Today gaba and i stopped by the VOIP sprint for the non-profit world being held in San Francisco. I spent most of today talking about various applications of VOIP for political campaigns.
We outlined four potential use cases:
What i discovered is that there is a fairly sophisticated open source PBX application, Asterisk and a voip wiki with a wealth of information. With Asterisk you can do a number of interesting things. What does is basically a voice router, you can setup voicemail boxes, automate call trees, automatically call numbers, cross between standard phone calls and VOIP calls. It's got it's own configuration / simple scripting language called dialplan but allows you to drop other programs using a cgi like interface at any point in the call process.
As with all new technologies the first adopters are often the porn / sex industry. With VOIP it appears that is also the case. Normally the porn industry is not so good at sharing their technical solutions due to stiff competition and a general culture of privacy. But that's not always the case. One of the publishers produces 'adult movies', sex books, and Asterisk / VOIP books.