Synclio Goes International: New Website Launched in China

Exciting news out of the pipeline here at the Synclio HQ.

We have taken our first virtual step across international waters with the launch of a brand new Chinese website. This is part of a continuous effort to extend our awesome virtual PBX services to international communities just as we do to North American markets. We realize it takes different kinds of people to make the world go round (and not only because we happened to hear that song playing on the radio!)

So if you’re a proficient reader of ancient logograms, a curious cosmopolitan, or perhaps simply a Google robot (*wink wink*), we invite you to sail over to www.synclio.cn or http://www.synclio.com.cn/ and enjoy our little slice of the orient.

Feel free to start spreading the word around in any language you can master—sing it, swing it, ring it, ding it, clap it, snap it, yap it... whatever it takes to let your overseas friends know that Synclio's virtual PBX is coming soon into the language near them.

First step China—then, THE WORLD! (*evil laugh*)

One satisfied customer at a time!

Related Posts:

1. Synclio’s Virtual PBX Free Trial: First 14 Days or First 60 Minutes on us!
2. Synclio’s Youtube Channel Goes Live with a Brand New Video!
3. New Code_Swarm Video Depicts Synclio's Software Project Evolution To-Date
4. What’s ‘Your Business, Anywhere’ Anyway?
5. Anatomy of a Virtual Phone System: What’s in it, and why you need it?

Labels: business, china pbx, hosted pbx, international phone system, ip pbx china, synclio, telecommunications, telephony, virtual PBX, voip

Use Synclio’s Virtual PBX with Google Voice

Not too long ago we blogged that you can Use Synclio’s Virtual PBX with a Skype Number. What we forgot to mention (or perhaps held back intentionally to squeeze out another blog post *evil smile*) is that the same applies to Google Voice.

Simply use your Google Number when setting up the service, and Synclio will automatically treat it as it does any other landline or cell-phone number. This lets you enjoy all the awesome features of Synclio’s virtual PBX while taking full advantage of Google’s cheap VoIP service. Wait—did I just say ‘cheap’? Scratch that—I meant to say ‘Free'

Google Voice offers free calling in the US and Canada (at least until the end of 2011) and ultra-low rates to all other destinations across the globe, rivaling even those offered by Skype.

At the very least, this should pique your interest. We’re not only talking about empowering you to give major telecoms the boot, we’re talking about challenging the most renowned VoIP telephony provider to date!

This may be fast turning into a phone-eat-phone world full of cut-cord competition—but hey, as consumers, we only stand to gain from seeing a good dog-fight!

So seat back, enjoy the show, and reap the benefits—starting with a brand new virtual PBX phone system from Synclio with free VoIP calling courtesy of Google Voice.

Now that's sweet!

To learn more about the common features of a virtual phone system, check out our 'Anatomy of a Virtual Phone System: What’s in it, and why you need it?'

Labels: business, free calls, google number, google voice, hosted pbx google voice, skype, virtual pbx google voice, virtual phone system, voip

Synclio’s Youtube Channel Goes Live with a Brand New Video!

Great news everyone!

Synclio’s Youtube channel just went live, and we’ve got a brand new video to show for it.

Take Mamet’s storytelling, stir in some Hitchcockian suspense, Cameron clichés, and a squirt of artificial tears curtsey of everyone's favorite governor Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and you’ve got one incredible story about a virtual PBX system traveling back in time to stop the assassination of Larry Page and Sergey Brin (before they could even spell the word ‘Google’) by a giant fibre-optic cable fished down a wormhole when the evil telecoms realized without Google there could be no cloud, VOiP, or any such shenanigans...

Ok, I may have laid it a bit heavy there—but we do have some great stuff coming up!

Tune in to learn about cool new features, watch how-to videos, or just kick back and enjoy some quality entertainment. It may not be Terminator 5—but it sure beats the last two sequels!

Without further ado, here's the first video from Synclio:

Labels: business, cloud pbx, phone system, telecommunications, virtual pbx video, voip, youtube, youtube channel

The Benefits of Visual Voicemail: Seeing is the New Hearing

Voicemail as we know it has been around for a while, and it’s probably about time the whole thing got a facelift.

Sure, it’s been great for gauging different people’s take on ‘a short message’ or for providing those we’ve been trying to avoid with a less obtrusive way of pestering us—even for receiving an important communication here and there—but let’s admit it, retrieving those messages could become a hassle.

First you had to dial-in and enter a silly pin number that, for some dang reason, never seemed to stick in your head. Next, assuming you’ve managed past the four-digit gateway, you had to plough through five minutes of your mother-in-law’s daily quibbling before getting to your client’s urgent message—asking you to call back no later than 4pm and it’s now 4:05, thanks to your extended family...

If you hung up and spent a few moments counting your blessings (or simply counting to ten), and later wanted to revisit that last message, you had to go through the entire process all over again.

While this might be better than the mini-cassettes of old—it’s like telling yourself now that you should be content with a good breadknife when they’ve already invented sliced-bread.

So what’s sliced-bread for voicemail? Visual Voicemail.

Visual voicemail lets you view your VM messages in a visual sequence listed by the caller’s name, just like viewing contacts in your call-log or songs in a playlist. This gives you the freedom to selectively prioritize which messages you’re going to listen to, when, and in what order (yep, dance around Wilma all you want or simply press delete—she’ll never even know!). What’s more, there’s no need to dial in—you simply tap the voicemail icon on your smartphone (or web browser if you're using a PC) and find all your messages magically listed right there.

If that’s not enough, additional features let you forward messages, reply via SMS/MMS, and even have them transcribed to text using voice recognition technology. While this last is presently estimated at about 40% accuracy, it’s still a great auxiliary for capturing quick notes or running a search using key-words (never before possible), and will continue to improve as the technology keeps advancing.

Visual voicemail is available on most platforms, such as Android, iOS, and Win 7, and can be purchased as a value added service from your cellular provider. But if you’re already shopping around for a hosted PBX solution, it’s also included for free with Synclio’s virtual PBX, so you might as well hit two birds with one stone and keep those few extra bucks in your pocket, right where they belong.

(Note: no animals were harmed during writing of this article)

Labels: android visual voicemail, benefits of visual voicemail, business, iOS visual voicemail, phone system, telecommunications, virtual PBX, voip, what is visual voicemail, windows mobile visual voicemail

Why Did Microsoft Buy Skype, and How Might it Affect Current Users?

Ever since the news broke out last Tuesday the internet has been abuzz. Everybody seems to think they know Microsoft’s business better than Microsoft—but seeing as the software giant didn’t rise to where it did without merit, shouldn’t we at least give them the benefit of doubt?

Why did Microsoft buy Skype?

The major criticism is that Microsoft has grossly overpaid for the acquisition.

It’s no secret that, while amassing users by the millions and growing popular enough to have become a verb, the telephony provider has been having a hard time converting this popularity into profit. However, the company has come a long way, with 20% increase in revenue and 40% increase in earnings through 2010. This still didn’t quite bring them over to see a profitable bottom-line, but all in all, they only dipped $6.91 million as opposed to a whopping $368.8 million in 2009—which is a huge improvement. They are further projected to earn 1 billion in 2012, which is expected to be their first profitable year, and Microsoft evidently has faith in this forecast.

Then, though popularity can’t guarantee profit it can certainly be a powerful auxiliary, especially in the hands of a company with products and services that can realize the conversion. Just to put this popularity into context, Skype has had over 100 million connected users every month with 30 million concurrently connected at any given time, and 600,000 new registrations every day. In 2010, the company facilitated a total of 207 billion minutes of voice and video conversations.

This is one huge chunk of the market when directed at the right product.

Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer additionally suggested monetization opportunities that have only been scratched so far, such as premium services and video advertising.

Then, of course there are synergies. Microsoft has many products and services that can readily benefit from the incorporation of voice and video—including Windows Phone 7 products, Xbox, Kinect, and Lync—but perhaps most imminent is integration with their Email service, where they’ve been pushed to the sidelines by the big G.

Google’s Gmail offers a robust one-stop-shop for managing email accounts and document through Google Docs, with integrated chat, voice and even video capabilities. This is one powerhouse of a system.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has its services scattered between Windows Live Mail on the web and Outlooks on the PC, with nothing that can hold a candle to Google’s communications offerings.

Now, Microsoft could start investing time and resources to develop its own VOiP/video service and then attempt to capture a market-share—but that’s an expensive and time consuming process with no guarantees of success. On the other hand, they could do just what they did and buy Skype outright, part-and-parcel with its entire dedicated user-base. Has this been any less expensive? Probably not. But it’s certainly a hell of a lot faster—and the folks at MS must’ve felt that they can afford the cash more than they can afford to lag behind Google any longer.

Buying Skype also landed them with a development team that has pretty much made video-calling what it is today. So if the goal is to keep pushing the boundaries, this definitely gives them a competitive edge.

All this shows that at the very least there’s some method to their madness (if Microsoft has indeed gone mad as suggested)—and perhaps even a good chance the deal will turn out very well for both companies.

How might this affect current users?

Both Steve and Tony Bates (formerly Skype CEO, now head of Skype division at MS) have made it clear that they will continue support and development of Skype on multiple platforms. In fact, Microsoft is one of the only big players that can show a track record of doing this. So if you’re a Mac user and the news got you worried, you can now breathe a sigh of relief.

Next, users might be concerned that the free service offerings will come to an end. But you don’t buy something that works only to mess it up—you buy to build up on it. Microsoft knows that the bulk of Skype users won’t stick around without free calling options, and they’ve just paid an arm and a leg (or at least a finger and a toe) to win these users over. It then stands to reason that rather than billing users for services they’ve gotten used to getting for free, Microsoft will come up with additional premium services and products that incorporate the technology and sell them separately.

Moreover, if a main driving force behind the deal was to stay competitive with Google, there’s simply no way they can start charging for voice or video calling while Google is offering both for free. That would be an economic suicide.

Lastly, consider that with pockets as deep as Microsoft’s, new features and services are likely to come out quickly—and many of them will be geared towards business users.

So rather than getting apprehensive, we should really be excited about what the future holds in store. After all, the biggest gamble here was made by Microsoft. As a user, should you find yourself unhappy with the way things turn out, you’ll always be able to opt out and switch over to the next big thing as it comes along. Microsoft, on the other hand, will left footing an $8.5 Billion dollar bill.

For those interested, here's the conference video:

Labels: business, how will it affect users, microsoft, skype, telecommunications, video calling, voip, why did Microsoft buy Skype