“…they love the fact that they can receive all their home phone calls also on their cell phones or forward them to any other phone if they are not at home.”

Phone.com is a 21st century VoIP (Voice over IP) and cloud based phone service specializing in small to very small sized business needs and sophisticated home (especially home office – or SOHO) users. Phone.com’s next-generation phone service is based on award-winning, innovative technology. The company offers Virtual Office solution that lets users get a local or toll-free 800 number (including vanity numbers) for their business and manage it however they want from a sophisticated control panel and supported by a dedicated 24/7 US based customer service team.

Phone.com is happy to provide services that save their customers tons of money on their home phone with unlimited long distance calls to anywhere in the U.S. or Canada.

Ari Rabban and Alon Cohen, CEO and CTO of Phone.com are both industry veterans and are excited to launch new mobile applications and interaction tools for Phone.com in the near future.

MO: Can you tell us about your personal backgrounds and what led you to being the CEO and CTO of Phone.com?

Ari: We both got our start in communications at the Israeli military signal corps unit though we both had quite a different path since. I studied law and practiced in Israel before coming to the US for an MBA and joined Lucent Technologies / Bell Labs while Alon studied engineering and Co-founded VocalTec Communications the first VoIP company. He is recognized as one of the pioneers of the VoIP industry. Alon served as VocalTec’s CTO and is responsible for many of the formative innovations and standards in the industry. I then joined VocalTec as its business development and marketing vice president and later as president of two subsidiaries that were two of the first click to call products and client based internet phone services. These were all the very early days of the industry before Skype, Vonage and any of the other services known today that really were influenced by the original VocalTec.

MO: What services do you offer through Phone.com that are most beneficial to residential users?

Ari: Though Phone.com focuses on small business and entrepreneurs we do offer a great home phone service we call Home Phone Plus. The service is similar in concept to those offered by other VoIP service providers such as Vonage but offers many more options, features as well as better cost. Feedback we get from customers is that they love the fact that they can receive all their home phone calls also on their cell phones or forward them to any other phone if they are not at home. They can also dial out of their cell phones using their home phone number so it appears as though they are calling from their home. Finally, with our home phone service one can also send and receive SMs text messages as if it were a cell phone number.

MO: What services do you offer that are most beneficial to corporate business users?

Ari: Phone.com offers a variety of services that make it easy for small businesses to set up a professional phone service that in the past would have cost hundreds or perhaps thousands of dollars to get. The basic premise is that one can obtain a phone number of their desire and through their online control panel “build” a phone system and route the calls to whatever phone they want. Set up welcome greetings, extension dialing, conference calls and fax services. All plans come with unlimited voicemail extensions that also allow you to listen to your voicemail from your email inbox or read a transcription of it.

We don’t believe in “one size fits all” and the idea is indeed for customers to customize their service to their own needs. Some might need sophisticated call forwarding such as ring different phones based on time of day or day of week or even based on who is calling. Some might need queues such as a small customer service line. Some might want to record their calls. This is another great service offered by Phone.com.

All plans also allow customers to place out calls from their cell phones using their Phone.com numbers as well as set up conference calls, view voicemail, faxes and call logs.

MO: How does the Virtual Office solution work?

Ari: The simplest way to describe our Virtual Office service is to compare it to the old days operators. You called the operator and told her who to connect you with. Well, now you the customer set up your phone number through your control panel and make up the calling rules and how you want people to reach you (or your team members or family members for that matter). You use regular phones to place calls and use regular phones to answer. All the “call control” is done by Phone.com. Set up is relatively easy as long as you know how you want your phone system to perform plus we have many online tutorials and videos and a 24/7 customer support team to help.