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Vonage Unveils iPhone, iPod touch, BlackBerry Apps 12.22.09 1Comment By Chloe Albanesius VoIP provider Vonage on Tuesday unveiled apps for the iPhone, the iPod touch, and BlackBerry devices. The apps – available now via the iTunes Store and Vonage’s mobile Web site – will provide unlimited international calling to 60 countries. The apps are free to download, but an unlimited international calling plan will run $24.99 per month. The company also has separate calling rates to specific countries. Existing Vonage World customers will save $10 when adding Vonage Mobile, for a total price of $14.99 per month. The iPhone and iPod touch downloads will allow users to make unlimited Vonage Mobile calls in the U.S. over Wi-Fi without using up cell phone minutes. The BlackBerry and iPhone app also run on your existing cellular network, which will eat up minutes. Cell phone numbers remain the same. Users can dial directly from an existing address book without calling cards or PIN codes, Vonage said. To install, click the “Download App” link on the iPhone, iPod touch, or BlackBerry pages, and Vonage will send you a text message with a link to download Vonage Mobile. Follow the steps to complete the installation. There are some restrictions with making calls to cell phones in other countries. There are only 15 countries and regions to which users can place calls to mobile devices: the Bahamas, Brunei, China, Guam, Hong Kong, India, Macau, Malaysia, Saipan, Puerto Rico, San Marino, Singapore, Thailand, United States, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Calls to other countries like Australia, France, Germany, and Japan must be made to landline phones. The apps also allow you to update your Twitter status and view updates from people in your cell phone contact list. Vonage announced in September that Apple had approved its App Store application, but had few details to share at the time.

Google, which is currently on one heck of a spending spree, is closing an acquisition of San Francisco based DocVerse, a service that lets users collaborate around Microsoft Office documents, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the deal. The purchase price is supposed to be around $25 million.

Docverse lets users collaborate directly on Microsoft Office documents. Appjet, another recent Google Acquisition, has a related product called EtherPad, although that team is reported to be working with Google Wave and the EtherPad source code has been released to the community.

DocVerse is a product Google is likely to keep. The company was founded by Microsoft veterans Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui. Shia drove product strategy for SharePoint and SQL Server, $1.6B and $3.0B products, respectively. DeNui ran Microsoft SQL Server’s web strategy.

With DocVerse Google will have a direct software connection to Microsoft Office, allowing users to collaborate real time on documents. Microsoft is also moving in this direction with Office 10. In effect, Microsoft is countering Google Docs with the new Office. And Google is countering that move with the acquisition of DocVerse. For more on this fight, see Imitation Isn’t Always Flattery: Microsoft Previews Google Apps Killer To Beta Testers.

DocVerse has raised just $1.3 million, in 2008, from Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal Capital and Naval Ravikant.

The deal has not yet been finalized, says our source, but is past the term sheet stage.

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One producer’s YouTube video, featuring giant robots invading the city of Montevideo, has landed him a $30 million Hollywood movie deal.

Fede Alvarez’s “Ataque de Panico” (Panic Attack) shows the gigantic CGI humanoids capturing the capital of Uruguay as citizens flee; the 5 minute clip has been viewed 1.5 million times on YouTube. It was created on a budget of $300. Alvarez says that after uploading the video on a Thursday, he was receiving offers from Hollywood on the Monday.

He eventually accepted a $30 million dollar deal from Ghost House Pictures for a full-length sci-fi thriller set in Uruguay and Argentina. The movie won’t be based on the YouTubeYouTube

video itself, Alvarez told the BBC.

While it makes for a remarkable story, you might be less surprised after watching the clip: it has a Hollywood polish that implies Alvarez’s work is ready for its big screen debut.

Facebook’s already the Internet’s ultimate time waster, with users spending more time on it than any other website including Google, YouTube and Yahoo.

But here’s another remarkable way to look at it: According to comScore, 5.5 percent of all time spent online in the U.S. during the month of November was spent on the social networking site. Considering the billions and billions of pages on the web, that’s a gigantic proportion of users’ time (and more than double last year).

In addition, FacebookFacebook

passed 100 million unique visitors in the U.S. for the first time (in comScore’s reporting anyways) during the month and moved up one spot to become the fourth most popular website in the U.S. in terms of traffic.

The chart pretty much tells the story of the run Facebook has been on over the past few years:

Image courtesy of iStockphotoiStockphoto

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The recently released e-book reader from Barnes & Noble, the Nook, has been rooted by the community of enthusiasts at nookdevs.com. The complete instructions for hacking the device and obtaining root access are detailed on the site. The Nook went on sale in late November and aims to compete with the dominant Amazon Kindle, a device which has spurred its own community of hackers and modifiers.

The Nook retails for $259, and is an Android-powered device with built in AT&T 3G service and WiFi, along with an e-ink screen that is found in most other readers. The instructions for rooting the device require that the device is opened up and that the SD card which stores the operating system be removed. The process seems a little too simple, almost as if the device was designed to be hacked. The storage is on a removable card, which can then be loaded in another machine where the process of acquiring root access to the operating system is carried out.

This will likely lead to DRM controls being bypassed, and a slew of homebrew projects being created based on the hardware – which might ironically help Barnes & Noble in its bid to unseat both the Kindle and Sony e-Reader.

Full detailed instructions and photographs are available on the site here. The entire process is straight forward and only takes around 30-45 minutes. I might actually order a Nook now.

Tip via Nenad Nikolic (@shonzilla)

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