Wow, it's been a crazy month. My 2.7 yr old son – Ky, has been in and out of the Children's Hospital with some virus that hit him in a bad way. Poor guy, it was hard for him but he handled it like a real trooper. While this was happening, business at Lypp was pushing forward at a serious pace, it was a difficult month. It looks like he is on the mend now so everyone is feeling a little less stressed.

At Lypp we did a little deal with WebEx in order to deliver a co-branded version of their service to round out our Conferencing offer. We soft-launched that yesterday. Anyone that signed up for Lypp Conferencing now gets access to Lypp Web Conferencing, which is essentially WebEx. Interestingly enough, we are able to charge much less than WebEx themselves, at 22 cents per minute it's a real bargain.

Right around the corner we have the Highrise + Lypp Mashup contest. Which we have a had a great response on. The doors open for that on April 15. We ended up pushing it back a couple of weeks in order to get the latest and greatest into the API before handing it over to developers.

In connection with the API, a MS Outlook developer has built a fully integrated Lypp Outlook plugin. For those who use Teleconferencing and live in Outlook it could be a real godsend. More on that later.

And finally, we are about to launch the beta of International Dial-out for the Lypp Conferencing service. Lypp Conferencing users will be able to conference-in attendees from all over the globe. This means that international attendees will not have to pay toll to dial-in, the host could have the system call them when adding them to an existing call or when creating a new conference call.

Rogers, Fido, Telus, and Bell not giving you Unlimited Mobile Calling in North America? 

Get Lypp's Mobile Unlimited and start saving!

We decided that Americans shouldn't be the only people who get to enjoy unlimited mobile calling in North America so we created a package ourselves.

The offer is simple, call any phone number(s) in North America, as much as you like, for a flat fee of $59/month.

If you live in Canada and call outside of your area you could easily save hundreds on your cellular bill every month.

Much like the previous Lypp Mobile offer, you will need a smart phone like a Blackberry, Windows Mobile device, Treo (etc.), or anything that supports Instant Messaging.

Want more info? You are going to have to wait until the new site goes live, just a few short weeks from now. Until then you could start saving by signing up today.

Andy contemplates a potential surge of VoIP apps likely to be written for the iPhone due to the latest announcements from Apple and KP.

I happen to agree with Andy on just about everything in that post, but I do have some comments that potentially relate more to the Canadian market.

It's true that mobile costs are going down for users in the US but the opposite is true for mobile users in Canada. Here, the mobile carriers are not facing the same level of competition as the carriers in the US. Local overages and long distance usage is still at a premium and not one carrier offers an unlimited North American-wide calling plan, at least that I am aware of or has been published. Also, the iPhone is not being offered in Canada at all, so one would have to hack it to get it to work, which means a loss in some functionality along with the other side-effects.

This actually presents a larger opportunity then some may realize for middleware VoIP service providers / developers and not just for iPhone but for any Smartphone. In the next post, I will explain myself a little better and go into some detail about what some companies like Lypp are doing about it.