Given Vonage stock recently jumped some 33% simply on the news they were developing a voice application for the iPhone, the company is trying to milk interest further by issuing a press release stating the application has been approved by Apple. Unfortunately, you won't be able to use it just yet. "Vonage is currently conducting a beta test and general availability will be announced at a later date," says the company. While the quick approval may be the result of a watchful FCC and the Google Voice fiasco, it's still unlikely that the application will work over AT&T's 3G network.

Google this morning fired a chrome cannon at Microsoft by officially announcing that they're developing a Chrome operating system for PCs. Sort of; so far it looks like just an application running over Linux, but substantive details seem scarce. "Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010," says the company. Tying an "OS" to their online applications will certainly get the attention of regulators and privacy advocates, and the new OS (combined with their push to be a centralized voice hub) is certainly making the company new corporate enemies in the telecom, voice and software sectors. "We have a lot of work to do, and we're definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision," the company says in a blog post.

After acquiring VoIP outfit Grand Central back in 2007, the search giant remained rather quiet, leaving many people in our forums wondering what was going on. Last March we got an answer, the Google Blog noting that the service had been repackaged as Google Voice. Google Voice aims to make Google your hub for all things phone and voicemail, something that obviously worries existing telecom companies -- who've already been working hard to smear the company for Google's positions on things like net neutrality and white space broadband. Google this morning took to the Today show, where NBC's Matt Laurer accidentally announced the service would be available to everyone, everywhere. That's not really the case: according to the Google Voice Twitter account, only invitations to those on the service's reservation list are going out today.

Google's no dummy when it comes to Internet architecture, given they own a lot of capacity and employ plenty of specialists -- including TCP/IP co-creator Vint Cerf. To engage the broader Internet on how to speed things up further, Google this week launched a new website that offers site tips and tools to developers, but also aims to encourage community discussion on how to improve protocols, content delivery, and the expansion of broadband services. "Networks have become much faster in the past 20 years, and by collaborating to update protocols such as HTML and TCP/IP we can create a better web experience for everyone," the company states in a blog post.

Opera this morning announced that they've unveiled Opera Unite, a new browser the company insists will "reinvent the web" by turning each user PC into zero configuration content servers. The new client-side service delivers a ridiculously easy way for users to host files, music, photos and websites. Opera this morning unveiled a rather spooky video exploring the idea. Over at the Opera blog, Lawrence Eng explores the idea and Opera's vision in a little more detail, noting that the sharing applications included in the first build are little more than demos aimed at fostering more elaborate ideas: story continues..