New VOIP startup Ooma, which is proving a free phone service to U.S. residents who purchase the basic hardware, started taking pre-orders about five minutes ago (6 AM PST). Orders are being taken by phone only, with delivery guaranteed before September 10. The phone number to call is 866-452-6662. The basic unit, called a “hub,” is $399. Additional “scouts” which you can plug into the various phone jacks in our house cost $40 each. Sales tax is being collected on top of that for California deliveries. Once you’ve purchased the hardware, all calls to U.S. numbers are free. International calls are at Skype-like prices. I don’t expect to see millions of people calling to buy an Ooma today. But for the early adopter crowd, this may be something they want to try out. I’ve been testing it for a few weeks and the call quality is good. → Read More
Consumer VOIP service Vonage is beta testing a new, self-described “cool and sleek, yet simplistic and approachable” gateway device produced by Ambit. The device, an Ambit VDV21, includes a LCD screen that displays caller ID and voicemail notifications. The hope, Vonage says in an email, is that it will “inspire consumers to proudly display their Vonage router rather than hide it under their desk.” It is not yet listed on their product page. It sounds like they’re taking a page out of Ooma’s playbook. Ooma offers users a much more compelling VOIP device as part of their service; it includes a speaker, voicemail controls and other features. Ooma is also free once the hardware is purchased. The Vonage gateway also includes other features – see the email sent to us below. If you’d like to test it, they are offering a month of free service during the test, plus a credit of $30 on your Vonage account. You must return the device at the end of the month, however. Sign up here. Text of email: → Read More
Cheapskates that we are, people are always trying to find deals, like, say, being able to make phone calls for free. Yes, that works. Over at the Times, David Pogue bravely looked at several services that offer, in one way or another, free phone calls. Skype we already know, so who cares. But there’s three other services that seem neat: Jajah.com, T-Mobile’s HotSpot@Home and Ooma. Jajah lets you make calls from your regular telephone, but you need to initiate the conversation with a Web browser. Jajah then calls both numbers and connects them, sorta like an operator. → Read More
You read the story and you heard the podcast. Now you can try out Ooma yourself, way before they go on sale to the public in September. We have fifty to give away. This isn’t like most account giveaways – each of these packages will be sold for $399 retail in September and gives you free VOIP phone service on your normal phones for life (the life of you or the company, whichever ends first). You get it for free, and you get it right now. Here’s another cool thing about these – each one includes three free “white rabbit” tokens that you can give away to others so they can try out Ooma, too. They have a limited number of these, but they’ll continue to give three to everyone until they start to run out. Here’s what you have to do. Just write a short comment below telling us why you want it. Or tell us about your favorite Ashton Kutcher movie or tv show (since he’s the Creative Director of the company). Or both. You don’t have to be truthful or nice, but you do have to be creative and entertaining. All you have to do is be one of the fifty most entertaining comments and you’re in. You have until end of day California time on Friday to write. Make sure you use your real email address in the comment or we won’t know how to contact you. Ooma will only ship these in the U.S. for now, so you must be living here. And there’s one more rule – We’ll be adding Ooma to InviteShare later tonight and allowing people to sign up to get one. If you are selected you have to agree to give at least one of the systems to the person on the top of the InviteShare list. That way we can possibly get some more of these to TechCrunch readers. Update: Ok Ooma is now up on InviteShare, so feel free to add your name to the list of people who want an invite. The list order is determined based on the time you enter your name as well as how many invitations to other services you give out, so move up the list by participating. If you are one of the fifty people who get a direct invite from this post, please remove your name from the list – and → Read More
While we’re spending our time pushing our Destroy Your Landline Contest, wherein you the readers are implored to destroy your traditional landline phones, something comes up that makes us want to perhaps hold on to ours. Ooma is a new Vonage-like VoIP service that tweaks the formula just enough to perhaps survive where companies like SunRocket have failed. The VoIP ideal has been around, and VoIP to VoIP calls are almost always free. Calling to a traditional landline, though, has some costs associated with it (per-call or monthly). It’s these costs that have added up and made problems for other VoIP providers. Ooma has come up with a fairly innovative way to literally skirt these costs, and it could make all the difference. → Read More
An ambitious and long awaited new consumer VOIP startup – Ooma – launches on Thursday morning. Much like Vonage and the ill-fated SunRocket, Ooma allows consumers to use their normal phones to make and receive telephone calls, but at drastically reduced prices. Vonage provides unlimited calling in the U.S. and Canada for a flat $25/month. Ooma, however, is using an innovative peer-to-peer architecture to significantly reduce their cost overhead. Because of that cost reduction, they’re charging for hardware only. Calls in the U.S. are free, and will be forever. That doesn’t mean there’s no cost to the consumer, though. You still have to get your hands on the hardware, which starts at $399, and have a broadband Internet connection. That buys you a base hub. You plug broadband ethernet into one end, and a normal phone into the other, and you’re all set. If you buy additional units, called Scouts, you can wire your entire house with Ooma. That is another distinct advantage over Vonage, which only allows a single phone to be plugged into the device. Spread the Ooma Scouts around the house, plugging one end into a normal phone jack and connecting it with a normal phone. It’s then part of the Ooma system and all calls will be free. Instead of using normal exchanges to terminate calls like Vonage does, Ooma routes calls through the phone lines of other users if it can. That saves them the termination fee on the call and eliminates their largest marginal cost. That does mean that if you have a normal phone line (its not required to use Ooma) it will be used by other Ooma users, but it isn’t something you’d ever notice because your inbound and outbound calls are routed around it. And in the event you call 911, any phone call using your line is immediately broken and you are put right through. If there are no Ooma user within twelve miles of where your call is being terminated, Ooma uses the normal phone system. From the caller’s perspective, its all invisible. The Ooma hardware is both beautiful and functional. Answering machine functionality is built in to the Hub and Scout devices via physical buttons. Every Ooma account also includes two lines, and either can be accessed from either phone. A speaker phone is also built in. Ooma isn’t just making money on the hardware. They’ll be adding → Read More
