SunRocket

Wouldn’t it be great to be the fastest-growing fish in a giant tank of sharks? That’s SunRocket’s position in the VoIP market.

While the company still has a relatively small customer base compared to Vonage or its corporate competition, SunRocket has become the fastest-growing company to offer residential VoIP services by focusing on customer service, and trying to be a phone company that people actually like.

How are they doing that? Sunrocket recently announced a new calling plan that drops rates to Asia to as low as one cent per minute. Although this plan will likely benefit mostly West Coast businesses and residential subscribers with relatives living in Asia, at 90 percent less than other major VoIP calling plans, it’s likely to be an effective wedge into the VoIP subscriber market.

As SunRocket continues to grow, it will either become a shark of it own or a tasty meal for one of its giant opponents to devour.>

ViaTalk

Flat-rate phone service so cheap that you pay for it by the year instead of by the month – that’s ViaTalk’s angle, and it seems to be catching on.

Leveraging the 50,000 website customers hosted by parent company HostRocket, ViaTalk has quickly become a major player in the VoIP service industry with customers in 2,200 markets throughout all 50 States.

ViaTalk offers phone rates as low as $199 per year, with a year for free. Plus, ViaTalk provides all the features customers expect from traditional phone companies like e911, caller ID and voicemail, plus fax service.

FirstHand Technologies

Where’s your boss? On her mobile phone and out of the office – again! So how do you transfer her calls? Or patch her into the important, last-minute conference call? FirstHand Technologies has figured it out.

Based in Ottawa, FirstHand helps your IT department integrate mobile devices within the company’s phone system and provides single-number reachability for executives and sales staff on the go. Firsthand, formerly called SIPquest, changed its name in May 2006 when it secured $7 million in Series C funding.

OneConnect, a division of Globalive Communications, has been using a trial version of FirstHand’s Mobile Assistant for Blackberry devices since 2006, and intends to purchase the full commercial service in the first quarter of 2007. With the company’s release of its Enterprise Mobility Gateway, which allows access to features previously only available through their desktop phones, FirstHand is creating more services for more platforms. It's a company to watch as it develops.