The VoIP (Voice over IP) technology is well on its way to becoming mainstream in both the business sector and for home communications.
The most common VoIP solution is the one supplied by Skype. However, Skype"s dominating position is now facing a serious challenge with the launch of Project Gizmo, the latest brainchild of Michael Robertson, the founder of MP3.com and the operating system Linspire.
The largest difference between Skype and Gizmo, is that unlike Skype, Gizmo has an open-source API which anyone can use to write their own Gizmo implementations. Other Gizmo features include things like a free voicemail service and a map to show the location of someone that you are chatting with. Gizmo also includes a service similar to Skype Out, which lets users make calls to telephones outside of the Gizmo client.