SMS is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet, and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short text messages. An intermediary service can facilitate a text-to-voice conversion to be sent to landlines.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms Internet telephony, broadband telephony, and broadband phone service specifically refer to the provisioning of communications services over the Internet, rather than via the public switched telephone network (PSTN), also known as plain old telephone service (POTS).
A voicemail system is a computer-based system that allows users and subscribers to exchange personal voice messages; to select and deliver voice information; and to process transactions relating to individuals, organizations, products, and services, using an ordinary phone. The term is also used more broadly to denote any system of conveying a stored telecommunications voice messages, including using an answering machine. Most cell phone services offer voicemail as a basic feature; many corporate private branch exchanges include versatile internal voice-messaging services, and *98 vertical service code subscription is available to most individual and small business landline subscribers.
Mobile phone spam is a form of spam, directed at the text messaging or other communications services of mobile phones or smartphones. As the popularity of mobile phones surged in the early 2000s, frequent users of text messaging began to see an increase in the number of unsolicited commercial advertisements being sent to their telephones through text messaging. This can be particularly annoying for the recipient because, unlike in email, some recipients may be charged a fee for every message received, including spam. Mobile phone spam is generally less pervasive than email spam, where in 2010 around 90% of email is spam. The amount of mobile spam varies widely from region to region. In North America, mobile spam has steadily increased from 2008 ed 2012 and is projected to account for half of all mobile phone traffic in 2019. In parts of Asia up to 30% of messages were spam in 2012.
Gizmo5 was a Voice over IP communications network and a proprietary freeware soft phone for that network. On November 12, 2009, Google announced that it had acquired Gizmo5. On March 4, 2011, Google announced that the service would be discontinued as of April 3, 2011.
Jajah was a VoIP provider, founded by Austrians Roman Scharf and Daniel Mattes in 2005. The Jajah headquarters was located in Mountain View, CA, USA, and Luxembourg. Jajah maintained a development centre in Israel. On 23 December 2009, it was announced that Jajah had been bought by Telefónica through its subsidiary Telefónica Europe. In December 2013, Telefónica announced that Jajah would shut down at the end of January 2014.
An SMS gateway or MMS gateway allows a computer to send or receive text messages in the form of Short Message Service (SMS) or Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) transmissions between local and/or international telecommunications networks. In most cases, SMS and MMS are eventually routed to a mobile phone through a wireless carrier. SMS gateways are commonly used as a method for person-to-person to device-to-person communications. Many SMS gateways support content and media conversions from email, push, voice, and other formats.
Google Voice is a telephone service that provides call forwarding and voicemail services, voice and text messaging, as well as U.S. and international call termination for Google Account customers in the U.S., and for Google Workspace customers in Canada, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. The service was launched by Google on March 11, 2009, after the company had acquired the service GrandCentral.
Unified communications (UC) is a business and marketing concept describing the integration of enterprise communication services such as instant messaging (chat), presence information, voice, mobility features, audio, web & video conferencing, fixed-mobile convergence (FMC), desktop sharing, data sharing, call control and speech recognition with non-real-time communication services such as unified messaging. UC is not necessarily a single product, but a set of products that provides a consistent unified user interface and user experience across multiple devices and media types.
Ooma, Inc. is an American publicly traded telecommunications company based in the Silicon Valley, California area. Ooma offers communications services including Voice over IP (VoIP) calling for business, home and mobile users. In 2015, Ooma was named one of the fastest-growing private companies by Silicon Valley Business Journal.
eVoice is a telecommunications service owned by j2 Global, Inc. (NASDAQ:JCOM). The company manages incoming and outgoing calls using virtual phone numbers. The service was initially founded by Wendell Brown, Mark Klein, and Craig Taro Gold in 2000 and re-launched in March 2010 with an expansion of services that include both individual, personal uses as well as services for businesses.
Jaxtr was a social communications company that melds together global calling, SMS, and social networking. Founded by Phillip Mobin and Touraj Parang in October 2005, jaxtr uses Voice over Internet Protocol to offer competitive rates as well as free international and long distance calling. Some key differentiators for jaxtr in its market include allowing phone-to-phone calls to and from any mobile and landline phones, offering social networking focused on voice, requiring no software downloads or access pins, and giving users local Direct Inward Dialing (DID) phone numbers. Offered in 56 countries, these numbers allow users in those countries to dial a local phone number which would ring a long distance or international destination phone. Jaxtr also offers users a set number of global SMS messages each month.
Acision was a privately held British mobile communications network infrastructure company engaged in messaging and charging systems that enable popular services such as Short message service (SMS), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), mobile internet browsing, mobile broadband, and voicemail. In particular, Acision specialised in providing IP messaging to over-the-top media services and other enterprises.
YouMail is an Irvine, CA-based developer of visual voicemail and Robocall blocking software. Their voicemail software replaces the voicemail service offered by mobile phone manufacturers, and offers webmail-like voicemail access and voicemail-to-text transcriptions. The company also compiles the YouMail Robocall index by monitoring automated call patterns and behaviors, and verifying that activity against numbers that its customers manually block or report as spam.
Founded in 2008, Voxofon provides mobile apps and communication services utilizing over-the-top (OTT) voice and messaging technologies for smartphones, tablets, and web applications. Voxofon is used to make free app-to-app domestic and international calls and texts as well as make cheap international calls and texts to friends and family that use feature phones or landlines. The Voxofon app is a cross-platform application that is supported on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, and through any web browser.
Voxeo Corporation was a technology company that specialized in providing development platforms for unified customer experience (self-service) and unified communications applications. Voxeo was headquartered in Orlando, Florida with main offices in Cologne, Germany; Beijing, China; London, UK and San Francisco, US.
IntelePeer is a privately held company based in San Mateo, California, and is a Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) provider of voice, messaging, automation, applications, APIs, and analytics for enterprises.
Voiceserve Inc. is a Delaware, USA telecommunications and softswitch company headquartered in Middlesex, United Kingdom and incorporated December 9, 2005. The company offers its own in-house developed VoIP, mobility, and IP-PBX software solutions with management, administration, billing, mobility, hosted IP-PBX, and softphone functionality found among its services, VoipSwitch, Call-to-PBX, and Vippie.
Messagenet S.P.A. is a company based in Milan, Italy, that develops and sells VoIP and internet fax services. The company claims to have more than 500,000 registered users, 400,000 telephone numbers assigned, more than 7 million minutes of conversation and two and a half million faxes processed per month. Messagenet is a sister company of KPNQwest Italia.
Sinch, formerly CLX Communications, is a telecommunications and cloud communications platform as a service (PaaS) company. Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, Sinch also has offices in over 30 cities worldwide, including Atlanta, London, Madrid, San Francisco, Singapore and Sydney.
