Posts Tagged: free


10
Mar 10

Shane Ross says “Blueface are launching the ideal product for a downturn”

Published in Feburary ‘10, The article featured in the Sunday Independent. Written by Shane Ross it focuses on the FREE CALLS FOR LIFE offer, and how it saves the general consumer a huge amount on their telephone bill.

Hannah Flattery posing for Blueface

Hannah Flattery posing for Blueface

So,what can small businesses, haemorrhaging with cashflow problems, do? One way they can cut costs is by cancelling their subscription to the SFA. Another is by ensuring that they owe no money to AIB. A third is by reducing landline phone charges.

Last week, I found a new way of slashing my home telephone bill, courtesy of a small business with big ideas. Any scheme that kicks Eircom in the solar plexus is good news for those of us who have been victims of the dinosaur for decades.

So, it was wonderful to stumble on a small business start-up that promises to put another nail in the Eircom coffin. Two entrepreneurs entered my life. They will not be joining the SFA or borrowing from AIB. So far they have taken the private equity route.

As a crusty sceptic, I gave Alan Foy and Brendan Gaffney of Blueface a sideways glance when they insisted that I could have “free landline calls for life” if i handed over €199.

I have to confess as a punter who lost Stg£200 in the Eighties on the three-card trick to a man with an orange box just outside Harrods, I am a bit wary of racing certainties.

But knowing the pair well, I handed over the money and tested the product. The two telecom wizards installed a phone and promised me that I now have free landline calls for life.

Blueface has landed a recession buster. The phone provided will eliminate my line rental charge, provided I have a decent broadband connection. I reckon that the end of rental fee alone will reduce my telephone bill by hundreds of euro every year. Not to mention the free calls.

The phone is a cordless handset, easily attached to my old number. I will still pay for mobile calls through pre-payment and any calls outside the country, but even the mobile charges are cheaper than Eircom’s.

I win on the rental, there is none. I win on the mobile charges, they are cheaper. Two fingers to Eircom.

Any punter who wants free landline calls for life should head to blueface.ie. It is Skype without the computer. Blueface is exactly the type of resourceful small business that Ireland needs.  Consumers will love it becuase it will dramatically cut the household budget. So far the offer is only open to residential customers. But Blueface already has visionary plans for small business. The company is lead by a group of young entrepreneurs determined to shake-up the telecoms market. They are launching the ideal product for a downturn, watch this space.

The free landline offer may not be open forever. But it is for life!


8
Jan 10

SIP Sorcery – Open Source SIP experimentation

Blueface CTO, Aaron Clauson, started some years ago a project that allowed mangling with multiple SIP accounts with a single SIP phone. One of the particularities of this project was the fact that it handles only SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) signaling, rather than signaling AND media (ie: audio streams), which enables a fantastic flexibility when it comes to managing calls.

My SIP Switch was born!

My SIP Switch

My SIP Switch

This project has come a long way since its early days. It is now fully open source (freely available online at : SIP Sorcery Source),  regular blog news are posted regularly (SIP Sorcery Blog ) ,  more than 12.000 messages have been posted on the forum and about 1.000 people are using the application online every day.

The name of this project changed to SIP Sorcery recently (June 2009) along with a major backend and frontend update!

SIP Sorcery the Ruby of VoIP.

The great strength of SIP Sorcery resides in its Ruby (programming language) dial plans, out of which an almost endless lists of call related features can be designed by a creative and tech-savvy mind.  The tool can be used for very simple PBX tasks such as “find me follow me” (also called : Call Hunting) or time based call forwarding to more advanced features such as ENUM lookups,  Google Voice integration or Voxeo IVRs integration. These features make of SIP Sorcery one of the best web PBX solutions available and best of all, it’s FREE.

With multiple SIP accounts registered to SIP Sorcery, you can receive and manage the calls from many different phone numbers easily. For outgoing calls, you can chose the SIP account that will be used when dialing out. That’s another great benefit since you can call out using your provider that has the best rate for the actual destination.

SIP Sorcery can be installed on your computer or used directly online. There are still regular improvements and new features added to the software so it is more for experimenting than for a production system as of now but the feedback we are getting from the community of users predicts SIP Sorcery quite a bright future.

Some  famous VoIP related open source projects have become complete products with major added value mainly thanks to their community of users and developers (Asterisk, Open SER, SIP Foundry…). Blueface has been sponsoring My SIP Switch (hardware, website, as well as some development) since the end of 2006 because we believe there is an enormous potential in this application.

sip-sorcery-banner

For more information : My SIP Switch / SIP Sorcery

Guillaume