The global credit crunch is causing problems in the VoIP and Internet telephony community. It seems that funding, start-up money, and investors left some companies in a pinch. One such company is EQO. EQO was/is a VoIP/social networking play offering a free application that provides free IM, cheap calling and cheap texting to your mobile phone. The problem is EQO was like about a dozen other companies on the market with the same business plan triangle of free client/cheap calls/on mobile phones, including Jangl, Jajah and TalkPlus.

Also in this mix is Jaxtr. Some companies are dying a clow death, others are gone, and Jaxtr just released Jaxtr 2.0. See more about Jaxtr.

The secret to success is the marriage of cell phones, speed dial, and calls to anywhere in the world. With no high international [+]

Free Conferencing Corporation, best known as freeconferencecall.com, has added private dial-in numbers to its SimpleVoiceBox and SimpleVoiceCenter services. To learn more about Free Conferencing visit Free Call Info.

Private number provides a direct route into the service without access codes or extra digits. The expanded offering includes a full-featured voice mail service with online account access, phone or web admin, multiple configurations that allow users to use the voicemail as a broadcaster, email notification of new messages, daily activity reports with a caller ID capture feature, unlimited outgoing greetings and no limits on incoming messages. A single voice mail box is available for $4.95 per month with unlimited multiple voice boxes available for only $9.95 per month.

Over the weekend, the one million registered users to Free World Dialup (FWD) were told that free is no longer free. After 12 years of free operations, users will be asked to pay $30 per year as of September 1, 2008. The announcement also named Daniel Beringer, as CEO of FWD.

In an email sent out on Friday by FWD founder and VoIP pundit Jeff Pulver, the $30 yearly fee is being justified as a “magic number” that is only “10%” of the cost of Vonage’s unlimited usage plan. However, Pulver has disavowed any connections with old style telephony and the PSTN, vowing not to chase per-minute arbitrage for lower-cost long distance calling as Skype, Jajah and others have done.

O3b Networks Ltd. today announced it will begin deployment of a new global communications infrastructure to provide high-speed, low-cost Internet connectivity to emerging markets in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Financial and operational support comes from Google Inc., Liberty Global, Inc. and HSBC Principal Investments.

The main idea is to increase bandwidth for providers such as telcos and Internet service providers.

One of our Windows Vista computers is a busy machine. We run the eBay tool bar, Ring Central call controller, magicJack, live help for our websites, and a few other programs that check things for us every 30 minutes. If you run magicJack and the RingCentral call controller at the same time you will have a conflict on SIP port 5060. You probably noticed that your RingCentral call controller icon is blinking. it is in logging mode. You probably also noticed that RingCentral works fine if you unplug your magicJack. The solution is very simple, and they will work fine together.

Open your RingCentral call controller. Click on the menu, then click on options. Open the “account information” menu by clicking on the “+” icon. Click on “connection”. Notice the SIP [+]

Nortel has bought Pingtel, a subsidiary of enterprise mobility firm Bluesocket. Nortel hopes the open source IP PBX software/appliance division will have better luck moving forward.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but Nortel will acquire the key assets of Pingtel from Bluesocket, Pingtel’s existing OEM relationship with Nortel will be brought in house and Pingtel employees will be integrated into Nortel’s Billerica, Mass. facility. Pingtel and Nortel have been working together for a while on SIP-based enterprise solutions

Pingtel’s sipX open source IP PBX software is highly regarded for its ability to scale to support up to 10,000 users; as an independent entity, Pingtel landed Amazon.com as its largest publicly announced customer. The Amazon.com installation reportedly supports over 5,000 users in a high-availability configuration.

Skype has released the Skype 4.0 Beta for Windows, focusing on better video calling and conversation management. The focus on video is driven by 28 percent of Skype calls in the first quarter of 2008 were video calls. The new version starts up a video call with a single click on a button with an IM conversation next to the video call can be generated with one click from one window. New “unified conversations capabilities” pull IM voice, video, file transfers, SMS and calls together to allow users to easily move in and out of conversations between single users or groups. There’s also additional ease of use features for installation, finding contacts, and adding new devices.

Beta for the new version is expected to span the entire summer, given the complexity of all the changes made; there are also some [+]

As BlackBerrys and the new iPhone that hits stores on July 11 become GPS-enabled, the world will see a drastic leap in hand-held technology, as well. Will GPS make people dumber? How about new jokes about Paris Hilton? Some people claim GPS technology will make it easier for 40 percent of Americans to find the ocean. Evidently they cannot find it now. On the other hand those who claim spell-checking created a generation of poeple that cannot spell are forecasting the worst for GPS.

For those who do not know that the sun sets in the West (and rises in the East) there is room for discovery. I doubt that it would be the quality of discovery that would be defended in a doctoral thesis, but a discovery none the less. If [+]