43% of North American Enterprises Now use SIP Trunking

It is a reasonable measure of the growth of SIP trunking that sales of session border controller sales have grown 70 percent in 2010, according to Infonetics Research.

"In our recent SIP Trunking Strategies survey of North American enterprises, 43 percent of respondents said they are using SIP trunks in some capacity, although they are not completely displacing PSTN connections," says Diane Myers, Infonetics directing analyst for VoIP and IMS.

"All indications show that as businesses upgrade their voice infrastructure, they are making the move to SIP trunking, which will continue to drive growth of enterprise SBCs," says Myers.

Infonetics Research: SIP trunking drives 70% jump in enterprise session border controller market

Google Voice Sprint Integration Goes Live April 26, 2011

Some Google users already have the feature activated.

There are two ways to enable the integrated service:

1. Option 1: Keep your Sprint number (all the benefits of porting without the need to). In this case, your Sprint number becomes your Google Voice number so that when people call your Sprint mobile number, it rings all the phones you want.

How to enable this: click on the "change/port" link next to your GV # in the settings page, choose the option to use your existing number, enter your Sprint number and select the Sprint option.

2. Option 2: Replace your Sprint number with your Google Voice number (all the benefits of the app without the need for one). In this case, all calls made from your Sprint phone will display your Google Voice # natively (same for SMS).

Location Tracking Might be More Extensive Than You Thought

Other devices, not just the iPhone, might be recording all your location information.

Unified Communications is Different These Days

The ability to use an existing Sprint phone number as a Google Voice number, with unified voice mail, is not a "full" implementation of unified communications. but it offers a feature that always has been a main attraction of unified communications and fixed-mobile convergence.

If you look across the range of specific applications that routinely are touted as UC advantages, you'll discover that many of the values now can be satisfied, albeit on a sort of case by case basis, and not as "unified" as a full-blown UC solution can provide.

Still, UC seems to be viewed differently than it used to. "Collaboration" sometimes is satisfied, in large part, by social networks of one sort or another, video conferencing or even some aspects of location features.

Amazon crash cripples D.C.-based Hotpads

District of Columbia-based Hotpads.com has been down all day, one of the unlucky group of web companies crippled by a crash in Amazon’s cloud service April 21, 2011.

The map-based property-search startup boasts about 200,000 daily visitors, who were today greeted with a lighthearted variant of the “technical difficulties” screen.

"HotPads is down. We'll be back as soon as possible!"

Amazon crash cripples D.C.-based Hotpads | Washington Business Journal:

Cloud Grows, Amazon Hiccups

The global market for “cloud computing” is going to increase from about $41 billion in 2011 to $241 billion in 2020, according to new estimates from research firm Forrester. But on April 21, 2011, Amazon had significant outages for customers of its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud on the U.S. East Coast.

The computing center hosted in northern Virginia, which handles operations for the U.S. East Coast, was afflicted. Websites such as Foursquare, Quora and Reddit have cited service problems. Both Reddit, a user-generated news site, and Quora, a question-and-answer service, had error messages on their sites saying their were experiencing outages.

The outage will not likely have any longer-term impact on cloud computing. Most of us encounter service disruptions from time to time for any of our cloud-based services and applications. More significantly, many of us experience "outages" that have no adverse impact, because we were not trying to use a particular application at a particular time, in a particular region.

These days, browsers, operating systems, local and remote applications can crash. It's just a fact of life.

More Predictions on the Huge Growth of ‘Cloud Computing’ - Digits - WSJ (subscription required)

Badoo launches mobile payments In the UK with Ericsson IPX - Ericsson

Social networking site Badoo, available in 180 countries, now is offering mobile payment services in addition to credit cards, debit cards, text messaging and PayPal.

Badoo is available in over 180 countries, has more than 114 million registered users and is growing rapidly. It is currently the 2nd largest Facebook Application (behind CityVille).

Badoo launches mobile payments In the UK with Ericsson IPX - Ericsson