Fonolo, Top VoIP Company 2008: FierceVoIP, Fierce 15

Fonolo 

Where it's based:  Toronto, Canada
When it was founded: 2007
Website: www.fonolo.com 

Why it's Fierce:   We're going to stick our necks out on this one; Fonolo is currently in a closed beta, but it seems to have the right combination of founders, open technology, and "Why didn't I think of that?" features.

Founders: Shai Berger & Jason Bigue.  Shai and Jason were previously at Keynote leading up the team for streaming performance measurement. The two built Streamcheck leading to an acquisition by Keynote. So they understand performance, complex code, and building a successful company.

Open technology: Fonolo supports SIP - great for making it a plug-and-play option for other SIP services to incoporoate - and has released an open API for its Deep Dialing service.  And they announced the API at the ClueCon open source telephony developer conference.

"Why didn't I think of that?": Deep Dialing allows people to skip through IVR phone menus (also known as "Phone hell") of large companies and navigate to the information/place they require. Find the company on Fonolo's website, click on the appropriate link, and then get a call back on your phone.

There's also an intelligent call history service - just the thing when dealing with crappy customer service - to automatic track calls made to a given company complete with recordings and user notes, regardless of the phone used.

Is there enough here for a sustainable business model? Good question but regardless, Fonolo has broken out of the drab set of me-too VoIP apps over the past year.