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In November, Phonebooth.com released the beta version of Phonebooth OnDemand, which is a full-featured phone service that lives in the cloud, but can communicate with both cellular phones and IP desk and conference phones. Today, that service — which costs $20 a month per user — is becoming generally available. Phonebooth.com is also leveraging its own private VoIP network to launch Phonebooth Free, a free version of its hosted phone system, which is very similar to Google Voice but aimed at small businesses. Phonebooth.com is a product from Bandwidth.com . While Bandwidth.com might not be as well-known as players like Comcast, Verizon and Cisco, in the business…

Not one to mince words, Steve Jobs squashed all hope of the iPad supporting iPhone tethering for wireless internet access with one word — “No.” The succinct answer was communicated by Jobs via email (from his iPhone) to Jezper Söderlund of Sweden who emailed Jobs to ask, “Will the wifi-only version somehow support tethering thru my iPhone?” 9to5Mac has both emails in question, along with email header information, and all indications point to the one word buzz-kill response being legit. You can read the text of the email inquiry and Jobs’ response below: Söderlund’s email: I’ll keep it short. I’m Jezper from Sweden, a long time Apple fan, …

Bloomberg is reporting that Verizon is planning on adding official support for Skype to its handsets. The two companies are expected to announce a partnership at the Mobile World Congress on February 16, which will allow Skype calls to be made from Verizon phones using the provider’s 3G data plan. This would be a shrewd move on the part of Verizon. Voice calls are becoming a less and less of a profit center for wireless carriers. Look at the big price cuts that both Verizon and AT&T introduced last month : The biggest area of price savings is in unlimited voice plans. Data is still a premium, and in the case of Verizon…

Though Sony’s overall bottom line is back in black , what held it back from an even bigger celebration cake was its core electronics brand, and no stranger to that sector is the PlayStation group. Both Joystiq and The Wall Street Journal took a more careful look at the numbers, and there’s a few points worth noting. PS2 sales took a year-over-year dip, down from 2.5 million to 2.1 million. PSP took a larger hit, down to 4.2 million from 5.1 million. The PS3 , however, is a mix of good and bad news. The good news: 6.5 million in unit sales, up from the 4.5 million prior. That said, it turns out Sony has yet to pull its home console away from “loss leader” status — WSJ reports the …

Topics: Macworld , Rumors , TUAW Business , Podcasts Talkcast time again! This week (for the first time) hosting duties will be covered by me, Kelly Guimont. We’ll review this week’s in Apple news, speculate wildly about the upcoming Apple Event, and speculate only slightly less wildly about iPhone 4.0 . We’ll be live at 10 pm Eastern, 7 pm Pacific, and various other times around the globe . To participate on TalkShoe, you can use the browser-only client , the embedded Facebook app , or the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client ; however, for maximum fun, you should call in. For the web UI, just click the “TalkShoe …

It’s no secret that the Tiger Woods debacle has reached epic proportions and is still escalating. Some companies have already dropped or removed Tiger Woods from their ads/marketing, and now AT&T has confirmed that the company has dropped the athlete as their spokesperson. Other brands though, like Nike and Gatorade, has stood by Tiger Woods. Related

When you’re running on a hot streak of smash hits, it’s not too tough to find investors. Such is the case for Smule, the developers behind I Am T-Pain , Ocarina , Leaf Trombone , and a handful of other App Store success stories. Today, Smule is announcing that they’ve secured an $8 million dollar round of Series C funding. That’s an absolutely massive pot for a development house focused solely on the iPhone, and it more than doubles Smule’s total funding thus far. This latest round of funding was lead by Shasta Ventures , and backed by Bessemer Venture Partners and Granite Ventures . Both of the latter companies had invested in Smule before; Bessemer fueled Smule’s $1.6 million seed round, and joined Granite Ventures and…

We know that Twitter believes that businesses are central to helping grow and monetize the microblogging service; recent integrations with Citysearch and LinkedIn have foretold its interest in the space. Today though, Twitter has begun to take its biggest steps in providing new features to businesses and monetizing those features. In a blog post , the company announced that it has begun beta testing its first feature made specifically for businesses: “Contributors.” An Explanation of the Contributors Feature Contributors is a feature that focuses on creating more authentic engagement for business accounts. With Contributors, a business account with multiple contributors (say, for example, the @Twitter feed) can add the specific user that…

According to the Source from this story, it would appear that Dell is planning on launching a tablet device, and it will run on Android. There is no word on when it will be out, but it should be announced at CES 2010 this year if this rumor is true. So, it looks

A mobile app needs to be more accessible than a web site, that’s for sure. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be simpler and dumber, as travel search service Kayak learned this year. Now, the company is changing its overall business strategy to address user needs that it only became aware of from seeing how they use the Kayak iPhone app. Kayak CMO Robert Birge and Chief Architect Bill O'Donnell When Kayak went to build its first iPhone app earlier this year, Chief Architect Bill O’Donnell told us during a visit this week to GigaOM HQ, it stripped down its travel search functionality to the bare essentials. O’Donnell’s thinking was that the prototypical mobile user was…