VoIP and ENUM

After I heard last year Alan Johnston had left MCI and joined upstart Tello, I was just sitting waiting what was happening, also because Jeff Pulver is involved as a co-founder. Tello was operating in stealth-mode, until Monday this week Jeff announced the launch on his blog , and already the next day Tello is no longer a secrect. Henry Sinnreich also pinged me.

For those who do not know it yet, from the Tello webpage:

The Tello service is an innovative new approach to simplifying, unifying, and delivering on the promise of real-time IP communications technology. Today's communications climate is characterized by a plethora of choices that provide a variety of different ways to communicate - VoIP, IM, Video, etc. - but that remain as unintegrated and closed environments. This lack of interoperability and interconnectivity results in individuals, both within and outside the enterprise, spending valuable time trying to find colleagues and then figuring out the most effective way to communicate and collaborate with them instead of increasing business agility and facilitating faster and better communication.

Using the Tello service eliminates thinking about how to communicate and lets you just communicate quickly and effectively. The solution is delivered as a hosted Instant Communications and Collaboration network service, Tello Connect, and is available with complementary Desktop and Mobile Client applications. It provides a Real Time Communications Presence & Connectivity Hub that allows people to instantly locate, contact, and connect with friends, colleagues, and partners using the devices and applications that they already know. Using the Tello Desktop and mobile applications, individuals can, at a glance, easily determine the availability of their contacts at any time anywhere in the world and initiate rich media multi-modal communications with the click of a button.

So basically a Uber-presence service bridging selected applications.

As Jeff pointed out today, word spread out in the press:

Some of the business press that first picked up on the launch of Tello included: Business Week, Wall Street Journal, Silicon Beat, Forbes, Associated Press and Om Malik. (Aha, Om is press already ;-)

and especially in the blogospere:

When news of Tello first broke, it was picked up by a number of bloggers including: Alec Saunders, Andy Abramson, Bruce Stewart, Michael Eisenberg, Staysafe Security systems, TechCrunch, Mathew Winggram, Techdirt, Tom Keating, MobileCrunch, Stowe Boyd, Business2blog, Al Brendenberg, Irwin Lazar, Nitin Badjatia, Cynthia Brumfield,Daniel Davenport, viola39, Raymond Weklar, Ron Jeffries, John Cook and Rob Robinson.

I did not mention Tello yet on my blog, because all what could be said from the information on the webpage and on the press release was already said (pro and con), and I first wanted to get my hands on the application.

But I am still sitting and waiting to get the allowance to use the 30-day free trial of Instant Web sharing. To do so, you need to register, filling out an endless form and after this you get an response that you will be contacted within 72 hours. I registered on Tuesday.

Nothing learned from Skype, eh?

Please do not steal my time.