Web Worker Daily

For mobile workers, it’s hard to beat the freedom and flexibility Internet telephony provides us.  One of our favorite web services, GrandCentral, gives you the ability to have one phone number that can ring an assortment of phones including your mobile, landline, office phone, and any other place you’d like to be reached.

Additionally, there are those who embrace the utility of a soft phone.  A soft phone is an application that runs on your computer and allows you to send or receive phone calls, normally through a microphone headset.  Skype is probably the most well known soft phone, but a competitor of theirs called Gizmo5 (formerly known as Gizmo Project) can be combined with GrandCentral to give you soft phone capabilities.

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Orange, the mobile arm of France Telecom, is marketing affordable plans to make it easy for you to use your mobile phone while traveling to some European countries.

When traveling abroad, travelers who want to take their mobile phones along for connectivity feel the sting with high roaming charges while overseas.  This is especially true with data enabled smartphones, as many European carriers charge by the kilobyte, where in the United States we are used to paying a flat rate for data usage.

Orange is offering a voice plan called Favourite Countries, whereby customers are charged an upfront monthly fee of 4 Euros with no hidden or additional charges.  Then, usage charges accrue at a low per minute rate depending on which country you’ve chosen.  For example, Orange France customers will pay 0.37 Euros per minute vs. the normal rate of 0.59 Euros.  Currently this offer is valid in France and Romania.  Later this summer, it will be extended to the UK, Spain, Belgium, Slovakia, and Switzerland.

As for a data plan, Orange offers their Travel Data Daily plan which involves paying a flat up front fee for affordable data roaming.  The plan costs 12-15 Euros for 50Mb of daily Internet usage within the European Union.  The plan is being rolled out in the UK, France, Spain, Poland, Belgium, and Romania.

Orange, while perhaps unfamiliar to Americans, is a major European mobile carrier that has 172 million subscribers over 5 continents.

How do you stay in touch when traveling abroad?  Do you use pre-paid SIM cards or does this type of plan from Orange offer you the most benefit?

Tungle, the meeting coordination web service we covered in February, has made it easier to coordinate meetings with your more mobile colleagues. The newly announced BlackBerry optimized mobile website features the Tungle web service, specially formatted for the BlackBerry’s screen.  After the meeting has been scheduled and finalized, the BlackBerry userwill recieve a specialized invite for use on their BlackBerry Calendar.

The BlackBerry optimized website is joined by an Outlook plug-in in an effort by Tungle to make usage as easy as possible.  Users can now schedule meetings with Tungle either through Tungle’s website in a conventional browser, use the Outlook plug-in, or using the BlackBerry site.

Have you ever been in a meeting involving collaboration around a whiteboard, sketched up brilliant ideas or diagrams on the whiteboard, only to have to erase it at the end?  Or perhaps you’ve wanted to permanently preserve a hand-written note or quickly scan a printed document, without a scanner?  Qipit aims to give those with either a digital camera or mobile phone featuring a mobile scanner a quick option for document scanning and retention.

Qipit works by taking the photo on either your camera or camera phone and loading it into their web service.  The image file can be sent to Qipit as either a multimedia message (MMS), mobile email, attached to an email from your PC, or loaded into their service using their website.  When Qipit receives the file, they quickly turn it into either a jpeg or Adobe Acrobat PDF file.

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When you think of what values you seek from co-workers, colleagues, and clients, punctuality is probably one that wouldn’t immediately come to mind. Being web workers, parents, co-workers, spouses and just about every other role you can imagine, we have many demands for our attention and sometimes these time frames overlap.

Being punctual shows those with whom you interact that:

• You care.  Being on time shows you give importance to the meeting or task you’ve agreed to.
• You’re competent.  If you’re late to a meeting or function, your client will wonder about your ability to complete the potential task that you two are meeting about.
• You’re accountable.  If you are consistently late, you will have a more difficult developing trust in those who want to interact with you.  When you arrive behind schedule, the person may be harboring an instant grudge against your tardiness, whether they visibly show it or not.

Now that we’ve established the reasons that punctuality is necessary and can be an edge in business, how do you ensure you’ll be on time on a more regular basis?

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When planning a vacation, it’s hard to find good information on the web.  UpTake, now out of private beta, tries to help with that process by assessing keywords and returning user comments from across the web to help you find great travel destinations based on your preferences.

UpTake aggregates information from Expedia, TripAdvisor, and Yahoo Travel.  The website crawls these sites (along with other travel niche sites) and returns user generated travel spot reviews for spots throughout the United States. UpTake provides information on hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions, and suggestions for things to do.

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Web Worker Daily readers are likely familiar with GrandCentral, a service that gives you a single phone number that can ring multiple phones including your office, cellular phone, and home number simultaneously.

However, if you’ve ever thought it would be nice to read your voicemails either in as a text message or email, PhoneTag has a service in mind for you.  With this add-on PhoneTag service, you can have all your phones ring at the same time, and if you call goes to voicemail - ready your voicemail through PhoneTag.

These voicemail to text services have been around for quite some time, but before this integration between PhoneTag and GrandCentral, you had to choose between the two services. No more.

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A common misnomer about Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is that it requires you to be using a headset, tethered to your computer.  This is simply untrue as modern VoIP services and solutions use either a) normal corded and cordless phones or b) a specialized phone that resembles a cordless phone or cell phone - just modified to utilized VoIP technology.

VoIP has some major advantages over traditional landline phones. First, typically you can call phones in the US and Canada for one monthly flat rate.  Also, international calls can be made very cheaply.  Included services with your flat rate service include: call waiting, call forwarding, online enabled voice mail, CallerID, and many more.  Whereas conventional phone companies charge you individually for each of these services, VoIP providers give them to you for one flat rate.

Where do you begin if you’d like to use your broadband connection to lower your phone bill dramatically?  Lets walk through some of the options.

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