To the envy of developers everywhere, Google Software Engineers are granted what they call their “20% time.”  As a result, Google coders get 20% of their working time to work on projects that the developers select away from management approval.  Many well-known Google projects have resulted from 20% time, showing that the effort benefits the company as well.

Gmail, one of WWD’s favorite web based utilities, has been put into the spotlight as Google opened the door on Gmail Labs.  This section of Gmail’s website will house new “beta” add-ins and features in an effort to gather feedback from users.  To get to Gmail Labs, inside your Gmail settings pane, click on the Labs tab.  Note: GMail is still rolling Labs out to users.  If your Gmail doesn’t have it yet, check back a little later. It appears that this is only available to @gmail.com email addresses and not Google Apps addresses.

Anything web worker useful here? Let’s take a look.

To break down the features, I’ll divide them up into useful and fun categories:

Useful

Quick Links: This can be a shortcut to any page in Gmail.  When I first saw this feature, I didn’t see at as being any different from a Label.  However, do you have a custom search you do on a regular basis?  Save it as a Quick Link. For example, if you want to see all the message from May 2008 with the keyword “Invoice” – you can now save it as a Quick Link for quick future access.

Custom Date Format: Outside of the United States, a date of 1/31/2008 might look odd.  Save your dates to show the date first or alternatively, turn Gmail’s clock into a 24-hour clock if you’re used to this formatting.

Superstars: Have you ever want to star an item, but have it be a different from all the other messages you already starred?  With Superstars, you can have additional star icons to display content with.  Use one icon for work contacts, one for family, one for action items and so on.

Fun

Email Addict: if you spend way too much time on your email and in chat, use Email Addict to have the system force you to take a walk, make a phone call or otherwise reach some work/life balance.

Hide Unread Counts: if you are depressed by the unread count of email being a constant reminder of how much work you have lying ahead, hide the counter with this Labs add on.

Mouse Gestures: some computer users love using mouse gestures to navigate around their software applications.  For instance, you can hold the right click button and move the mouse to the left to go to a prior conversation, or move the mouse up to go to the inbox.  While not for everyone, mouse gestures might be a key way you like to move around within Gmail.

What are your impressions – are there some new features in Gmail labs that you feel now you couldn’t do with out?

Scribd is a document hosting service that we’ve touched on before that allows users to bring their documents into their online service for viewing and later use.  Scribd recently launched a service called iPaper@Scribd that is aiming to do away with annoying email attachments by granting users the ability to convert documents to the company’s iPaper format.

Using iPaper@Scribd is drop dead simple.  To get started, cc: ipaper@scribd.com in your outgoing email attachment and fire off the email.  As a result all your other recipients will receive a link to the Sribd hosted document a few moments later.  Alternatively, you can just email Scribd your document and forward on the link when you receive it back from your web service.

If you use the first option mentioned above, it may really annoy your email recipients.  This is because they’ll receive two emails – one with the original attachment and a second Scribd email with a link to their version of the document.

On another note, considering you’re uploading business documents to the Internet, we would not recommend putting up business sensitive documents that may contain proprietary business information.

Scribd has been used to display business documents on blogs for a while and I think it will be a great tool for people who wish to share documents in a very easy manner.

Small business owners are always looking for smart ways to keep costs down while achieving useful practicality.  Whether it’s running a business from your home office to avoid renting an office or completing administrative tasks sometimes best outsourced to a hired hands, business owners seek balance in profitability and efficiently running their businesses.

Additionally, US cellular service providers over the last few months have been rolling out “unlimited plans” that offer an unlimited bucket of minutes for one flat monthly rate.  In most cases, $99 a month will give you unlimited chatters a way to talk all you want.  Sprint’s plan is very attractive because it includes unlimited voice, data, and SMS.

However, T-Mobile put a new spin on the unlimited plan by offering an unlimited family plan.  For example, if you have a $99 T-Mobile unlimited plan, you can add additional lines for just $49/month that will include unmetered national voice minutes, SMS, MMS, and instant messaging.

Small business owners may not know this, but this “Family” plan is not only usable by those who share genetic bonds.  This is applicable to small business because for about $250 (not including taxes), you can have unlimited wireless minutes to run your business with.  This type of value makes the offering very competitive and could be comparable to Internet telephony (VoIP) offerings.  However, the beauty of this T-Mobile unlimited family plan is that you have access to your minutes no matter where your cell phone happens to be.

For more information about the new plans, see T-Mobile’s website.

Would you consider running your small business on cell phones?  What tradoffs can you think of?

Being able to bookmark and save web pages for future reference is a functionality that has been tried by many players, including Instapaper, toread, and Iterasi (previously covered).  However, a new entrant called LaterLoop is approaching this web page saving space with some unique and interesting features.

Using LaterLoop couldn’t be easier.  Begin by signing up on their web site.  Because the service is built on Google’s App Engine (Google’s brand new application environment for web developers), if you have a Gmail (Google) account, you can just sign in.  Otherwise, choose a username and password as normal when signing up for a web service.

Next, install their Firefox Bookmarklet which is displayed on the right.  Now, while perusing the web, if you see a site you like and you want to save it for later, click the LaterLoop bookmarklet and the page will be saved for future reference in your LaterLoop account.

So far, LaterLoop doesn’t look all that different than the other bookmarking tools.  However, to set itself apart, LaterLoop:

• Is optimized for mobile phone users.  So far similar services have released iPhone versions.  LaterLoop takes it a step further by optimizing their service for BlackBerries, Nokias, and Windows Mobile devices as well.
• has a great social feature.  If you want to share a bookmarks, star it and it will then appear in an RSS feed you can publish out to your blog or simply share the RSS feed with your friends.
• features an Airplane mode: this will allow you download a ZIP file of all your links for offline access.
• allows you to grant granular permissions.  You can set all of your bookmarked pages to be public, or just your starred ones.
• supports the Firefox Scrapbook extension.  This is an established Firefox extension that allows you to save sites on your computer for future reference.

After using LaterLoop to bookmark a few sites, it appears to be very functional.  The offline capabilities make it an attractive offering as I travel to sites where Wi-Fi access can be hard to come by.  Also, the mobile site looks fantastic on my Nokia phone.

LaterLoop has put together an attractive offering that is worth taking a look at.

As forecast in a previous post, Starbucks has begun their complimentary Wi-Fi service.  To get your two free hours of Wi-Fi, you must:

1. Create an AT&T Wi-Fi account
2. Have a Starbucks card (that can have as little as $5) on it and you must have used your Starbucks card once in the last 30 days.
3. And agree to be emailed (spammed) by AT&T up to 4 times a year.

Not a bad deal: get a Starbucks card and an Americano and you can have 2 hours to use their professionally managed and speedy Wi-Fi.

As another option for free Wi-Fi with your morning coffee, check out your local coffee shop and of course Boingo is also an option.

For more information on AT&T’s Wi-Fi Service, see their FAQ.

(Photo credit: Flickr User visualpanic)

When traveling abroad, making calls back home or otherwise can get very expensive, as alluded to in a previous post. With an unlocked GSM mobile phone, you can use the Orange service as discussed in the aforementioned link, or any other pre-paid GSM provider.  However, what if you could combine the convenience of a mobile phone with the low-cost calling of a VoIP company.

A mobile VoIP company called Truphone is attempting to make international calling very inexpensive for travelers and other users of their service.  Truphone is a program that runs on your Wi-Fi enabled mobile handset used the Internet to cheaply send and receive phone calls, much like to Skype on your PC.  Truphone allows for cheap calling from your mobile phone when signed onto Truphone via Wi-Fi.

Truphone Anywhere is a new feature of the 4.0 version of their software.  When you are out of range of a Wi-Fi hotspot, you can use Truphone Anywhere to take advantage of Truphone’s inexpensive international calling rates.  To use the Truphone Anywhere service, dial an international number.  TruPhone will use a call-through mode by using a domestic phone number as a bridge.

Truphone will first see if there is Wi-FI available and if so, will route the call accordingly.  Otherwise, the handset calls your local Truphone gateway (depending on which country you’re in currently) and passes the dialed number for connection to the internet via the local gateway.

TruPhone Anywhere works in many countries including most of Europe, North America, and some Asian countries.  For the full list, consult Truphone’s website.

If your company or co-workers are involved in numerous web 2.0 sites, you may have images on Flickr, videos on YouTube, a blog with an RSS feed and so on.  This results in giving your website users many places to look when they consume your organization’s online media – not very user friendly.

This content separation leaves a space that aggregation services are trying to fill.  Sites such as FriendFeed (covered before), Tumblr, and the new Strands.com (covered by parent site GigaOm.com) are all vying for your attention.  These aggregation websites create what are called activity streams or life streams, and combine all your online media into one place (and one RSS Feed) for your intended audience.  You have complete control as to which sites are combined and aggregated in the services.

Tumblr

Tumblr was the among the first aggregation services and allows you to create a tumble-log.  Basically a tumble-log is a variation on a traditional blog that is allows you to publish many different types of media to it.  Tumblr wants you to put your photos, videos, blog entries, message boards onto their service, no matter where these media items exist.

Tumblr tumble-logs feature an RSS feed, giving users easy access to stay up to date on all the items you include in your tumble-log.

FriendFeed

FriendFeed is the current web 2.0 darling site with lots of usage among bloggers.  To get started, head over to their homepage and complete the sign-up process.  Adding your services is as easy as giving your various account names for that service or simply the RSS feed.  For example, to add your Flickr photostream into FriendFeed, just supply FriendFeed your Flickr username.  The web service will handle the rest.

FriendFeed recently announced the inclusion of “Rooms.”  With this feature, you can create a room based on an interest, event, company name, or whichever topic you chose.  A company or group might want to create a room for their business or topic area to give users a way to particpate in creating an online home for their area of interest.

Strands.com

Strands.com, from the social music recommendation service company Strands, takes FriendFeed and adds on a layer.  Strands.com tries to improve upon FriendFeed by offering the aggregation functionality, but giving you suggestion as to what content will be of interest to you based the way you consume social media.  Strands.com knows your online contacts are fantastic filters for online content, and will use them to show you items you may find interesting.

For example, if you have a co-worker who is an expert in a particular field of interest, add them to your Strands.com contacts and when they recommend a video, online article, or other media item, you’ll be alerted through your Strands.com webpage.

As you can see, there are many sites that give you the ability to bridge your online assets into one functional website.

How do you keep people connected to your various online media items?  Does aggregation interest you?

Back when broadband Internet access was made available to homes in the late 1990’s, teleworking took off.  In businesses, employees were allowed to work from home part time (in some cases, full time) and many home based businesses took off, allowing small time entrepreneurs to have a low-cost launching point for their great idea.

Then, reality set in.  Working from your home can be isolating and can result in feeling cut off from the working world.  Co-working is a new trend, as recently reported by CNN and others, which involves teleworkers gathering within the same physical space in order to have some social time while working on their tasks.  There are businesses such as CubeSpace and Citizen Space that make co-working easy by offering space for co-workers to gather, however what is a web worker to do if they don’t have this type of option close by?

Do It Yourself

Most teleworkers likely know someone who also works remotely from their office.  If you feel comfortable doing this, offer to host a co-working session at your house or other meeting space.  Much in the same way moms self-organize play dates, teleworkers will gain benefit by gathering to work together on an occasional basis.  In exchange for offering up your Wi-Fi connection and a making a few pots of coffee, you’ll be able to exchange ideas and make some potentially profitable business connections.  For example, by gathering with other bloggers or programmers, I often gain story ideas and other opportunities I would otherwise not come across.

Break Out Of Your Shell

If you see the same people routinely at your Starbucks, engage with them in a conversation to see if they’d like to make it a regular meeting time.  This might be a great way to meet teleworkers who don’t necessarily work in your field.  Additionally, by meeting at a Starbucks or your local pub, you can use the hosting business’ Wi-Fi and avoid the effort of hosting a co-working session at your house.

Tools to Aid You

To organize a group of co-working professionals, you can either:

• Start a website: build a web site to serve as the communication hub.
• Initiate a Google Group: Drop dead easy way to centralize communications, however everyone will need a Google Account
• Simply start an email mailing list
• Check out the Co-Working wiki page as it has many valuable resources.

For mobile workers, it’s hard to beat the freedom and flexibility Internet telephony provides us.  One of our favorite web services, GrandCentral, gives you the ability to have one phone number that can ring an assortment of phones including your mobile, landline, office phone, and any other place you’d like to be reached.

Additionally, there are those who embrace the utility of a soft phone.  A soft phone is an application that runs on your computer and allows you to send or receive phone calls, normally through a microphone headset.  Skype is probably the most well known soft phone, but a competitor of theirs called Gizmo5 (formerly known as Gizmo Project) can be combined with GrandCentral to give you soft phone capabilities.

This Gizmo/GrandCentral combination is made possible because of the two services’ use of SIP, a standard protocol for VoIP communication.  Using Gizmo and GrandCentral together will give you absolutely free calling inbound and outbound to your callers, absent of using any cell minutes or using a landline.

Follow this hands-on guide to enable Gizmo5 to be added as a phone in your GrandCentral set up.

First and foremost, you must have a GrandCentral account set up and ready.  Secondly, download Gizmo5 from their website and create an account. Gizmo5 is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Nokia Internet tablets.

Now that you have your two accounts on GrandCentral and Gizmo5 set up, it’s time to integrate them.  Log in to your GrandCentral account and click on the “Settings” tab.  In the Phones group, you can see where you have your various phones that GrandCentral forwards your calls to, according to your preferences.  It is here that we will put in our Gizmo5 ‘phone number’ for GrandCentral to use.

To find that Gizmo5 phone number, launch Gizmo 5 and under the Account menu, click on “My Profile”.  In this window, shown on the right, you’ll see your SIP phone number.  Write down this number, minus the 1 at the beginning and excluding everything after the @ sign.

Now, go back to GrandCentral and click “Add/Edit Number”.  In the dropdown, choose Gizmo, type in the SIP number found in Gizmo5, and assign a name of your choosing to the entry.  Lastly, click “Save” to commit the change.

Now, whenever you have Gizmo5 running on your computer, you have the ability to recieve phone calls without using your cell minutes or tying up a landline.  All voice packets are carried over the Internet from GrandCentral to wherever your logged into Gizmo5 from.

Orange, the mobile arm of France Telecom, is marketing affordable plans to make it easy for you to use your mobile phone while traveling to some European countries.

When traveling abroad, travelers who want to take their mobile phones along for connectivity feel the sting with high roaming charges while overseas.  This is especially true with data enabled smartphones, as many European carriers charge by the kilobyte, where in the United States we are used to paying a flat rate for data usage.

Orange is offering a voice plan called Favourite Countries, whereby customers are charged an upfront monthly fee of 4 Euros with no hidden or additional charges.  Then, usage charges accrue at a low per minute rate depending on which country you’ve chosen.  For example, Orange France customers will pay 0.37 Euros per minute vs. the normal rate of 0.59 Euros.  Currently this offer is valid in France and Romania.  Later this summer, it will be extended to the UK, Spain, Belgium, Slovakia, and Switzerland.

As for a data plan, Orange offers their Travel Data Daily plan which involves paying a flat up front fee for affordable data roaming.  The plan costs 12-15 Euros for 50Mb of daily Internet usage within the European Union.  The plan is being rolled out in the UK, France, Spain, Poland, Belgium, and Romania.

Orange, while perhaps unfamiliar to Americans, is a major European mobile carrier that has 172 million subscribers over 5 continents.

How do you stay in touch when traveling abroad?  Do you use pre-paid SIM cards or does this type of plan from Orange offer you the most benefit?

Tungle, the meeting coordination web service we covered in February, has made it easier to coordinate meetings with your more mobile colleagues. The newly announced BlackBerry optimized mobile website features the Tungle web service, specially formatted for the BlackBerry’s screen.  After the meeting has been scheduled and finalized, the BlackBerry userwill recieve a specialized invite for use on their BlackBerry Calendar.

The BlackBerry optimized website is joined by an Outlook plug-in in an effort by Tungle to make usage as easy as possible.  Users can now schedule meetings with Tungle either through Tungle’s website in a conventional browser, use the Outlook plug-in, or using the BlackBerry site.

Have you ever been in a meeting involving collaboration around a whiteboard, sketched up brilliant ideas or diagrams on the whiteboard, only to have to erase it at the end?  Or perhaps you’ve wanted to permanently preserve a hand-written note or quickly scan a printed document, without a scanner?  Qipit aims to give those with either a digital camera or mobile phone featuring a mobile scanner a quick option for document scanning and retention.

Qipit works by taking the photo on either your camera or camera phone and loading it into their web service.  The image file can be sent to Qipit as either a multimedia message (MMS), mobile email, attached to an email from your PC, or loaded into their service using their website.  When Qipit receives the file, they quickly turn it into either a jpeg or Adobe Acrobat PDF file.

After a few trials, I have been impressed with Qipit’s service overall.  I have a Nokia phone with a high quality 5MP camera and handwritten notes and a printed memo were easily legible when I viewed it on Qipit’s website.  I also tried the Qupit service with a Motorola RAZR, featuring only a 1.3 MP camera.  Printed materials again looked good, however a whiteboard didn’t was not as legible when pictured and sent to QipIt.  In order to frame shot, I had to stand back.  The RAZRs lousy image sensor combined with the lossy compression used on the RAZR camera resulted in a PDF that was barely readable.

If you use Qipit to scan a document or handwritten note, the image will turn out on even an older camera phone.  However if you have a large document or whiteboard to capture, I’d recommend a digital camera that has 3 megapixels or more.  This is the only way to get a quality PDF out of the Qipit service.

Qipit allows you to share the scanned images with others by using their online file storage.  The service is worthy of being called “a poor-mans electronic whiteboard.”  It’s also exceptionally useful for scanning documents on the go, including receipts for those who are on business travel and don’t want to keep all those expense receipts in physical form.

When you think of what values you seek from co-workers, colleagues, and clients, punctuality is probably one that wouldn’t immediately come to mind. Being web workers, parents, co-workers, spouses and just about every other role you can imagine, we have many demands for our attention and sometimes these time frames overlap.

Being punctual shows those with whom you interact that:

• You care.  Being on time shows you give importance to the meeting or task you’ve agreed to.
• You’re competent.  If you’re late to a meeting or function, your client will wonder about your ability to complete the potential task that you two are meeting about.
• You’re accountable.  If you are consistently late, you will have a more difficult developing trust in those who want to interact with you.  When you arrive behind schedule, the person may be harboring an instant grudge against your tardiness, whether they visibly show it or not.

Now that we’ve established the reasons that punctuality is necessary and can be an edge in business, how do you ensure you’ll be on time on a more regular basis?

Focus: Time management is a reflection of the rest of your life.  Therefore, it’s important to only focus on things that are of value to you.  If you agree to take a meeting only because you’re being “nice” and don’t want to say no; re-visit this line of thinking.  Keep in mind that your time is valuable, no matter if it’s spent on items for business or pleasure.

Build in a buffer:  Competent time managers know that tasks often take more time than you initially predict.  Build in buffer when you agree to a deadline or milestone.  This is also important when forecasting how much time it will take to get to a meeting.  For example, expect traffic and plan accordingly.

Leave Reminders: If forgetfulness is an issue, leave post-it notes in your car, on the coffee maker, anywhere that will be obvious to you to remind you of upcoming events.

Don’t Allow the Little Things to Get In the Way:  If your gas tank is almost empty, fill it.  Having to stop to fill up the tank on the way to a meeting, it will most likely make you late.  If you need to drop mail off at the post office, do it when you’re not en route to a scheduled event.

Being an effective time manager requires you to be honest with yourself about your limitations and abilities.

How do you ensure punctuality?

When planning a vacation, it’s hard to find good information on the web.  UpTake, now out of private beta, tries to help with that process by assessing keywords and returning user comments from across the web to help you find great travel destinations based on your preferences.

UpTake aggregates information from Expedia, TripAdvisor, and Yahoo Travel.  The website crawls these sites (along with other travel niche sites) and returns user generated travel spot reviews for spots throughout the United States. UpTake provides information on hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions, and suggestions for things to do.

The site is very similar to TripAdvisor, TripHub, or Yapta. However UpTake provides more contextual returned results based on users’ queries.  Uptake strives to build intelligence into the search results by providing you with accommodations and options tailored to the type of trip it senses you’re using.  For example, if you enter “wi-fi fax hotel,” it will assume you’re a business traveler looking for hotels that will allow you to work from a business center inside the hotel.

As you can see form the screenshot, the results are returned in an organized and well-laid out manner.   A Google Map is provided to help those unfamiliar with a town’s geography find the attractions near their area of interest.

UpTake was formerly known as Kango and is headed by Yan Lee, the former GM of Yahoo Travel.

Web Worker Daily readers are likely familiar with GrandCentral, a service that gives you a single phone number that can ring multiple phones including your office, cellular phone, and home number simultaneously.

However, if you’ve ever thought it would be nice to read your voicemails either in as a text message or email, PhoneTag has a service in mind for you.  With this add-on PhoneTag service, you can have all your phones ring at the same time, and if you call goes to voicemail – ready your voicemail through PhoneTag.

These voicemail to text services have been around for quite some time, but before this integration between PhoneTag and GrandCentral, you had to choose between the two services. No more.

PhoneTag, formerly known as SimulScribe, was among the first to offer voice-to-text transcription.  PhoneTag also gives you a wav audio version of the email, along with your text summary of the message.  The company is well established and is compatible with many mobile carriers including AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Alltel and more.

After 10 voicemail tests, the PhoneTag service works very well.  All messages were transcribed with 98% accuracy.  If PhoneTag can’t decipher a word spoken to it, it puts a question mark at the end of the word to alert you.

The service is useful, but voice-to-text services as a whole are not without their flaws.  Voice recognition is still more of an art than a science, and errors can occur when a computer tries to interpret voicemails and relay them into text.

I have used a similar service from CallWave, with unfavorable results.  Voicemails were interpreted incorrectly and if you simply relied upon the text summary of the voicemail, you’d receive the wrong message.  For example, a person left me a message that actually said, “Hi Jason, this is Josh, please call me”.  The text transcription literally read, “Hi Jason, this is Josh, don’t call me”.  Luckily I had the raw voicemail to listen to and didn’t think my co-worker didn’t wish to hear from me.

PhoneTag service starts at $10/month for 40 messages or $30 for unlimited messages.

A common misnomer about Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is that it requires you to be using a headset, tethered to your computer.  This is simply untrue as modern VoIP services and solutions use either a) normal corded and cordless phones or b) a specialized phone that resembles a cordless phone or cell phone – just modified to utilized VoIP technology.

VoIP has some major advantages over traditional landline phones. First, typically you can call phones in the US and Canada for one monthly flat rate.  Also, international calls can be made very cheaply.  Included services with your flat rate service include: call waiting, call forwarding, online enabled voice mail, CallerID, and many more.  Whereas conventional phone companies charge you individually for each of these services, VoIP providers give them to you for one flat rate.

Where do you begin if you’d like to use your broadband connection to lower your phone bill dramatically?  Lets walk through some of the options.

More “Traditional” VoIP Services

Vonage is the most well-known Internet telephony service, thanks to their aggressive marketing campaigns. Vonage is a service that gives you a telephony adapter that converts your standard voice signals into packets that can be sent over the internet.  Therefore, you can plug your normal phones into this adapter and start dialing the same way you do with a landline.  Vonage service runs $25/month for unlimited calling to the US and Canada and many additional services including voicemail, call forwarding, etc.  Vonage requires a U.S. shipping address so you must live in the U.S. to use Vonage service.

Vonage service includes e911, which is a service that enables emergency responders to locate you when you dial 911.  Just a few years ago, before e911, there were incidents where responders couldn’t located VoIP users who called for emergency assistance.  Now with e911, you give your physical location to the VoIP service provider when you sign up for service.  Accordingly, it is important to update your address with our VoIP service provider should you move.

Packet8 is a veteran VoIP provider and prides itself on stability and reliability.  Packet8 sets itself apart from the VoIP pack by offering solid service and optional video conferencing features.  Their most popular plan, Freedom Unlimited, includes calling to United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, Guam, France, Italy, Ireland, Spain, and the UK for the flat rate of $24.95/month not including taxes and regulatory fees.  Packet8 charges a $30 activation charge.  Like Vonage, Packet8 will provide you with a telephone adapter.  Packet8 also includes e911.

There is a difference between Packet8 and many other VoIP providers that needs to be noted.  The voice technology Packet8 uses to transfer your voice over the Internet, called a codec, is different than Vonage.  Packet8 uses g.729 whereas Vonage utilizes g.711.  The result, in my experience, is that voice quality suffers.  This difference is especially noticeable when two parties on a phone call attempt to speak at the same time and drown each other out because of the way g.729 functions.

Rounding out the group of notable VoIP providers is ViaTalk.  One of the lesser known VoIP providers, ViaTalk prides itself on outstanding customer support.  You can either pay for an entire year (currently priced at $200/year) or monthly at $23/month, not including fees and taxes.  Their feature set includes voice mail, caller ID, call waiting, call forwarding, call return (*69) and an impressive customer control panel.  e911 service is included with ViaTalk service.  ViaTalk, along with Vonage, is only available in the United States.

I have had to work with ViaTalk customer support on a few occasions and have found them a pleasure to work with.  Their support is U.S. based and available 24 hours a day.

Skype

Unlike the afore mentioned options, Skype does not use a telephone adapter to make your voice calls route over the Internet.  Skype is the grand daddy of the VoIP world and is wildly popular as a computer-based VoIP service.  They offer very cheap voice calls to landlines and cell phones that are billed at around 2 cents a minute.  They’ve partnered with a few hardware manufacturers and have built Skype phones that look exactly like a cell phone or conventional cordless phones.  My favorite device is the NetGear VoIP841, however I look forward to trying more in the near future.

Skype recently announced a monthly plan that includes unlimited calling to the United States and Canada for $2.95/month.  Skype calls to landlines and cell phones used to vary in call quality, but I have found SkypeOut calls to be as good if not better than a normal landline phone conversation.  To see if Skype might work for you, download Skype and make a few calls to see if your quality is up to acceptable for you.  To get a phone number for people to dial you from conventional phones, you must purchase a SkypeIn number which runs $12 for a 3 month subscription or $36 for one year.

Important notes:

• You cannot use Skype to dial 911 in an emergency.  So if you need to dial 911, do it from a cell phone if Skype is your only calling option.  Skype does not use e911.
• With any VoIP service, service can go out from time to time, and relies on electric service.  It’s important to have a backup plan such as a cell phone in order to conduct business and make phone calls should your VoIP go out for any reason.
• These VoIP services are intented for those living in the U.S.  For international VoIP, Skype would be my first suggestion.  If you have experience with an alternative international VoIP provider, please share in the comments.
• VoIP call quality is dependent on the quality of your broadband connection to the Internet.