PhoneGnome answers ooma's call

Over the summer, a little gizmo dubbed "ooma" was rolled out and promised free VoIP services for the price of the hardware. Industry experts said it resembled a previously introduced product known as "PhoneGnome."

FierceVoIP last week asked ooma founder Andrew Frame how his company's free VoIP device compared to PhoneGnome (Sept. 4, "ooma chief talks with FierceVoIP"). This week, PhoneGnome founder (and co-founder of EarthLink), David Beckemeyer, responds.

FierceVoIP: Tell us a bit about your company….
David Beckemeyer: I founded TelEvolution in 2004 with the mission of removing the barriers holding VoIP migration back. The PhoneGnome global service is our flagship product that lets anyone with a telephone number and Internet service quickly augment their phone experience with next-generation Internet telephony capabilities. It's VoIP for the rest of us.

FierceVoIP: Where is it located and how many folks work there?
DB: The headquarters are located in Danville, Calif., in the San Francisco Bay Area. We are a typical early stage startup, running very lean and mean. We don't have any Hollywood actors and we don't have a big pile of VC cash to burn. We have less than 10 people working full time, and many, many, terrific folks who work with us, outsourced and under other arrangements to allow us to operate without large capital requirements as we strive to expand and grow organically. 

FierceVoIP: Is it privately held, and whom, if any, are the investors?
DB: We are privately held, and many of our investors prefer to remain behind the scenes; however one of our most active investors is Bob Packer, founder of Packeteer.

FierceVoIP: What is PhoneGnome and how does it work?
DB: PhoneGnome is a service attempting to bring VoIP to the mass market. Our objective is to make sophisticated and powerful open standards-based VoIP capabilities available to, and usable by, mainstream consumers...

Click here to continue reading the rest of this interview.