I received a note from Michael Robertson last night. Gizmo Project (a Skype-like competitor) is launching a new service called Area775, Alec Saunders gets the joke and Andy Abramson was my source yesterday for learning Gizmo / Sipphone just closed a $6m round of funding.

What's new with Area775. Michael's intro:

Imagine having one telephone number that will ring your PC at home or work, mobile phone or land line. Answering the call is easy at whatever location is most convenient and the caller has no idea where you're answering the call - maybe in your car, maybe from a WiFi enabled laptop in a distant country. Now imagine that you can answer the call at your desktop computer and then transfer it mid-call to your cell phone with the push of a button (or vice versa).
Area 775.

Area775 comes with a three tiered pricing plan. In the free iteration it provides a free number with a BIG catch. In the free plan your home phonewill ring and it will cost you $2.00 each timef you answer it. That's where I found it hard to understand. I immediately what to try it. But..... it is a $2.00 charge if I pick up my home phone and I'm on a free account. That' is simply too expensive. So even I don't get past the first pages and put my credit card down. It inhibits rather than creates trial. By contrast Skype Forwarding costs SkypeOut $.02 per minute. That's nothing to ring my phone when my desktop is not on.. Gizmo also already provides this same feature. The real product here is the idea of a universal inbound personal number (which you can select currently in the US) and the capability to tranfer inbound calls between devices.

You can quickly make the $2.00 penalty per call go away. You can buy a $3.95 per month package which will let your choose your own area code etc. This is a good deal and compare well with SkypeIn for 30 euros per year. . In fact I was recently wanting a second "traditional line replacement" into my home. With this service I can add a Sipphone ATA and have that line tied to a traditional phone and all the ring features Area775 promises. That's pretty attractive. It's also the holy grail for many of us. Make our cellphones and our Gizmo / Skype desktop client ring at the same time. Then don't penalize me for the mode I decide to pick up on. It's the reason Wi-Fi phones will be big.

The key here is the identification that we want more than one device to either ring when a call is inbound (so we can chose the device) and perhaps the costs that go along with it. The example is the work call on the PC, the friend on the home phone or mobile. We also don't want devices to ring when they are meant for us but not there. Eg Young child intercepting business call on home phone. Certainly saves on hardware, dualphones and the like if the software backend just integrates them.

Alec really likes the advance in his post and decides it is finally time to give up on Vonage. He makes comparison to other VoIP providers. I think I'm going to buy another number too... only if I can get it with a SIP ata box as well. What I don't know is if the Sipphone ATA box is actually unlocked. I'm tired of throwing out ATA's when the service is rejected.Plus that is the most costly part of the experiment.

Where Alec doesn't make the comparison is with PhoneGnome, which like me he has been testing. PhoneGnome provides a similar service that will find and ring your other devices. In contract it adopts your current home number and rings your desktop etc where ever you are concurrently. The difference is... and it is an important difference. When you pick up your home phone you can use all the calling out VoIP benefits that Gizmo is only promising from the desktop. There is another one too. If you are using the Area775 service to ring your home number it may be hard to determine whether it is a forwarded call or not unless you already pay the PSTN for CallerID .

Like Alec notes Gizmo is hampered by that slightly underdevelped feel (example the chat messages doesn't return when typing a longer message). With the infusion of money Gizmo could quickly run to the head of the pack. Skype will find it hard to duplicate this type of feature. It brings them totally into the SIP world. By contrast they want presence and click to dial on names not numbers. It makes for an interesting looming battle. Still with recent rumors for Skype in Symbian and other mobile solutions appearing all the player in the space should remember this is about personal communications. The call has to reach you.

In the end "we" just want better conversations at the right time, right place, right device.