Apple faces more trademark trouble: “Visual Voicemail”

Seems like the iPhone name isn’t the only challenge Apple will be facing with their first foray into the cell phone market. Turns out that what Steve Jobs thought was innovative, actually wasn’t all that novel at all. Visual voicemail software has been sold by Citrix since 2004.

As you recall, Visual Voicemail (capitalized in Apple documents by emphasis of it being a special feature) allows users to randomly access voicemail messages, instead of having to go through them in sequence. Basically, when someone leaves a voicemail, you can know who it’s from based on the caller ID, so when you have several messages waiting for you, you can immediately go to the one that you feel is most urgent (wife or girlfriend, it’s up to you).

To make this even more interesting, Citrix has been selling Visual Voicemail to users of (drum roll please…) Cisco’s IP phones. Citrix has not officially commented on the matter, nor have we found any specific trademark documentation on Visual Voicemail. The drama continues…