Google Voice is all set to change the face of modern communication. This is a free service that uses VoIP calls to interconnect phone numbers. Google Voice is a service that gives you one number for all your phones, voicemail that is easy as email, and many enhanced calling features like call blocking and screening, voicemail transcripts, call conferencing, international calls, and more.

"Spencer is the inventor of Asterisk, a free software program that establishes phone calls over the Internet and handles voicemail, caller ID, teleconferencing and a host of novel features for the phone [...] Outsourcing company Sutherland Global Services has tested Asterisk in 400-person call centers, finding it cuts telephone costs by two-thirds."

Wammu is a mobile phone manager that uses Gammu as its backend. It works with any phone that Gammu supports, including many models from Nokia, Siemens, and Alcatel. It has complete support (read, edit, delete, copy) for contacts, todo, and calendar. It can read, save, and send SMS. It includes an SMS composer for multi-part SMS messages, and it can display SMS messages that include pictures.

Gespeaker 'Text to Speech' utility is a GTK+ frontend for Espeak , that allows you to listen to text in many different languages. The utility also allows you to listen received messages from Empathy and others instant messengers.

Using actors and messages, concurrency is easier to understand. However, most developers don't want to learn a new programming language in order to use actors and messages. If you want to forget a bit about threads and locks, you can add nice actor support to an existing Java application using Jetlang.

Did you know that Pidgin (formerly named Gaim), a Free and Open-source multi-platform (Instant Messaging) IM client, can be used to send and receive SMS text messages for free?

"People handle large volumes of mail in different ways. Keeping everything in one mailbox can quickly become unmanageable because messages you need to read get lost among messages you don’t need to read. [...] Moving messages by hand is tedious and time-consuming. One way to deal with this is to set up rules that automatically file mail into different groups ..." (by Sacha Chua)

"Google's first mobile phone will run a Linux operating system on a Texas Instruments "Edge" chipset, and will likely ship to T-Mobile and Orange customers in the Spring of 2008, according to unconfirmed reports. "GPhone" call minutes and text messages reportedly will be funded by mobile advertising."

Issue 8 of o3 magazine is now available. This issue provides an end to end guide for building enterprise grade email systems using FOSS. o3 magazine is a FREE digital magazine, published twice a month in PDF format.