StreetSmartMeeting.com is a free conference call service with some extras. It includes a calendar tool that generates invitations to your meeting and provides reminders for group calls. In the past, we’ve missed a lot of conference calls.

Calls are secure and may be recorded and stored for playback for up to 90 days. The service also gives you a free permanent meeting call number, so you can have impromptu calls with colleagues and friends without the hassle of setting up a group call.  For a fee, you can also store files that can be shared with your meeting participants, as long as they have an Internet connection. You can allow them to just view the files or edit them.

Most people who want to make video phone calls use Skype. You just plug in a webcam into your computer, download the free Skype software, and follow the easy instructions to make free calls to other Skype users, or cheap calls to regular phones.

We’ve been testing a new system that lets you make Internet phone calls to any kind of landline, cell phone or Internet phone. The phone includes a video screen that shows you a picture-in-picture view of yourself, as well as the person you’re talking to.

It’s called the “Vidtel,” (for video telephone), and it sells for $200 from Vidtel.com. There’s a $20 a month charge on top of that. This covers unlimited calls in the U.S. and Canada, and an additional five cents a minute for calls to most other countries. If you want to see the other person on your video screen, they have to have a Vidtel phone too. But there’s no software to install, you just plug it in. The Vidtel looks just like a regular landline phone with a 4.5 inch by 3.5 inch viewing screen built in.

The Vidtel must be connected to the Internet to work, of course, just as Skype must be connected to the Internet. We use a long Ethernet cable that goes through a tiny hole in our living room wall and connects the Vidtel to our router. The video phone does not have WiFi built in but it does support WiFi so you would need an adapter for it to work wirelessly. We could have used something like the “HomePlug,” sold by Netgear and others, to turn the local wiring system into a carrier for digital signals, or the Dlink Wireless Pocket Router.

We have tried several of these video phones over the years and the is the best so far. Besides getting to see your aunt’s new baby or your cousin in the service, the Vidtel phone offers many other features that traditional phone companies charge extra for. These include Caller ID, Call Forwarding, Call Waiting, Voicemail, Caller ID Blocking, Anonymous Call Block, Speed Dialing, etc. If you miss an incoming call, the service sends you an email telling you who called. You can ring two phone numbers at the same time until one call is answered or goes into voicemail. Perhaps best of all for many people, you can call people from your Vidtel phone by name, without having to memorize or store a number.

For instance, you might want to tell everyone in a group that “We’re meeting at 7 this evening instead of 6.” Most people don’t check their email all that often but many people – especially young people – often check for messages on their cell phone. Pinger is a lot faster and more personal than sending their phones a text message.

But how does Pinger.com know the names and numbers of your friends and associates? Well, you get an account when you sign up at Pinger and you can import all your  contacts — from sources such as Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, and Outlook Express, to that account (they are not available to anyone else), or manually type them in.

We called our special Pinger account number from a $30 “Virgin Mobile” cell phone (the cheapest one we could find) and spoke the name of a contact. The voice recognition software at the other end had no trouble locating that person’s number and sending a message to that cell phone. We also tried sending a message to an entire group: All we had to do was define the group first, at the Pinger website, by selecting names from our private list. Then we called our Pinger number, spoke the group name, and off went our message.

Finally, we tried sending a Pinger message to someone without a cell phone. They received an email message asking them to call “858-2pinger” and enter a special access code. They then heard our message.

The Pinger service is free for now and a spokesman for the company said it will likely remain so for most users. Heavy users will have to pay a fee but no pricing has been set yet. (“Ping,” by the way, is an old Internet programmer’s utility and stands for “Packet Internet Groper.” It is used to test a computer’s connection to the Internet. The author of the utility named it that because of the “ping” heard in searches made by underwater sonar devices.)

Peter of England turned out to be a retired printer in North Yorkshire, and while we were talking to him, he brought in Norm, who was taking it easy at home in the kiwi-growing center of New Zealand. We all chatted together in a conference call that was entirely free, because we all had downloaded the free Skype software from Skype.com. Norm of New Zealand, who is 85, said he prefers using Skype to a regular phone because he can turn the volume up as much as he likes.

We spoke through our computer using a Web cam; you can use video only for one-on-one conversations. Web cams turn out to be fairly cheap, and we bought ours for around $30. All of the conversation and the video came through very clearly, with none of the static or breaks we used to associate with Internet calls a couple years ago.

We accepted an invitation to join a virtual meeting of a group of Rotarians with 18 members: 10 in London, three in the United States, and one each in France, Switzerland, Portugal, Malaysia and Germany. On that day, they were visiting with another virtual Rotarian group in Iceland. The Skype screen display showed us who was talking and who was present at this conference call. If we wanted to, we could have clicked a button on the Skype screen and recorded everything. The whole thing was a kick and an international adventure. And it was all free.

The meeting in Iceland was a private conference, but there are plenty of public conferences going on all the time. These are listed in a column of “live” links on the Skype screen. The links also show what language is being used, and you can join in if you want. To create a Skypecast of your own, go to Skypecasts.Skype.com. If someone is obnoxious or turns out to be simply troublesome, the originator of the conference can click a button to mute him. 

Skype allows you to add all the participants in any conference to your contacts list. For that matter, the software can comb through your Outlook or Outlook Express mail and compile a list of those names who also have Skype. You can then make a free Skype call to any of them just by clicking on their name from within the software. Works with Windows, Mac or Linux.

Calls are restricted to the United States and Canada and can be made to either landline or cell phones. If you sign up before the end of January, the charge is only $15 for a year of unlimited calls.

You have to sign up at the Web site: Skype.com. You cannot use this service to make calls to emergency services, like the 911 police number.

Competitor Vonage (Vonage.com) says it has fixed this problem for emergency calls made by about 93 percent of U.S. callers. When you make such a call, however, the service reports your location as the one you used to register with them, which may or may not be where you are when you make the call.

In operation it seems like an old-fashioned switchboard: You enter your number through the computer keyboard, then the number you want to call, and click “connect.” If you want to connect by telephone instead of through theWeb site there is a small increase in the charges. Calls are billed by the minute, regardless of day or night. You can buy however many minutes you want in advance and add to them if necessary while on the call. First-time users can try ConferenceCalls.com for free for 100 minutes.

There is a similar service offered by Skype (Skype.com), which is free to Skype users. This allows up to five people to teleconference on an Internet call.

The Spracht Mobile easily fits in one hand (most of the space is taken up by the unit’s speaker). The sound quality was terrific, better than the cell phone itself, and we’re talking about an expensive Sony Ericsson cell phone here. It can be used with any phone that has blue tooth capability, or connected to any PC or Mac computer with a cable.

You both speak and listen through the same device. The volume is good enough that everyone could hear it in an open car or a conference room.

If you’re connecting it to a computer, it’s a quick and easy way to make Skype calls, the software commonly used for making Internet phone calls. Skype now lets you connect to land lines at no extra charge, by the way. We talked for an hour to friends in California, and the quality was great. Computer to computer calls were always free with Skype and other Internet phone services, but being able to call someone’s regular phone line free of charge is a new wrinkle.

The Spracht Mobile comes with several accessories for connections to various devices, including a charger that plugs into a car’s cigarette lighter. Since it has good pickup and volume, it’s kind of ideal for hands-free operation in a car or elsewhere. The battery is good for four hours of talk or 24 hours on standby.

List price for the Spracht Mobile is $150, which is not cheap but the quality was excellent. Web info at Spracht.com.