VUC Holiday Special Edition

Today, our sponsor e4 Strategies is giving away two  HD-capable Gigaset DE380 IP R VoIP phones (shipment to North America only)

Polycom Productivity Suite licenses. We’ll be giving these away each week for the next few weeks. The suite adds the following features to your USB-equipped Polycom IP phone:

Corporate Directory Access
Local Call Recording
Visual Conference Management
Voice Quality Monitoring

From Voxeo Labs and Tropo

Congratulations to wolrah, our winner!

As we approach the US Thanksgiving holiday we are given pause to reflect upon our many blessings. While many of us exist in a wideband realm where clarity of voice leads to universal understanding, there remain a great many who suffer through the narrowband reality of the past. These poor folk suffer not only a startling lack of clarity, they are typically tethered, bound to their toil by wires.

Gigaset Communications aims to give a hand to some poor unfortunate soul, bestowing upon them the gift of clarity*. This gift takes the form of a Gigaset S675IP SIP/DECT starter system. To further aid in the mobility of the downtrodden they also offer the S79H expansion handset, enhancing the basic set.

These tools, HDSP capable…or HDVoice capable for the followers of Plcm….promise to uplift up their users with both clarity of voice and mobility of action. Such outstanding clarity that they might understand The Words.

However, such clarity will not be bestowed upon the idle or laggard. It will be granted only to the one who proves themselves most worthy at the appointed time. A question will be asked. These gifts will be given to one of those who answer the question correctly.

Look to the mailing list. Watch for the signs. Then be on the call Friday, November 26th.

*For regulatory reasons this offer is restricted to North American listeners only.

S675IP and an A58H accessory handset

Thanks to Gigaset of North America, we are planning a new giveaway of a Gigaset wideband-capable SIP/DECT phone.

To win the Gigaset you will have to be in the IRC channel #voip-users-conference as well as on the conference.

The winner will need to identify a short piece of music and the album it comes from.

Be there!

On VUC session of Friday, July 10th we were able to give away one of the new A580IP phones from Gigaset. Congratulations to conference regular Karl Fife of “The Karl Experience” for winning the phone. We know he’ll put it to good use by calling in to the conference each week!

The contest consisted of finding the movie whose soundtrack featured the VoIP-appropriate song “Calling You”. Karl was first to type  “Bagdad Cafe” in our IRC channel #voip-users-conference on Freenode.net. The song is a beautiful, haunting piece of music and I would like to use an excerpt from time to time in our opening or closing theme.

Thanks again to Tony Stankus, Product Manager of Emerging Technologies Gigaset Communications USA, LLC for providing this phone as a prize and for being a great guest. I am counting on Tony to come back and tell us when the phone features evolve, which they do from time to time.

Early on, we spoke about the lack of a mute button on the S675IP, and lo and behold, they added one to firmware, which is easy to update. The phone shows a message when new firmware is ready, and asks if you want to update. See the original post for more articles on these phones.