evolution creations

In my line of work, I have to make quite a few calls to the UK. As part of our standard business practice, we make use of services like Skype to help reduce the costs of international calling that you would incur if you use traditional telephone providers. It occurred to me recently after a plethora of issues in getting the call quality of Skype to be what I needed it to in order for the person on the other to understand me, that I needed another solution.

So my options were:

• Skype (Skype to Landline or Skype to Mobile)
• Ooma (VOIP to Landline or VOIP to Mobile)
• Google Voice (VOIP to Landline or VOIP to Mobile)

Some of the requirements that I had going into this were:

1. The call quality was essential. I need to be able to use a traditional phone line that will give me more call quality than using an interface off the computer (such as a bluetooth device connected to a laptop connected through Skype to VOIP).
2. Ease of use, the solution has to be easy to use.
3. Maintain list of contacts, I can’t have contacts in Outlook, and in whatever I use, and maintain them separately. I either have to use one exclusively or have a link between Outlook and it.
4. Ability to seamlessly charge, most solutions require the use of payment, so that payment option has to be a one-click solution. I can’t be reaching for my credit card each time I run out of minutes.
5. Ability to receipt. This one seems kind of obvious, but in reality it’s not. But the solution has to be able to generate a receipt that indicates I was the one that purchased it, so that I can then claim that expense on my expense report.
6. Must maintain a call history or call log so I can see when I make calls.
7. Cheap international rates. I’m a cheapskate let’s get over that! Also it makes good business sense that you want a solution that is going to save you money instead of what you are currently paying.

With all of these requirements to go after lets look at each solution. So to start with you have Skype. Some of the benefits here are:

1. There is a seemless link between your contacts in Outlook and the contacts in Skype. This makes maintaining contacts very easy.
2. Call history is there, so I know when the last time I contacted the person, etc.
3. Each time I refill it’s a push of a button and I get an email generated that I can print to PDF and expense.
4. Easy to use, Skype is a no-brainer

The only real downside with Skype has been the call quality. Most of the times I’m at home the calls are pretty good, and I attribute that to the firewall configurations I made and the fact that I have a fairly good speed with Comcast (15Mbps down/8Mbps up).

Now just this week I started to look at Ooma. They do have a function where you can add funds to your Ooma account and then be able to make international calls. The upside to Ooma is:

1. Call quality is amazing.
2. I can use my home telephone equipment
3. Easy to recharge

The immediate downsides were:

1. There isn’t a good way to maintain contact addresses and they are separate from Outlook.
2. While recharging the minutes is easy, getting a receipt is non-existent. I contacted Ooma billing and they sent me a screenshot that was in all ways useless. I have more benefit getting my credit card statement and redacting the other bits and sending that in to expense.

Then I tried Google Voice. This was a surprise to me as I have been using Google Voice since they were GrandCentral and primarily use it for US business calls. The functions of Google Voice are amazing, and I’m surprised it took me this long to use it internationally.

The upsides are:

1. While you do maintain the addresses separately, Google Voice provides a better platform for maintaining your contacts and grouping them together in meaningful ways.
2. Easy to use
3. You can select which phone you want to take the call on and you get all the GV features such as call recording, voice mail transcription, call transferring etc.
4. Recharging is one-click.
5. Great receipt feature to be able to expense off of.

At the present moment, I can’t see any downsides of Google Voice. This has been definitely a diamond in the rough and I’m kicking myself that I didn’t use this earlier!

Now comes the last bit which is cost. Is Google Voice a better option functionally but not so on the cost side of things. Let’s look at a comparison of rates that I have put together. Let’s start with Comcast Digital Voice as I had them before moving to Ooma, just to see what the “other” guy can do for you:

Comcast Digital Voice
United Kingdom $0.08
United Kingdom – Mobile $0.30

Clearly there isn’t a whole lot of savings here, but this is what you would expect from your traditionaly phone company.

Ooma
United Kingdom $0.028
United Kingdom – London $0.019
United Kingdom – London $0.019
United Kingdom – NTS $0.33
United Kingdom – NTS $0.33
United Kingdom – NTS $0.33
United Kingdom – NTS $0.33
United Kingdom – NTS $0.33
United Kingdom – NTS $0.33
United Kingdom – NTS $0.33
United Kingdom – Mobile $0.33

The prices from Ooma are much more competitive than from your Comcast Digital Voice solution for land-lines, but not so much for mobile as their calls are actually more expensive. This was definitely surprising for me as I would have assumed that from a VOIP provider their pricing would be much more competitive. Let’s look at Skype.

Skype
United Kingdom $ 0.024
United Kingdom-London $ 0.024
United Kingdom – Mobile – Hutchison3G $ 0.291
United Kingdom – Mobile – O2 $ 0.291
United Kingdom – Mobile – Orange $ 0.291
United Kingdom – Mobile – Others $ 0.291
United Kingdom – Mobile – Tmobile $ 0.291
United Kingdom – Mobile – Vodafone $ 0.291
United Kingdom – Premium Rate – Band 1 $ 0.559
United Kingdom – Premium Rate – Band 2 $ 1.117
United Kingdom – Premium Rate – Band 3 $ 1.676
United Kingdom – Premium Rate – Band 4 $ 2.792
United Kingdom – Premium Rate – Band 5 $ 3.351
United Kingdom-Shared Cost-0844 $ 0.136
United Kingdom-Shared Cost-0845 $ 0.147
United Kingdom-Shared Cost-0870 $ 0.208
United Kingdom-Shared Cost-0871 $ 0.261
United Kingdom-Toll Free $ 0.000

As we would expect, Skype’s costs are just slightly better than either Comcast or Ooma. Their landline costs are about the same, and their mobile calling is just slightly better. Still any savings is a savings! Now to Google Voice.

Google Voice
United Kingdom $0.02
United Kingdom, Mobile $0.19

Well as you can see, Google Voice comes in right at the bottom of all of the above providers. Their cost for landlines is a flat $0.02 so some savings there, and their mobile is a few pennies less than all the previous providers. The winner appears to be Google in this round! Now I will caveat this by saying that Skype does offer unlimited international packages for a monthly and quarterly fee that allow you unlimited calling to landlines in the UK along with other countries. Now I’m not saying that this is bad, as I was signed up for this service until just recently. But the downside is that the Skype call quality was never what I really needed it to be, so even though the landline calls were covered and ultimately reduced the price, I always had issues with people not being able to hear me well.

In the end I would recommend anyone who in a similar position as I am to look at Google Voice as an inexpensive way of both making international calls, but making it easier to manage your contacts and voice messages and leveraging the services within Google Voice to do your job more effectively! Post comments if you have any questions!

As most of you know I’ve been knee deep in Atkin’s and really now seeing some major progress. But after watching a Donut paradise special on TV the other day, where they took us on a cross-country adventure looking for the best donuts, I suddenly started to crave that which we all know is bad for us–the donut!

So wouldn’t you know what I started looking for Nutritional information from websites and I couldn’t find the ingredients for a KK donut. Now as most know Atkins is all about the carbs, but getting further into your eating, you should also (regardless if you are on Atkins) be focused on WHAT is in your food. It’s absolutely surprising to know that the food that we’ve come to love and enjoy is actually pretty bad for us in many different ways, but mainly because of the raw materials that goes into making the food.

Below is what I got back from Krispy Kream regarding the ingredients that they use, and enough to say YOU SHOULD NOT EAT THESE on the sheer principle that the first ingredient is not at all what you want to put into your body!

Ingredients: Enriched bleached wheat flour (contains bleached wheat flour,
niacin, reduced iron, thiamine, mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), dextrose,
vegetable shortening (partially hydrogenerated soybean and/or cottonseed oil),
water, sugar, soy flour, egg yolks, vital wheat gluten, yeast, nonfat milk, yeast
nutrients (calcium sulfate, ammonium sulfate), dough conditioners (calcium
dioxide, monocalcium and dicalcium phosphate, diammonium phosphate, sodium
stearoyl-2-lacrylate, whey, starch, ascorbic acid, sodium bicarbonate, calcium
carbonate), salt, mono-and-diglycerides, ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides,
lecithin, calcium propionate (to retain freshness), cellulose gum, natural and
artificial flavors, fungal alpha amylase, amylase, maltogenic amylase,
pantosenase, protease, sodium caseinate, corn maltodextrin, corn syrup solids
and BHT (to help protect flavor).
Glaze also may contain: Calcium carbonate, agar, locust bean gum, disodium
phosphate, and sorbitan monostearate.

This isn’t to say that the donuts are terrible, but for those who are health consicous and this is going out to the majority of US folks who are considered to be on the obease side of things, you should definitely stay away from foods with enriched bleached white flour. Really where’s the nutritional benefit from that!

Lets say you want to create a subdomain, and then route it to a completely different webpage after a predefined length of time, but you want it to execute the Google Analytic code to be able to then track the transaction. How do you do that? 

For awhile now I’ve been adding technical docs to this blog in attempt to both retain knowledge that I find over the ages, but also to share with the wider community and partipate in the conversation.

When you first install SQLTools, you receive an error message:

SQLTools.exe – Unable to Locate Component

This application has failed to start because OCI.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.

It’s been a few weeks after I got a G1, and one area of the phone that really has me going is the screen. Not only is it brilliant and clear, but since you use it for practically everything on the phone, the tendency for it to get scratched up is fairly good. When you first get the G1, there is a plastic film that is over the screen, and for those who are gettin G1′s, I’d recommend that you leave this on for the time being.

So after a few weeks of using my G1 successfully, I regret to post that I have run into one critical issue here that seems to be a show stopper in terms of every day functionality. I can use the G1 anywhere in Chicago-land without problems. I do get spotty 3G signals, but that’s to be expected as T-mobile expands their 3G networks. But every time I come to downtown Chicago and get to my office the G1 will lock up and become unresponsive. The only fix that I’ve found to this is to pop the battery out to restart it.

I’ve reached out to T-mobile support several times, and one suggestion was to put the phone into 2G mode only (Settings > Wireless Controls > Mobile Networks > Use only 2G networks), and this has helped the situation, but several times a day the phone will lock up.

One fix that I’ve tried that has also worked is to put the G1 into airplane mode that will disable all the wireless functions on the device, basically makes the phone useless with the exception of looking at it and using apps on it that don’t require a mobile or wireless network to be functional.

Have others run into the same problem downtown Chicago?

Whenever I think of Android, I always go back to my childhood memories of Lt. Commander Data, the first positronic Android to serve in StarFleet.