Teleo has been making quite a buzz in recent days. In effect, Teleo is a lot like Skype, but it offers greater features and functionality that should make it very attractive for business users.
Like Skype, Teleo offers a PC-based softphone, free calls to any other Teleo user as well as low-cost calls out to the PSTN. However Teleo offfers much more, including the ability to have a traditional phone number that will allow you to receive calls on your PC from any phone, integration with Microsoft Outlook/Internet Explorer to allow dialing from your phone book or from a web page.
Teleo's feature list is sparse. They currently offer conferencing capabilities as well as call forwarding so that you can set calls to ring your cell phone for example when your PC isn't turned on.
In addition, Teleo will soon offer the ability to plug a traditional analog phone into your PC if you'd rather use a plain old phone instead of a headset. Teleo also plans to support voice mail via forwarding of messages to your in-box as .wav file attachments.
Teleo is still in beta, and most unfortunately it is still only available for Windows XP/2000 (which means we Mac users can't try it out yet). But it is very promising, and it will represent a serious threat to both Skype as well as IP Centrex services. If Teleo can execute on their plans, they will be perhaps the ideal phone service for the mobile or home worker.
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