a lot of features to Google Voice, which makes the overall concept a bit hard to explain, as I’ve realized over the past couple of days as I’ve talked with friends and colleagues about it. So I’ll try to simplify things. You start by signing up for a new phone number in your area code of choice. Google provides a search page where you can look for numbers that spell out mnemonics like “617-IM2-COOL.” In practice, there aren’t that many numbers available, so you might have to search for a while before you find one that spells out something that appeals to you, and that won’t embarrass you five or 10 years from now. (Google could do a better job explaining the number selection process—and it wouldn’t hurt if they showed a picture of a phone keyboard, to remind you of what letters go with what numbers.)

In the same way that an e-mail address doesn’t correspond to a single computer, your Google Voice number doesn’t correspond to any single phone. Indeed, that’s the beauty of the whole system. So once you’ve picked your number, the first thing to decide is which actual phones should ring when someone calls it. You can tell Google Voice to route calls to your office phone, your home land line, your mobile phone, your vacation rental, your Aunt Minnie’s house where you’re staying for the weekend, or all of the above.

The next big decision is about how Google Voice should handle voicemail messages, for those times you can’t answer or don’t want to. As soon as someone leaves a message, it goes into your Google Voice inbox, which you can access by calling the service or by directing the browser on your computer or your mobile phone to the Google Voice website.

If you like, you can simply let messages pile up in your inbox, and check them once in a while by calling in or visiting on the Web. Or you if you want to know about new messages right away, you can set Google Voice to notify you via e-mail or SMS text message.

Now here’s the really cool part. Rather than just notifying you that you got a voicemail the way your cell phone does, Google Voice can—if you choose—send you a text transcription of the message itself. Transcriptions are created automatically using speech recognition software, so they aren’t as accurate as one might like, but they … Next Page »

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Seattle and San Francisco-based Twilio, a software startup focused on telephone applications, closed its first institutional round of funding today, according to co-founder Jeff Lawson. The investment was led by San Francisco-based venture firm Founders Fund (which includes founders of PayPal, Facebook, and Napster) and computer industry pioneer Mitchell Kapor, the creator of Lotus 1-2-3 and founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The amount was not disclosed, but it’s enough for the firm to think about expanding its four-person team and its services, says Lawson, who is based in Seattle.

Twilio rolled out its product in late November—a cloud-based tool for Web developers to build phone applications for businesses, such as letting customers call in and get shipping information, record audio as an MP3 and send it as a phone message to friends, blog by phone, or just connect callers to specific cell phones or land lines.

There are plenty of existing tools for building voice applications, of course. But most require upfront payment for software or hardware, or take a while to get started. With its fast setup and pay-as-you-go service, Twilio has quickly amassed a customer base of more than 1,500 developers, who have built applications for businesses and large companies. Its top customers include Sony Music, Earth911, and Tumblr.com.

Lawson says he met his investors through the usual networking channels—events, colleagues, and other contacts. “They bring stellar backgrounds. They’re all coming from entrepreneurial backgrounds,” says Lawson, who notes that he has more connections with investors in Silicon Valley than Seattle. (He moved to the Northwest in 2004 to work on Web services for Amazon.) That is at least partly because there are many more investors in Silicon Valley. “We had great conversations with Seattle investors, but we just had more contacts there,” he says.

As for how the funds will be used, Lawson says, “We want to be able to expand our core offering of telephony operations in the cloud.” He added that the company has gotten some early traction in enterprise software, but wouldn’t say much specifically about what other markets he has his eye on. Twilio will also be growing its team, which is currently split between San Francisco (where co-founders John Wolthuis and Evan Cooke are) and Seattle, where Lawson remains.

“The Twilio team has merged the worlds of cloud computing, Web services, and telecom in unprecedented ways,” said Kapor, in a statement. “I’m excited to help Twilio grow, and explore the range of opportunities in this exciting intersection.”

Twilio plans to introduce a bunch of new features this year. “We listen to our customers a lot,” Lawson says. “There is a very active community on our site.” For example, a number of customers have been asking Twilio to provide services to international numbers—so far, it’s only been within the United States. “For us, it’s less of a technological issue than a pricing and business issue,” says Lawson. For U.S. phone numbers, the pricing is very simple: Twilio charges 3 cents a minute, or 5 cents a minute for toll-free numbers.

In the end, that’s probably the key to getting funded in the current climate. As Lawson emphasizes, “We are generating revenue.”

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Marlborough, MA-based ThinkEngine Networks, a telecommunications company whose media servers unify traditional circuit-switched and Internet-based voice signals, has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection in U.S. bankruptcy court in Worcester, MA, according to reports today in the Boston Business Journal and the Boston Herald. The American Stock Exchange delisted the company last March due to underperformance.

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If nothing else, Michael Robertson gets credit for stickin’ it to the establishment. Maybe it’s because he was born in 1967, amid America’s flaring protests. Maybe it’s just a result of his penchant for libertarian views.

When I saw an announcement earlier this week from Robertson about GizmoCall, his new browser-based calling service, my first thought was, “This looks like another one of Michael Robertson’s guerilla campaigns.”

When I bounced that off Robertson in a call Wednesday while he was finishing lunch, he replied, “Right. That’s where the money is. Whether it’s telephone companies, or music companies, [or Microsoft---let's not forget Microsoft], it’s where disruptive technologies can add value.”

That’s the way many entrepreneurs think. But where other entrepreneurs approach technology disruption as a delicate matter, akin to tickling a dragon’s tail, Robertson seems to relish a more direct provocation.

As the founder of MP3.com, Robertson was at the center of a legal firestorm that pitted his dot-com startup against major record labels and the Recording Industry Association of America. Of course, he had become an overnight sensation as San Diego’s most-prominent dot-com millionaire in 1999, when MP3.com raised more than $370 million in its IPO.

As MP3.com’s largest shareholder, Robertson pocketed an estimated $103 million when he sold his company to French media conglomerate Vivendi in 2001 for $372 million. Since then, he has self-funded most of his new ventures.

Later in 2001, Robertson started a new business around technology for a Linux-based operating system intended to compete against Microsoft Windows. He provocatively called his startup Lindows, unleashing a predictable flurry of trademark lawsuits from Microsoft. The software giant, which apparently feared losing its Windows trademark, later paid $20 million … Next Page »

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Westford, MA-based Sonus Networks (NASDAQ: SONS), which makes servers, switches, and software for Internet-based residential and business telephony, said yesterday that it will lay off 50 employees, or roughly 5 percent of its global workforce, as part of a cost-management plan. The company did not say how many of the affected employees worked from the Westford headquarters. We’ve updated our Boston Tech Layoff Tracker accordingly.

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Back in July I wrote two somewhat skeptical stories about Slydial, the free service that lets you leave voicemail messages for cell-phone users without causing their phones to ring. My problem wasn’t with the technology itself, but with the misanthropic way that MobileSphere, the Boston company that created Slydial, was marketing it. They were promoting it as the perfect solution for those times when you have to call someone, but you don’t really want to talk with them. In the company’s own words: “Slydial provides the illusion of communication without the hassle of engaging in a time-consuming conversation.”

Well, it turns out that a lot of people are misanthropes. Either that, or Slydial has stumbled upon an unexpectedly useful new variation on the old technology of telephony. Since Slydial’s July launch, users have sent just over a million Slydial messages via its free, ad-supported service at 1-267-SLY-DIAL, the company announced Monday. That growth has come exclusively through word of mouth and public relations: the company hasn’t spent a dime on advertising, according to Gavin Macomber, MobileSphere’s executive vice president for marketing and business development.

The company believes that it’s hit a nerve with the service. “Just based on the response from our customers in the last three months, we think voice messaging is going to be huge,” Macomber told me this morning. “When we spoke back in July, there was a lot of ‘Hey, this is a great way to break up with your girlfriend’ going around, and sure, the name of the service is Slydial. But it’s also become a really practical and efficient way to communicate with somebody.” For example, many users have told MobileSphere that they turn to Slydial in situations where it would be difficult or dangerous to send a text message, such as when they’re driving, Macomber says.

To make sending “sly” messages even easier, MobileSphere also announced this week that it has created three dedicated Slydial applications—one each for the Apple iPhone, RIM’s Blackberry line, and Windows Mobile phones. The applications let users initiate Slydial calls just by clicking on a name in their phones’ built-in contact lists—so they don’t have to remember the recipient’s phone number.

“All of those first one million calls were made by people using the 267-SLY-DIAL number, then, at the prompts, manually entering the recipients’ mobile number,” says Macomber. “But at the end of the day, it’s a slightly cumbersome process. That’s what the mobile apps are meant to address. If you’re a Windows Mobile, iPhone, or Blackberry user you can go into your address book in one simple step and voice-message somebody.”

You can download the Windows Mobile and Blackberry versions of the software after signing up for a “MySlydial” account here. The Slydial iPhone app isn’t available from the iTunes App Store yet (which is a saga unto itself—see below), but I was able to get the app directly from MobileSphere and test it out. It works exactly as advertised. I was able to use the app to leave messages for several people in my iPhone’s address book.

But as with the regular Slydial service, you still have to listen to a 10-second audio advertisement before your call is put through. And the system isn’t foolproof: if you really don’t want to interrupt someone, or if you don’t want them to know that you called until they notice that they have gotten voicemail, you should be aware that calling someone via Slydial sometimes causes their phone to ring once, depending on which cellular network they use.

Every time I used the iPhone Slydial app to call Rebecca’s T-mobile phone, for example, her phone rang briefly—too quickly for her to answer it, but giving me away nonetheless. [Editor's note: Dude, knock it off!] But when I called Bob’s Verizon phone, my call went directly to his voicemail, without making his phone ring.

Those differences result from the fact that the major wireless operators all use different voicemail technologies. (Even within networks, systems vary from region to region. That’s why a Verizon subscriber in Boston can forward a voice-mail message to another Verizon user in Boston, but not to a Verizon user in New York.) But these incompatibilities are exactly what … Next Page »

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Updated Nov. 5, 4 pm PST: See below for details on funding

TelCentris, a new San Diego company, says it has released a beta version of its free consumer service called VoxOx, which combines Voice-over-Internet telephony and other types of communications into a single screen on a computer desktop. The company says its universal communicator service is the first in a coming generation of consumer software products that combine voice, video, instant messaging, text, e-mail, fax, and social networks into a single screen on a desktop.

While competitors such as Skype offer VoIP and rival Digsby aggregates messaging, social networking and e-mail onto a single screen, the company says that VoxOx combines all these features into a single product—with an iPhone-like graphical user interface. The name VoxOx is a play on “voice over X,” meaning the system can send voice over any type of network.

TelCentris says it has targeted communications-overloaded GenXers and “Millenials,” those born between 1980 and 2000. That’s a different tack than rivals that have been trying to get corporate customers to commit to their hardware and software for Voice-over-Internet telephony. It might be an easier sell, but Voice-over-Internet telephony is rapidly becoming a commodity, meaning the competition is getting fiercer and players are looking for ways to break out of the pack.

TelCentris was founded by CEO Bryan Hertz, his brother, Kevin, who is chief technical officer, and father Bob, chief information officer. The CFO is Michael Faught, who has 25 years experience in finance, management, and technology commercialization, according to the company’s Web site.

A spokeswoman for TelCentris says the founders bankrolled the company themselves, with some additional angel investment. She added that TelCentris has been generating revenue by powering small telephone companies with its Unified Communications Service Delivery Platform, as well as providing Hosted PBX service to dozens of small-to-medium businesses.

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Billerica, MA-based NextPoint Networks, the telecommunications equipment maker just formed last December from the merger of Billerica’s Reef Point Systems and Gaithersburg, MD-based NexTone Communications, has been acquired by Plano, TX-based GenBand, the company announced yesterday. GenBand, which is paying an undisclosed sum for NextPoint, makes devices called session border controllers (SBCs) that are used to set up calls in voice-over-Internet networks; as an article in Mass High Tech explains, the acquisition puts GenBand into more direct competition with other Boston-area SBC makers such as Acme Packet and Starent Networks.

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