Live Messenger

Perzonae Looks to Enter UC Arena

A Dutch startup called Perzonae Unified Communications entered the battle for unified communications market share with the release this week of the public beta version of their service.

The service combines email and instant messaging and Perzonae has plans to incorporate voice capabilities when the official release is made available. According to the article Perzonae feels their product can replace Outlook, Thunderbird, MSN / Live email, Hotmail, Skype, and GMail among others. Seems like a pretty tall order for a startup to take on Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google all before their product is even officially released.

The official release is not expected for another 6 months or so and the beta only runs on Windows XP- so they have some work to do. I don’t think that a company or product like this provides any serious concern to Microsoft or other enterprise-class unified communications providers. It remains to be seen what Perzonae will bring to the table and whether consumers or smaller businesses might be willing to pay Perzonae for services they can currently get for free using Windows Live Messenger or Google’s services such as GMail or Google Talk.

Microsoft ‘Echoes’ Aims to Get Rid of Phone Numbers

In a recent post on the ‘All About Microsoft’ blog at ZDNet, Mary-Jo Foley describes an ambitious plan already in the works from Microsoft that seeks to eliminate the need for phone numbers. The project, codenamed ‘Echoes’, is being developed and incubated by Microsoft’s Israeli Strategic Development Center. The short-term plan apparently involves engaging telcom providers to partner up to provide a common network address book, to SMS in/out messaging, simultaneous ringing, click-to-call, single-sign on and more for their mobile phone users. In a nutshell, the goal seems to be a move toward greater convergence of the unified communications components (email, voicemail, instant messaging, presence, etc.) that will result in simplified communications that can be initiated by just knowing a user’s name rather than having to know, or look up their phone number.