It’s been a long time coming, but Google just announced that Google Voice is now open for everyone. Until today, Google Voice was an invite-only service, though Google slowly opened up the doors to more users over the last few months and the service already has over one million users. Starting today, anybody with a Google Account in the U.S. can open a Google Voice account and get a Google Voice phone number without having to wait for an invitation. Sponsor Google Voice gives you a new phone number that can ring all of your landline and mobile phones simultaneously and provides automatic voicemail transcriptions. In addition, Google Voice offers free calls and text messages in the U.S. and Canada, as well as cheap international calls. The service is based on GrandCentral, a service that Google acquired in July 2007. Last November, Google also acquired Skype competitor Gizmo5, though the company hasn’t integrated any of Gizmo5’s functionality into Google Voice yet. In the long run, though, Google Voice could easily morph into a full-blown competitor to Skype. A number of other services, including the newly launched Phonebooth.com and Ribbit have launched Google Voice competitors with very similar features, though Google’s name recognition and ability to integrate this telephony service into its other products gives Google a competitive advantage. Our Favorite Features If you are not familiar with Google Voice, here are some of our favorite features: transcribed voicemails : whenever somebody leaves a voicemail, Google Voice will transcribe the message as best it can (this only works for English right now). These transcripts are then forwarded to your email account and you can also opt to receive an SMS notification. listening in to voicemails : whenever you receive a call and decide to let it go to voicemail, you can also choose to listen in and even pick up the call if it turns out to be an important message. This feels just like the old days when answering machines with tapes were still a novelty. call screening : one neat option in Google Voice is the ability to screen calls. If you activate this feature, callers will be prompted to leave their name once they call, and once you pick up the phone, Google Voice will play the name back and you can choose whether you want the call to go to voicemail or actually speak to this person. You can opt to let all unknown callers who are not in your Google address book go through this procedure or just those calls from callers who have blocked their caller ID. recording calls : at any time during a call, you can press 4 and the call will be recorded. This only works for calls you receive on your phone for now, and doesn’t work for outgoing calls. conference calls : just ask participants to call your Google Voice number and as more callers arrive, you can just conference them in – this works for up to 4 callers. switching phones : if you want to switch phones during a call (say you took a call on your landline and decide you want to take a walk and continue the call on your cell), just press * and all your other phones will ring again and you can continue the conversation on any othe rphone. SMS : you can send and receive text messages from your Google Voice account and web interface integration with Google Contacts it just works : the call quality is good, we didn’t experience any outages during the last few months, and calls aren’t dropped. Google Voice does what it says it does, and it does it well. Discuss

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Google made a number of announcements in the past week that are of interest to educators: opening Google Wave to the public and extending Google Voice accounts to students. But one announcement that didn’t receive much press was its release of CloudCourse , the new internal learning platform. Sponsor Built on Google’s App Engine , CloudCourse is a course-scheduling tool, fully integrated with Google Calendar. CloudCourse also features approval processes, wait list management, as well as room and user profile information and can be further customized to sync the data with other internal systems. Google hopes that by releasing this under an open-source license that it can “help developers who want to port or build enterprise applications on App Engine.” According to Irwin Boutoul, a software engineer at Google, “We actually didn’t design this system with universities in mind – we designed it as a course scheduling tool for enterprises. Nevertheless, CloudCourse can certainly help school administrators, who most likely don’t have the time or resources to worry about hardware hosting and dealing with traffic bursts like the ones that occur during class enrollment periods. We’d love to see universities pick up this platform and code additional features on top of it to make it more relevant to the higher education ecosystem. ” While course management is part of what makes a learning tool appealing, CloudCourse does not yet contain all the functionality that would make it an alternative to the other learning management systems available But as Katie Christo, an instructional technologist at the American International School in Chennai, India says – echoing the frustrations that many teachers have with these alternatives – “I would love something from Google. Moodle is still very basic, Blackboard is worse. It’d be nice to have something that is free, cleanly designed, and integrated with other solid programs.” And as the source code is open, and as more and more schools explore and embrace Google’s Apps for Education , CloudCourse may become another part of the ed-tech arsenal. Discuss

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Google just announced that it will now make Google Voice – the company’s free VoIP telephony and voicemail transcription service – available to all students with a valid .edu email address. Currently, Google Voice is still only available by invite, though Google has gradually opened the service up to more users since its launch in May 2009. Last August, for example, Google opened up Voice for all active U.S. service members with a .mil email address. If you are a student, you can now get an invite by going to google.com/voice/students . Sponsor After signing up, you should get aninvite within the next 24 hours. If you are not a student, but still have an .edu address (maybe from an alumni association), chances are that you will still get your invite. If you are not familiar with Google Voice, have a look at this series of videos that explains how to set Google Voice up and use it. Oddly enough, Google still hasn’t opened up Google Voice to a wider public. When Google opened up Google Voice for all U.S. military personnel, we speculated that this was a move to garner some free publicity ahead of a larger public launch. This public launch never happened, however. While Google is waiting, new competitors like Phonebooth.com and British Telecom’s Ribbit have been able to establish a reputation for themselves by providing more fully-featured services geared towards individuals and small business. Discuss

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Google is touting a new feature for their mobile VoIP application, Google Voice : instant notification of new SMS text messages and voicemails. You may have thought an app meant to replace your phone’s functions would already be doing that, but in reality, Google Voice delayed notifications for 15 minutes by default. You could change this to 5 minutes or force a refresh manually, but many don’t bother tweaking settings or obsessively refreshing just to see if they have new messages. Now that’s no longer necessary – messages are delivered almost immediately. Sponsor According to news posted on the Google Voice blog , the new notification feature called “Inbox Synchronization” will notify your Android-powered device (sorry, iPhone users!) of new messages “within seconds” of receiving them. That’s not exactly real-time, but close enough – at least now your text messaging friends won’t think you’re ignoring them. Unfortunately, this feature isn’t being switched on automatically – Google Voice users will have to make the adjustments themselves. To enable it, you’ll need to open the Google Voice settings on your phone and touch Refresh and notification. Doing so will automatically disable SMS forwarding to your phone, too, so you won’t receive duplicate notifications. Also included in the update is a new pop-up bar that appears when you tap a contact’s photo. From here, you can quickly respond via voicemail, email or IM. Google Voice: Not There Yet? Despite this obviously welcome advance for the Google Voice app on Android handsets, some are still questioning why the service hasn’t been better integrated with the mobile operating system itself. Only days ago, tech guru and founder of O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, posted on Google’s new service, Buzz : “What’s with Google Voice as a second-class citizen on Android?” He cites a few examples of improvements that he believes should be made specifically regarding the app’s voicemail feature. “There’s no link to [voicemail] from the phone app, even if it’s installed, so you have to use the old-fashioned voice mail, or else check it in a separate application,” he notes. “Phone numbers that are left in messages are not clickable dial links when the message is transcribed.” Soon after, dozens of commenters chimed in, some with their own gripes, mentioning issues with transcriptions and making calls. However, more were actually sticking up for the service than complaining. Anecdotally, we’ve heard stories from Google Voice users who’ve complained about minor issues that, on their own, don’t seem like “make it or break it” bugs. But they can be irksome enough that some of these users aren’t making a full transition from phone-based calls, texts and voicemail over to the VoIP application. That may change in the future as Google pushes out more updates and bug fixes…at least we hope it will. In the meantime, at least some people are having fun with the service’s issues. For example, over on the Facebook page ****GoogleVoiceSaid , mimicked after the Twitter account with a similar name, users share the worst (and funniest) translations Google Voice has created. An example post: ” This is or you need the hello. Yeah for hello hello at.” Sounds like voice recognition still has a ways to go. Discuss

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Phonebooth.com , a VOIP service for individuals and small businesses, just launched a free version of its service. Phonebooth, just like Google Voice and Ribbit Mobile , provides its users with a free local phone number that can be forwarded to any cell phone and landline. Phonebooth also offers voicemail transcriptions. What makes it stand out from it competitors, however, is that it offers an auto attendant feature that allows you to route callers to different employees. Sponsor It’s worth noting that Bandwidth.com , the company behind Phonebooth, has been providing infrastructure services to other VOIP services, including Voxeo and Yext, for more than three years. The company’s VOIP network delivered almost 4 billion minutes in 2009. Bandwidth began a beta test of the paid version of Phonebooth.com last year and now has over 1,000 customers. Features in Phonebooth’s free version : Free local phone number for your business Includes an auto attendant (Press 1 for Sales, Press 2 for Support…etc.) Unlimited extensions for your employees or partners Read your voicemail, with VM-to-email & text transcription 200 free minutes of inbound calling (6¢ additional) Includes new Contact Us Plus feature A Free VOIP Service that Will Grow With You Starting today, Phonebooth will offer a free service geared towards individuals. The company also announced the general availability of its $20/month/user option, which offers a fully featured phone system in the cloud. One of the advantages of using Phonebooth over similar services like Google Voice or Grasshopper is that the company allows users to upgrade their phone system over time. Once your company outgrows Phonebooth’s basic plan, you can easily switch to a higher-end phone system (Phonebooth on Demand) with hardware IP-based phones. Phonebooth’s users will be able to choose local numbers from virtually everywhere in the U.S. (the service us U.S.). Sadly, though, there is no way to make your Phonebooth number appear on the caller ID for outgoing calls from your landline or cell phone. Phonebooth doesn’t currently offer any mobile apps, though the company told us earlier today that mobile apps are definitely on Phonebooth’s roadmap. Contact Plus Widget In addition to the free VOIP service, Phonebooth is also launching a new widget for small businesses – Contact Us Plus – that allows potential customers to use Phonebooth’s VOIP service to initiate a call right from the website. In addition to initiating phone calls, the Phonebooth widget can also feature additional contact info (Twitter account, email etc.), as well as your address and a map. Phonebooth’s users can also opt to show phone numbers for different departments in their company in the widget. Discuss

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