Gizmo has launched a new Free Worldwide SMS service, a great idea although I can't get it to work on my Rogers cel phone.

Not sure why but when I try sending a Gizmo SMS message to my cell phone I get a message from Rogers that goes something like "Welcome to Rogers Email to SMS. You have mail but you are not subscribed. Reply "Yes" to this message to subscribe." Fearing yet another charge on my cell phone I discard the message.

It's weird because if I use other SMS services the message goes through fine without this prompt from Rogers. 

Wow, this is nuts.

What Paul did not mention is that this FreeConference.com and other free conference offerings are potentially responsible for more than 2% of the $2B annual in conferencing revenue worldwide. A good reason for some telco upheaval.

The telcos are trying to strike back, not unlike the record and film companies they still own the distribution of said calls.

Hmm, they might have to change their name to FreeConference.ru.

It looks like Cisco is following a certain mantra laid down around the same tme they bought Latitude.

The $57 per share offer for WebEx (NASDAQ:WEBX) represents a 23 percent premium over Santa Clara-based WebEx's closing price of $46.20 on Wednesday on the Nasdaq Stock Market. San Jose Biz Journal

Matt Assay has the same sentiments that I do about Webex,

All great. The deal makes sense on a range of different levels. But the one I'm hoping for is that maybe WebEx will actually work now. We're already in the process of cancelling our account due to shoddy technology – it crashes all the time, maybe in part because Alfresco's US team is almost entirely on Macs. We're moving to Adobe's Breeze product, and would have moved to dimdim if it were out of alpha. Cisco: Please fix WebEx. It lacks a feature that I need: stability.

More from Om, Andy, Carolyn and Tom. 

Tom did his homework and found that Cisco is using OpenSER as a SIP proxy for their Linksys One service node. This is very interesting considering the original SIP Express Router (SER) was used widely as a test proxy for various applications, I seem to remember one in particular, although who knows what it’s running on now.

I know that colleague Adrian Georgescu over at AG Projects has leveraged OpenSER for some very interesting projects they are working on.

Good to see OpenSER making strides with the larger vendors, although Cisco is no stranger to that. Some of you may remember a little open source shop named Vovida that got snapped up by Cisco some years ago.