Web Worker Daily

Even though corporate telecommuters can leave the sterile cloth walls of their cubicles, they can’t escape the long arm of the conference call. This means that corporations launching a telecommuting program need to carefully consider how their remote workers will communicate via telephone. There are several choices:

• VoIP
• Plain Old Telephone Systems (POTS)
• Mobile
• Hybrid

It’s important that remote workers have a business line that rings separately from their home phone. This post is going to look at these options for corporate telecommuters.

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Blackberry Pearl Flip

Editor’s note: With this post we welcome Rachel Murray to the WebWorkerDaily team. Rachel has been building web sites for more than 10 years, and currently manages the online presence of a nonprofit in the Boston area.

I’ve only made the transition from a “regular” mobile phone to a smartphone recently. I had been able to hold off up until now, but then the trusty Razr that I had for three glorious years just gave up on me. After a heart-to-heart with the sales rep at T-Mobile, “we” agreed that perhaps I should try the BlackBerry Pearl Flip for the new contract price of $50 (as opposed to the Razr for $20). I didn’t want to be a slave to yet another device, but he showed it to me, and it actually looked like a regular phone. Read the rest of this entry »

Small business owners are always looking for smart ways to keep costs down while achieving useful practicality.  Whether it’s running a business from your home office to avoid renting an office or completing administrative tasks sometimes best outsourced to a hired hands, business owners seek balance in profitability and efficiently running their businesses.

Additionally, US cellular service providers over the last few months have been rolling out “unlimited plans” that offer an unlimited bucket of minutes for one flat monthly rate.  In most cases, $99 a month will give you unlimited chatters a way to talk all you want.  Sprint’s plan is very attractive because it includes unlimited voice, data, and SMS.

However, T-Mobile put a new spin on the unlimited plan by offering an unlimited family plan.  For example, if you have a $99 T-Mobile unlimited plan, you can add additional lines for just $49/month that will include unmetered national voice minutes, SMS, MMS, and instant messaging.

Small business owners may not know this, but this “Family” plan is not only usable by those who share genetic bonds.  This is applicable to small business because for about $250 (not including taxes), you can have unlimited wireless minutes to run your business with.  This type of value makes the offering very competitive and could be comparable to Internet telephony (VoIP) offerings.  However, the beauty of this T-Mobile unlimited family plan is that you have access to your minutes no matter where your cell phone happens to be.

For more information about the new plans, see T-Mobile’s website.

Would you consider running your small business on cell phones?  What tradoffs can you think of?

According to Webcredible, a usability and accessibility consultancy, the most requested mobile service respondents wanted on their data-enabled mobile phones was email.

This is really of no surprise that 33% of respondents stated email was their most needed mobile utility. There are many reasons to have a data enabled mobile phone such as: keeping up to date with your schedule, supporting your social life, and being able to check traffic when driving to a meeting; but when it comes to getting business done, email is still where the rubber meets the road.

This also explains one possible reason that since the iPhone was released, it’s been the number 2 smartphone, behind Research in Motion’s BlackBerry. Road warriors use technology to enable us work from anywhere, and BlackBerry is simply made for email.

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