VoIP Tech Chat

Free has a price, and it’s usually subjecting ourselves to marketing based on the magic numbers games.

Here at VoipTechChat(.com!) we don’t (as of this writing, but things change…) have any paid advertising on the site, and have abandoned AdWords, since it’s giving away real estate and not getting a lot of value. While we are open to targeted advertising (if you have a phone to sell, we are available to pitch it!), we appreciate that generic revolving text ads aren’t super valuable to anyone.

Today I started noticing the heavy addition of leading ads in my YouTube videos and I realized a critical feature all ads should share, and very few do: Read the rest of this entry »

When my little girl went from being a benign, unmoving lump of sleeping, drooling baby to a terroristic unplugging, biting, chewing, eating, swallowing, gagging, breaking, pulling, tugging beast of a toddler, my home decor changed. When we moved into our excessive 4 bed / 2.5 bath home in 2007, we had dreams. We had a guest room, and a Disney room, and my home office taking up about 25% of the under A/C space. When the beast began terrorizing our home, we retreated into a fallback position and isolated her to the safest room in the house, my former office. I was relegated to Read the rest of this entry »

Good things come to those who wait…to cancel. On the heels of the “announcement” that Verizon Wireless will be doubling their early termination fees, I found myself considering how commerce and service has changed. As I have mentioned in our previous chats, I pay some $400+ a month for my extended family and I to have Verizon Wireless. Every month I give Verizon about $400, and on top of that, have spent over $2,000 on phones and another $500 on applications, ring tones, and content (that’s phone specific — if I buy a new phone, I get to buy new applications, ring tones, and content).

Businesses routinely (and almost exclusively) employ “short-timers” for their front line contacts — people that work at most six to twelve months answering phones, then move to another company. Customer service itself seems to follow the same pattern of always looking six to twelve months ahead, and making all judgements on a short-term basis. Have you been a great customer for 10 years? Who cares. What have you paid us lately? Read the rest of this entry »

The structural faults, many of them legacies of the 1980s, represent once-in-a-lifetime dislocations that will take years to work out. Among them: the job drought, the debt hangover, the defense-industry contraction, the savings and loan collapse, the real estate depression, the health-care cost explosion and the runaway federal deficit. “This is a sick economy that won’t respond to traditional remedies,” said Norman Robertson, chief economist at Pittsburgh’s Mellon Bank. “There’s going to be a lot of trauma before it’s over.”

America’s structural burdens have hit home most profoundly in terms of jobs. The U.S. workplace is “in a profound, historic state of turmoil that for millions of individuals is approaching panic,” according to labor consultant Dan Lacey, publisher of the newsletter Workplace Trends.

The latest recession has hit white-collar workers particularly hard, both in terms of layoffs and slippage in their real wages. “These people can’t believe what is happening to them,” says Illinois opinion pollster Mike McKeon. “They decided they didn’t want to work in factories, so they learned how to use computers. They were rewarded with service-sector jobs[...], but now they’re out on the street and no one wants them.” Open season has been declared on corporate bureaucrats. “The middle manager has gone out of vogue in corporate America,” says Lacey. “Indeed, the word manager is the kiss of death on resumes.” Read the rest of this entry »