While Truphone used to have free calls to the PSTN until recently-but only for those who signed up at the beginning-new customers can get in on some free call action as well.

Well, ok, it's only $8 USD, instead of the usual $2 credit for new signups. And it's only for a limited time (offer expires at 0:00 BST 11 July 2008). But still, that's still 133 minutes to customers in the Tru Zone, which includes landlines in 40 countries as well as mobile phones in the U.S. and Canada.

While WiFi calling from a compatible Nokia handset is a cool thing-when you have a wifi connection available-I'm waiting for the Truphone SIM card. Won't be as cheap as WiFi calls, but loads more convenient.

The folks at SightSpeed are getting their product out there. What better way to do so by having a Dell-branded version of the application pre-loaded on Dell's newest laptops?

It turns out that, as a Dell customer, you are essentially getting the SightSpeed Plus features for free. This includes 4-way video calling as well as 3 minute video voicemails! You also get 5 free minutes of PSTN calls, which isn't much, but it's enough to try out the service.

I was trying to figure out why this particular announcement was news. In fact, this was discussed on Friday's Squawk Box call about 23 minutes in.

Who cares what backend services platform Gizmo5-or any other VoIP company-uses? I suppose Level 3 might care, since they just lost Gizmo5's business. I might care if I used Gizmo5's service and the voice quality suddenly got better. Jajah certainly cares because they're getting more business out of the deal.

Maybe Jajah becoming a truly global carrier-and taking business away from the likes of Level3-is the story here.

Jaduka originally released their APIs for their telephony platform over a year ago, which can easily be used to integrate with other applications. Open the platform, let the masses create their own voice mashups, or so the theory went.

Developers signed up, alright, but they didn't create much. While the APIs are still there and you can sign up for their developer program, Jaduka switched strategies, providing custom applications to enterprises on their own. The end result? Over 4 million minutes of voice traffic a month.

Makes me wonder how many of Ribbit's more than 2,000 participants in their development program are actually developing money-making applications. It also makes me wonder if they have a plan B, because developers and an API aren't a business model.

From hardware PBXes like Jazinga, we move to a PBX that runs on Windows. 3CX sent me a press release about version 6.0 of their Windows-based PBX. They made a big deal out of adding 10 features in 20 weeks.

3CX has four different versions, including a free edition that is feature-limited, which includes an 8 simultaneous call limit. The other editions support additional features and more simultaneous calls (up to 32), as you can see in the comparison chart.

I suppose this is good if you're not comfortable with Linux-based solutions like Asterisk (and derivatives), but I am failing to see what is particularly innovative about this product other than it runs in Windows and is explicitly supported in virtual machines. Anyone?

I got a piece of hardware from UPS on Monday from a company called Jazinga. It's a Wifi-enabled router with a PBX that promises to make it possible to have a PBX up and running without an IT staff. In it's pre-release form, it's not quite like that, but with some bug fixes (and updated documentation), this could be really big.

After going through their web-based setup wizard, which took maybe 15 minutes at the most, I had defined users, extensions, and an auto-attendant. There is a lot of features in the box to explore, but I left it at that for the moment.

One feature I did play with was device provisioning. The promise is plug-and-play, and it was basically that. Aastra, Cisco, Linksys, polycom, and Snom handsets are supported in this manner. Given how complex these devices are to configure by hand, having the PBX do it for you is an absolute must!

I took a Linksys SPA-941, plugged it into the Jazinga box, reset it to factory defaults, and within a few minutes, it was an assignable IP phone on my Jazinga box. I had a similar experience with a Polycom IP600 phone-after I upgraded the antique firmware to something more current.

All in all, for a pre-release product, it left a favorable impression. More exploration in the days to come.