In a nutshell, according to this agreement, Junction Networks has been selected by edgeBOX to be the preferred voice provider for their “office-in-a-box” solution. edgeBOX is “an integrated device aimed at the SMB market and including a full-fledged IP-PBX, wireless access point, router, file, e-mail and VPN server”.

In this story what caught my attention is the following paragraph:

Calls between edgeBOX extensions, whether on-premise or around the world across Internet connections, will incur half-cent-per-minute charges. 

What? IP to IP voice calls are not FREE? Guys, I love this. Praises to Junction Networks and edgeBOX for this brave choice! While someone could see this as a downside of this service, I look at it as a great innovation and potentially the beginning of a new era for VoIP.

On-net VoIP calls have always been offered for free, without any charge. To my knowledge, every VoIP service out there doesn’t charge for IP to IP calls. This could work in the past, but in times where there is a new VoIP service coming out every day and when you offer SMB services to companies whose traffic is mainly on-premise, how can you make money and make your customers happy at the same time? 

This is a great way to lower monthly fees and avoiding long term contracts, something companies don’t always want to deal with. Small companies sometimes don’t trust on VoIP services completely, thinking quality could be an issue. With this approach they don’t feel to be bound to a certain service for a long time, so it definitely helps to shorten the sales cycle. And, we are not talking of a fortune, it’s half-cent per minute

For more information about this new collaboration, take a look at the official press release.

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Technorati Tags: Business, critical links, edgebox, junction networks, luca filigheddu, VoIP

Image via CrunchBase

This news this morning makes me really happy. Peter Csathy’s SightSpeed, a high quality video call/conferencing service, is going to be acquired by a very big name in the computer market, Logitech, very popular, among the other things, for their high quality webcams.

I blogged so many times about SightSpeed and I really love that service, reason why I’m very happy for Peter and his team in San Diego. This is a great deal for both, since Logitech can now provide an effective way to give more value to their webcams, for both the consumer and business market. And it seems that SightSpeed is the 3rd company Peter succesfully sold.

Moreover, I really would like to congratulate Andy “everything I touch becomes gold” Abramson, since SightSpeed is the Nth company he’s involved with in terms of PR or in terms of board of directors which has been sold recently. Wow.

Details of the deals are summarized below.

Logitech International (SIX: LOGN) (Nasdaq: LOGI) today announced that the company has agreed to acquire privately held SightSpeed Inc. of Berkeley, Calif. for approximately $30 million in cash. SightSpeed is an award-winning provider of high-quality Internet video communications services. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in early November.

The acquisition of SightSpeed will provide Logitech with video calling technology and a software and services development team that can be focused on future video calling initiatives that can enable cross-platform video communications with an intuitive, lifelike experience, for people sitting in front of a personal computer or with their family in a living room.

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Technorati Tags: andy abramson, Business, Logitech, luca filigheddu, peter csathy, sightspeed, Video

Image via CrunchBase

I just received a note from Fring informing me that the popular mobile IM/VoIP service has been selected by Mobikom’s brand A1 to be distributed to their customers in Austria.

Here is an excerpt from the official press release:

Under the agreement, mobilkom austria will give its customers access to a dedicated version of the fring mobile client, containing fring’s entire open-platform, feature-rich suite of internet based mobile communications & community services, allowing A1 over IP users to talk, chat and interact with each other & all of their online communities, and access fun mobile web applications, using the internet connection capability of their mobile device.

In Phase 1 of the project, the A1 over IP service will be integrated into fring’s SIP service, offering fring users the opportunity of using A1 over IP accounts and also the ability to configure their A1 over IP accounts to work within fring.

Phase 2 will see a fring application being built into mobilkom austria’s mobile offering and pre installed onto a large number of mobile devices. This will comprise fring’s entire feature set of voice over IP, instant messaging, real-time presence / availability indication, file transfer and access to fring’s new always-on mobile internet applications (fring Add-ons)

This is definitely a major news for the Israeli-based service, which is continuosly bringing innovation to the mobile market and making the mobile IM/VoIP experience much better than what you can get by other competitors.

Skype, Twitter, all major IM networks, SIP calling and much more are the key ingredients for this growing success. Moreover, they recently announced that Fring is finally available on the Apple iPhone’s App Store but if you don’t own an iPhone and you are a Symbian user, you can get the latest version of Fring released yesterday.

Congrats to all Fring’s team for these continuous important announcements, keep up the good work!

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Technorati Tags: App Store, deal, fring, Instant messaging & messengers, iphone, luca filigheddu, mobile voip

This is a clear sign that something huge is happening and that there is no doubt Facebook is more and more going mainstream.  That said, I started looking at this phenomena from a different standpoint: is Facebook capable of behaving like an operating system? If you look, for example, at the new Facebook iPhone application, everything you need from an operating system is there: messaging, IM, applications, microblogging, presence, live feed, photos, videos…

In my opinion Facebook could potentially be used for 99% of your time as a central dashboard from which you perform any activity on your computer and your mobile phone, but there are five important features that are currently missing.

1) Address Book - I mean the ability to add people in your “Friend’s List” regardless of whether they are subscribed to Facebook or not.

2) Mail Client - Currently Facebook’s messaging service is rather poor and is not ready to become a fully functional mail client. What if Hotmail would be integrated into Facebook? After Live Search, another move to better integrate Facebook with Microsoft’s services.

3) Documents - If I were Facebook, I would buy a service for online documents management as Google did a couple of years ago with Writely which was the basis for Google Docs. This application, together with the powerful mail client mentioned above, would be a killer feature for me.

4) Web Browser - It would be great if I could open any web page from within Facebook itself, leveraging its powerful sharing capabilities. A wordpress/typepad/… blog editor? A Wordpress.com Facebook application is available already, but a similar app for personal wordpress installations is still missing.

5) Calendar/PIM - 30Boxes is already offering it and it seems users like it (about 24.000 monthly active users) even if it’s still a little percentage of the whole FB population.

What do you think? What should Facebook add to become a real operating system? Can we expect to see a new mobile phone “F1” sometime soon? I look forward to your comments.

Technorati Tags: facebook, Google, Google Docs, iphone, luca filigheddu, operating system, Web 2.0

Image via CrunchBase

Facebook released today a new feature (rumored some months ago) which lets users search the web through their Facebook global search box by integrating Microsoft Live Search.

This is a major feature which will leverage Microsoft Live Search engine and bring it to their enormous user base. Moreover, as AllFacebook.com highlights, the implications in terms of revenues for Facebook are going to be very important, becoming the most important bridge between users and Microsoft search engine with the additional ability to show ads which are relevant to the user’s profile.

I guess Facebook is deploying this new feature across its user base slowly, as usual, since on my account I’m still unable to get access to this feature (UPDATE: after some refreshes, I can see it now). In any case, I bet this will become the major news in the following hours.

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Technorati Tags: facebook, live search, luca filigheddu, microsoft, Microsoft Live Search, Search

It looks like Microsoft is playing hard to strengthen his position in the search and ecommerce sector.

They just announced they bought Ciao.com for $486 million. Ciao.com is a popular price comparison site and a public company (Greenfield) in Europe where users write reviews of any kind of digital good and where you can find the best deal for your online purchases.

Microsoft is far behind Yahoo and Google in the search market and this move is aimed to try to increase its market share quickly, after the much discussed no-deal with Yahoo.

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Technorati Tags: Ciao.com, deal, Europe, luca filigheddu, microsoft, Price comparison service, yahoo

Both of them joined the Qik’s board of advisors and I believe they will offer a very important contribution to the growth of the company. They have been key figures in Netscape, Ning and Opsware (recently acquired by HP) and this investment proves that the guys at Qik are definitely doing a great job.

The financial terms have not been disclosed, but I believe that’s a secondary aspect of the deal. The contribution of people like those can be priceless sometimes.

Congrats to my friends Bhaskar and Jackie!

Technorati Tags: ben horowitz, Deals, luca filigheddu, mark andreessen, Mobile, netscape, ning, opsware, qik, Social Media, video sharing

More here.

BT today announced it has acquired Ribbit Corporation, a Silicon Valley-based ‘Telco 2.0′ platform company, for $105 million in cash, on a cash-free, debt-free basis. The acquisition will accelerate BT’s strategy to transform itself into a next- generation, platform-based, software-driven services company.

Congrats to all the Ribbit team!

Technorati Tags: acquisition, BT, Deals, luca filigheddu, ribbit, Voice 2.0, VoIP

The interesting aspect which both deals have in common is that they are about consolidation of the “news” market, even if it’s pretty clear that the size of the deals is much different. Both companies are not going to re-invent the wheel, but they are bringing value to their products (Google News and the GigaOM Network) by integrating well known and already successful services.

I believe we will see more deals like these in the following months, the “consolidation” process is just beginning and, in addition, many VCs which invested in the web 2.0 world are eagerly looking for exits. Stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: Deals, digg, gigaom, Google, jkontherun, luca filigheddu

Not sure whether this rumor has really a solid base or not, anyway since Michael Arrington lives his life dealing with rumors, I think we can play with this rumor as well

BTW, I believe TechCrunch is worth much more!

Technorati Tags: aol, Business, Deals, luca filigheddu, rumor, techcrunch