I'm really surprised that mobile phone companies are not providing exact same features as GV ... GV features are nice but not impossible to implement...
so i wonder what will happen if to undermine competition from GV, Verizon gives away a phone number that will be ringed (or forwarded) to 'n' number of devices and sends you sms and email message if someone leaves you voice message... how difficult is this to implement for a company that spends millions of tech dollars on almost daily basis???
Wildfire was absolutely spectacular, and I think better than GV. Too bad they didn't adapt. I believe someone has ported similar features to Asterisk.
Bell Atlantic (Verizon now) years ago had something very similar with ContactLine. You had 99 preprogrammed 'call plans'. 1-9 would forward through with various options, 10-19 would forward with screening, in the 30s you could check in and it would forward the call to the ___location where you were, with a greeting to call the person. 60-69 call plans would page you, allow you to get to a phone, and it would bridge the call. I believe produced by Octel, later purchased by AT&T, spun off into Avaya. Back in the late 80s, made the mobile phone incredibly powerful - back when phones had 3 watts, not the .6 watts we have today. :)
Vonage has Simulring which has some of the features that Google Voice has.
However, to the phone companies, any solution here is a cost center, not a profit center (except ContactLine which was $19.95/month). It is difficult to get them to spend even more money providing a service that a fraction of their users would use.
That doesn't look like the Wildfire from CR Technologies - just a product similarly named.
Wildfire as a phone service ran on Dialogic cards and acted like a virtual assistant. Calls you made were bridged through, so, you could have an 800# pointed to your wildfire number and call from a payphone. You would call in, listen to your voicemail and with voice commands be able to direct it to call the person back, conference in someone, etc. If you were listening to messages when an incoming call was coming in, wildfire would tell you that you had an incoming call, etc.
The real power of it was building your contact list. If you called my number, Wildfire would interview you. I couldn't find any of the old audio demos that used to be online, but, it went something like this:
Chris isn't available can I take a message? you speak the message, Wildfire would say, can I ask for a callback number? you would give the number, I heard, 555-1414 is this correct? yes. Is this a work or mobile number? work. I don't recognize this number, may I ask for more information? Yes (would register your name, additional numbers, weekend number, etc) Ok, thank you, I'll have Chris call you when he get the message.
At this point, Wildfire would page me with a code, # of messages, etc. Keep in mind, while you were on the line, Wildfire was already calling any registered numbers I had to try and contact me and would bridge the connection if possible. You call in, listen to the message, Wildfire would connect the call. During the call, if you needed to conference in someone, you said WildFire 'Here I am' Call Bob, 'Do you want to add this call to a conference?' Yes. 'Dialing'
If you called into the 800#, you could also direct calls from there. Depending on the interview Wildfire got from an incoming caller you could say: Wildfire, 'Here I am' Call Bill, 'I have a work and mobile number' Dial work, 'Dialing'. Wildfire would listen in, make sure the call was connected, offer to dial the mobile number if you didn't get a connection, etc.
I've written so many notes regarding this. With sip service being as inexpensive as it is, and contact management software being in the cloud, it would be a very powerful tie-in. For a product in the mid to late 90s, it was very ahead of its time making road warriors very efficient.
Hence "parts" :) Jive used to have Wildfire, in its entirety, in their website. It has since dwindled to the Asterisk integration stuff you see on their website now.
That is a different Wildfire. From what I can tell, that is the Wildfire IM platform. The Wildfire I'm talking about was from CR Technologies, and was a voice telecom product, was sold in the mid 90s until it was discontinued around 2001 - with Orange Telecom having the last working enterprise installation until 2005, though, they wouldn't add any new clients after 2003.
i would appreciate courtesy if you explain your reasoning for downvoting me .... do you really think as a hacker that its impossible to provide those features???
so i wonder what will happen if to undermine competition from GV, Verizon gives away a phone number that will be ringed (or forwarded) to 'n' number of devices and sends you sms and email message if someone leaves you voice message... how difficult is this to implement for a company that spends millions of tech dollars on almost daily basis???