CES: Pulver app to interconnect with Skype

FWD Communications, a division of the Pulver Group of companies led by pulver.com president and CEO Jeff Pulver, will announce next week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that its recently-released IP communications application, the pulver.Communicator, interoperates with Skype.

Launched last October at the Fall VON conference in Boston, the Pulver application offers a combination of instant messaging, voice, video, presence, and social networking capabilities. Users of the pulver.Communicator now can import Skype contacts into the application and conduct voice calling and instant messaging with those contacts, as well as engage in multi-party IM chats amongst friends across multiple IM networks.

As a long-time Skype proponent, Pulver said in a statement that his is the first outside application to offer interconnectivity on an individual basis to Skype's users. It also expands the community of cross-platform users to AOL AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and ICQ. Users can communicate via voice, video, or text Instant Messaging across any or all of these platforms.

The pulver.Communicator allows users to make free calls to the millions of VoIP users worldwide who subscribe to any of the 80 VoIP service providers with whom FWD Communications has established peering partnering agreements, as well as to free-call services in the U.S., UK, Holland, Japan, France and other locations.

Users also can initiate on-the-fly conference calls, establish person-to-person IM sessions, establish multi-party IM sessions that cross IM service provider boundaries, place video calls and use the Shared Buddy List feature to view and share lists with other subscribers.

The pulver.Communicator, which more than 50,000 users have downloaded since October, is free and can be downloaded to a Windows XP PC by going to pulver.com's web site.