iNum numbers will be used this whole week to enable wireless texting and calling to Burning Man participants.

This has been done in partnership with the OpenBTS project, and one of the purposes of this partnership is to showcase how inum can be used to quickly and cost-effectively connect regions that need it, for example when a natural disaster or a war isolate a region from the rest of the world.

We first met David Burgess at eComm where he introduced us to the OpenBTS project. Thanks David for your tremendous help and efforts in getting this launched !

Burning Man is a huge event gathering 50,000 people and taking place in the middle of the Nevada desert. For more info, see www.burningman.com

OpenBTS is an open-source project forming the basis of a new type of cellular network. It basically allows the deployment of a VoIP and Asterisk based wireless network. For more info, see openbts.sourceforge.net

UPDATE: see daily updates and pictures on the OpenBTS blog: openbts.blogspot.com

Great feedback from Pete Wylie at FierceVoIP, Nadeem Unuth at About.com and Gary Kim at TMCNet about the results of our survey, showing that 70% of the people have lost contacts as a result of changing their phone number….

Amongst other things, this survey confirms the pressing need for global telephone numbers, which is what inum intends to deliver.

UPDATE: further feedback from Ted Stevenson at VoIP Planet and Robert Poe at VoIP Evolution

This week we assigned the 15 millionth iNum number!

We have been quiet on this blog for the last couple months, but nonetheless actively working on supporting the growing inum user base and preparing for the launch of some exciting features (more to come on that later).

The iNum reachability is also increasing month after month and a first incumbent operator has opened up its network to iNum — an important first step towards global reach.