Skype’s login service is down.

Other than a brief post:

Some of you may have problems signing in to Skype – we’re investigating, and we’re sorry for the disruption to your conversations

Our engineers and site operations team are working non-stop to get things back to normal – thanks for your continued patience

What are we doing to help? Our engineers are creating new ‘mega-supernodes’ as fast as they can, which should gradually return things to normal. This may take a few hours, and we sincerely apologise for the disruption to your conversations.

Tropo Go Global

Tropo, a voice application platform, announced yesterday availability of local numbers in more than 40 countries. Tropo previously had offered local numbers limited to the United States, but now launched the program internationally.

Need to test an app that makes calls? Those have been 100% free in development for calls to US numbers. We’re expanding that support internationally as well. In addition to the free calls to US mobiles and landlines that you’ve always had, our developer program now supports free calling to landlines in 17 other countries.

Although SMS may still be limited to US numbers, the availability of International local numbers to developers makes testing voice applications incredibly easy and affordable (as in free).

More information can be obtained directly from their release announcement.

You know, Levent-Levi’s 50+ non-Top blogs actually feature some of our must read blogs. We’re listed along with Michael Graves, Dave Michels, and even Jeff Pulver (all required reading).

About Tsahi Levent-Levi

Tsahi Levent-Levi is a seasoned product manager and system architect at RADVISION. His experience includes product management and development, project management, with a strong background in development and management of complex VoIP projects. Tsahi currently manages a wide range of VoIP and 3G client products, which enjoy significant market share in the industry.

Anyway, as we were saying… every now and then you just need to go ahead and make a change. After all, it was the greatest musical act of all time that told us:

When it’s time to change, then its time to change
Don’t fight the tide, come along for the ride, don’t you see
When it’s time to change, you’ve got to rearrange

Yes, that group was The Brady Bunch. Peter, Greg, Marsha, Bobby, Cindy, and Jan were right. When it’s time to change you’ve got to rearrange.

Today, we rearranged our site. Nothing crazy. In fact the only really crazy aspect is the homage to Mr. Ben Affleck. If Ben Franklin is the patron saint of VoIP Tech Chat (and he is) then Mr. Ben Affleck is, well he’s just the baddest man in the whole town.

Thanks for reading.

Atlas heard about this venture and shrugged...(cause he had the whooooole world....)

I was introduced to a fun little “tool” today: Find the shortest route between two Wikipedia articles.

The first thing I tried was an analysis of the path from Death to VoIP, and I discovered Death to VoIP takes a direct path through my hometown of Chattanooga, TN. So then I became concerned with my own mortality, and found:

• Patrick’s path to death is via Christianity.

If I am going , I want to know about Fred:

• Fred’s path to death is via marriage.

From Patrick to Fred is just a simple set of name shuffles:

• Patrick -> Rick -> Fredrick -> Fred

Fred to Patrick is a little more complex, and involves Spongebob Squarepants.

For the wealth-minded:

• Rags to Riches requires a path through Boston, MA.

And the often inquired about connection betwen VoIP and Ben Affleck?

• VoIP -> Caribbean -> Turks and Caicos Islands -> Ben Affleck

Turns out anything can be connected via wikipedia…try it! Leave comments on the ones we might find funny!

Comcast...Cares?

I am leaving you this note on the fridge because I can’t bear to face you.  I can’t bear seeing the look in your eyes when I tell you that it’s over. This off again, on again blamefest has come to an end. I was always there to support you financially, but you never reciprocated with the kind of love, the kind of consistency I needed in my life.

This isn’t easy for me. As I close this chapter in the book that is yet to be finished, I know I will look back on our times together with some hints of fondness. I am sure we will cross paths again, someday. I hope that we can smile, exchange greetings, show each other a base level of respect and courtesy.

I have taken the liberty of leaving all of your things at your office, so, aside from this note, this is goodbye.

Or is it…

After ten years of intermittent service, five of which were served in exile between Ohio and Orlando, my often tumultuous relationship with Comcast has come to an end. I now enjoy EPB‘s fiber service with 30mb up/down, and I have yet to experience an outage in my first three months of service. It just works, and works well.

When I called today to cancel my Comcast service, I was informed of a vague and unwritten rule that I would have to continue paying for service for another seven days.

Tip of the day for anyone out there in the business world:

The goodbye is your last, great chance to have a happy customer.

This is it. If you don’t make this customer happy at the cancellation, you have failed. EVERY company has an opportunity when a customer requests termination of service to perform this last great act.

1. Always ask what you could have done better to retain the customer, expect to get some angry responses here.
2. Always be appreciative of the feedback you received, it is priceless.
3. Always close the interaction with an open invitation to return, if possible.

Especially in the VoIP world, where margins are thin and customers are picky, there is this urge to “tax” customer’s to death as they go out the door. There are subtle signs this is turning around, and it should. Much like Comcast insisting I keep and pay for an extra seven days of service, unreasonable and excessive termination fees are the last gasps of a dying machine. Losing a customer is free, if it’s producing enough revenue to help the company, your model is dead.

As with every practice in any business, if it doesn’t produce meaningful revenue and doesn’t improve the customer experience, what is the point?

UPDATE 2010/8/27: In fairness to Comcast, prior to this blog ever being posed. the @comcastcares folks from Twitter took care of the nightmare runaround my local person had given me, and they were also the only source of useful technical assistance in the last three years. Comcast’s entire hope for being around ten years from now lies in being able to scale that team, and that model.

It’s a GREAT read and I leave you with this: Magic Button. (read the article)

Related links:

• e4 Technologies
• Michael Graves on SOHO VoIP

†Yes… Wicked cool and useful. If it doesn’t meet the criteria for both, it doesn’t make his blog.

I R Eatz U R Dataz!

I love my netbook. I love my netbook so much, I have two of them (okay, one is the wife’s). Surprisingly, I managed to survive months on nothing but my netbook doing fairly intensive SQL / VoIP / Web work. The hard drive is a little slow, but the overall performance is outstanding.

When I travel, I can use Skype to video chat with the built in webcam and get great quality (both ways) for both picture and sound. It’s like a giant smart phone. It reminds me of the $1000+ “video phones” that were supposed to be the future of talking on the phone… then people realized they really didn’t want to “get pretty” to use the phone. Now, for around $250 a unit, you can have that and so much more.

Recently, my wife’s netbook gave an error on boot that had something to do with a missing windows file (system32\ntoskrnl.exe). Apparently, she’s not the only one with this issue… it seems to be quite common. Of course, as the techie/geek/nerd of the castle, it was my job to slay this dragon and I came across the only problem I have had with this magical mini machine. Not so much a problem… more like open questions to Acer.

1. To access the hard drive, you have to remove 17 screws (maybe more, I think I lost some extras), you have to remove the keyboard, you have to remove the top, you have to remove this little card on top of the mother board, this side circuit board, the motherboard. Then you slide the hard drive out, reverse. Why not put a panel on the bottom to access the hard drive directly?
2. Why can I find nothing in your documentation about Alt-F10? This is a handy mode that lets you recover the operating system to factory defaults, but I don’t see it in my Acer manual.
3. In line with question 2, Why is the only recovery option to completely reset to factory? Since this is basically a stripped version of the OS, why not offer an explorer window so I can copy files to an SD or USB drive before formatting, or just backup the user files to another partition?
4. What degree in sadism lead to the design of the three little clips that hold the keyboard in place?

All told, from error to recovered could have been done in < 30 minutes, and I HIGHLY recommend Acer products to everyone I know. From their higher-end Ferrari laptop to the humble netbook (go with XP home, Windows 7 netbook edition is crippleware garbage), I have never had a problem with their hardware or software that made me lose respect for the brand, which is saying a lot.

For More Information:

• Acer: Acer Aspire One Website
• Skype: Free PC to PC Video Calls

Truth in Caller ID Act of 2009 – Amends the Communications Act of 1934 to make it unlawful for any person in the United States, in connection with any telecommunication service or VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) service, to cause any caller identification service to transmit misleading or inaccurate caller identification information (“spoofing”) with the intent to defraud or cause harm. Prohibits construing these provisions to prevent blocking caller identification or to authorize or prohibit law enforcement or U.S. intelligence agency activities.

Interestingly, the bill provides the FCC authority to “to collect fees from the telecommunications industry sufficient to offset the cost of its regulatory program” — a cost which is estimated at $1 million dollars per year. The only exception to the proposed law appears to be for Law Enforcement purposes, however even the CBO points out that domestic violence shelters (attempting to protect the identity of spouses) may be affected by the new regulation.

Of course, as Schoolhouse Rock taught us, the next step is for the House and Senate to resolve any differences. After that, it’s up to the President to decide if this bill becomes law. After all,  it’s a long, long journey to the capital city. Today, it’s just a bill.

Additional Reading / Links of Interest

• Schoolhouse Rock: I’m Just a Bill (Schoolhouse Rock)
• S. 30:Truth in Caller ID Act of 2009 (govtrack.us)
• HR 1258, Truth in Caller ID Act of 2010 (Congressional Budget Office)
• HR 1258, Truth in Caller ID Act (Library of Congress)
• Grammar Girl: Affect Versus Effect (Grammar Girl)