ReadWriteWeb

We hate to burst your bubble, but the ReadWriteWeb newsroom is not the luxuriant, mahogany den of intellectualism that you envision. Instead, we discuss the greater points of start ups, enterprise and the tech world via conference chat in the comfort of our pajamas. When you've got a virtual team, tools like chat, email and voice over IP are your lifeline. Sipgate founder Thilo Salmon hopes his recent launch of sipgate one VoIP will add new work features where Skype, Fring and Jajah mobile have left off.

Ribbit, the VOIP platform that was bought by British Telecom last year, announced the winners of its $100,000 KillerApps challenge today. The contest was obviously meant to stimulate interest in Ribbit's APIs among developers, and judging from the line-up of winning applications, a lot of developers came up with highly creative ways of using Ribbit's platform in their apps.

Google today finally announced its plans for GrandCentral, the telephony service it acquired in July 2007. GrandCentral will be reborn as Google Voice, a comprehensive suite of telephony services, including all of GrandCentral's features. In addition, Google Voice will also include an automated voicemail transcription service, the ability to send and receive text messages, and integration with your Gmail contacts. Users can now also call any number in the the U.S. for free.

While it can sometimes seem like Skype has been around forever, today only marks the 5th anniversary of the popular VOIP client. When it was first released, Skype marked a huge improvement in voice quality over any other VOIP client at the time. Just a few days after its release, Skype already had close to 10,000 users online at any time. Since then, the company has added plugins, video calls, voicemail, Skype to phone calls, and many other features. Most importantly, though, Skype has changed how we communicate with each other and allowed us to run small, virtual companies.

Moconews posed an interesting question this morning: will wifi go the way of the public phone booth? Their premise was that public wifi (i.e., at conferences, or busy coffee shops) is often slow and hard to use, while mobile broadband is more reliable. Further, mobile broadband is spreading like wildfire and becoming more ubiquitous. As that happens, is wifi in danger of becoming no longer useful?