Almost two years ago, I blogged about Jazinga, a killer new phone system aimed at small to medium sized businesses. What is the need that Jazinga helped fill? If you’re a small business owner – say a doctor or other small business, setting up your phone system can be very expensive; perhaps in upwards of $20,000-$40,000 depending on your needs. The system that runs that phones is called a PBX and getting a consultant to help you set one of these up can be equally as expensive to get going.
Jazinga sought to make the process easier and very very inexpensive by offering a phone PBX that anyone with a bit of technical knowledge could get up and running. The way I worded it to people is – if you can set up a wireless router, you can set up a Jazinga powered phone system.
Enter FREETALK and the FREETALK Connect
By a partnership with Jazinga, FREETALK, the company behind the high quality, low-cost Everyman headsets (wireless and wired versions) has created a stellar PBX that combines the ease-of-use of Jazinga with a sexy new feature: Skype calling!
You see, over the past few years, Skype has make into to the business market by offering products such as Skype for SIP. Basically, in non-geek terms, this capability would enable you to make free or very cheap voice calls via your conventional desk phone at work.
Using the FREEALK Connect, a business owner can easily set up and enable a fantastic office phone system that an send and receive Skype calls without any formal training. There are on-screen guides and wizards that allow you to set up each phone user, make call groups, set up on-hold music, and enable your on-hold music, amongst many other capabilities. A list of capabilities follows:
- Callback / Dial-around
- Access to Skype Buddy lists Auto Attendant / IVR
- Paging
- Call Parking
- Remote Extensions
- Music on Hold
- Conferencing
The FREETALK Connect also has an easily configured and updated:
- Managing routes to users, telephone services, and applications
- Providing SIP/Skype telephone service management
- Router management (networking, port forwarding, DNS, DHCP)
Easy As Pie
I got to meet Andrew Hanson, the manager behind this product, at CES and got to demo the FREETALK connect. This was amongst the top devices I saw, because it makes your existing office phone system completely Skype friendly. Any Skype user can call into your business, and alternatively, any of your employees or phone users can use Skype running on any device to have a ‘remote extension’ while on the road. This means when someone phones you on your office extension – it can ring you through Skype – wherever in the world you may be!
This is a major cost savings and feature load for any business who checks it out.
The FREETALK Connect retails for $999 and will be available in the Skype store in March 2010.