For a limited time only, we are offering a special Refer-A-Friend Reward Program that provides your family and friends the gift of free calling while giving you rewards.

Let your family and friends know that there has never been a better time to purchase ooma! We are offering the ooma Hub for $199.99 at the following Costco locations. For each successful referral, you will get your choice of either a $50 international calling credit OR 6 months of ooma Premier service.

All they need to do is purchase at one of the 20 Costco locations before July 11th, activate by July 18th and remain active for 30 days. There is no limit to how many friends you can refer and how many rewards you can collect.

Simply buy an ooma Hub at any of these following Costco’s:

For more details or to redeem your reward, please visit http://www.ooma.com/referafriend.

If you’re already enjoying the convenience of receiving your ooma voicemail in your e-mail or on your mobile phone - get ready for more. We’ve recently rolled out a couple highly useful enhancements to the voicemail forwarding feature:

1. New e-mail client support. We’ve expanded support for mobile e-mail clients. Now you can listen to your ooma voicemail from your Blackberry, iPhone or other mobile smartphone.

2. MP3 encoding. Voicemail attachments are now encoded in MP3 format, reducing the file size by more than half without sacrificing any quality.

These two enhancements are ready for use now. If don’t have voicemail forwarding enabled - go ahead and take it for a spin!

Voicemail forwarding is only available with ooma Premier service. If you’re interested in learning more about ooma’s enhanced voicemail features, visit ooma.com/premier.

There have been a number of discussions internally about the two outages this week. Needless to say, we are very disappointed in our handling of the situation. Although there are some external factors we don’t control, there are many that we do, and we clearly have room to improve. We’ve listened to all the feedback that the community has been kind enough to share and I want to take a moment to go over some of the steps that we are taking to improve communication about major outages and how we plan to mitigate/avoid them in the future.

Communication

• We have closed a loophole that prevented the product marketing team from being immediately notified about major outages during off-hours. This prevented us from responding in the forums in a timely manner this morning.

• We are adding a mechanism for us to display outage notifications on our homepage and Lounge login page. The notification will be displayed at the top of the home page and link to our status in the forums. This should be live tomorrow.

• We have created an official ooma_status twitter feed. You can now find us at twitter.com/ooma_status. This gives you RSS and SMS notification options as well.

• We will send outage notification e-mails to customers who are subscribed to our marketing communication list. If you are not subscribed, you can do so here: www.ooma.com/contact/. Be sure to click the “I currently own an ooma system” checkbox. This is the only opt-in list we can use right now where we can safely send tens of thousands of e-mails without getting blacklisted. In the future, we will consider allowing separate opt-in’s for outage vs marketing notifications.

Mitigation/Prevention

• We are adding a second upstream Internet provider. We have hardware on order, hope to have it live next week.

  We are doubling the capacity of our provisioning systems so we can accelerate the rate of recovery. That should be live by the end of the week.

• We have found two issues that prevented the ooma Hub from automatically recovering during the last two outages. The fix is being tested as we speak and will remove the need for a manual power cycle.

• We are adjusting our back-off and retry mechanisms to prevent the Hubs from placing undue load on our system during outage recovery. That should be complete by the end of the week.

• Longer term, we are planning to add a second data center in the Midwest/East Coast.

No doubt there will always be room for improvement, and we will continue to look to the community for feedback.

A major outage of the ooma service began today (April 13th) at approximately 11AM (pacific time). This outage affected all ooma customers and was triggered by Internet connectivity issues at our upstream service provider. While we do not have all the details around the problems that affected the Internet connection at this time, we do know that these problems were not isolated to ooma, but did effectively cut off the ooma service from the outside world.

Between 2PM and 3PM, Internet connectivity was slowly being restored to our service. However, the flood of ooma Hubs coming back online created an immense amount of load on our provisioning systems. We rushed to add capacity to the system, but the nature of the network outage had interfered with the system’s ability to recover by itself. Beginning at 2:30PM, we began throttling Hubs from connecting to our servers. This allowed the system to settle down and work through the backlog of requests. As the systems stabilized, we slowly began opening up blocks of users to connect to the ooma service.

As of 5PM, most service has been fully restored. Some Hubs may not recover automatically in an expedient manner - if your ooma service is still down, please reboot your ooma Hub. Unplug power from the back of the device, wait one minute and then plug the power back in. The ooma Hub may need to download a software update, but it should go into service shortly thereafter.

Rest assured that we are taking this outage very seriously. Discussions have already started on how to make the service resilient to a similar event in the future. ooma currently has one data center located in west coast. We have planned to light up a second data center in the midwest or east coast this year, and this outage has served as a stark reminder for us to get moving on that. This has also served as a good opportunity for us to re-evaluate our contingency and business continuity plans.

We know that phone service is critical function that everyone relies on. We apologize for the outage this afternoon and thank you for your patience as we work through some growing pains.

Update: Please refer to our latest post to read about how we plan to mitigate and handle outages in the future.

For fans of GrandCentral, the launch of Google Voice last week was a long time in the making. We at ooma were excited to see what GrandCentral had evolved into and we were not disappointed. GrandCentral brought a new world of intelligence and connectivity to the phones you use and Google Voice takes it to the next level. Their feature list is impressive.

Although we differ in our approach, ooma has always shared the same vision of bringing better services, enhanced productivity and a more fluid experience to voice communication. Hopefully this is evident in our product and the features we offer as part of ooma Premier.

So what does Google Voice have to do with ooma anyway? For starters, it is important to understand Google Voice doesn’t provide phone service - it works over the phone service you already have. Whether it is your home phone, cell phone, work phone or all three, Google Voice still needs to reach you at a phone. That’s where we come in. What better phone service to use at home than a free one?

Now given that Google Voice already does so much, how does one make it better? For one, we make it a whole lot more convenient to use. With ooma Premier’s Google Voice Extensions, we can automatically show your Google Voice caller-ID when you make a call, no need to use the web site or call into Google Voice just to do that. You can also check your Google Voice messages with a touch of a button, just like using an answering machine. And with ooma, you don’t need to pick up your phone to hear who is calling. We’ll play the announcement and message over the speaker for you - pick up the phone only if you really want to answer. Finally, if you don’t want to go through the hassle of switching to yet another new phone number, use your existing ooma number (or port your number to ooma) and we’ll forward it to Google Voice. Your friends and family will be none the wiser! You’ll still be able to answer calls at home thanks to the Instant Second Line.

So there’s a sneak peek at what’s coming to ooma Premier. Have an idea that you’d like to share about how ooma and Google Voice can work better together? Chime in below!

Last week, ooma released two new features that update the way users make phone calls with the ooma system.

10-Digit Dialing

ooma has enabled 10-digit dialing for all ooma users. This feature allows you to dial any domestic phone number without having to enter a “1″ before the area code and number, just like on a cell phone.

To call (650) 555-1234, you can now dial 6505551234 instead of 16505551234. 10-digit dialing will allow you to easily return missed calls logged on your home phone.

With 10-digit dialing enabled, you’ll still be able to dial 7-digit phone numbers for local calls (if allowed in your area). However, you may notice an extra 4-5 second delay before the call is placed. You can avoid this delay by pressing # after you finish dialing or by disabling 10-digit dialing in the ooma Lounge.

ooma Connect Tone

You can now configure the ooma Connect Tone. The ooma Connect Tone is the friendly chime a caller hears when a call is connected through the ooma. You can select a different tone or disable the feature altogether.

Click below to download and listen to the different ooma connect tones:
Classic
Harmonic
Galactic
Acoustic

To configure these two features, please visit the system preferences page in the ooma Lounge.

We just got back from CES 2009 in Las Vegas. The event was fantastic! Thanks to everyone who visited our CES booth in the Grandy Lobby this year. It was great having the opportunity to chat and exchange ideas with all the CES attendees that stopped by. Check out some of the snaps below from the show!

We’re pleased to announce that we’re launching three new beta features to keep unwanted callers out of your life. That’ll be one less thing for you to worry about this holiday season. Keep reading to learn more about how ooma can keep the peace in your home!

Anonymous Call Blocking 

Fed up with anonymous calls? Force callers to expose their identity with Anonymous Call Blocking. In order to reach you, callers will need to show their caller-ID - this way you’ll always know who is calling. With ooma, you have the option of blocking anonymous calls completely, or sending them straight to voicemail.

Personal Blacklist  

ooma can now be your personal bouncer. Review your call logs in the Lounge. For anyone who doesn’t make the cut, add them to your blacklist. They’ll get diverted next time they call. You have the option to block them completely or send them straight to voicemail. For a limited time, all ooma users can take advantage of our sneak preview of this feature!

Community Blacklist  

Harness the power of the ooma community to block unwanted callers. Think of it as Survivor for telemarketers. As other ooma users vote callers “off the island” by adding them to their blacklist, we’re there to tally up the votes. Combined with our sophisticated algorithms for detecting phone spamming patterns and, with ooma Premier, you’ll get access to the mother of all blacklists.