Wow! I haven’t had to wait too long.. I’ve just received today the awaited invitation from Google that allows me to use Google Voice, the experimental unified telephony service recently opened to a restricted number of selected users.

Below some of the offered services:

• A personal phone number that rings all of your existing phones when people call
• A voicemail in one inbox with unlimited online storage and free voicemail transcripts sent to your phone and email
• Low-priced international calling to over 200 countries and free SMS
• Other powerful features like the first phone spam filter to protect you from unwanted callers, the ability to ListenIn^TM on your voicemail messages while they are being left, conference calling and more

I’m very curious, I will definitely give it a try and see if I can leave some further feedback on this blog..

Google Voice is not available in your country.

Thanks for visiting Google Voice. We’re not yet open for users outside the US, but are planning to expand our service to additional countries in the future.

I thought everything should be fine once you get the invitation, but here it looks like I still have to wait..

Google Voice (ex GrandCentral) is definitely another unified communication solution available in the market. As Google seems to have already planned, the claimed telephony service will be soon opened to everyone, publicly. The basic concept is the same developed by IBM through its Sametime Unified Telephony, in which a single unified number is assigned to each user and then associated to a set of personal devices by setting simple routing rules. Just the implementation is what deeply differentiates the two solutions. Google is for now interested in opening this service to a small group of test users. To get an invitation try to apply through this website. Good luck!!

Integrating different forms of communication (mail, chat, audio, video, ..) in a single unified solution is today identified through the acronym “UC”, which stands for “Unified Communications”. Some multinational companies like Cisco, Microsoft, Nortel, Avaya, Siemens, IBM, seem to try to corner the market introducing different brand-new solutions. Through the following video I just want to show you an example of a concrete UC implementation, the solution presented by IBM at VoiceCon Orlando 2009.

More details about this and other UC solutions are available at www.ucstrategies.com.

P.S. I’ve selected this IBM solution because of my current job, which allows me to follow these events from the inside and track the interesting evolution of some adopted strategies..