“For every type of communications protocol that’s an open standard, we either support it already or are integrating it into the platform,” he says. The center of the company’s technology, Hertz adds, is a hub that includes support for a wide variety of communications protocols, which can be extended to include many more. VoxOx can afford to hand out phone numbers for free because it is owned by TelCentris, a communications company with existing infrastructure, says CEO Bryan Hertz. A user gets two free hours of calling time within the United States and Canada when she signs up, and has the option to pay for more minutes or earn them by watching ads. Whether messages are sent as texts, instant messages, or e-mails, the conversation pops up onscreen like an IM. In some ways, VoxOx functions like a powerful instant-messaging application. VoxOx pulls in these contacts, allowing the user to scroll through a composite list and select whom to talk to and how. After signing up for an account, a user is given a free VoxOx phone number and configures the rest of the service by providing usernames and passwords for compatible IM, e-mail, and social-networking accounts. Michael Faught, chief financial officer with VoxOx, says that the service is, initially at least, aimed at younger users who “are confronted with this chaotic world of many kinds of communication tools.” Faught sees social networks as compounding the problem and says that there’s no simple, efficient solution.Ī preview release of VoxOx was launched last week and can be downloaded for free for both Windows and Mac computers. The idea has proved especially popular in the business world, with companies such as IBM building products that combine a variety of communications tools–voice mail, IM, Web conferencing–with business applications like Lotus Notes. And as cell-phone use has grown, companies like Grand Central (now owned by Google) and Ribbit (now owned by BT) have focused on bringing together multiple phone numbers. Over the years, several popular instant-messaging clients have been developed to let users from one network chat with those from others. Unifying communications tools is hardly a new idea. Multitasking: VoxOx software, pictured above, allows users to make phone calls send e-mails, instant messages, and text messages post to social networks share files and host video conferences. TelCentris, a company based in San Diego, hopes to untangle this mess by providing VoxOx, a single piece of software that can be used to communicate with contacts in a wide variety of ways. Checking every account for new messages can be tedious and time consuming, and nowadays many people have multiple telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, and instant-messaging accounts–even several social-networking identities. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that life’s more convenient. Thanks to the constant advance of communications technology, there are now more ways than ever to reach the people you know.
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