With the recent acquisition of Sokol and Associates, the firm that originally produced the AstriCon open source conference, we can only expect great things in the upcoming Astricon 2007 conference.

From the Official Asterisk Announcements:

“AstriCon’s mission is to expand awareness and knowledge of Asterisk. The four day conference includes getting-started seminars for both users and developers; a series of tutorials presented by experts from around the globe; keynotes and industry perspectives covering the technical, business and even social aspects of Asterisk; and panel discussions surrounding the ongoing growth of open source telephony.”

The 2007 Conference will be held in Phoenix, Arizona from the 24th to the 28th of September this year.

For the newcomers to the AstriCon Conference, this is a quick primer on what to expect during the conference:

There are three main things to look forward to every AstriCon Conference:

The Conference
The conference includes getting started seminars both for users and developers; a tutorial series brought by Asterisk experts from all around the globe; keynote presentations that covers the Asterisk market; and panel discussions surrounding the ongoing growth of open source telephony

The Exhibition
The Asterisk open source platform has created a rich ecosystem of products that both leverages and enhances the power of the platform.The AstriCon Exhibition aims to showcase the leading products that ranges from endpoints, gateway hardware, software add-ons, embedded solutions, and Internet telephony services

The Meeting Place
The conference is an excellent opportunity for you to meet experts, venture capitalists and code gurus in the Asterisk community. There are group meetings as well as an all-night coding sessions in the Code Zone.

This year’s AstriCon also brings additional things to the conference:

The Asterisk Job Fair.
This is an excellent event both for people who want to work on asterisk-related technologies and for those who want to build a team of engineers to work on Asterisk-related products.

Open Source Telephone Executive Roundtable
This is the opportunity for technology and community leaders in the open source communications space to interact with each other and hear from members of the press and analysts. They will also discuss key topics about the industy.

The Commercial Track
The commercial track provides an excellent venue both for companies of commercial products related to asterisk to showcase their products and services as well as to those attendees who want to know more about these commercial offerings.

With Asterisk taking on a very important role in the Open Source communications space, the AstriCon is the place to be for engineers, venture capitalist, company leaders, and the rest who are interested in this space.

Voice over internet protocol (VOIP) has made possible for people to replace their traditional phones for making phone calls and still pay much less than what they would usually give for the traditional phone companies. For example, Skype, one of the first VOIP products that went mainstream, has long allowed its users to make calls to regular phone numbers, local, long distance or international calls. Vonage has also been offering an unlimited call plan for all local and long distance calls, and for minimal charges, international calls.

But VOIP hasn’t really turned the telecom world upside down as most people expected it to do when the idea first came to the industry. Consumers didn’t really dropped their regular phone lines and switched to VOIP services in droves. One of the primary reasons that a few people have adopted VOIP services as a replacement for their regular phone lines is the lack of ability to call 911 (though some have workarounds for that). Also, internet services in general has not been really perfect in terms of reliability of service. For people who may depend greatly on a phone for personal or business reasons, the scenario that they will lose their phone service when the internet is just not very appealing.

One silicon valley startup however is aiming to change that, and bring the innovation that the VOIP market needs in order to change the game altogether. OOMA Inc, based in Palo Alto, is reinventing home phone service and transforming it from service-oriented to device-oriented. In lay man’s terms, OOMA is offering a promise of a lifetime VOIP local and long distance calling through their device.

You only need once for the $399 Ooma device. There are no monthly bills. The Ooma system is composed of the Ooma hub, which you connect to your internet broadband connection and to a phone, which then enables you for a lifetime local and long distance calls.

How does it solve the 911 problem? Easy you can choose to keep your standard telephone service, select the very basic plan, just for 911 and backup purposes. All 911 calls will be made using the traditional phone line. When the internet connection goes down, Ooma will automatically switch to your backup traditional phone line.

International calls are automatically routed through the Internet by Ooma and the company promises that these calls will cost roughly what Skype and other VOIP services charge for international calls, which are still well bellow traditional landline rates.

Each system comes with a suite of innovative features including:

• Instant Second Lineâ„¢ – gives users access to a second line in their home, with no installation or new phones
• Broadband Answering Machineâ„¢ – combines the power of voicemail with the convenience of the Internet and ease-of-use of a traditional answering machine
• ooma Dial Toneâ„¢ – delivers unique tonality through an audio interface, creating a new dial tone
• ooma Lounge – provides consumers with the ability to manage their voice mail and call settings online

You can also buy the Ooma scoutâ„¢ for each additional phone extension that you use in your house.

Digium, the company that invented and is behind the Asterisk open source telephone communication platform, recently acquired Sokol And Associates. Sokol & Associates is the premier provider of training services for Asterisk users and producer of the AstriCon Open source conference.

Sokol has been an important part of the Asterisk community, and has more that 10 years of experience in the VOIP industry. The firm is composed of network and system engineers, and software developers who have in-depth knowledge of the Asterisk platform. This allows them to provide intensive training programs for Asterisk users across Europe and the United States.

For a company that is solidly backing and banking on the success of the Asterisk open source communication platform, Digium’s decision to acquire Sokol and Associates is a very good move. The expertise of Sokol & Associates’ engineers and staff will be a vital addition to Digium.

To quote from the official announcement in Sokol and Associates’ website:

“We’ve been such an active part of the Asterisk community for years that joining Digium seemed like the logical next step for our group,” said Steve Sokol. “We look forward to continuing to work with Asterisk users around the world and to taking our knowledge of how people are using Asterisk every day and using it to impact future product development.”

“Asterisk is one of the most commonly used open source projects today, and as the community of users and contributors grows, we want to deepen our relationship with them,” said Mark Spencer, founder and chief technology officer of Digium. “Sokol & Associates has run Asterisk training classes around the world and has long been a central part of this community. By bringing Steve and his group on, Digium gains another conduit to new and advanced Asterisk users around the world.”

Steve Sokol, which is an active and prominent member of the Asterisk community, will become responsible for planning and strategizing for future software offerings from Digium. Digium currently offers AsteriskNOWâ„¢, Asterisk Business Editionâ„¢ and the AsteriskGUI â„¢ besides the core Asterisk platform.

The puzzles pieces are becoming complete in Digium’s goal to become the de facto support company for Asterisk. The company have previously stated its plan to offer everything Asterisk (which, being the inventor and backer of the technology, doesn’t come as a surprise), including documentation, cards and turnkey solutions, and now, training for asterisk users.

Nokia recently released its most recent update to the operating system of its internet device N800, bringing improvements to the OS and bringing in new applications and capabilities to the device. For those who are just tuning in, N800 is an Internet tablet device that runs Linux. It contains internet applications like the opera browser (of course), an RSS Reader, multimedia and other applications. And since its based on Linux, there are many apps built for this platform that has been modified to work with the nokia device. It primarily uses wifi for its internet connectivity but it can also pair with an internet-capable Bluetooth device and connect to the internet through that.

The upgrade includes the inclusion of Flash version 9 plug-in to the web browser, support for up to 8GB of memory cards, better battery performance, improved sensitivity of the touch screen, and the most awaited upgrade of all: the arrival of the skype client to the nokia internet device.

The nokia table has now an excellent VOIP support that will let its users make voice calls, filling in the gap of the missing true phone capability. Two other VOIP client applications are already in the device before the upgrade: a Google Talk client as well as a client for the Gizmo project, a SIPphone VOIP product. However, Skype, the one VOIP application that’s most popular to the VOIP crowd has been missing, until now.

The role that Skype plays in Nokia’s internet devices is really important because the VOIP product already has a huge market (and mind) share. If the idea of a light internet tablet device should take off, support for Skype with its enormous user base and the healthy business ecosystem that surrounds it (skype wifi phones headsets, and other accessories) would be one of the elements for that success. In fact consumers and industry watchers alike has been waiting for the arrival of the skype client to the device.

As wireless access to the internet becomes more prevalent, VOIP in mobile devices such as the N800 would continue to gain momentum and believers / users. WiMax is showing a lot of promise for a much wider wireless internet access coverage and it should bring up exciting possibilities for VOIP on handheld and mobile devices.

Early this month Google announced its acquisition of VOIP company GrandCentral Communications, a Freemont California – based VOIP company that provides a smart “universal phone number that rings all your phones” as well as a plethora of features that certainly makes your phones a lot more interesting, useful and powerful.

GrandCentral provides the following features:

Screen Callers – lets you know who are calling and screen unknown callers

ListenIn – hear about the caller before taking the call

Call Record – allows you to record calls on the fly and provides an online access for these recodings

Block Callers – allows you to block unwanted callers

Notifications – lets you receive voicemail notification thru email or SMS

Ring Different Phones – perhaps the killer feature of grandcentral, this provides a capability of ringing a different phone based on who’s calling

Greetings – allows you to create personalized voicemail greetings by caller or group

RingShare – provides ringback tones for your callers

WebCall Button – allows people to call you from a web page but still keeping your number hidden

CallSwitch – allows you to switch phones in the middle of a call

Click2Call – call from your address book without typing any number

Mobile Access – provides visual way to access your voicemail randomly.

With these, features GrandCentral could really have been a good candidate for an acquisition by a bigger company like Google. Indeed GrandCentral caught some interests when it launched late last year during the DEMO conference. Techcrunch gave it a glaring review, and a very good outlook for its future.

Google has been toying with VOIP for a while with its Google Talk product although in terms of number of users and functionality, Talk is not as competitive with the rest of the players like Skype and other Instant Messenging / VOIP products. It’s also a well-know “secret” that Google is very interested in getting involved with the telecommunication business. It has bought a lot of dark fiber in the past and lately it has been vigorous in lobbying for important issues in the industry (the upcoming auction of the 700MHz spectrum is one example).

Could its GrandCentral acquisition bolster its VOIP efforts? This is a very high possibility. GrandCentral’s expertise and feature set has a very good potential of being integrated into Google’s existing communication products, and other future telecommunications efforts.