Tag Archive: voip


Rebtel and other discoveries

Rebtel is the rockin’ most service I’ve used this week/month/year. I think. I can’t say enough good things about it. And this morning they even gave me an hour of free calling to India (the country I call most often with that service) for filling out a little “are you satisfied” survey. Who can say no, eh? But I think I’ve spent about… 20€ with Rebtel and talked about the same amount to India as July. In July my international charges with Elisa exceeded 500€. Whoops (you’d think they’d warn ya).

Now that Liigapörssi is pretty much out there, I’m not staying up late-at-night programming my arse off (for IS), but instead delivering on other projects, including but not limited to projects relating to the web-services of my own companies. I finally fixed a CSS bug at CNM Ltd, got Seven Poles website up, made some changes and fixes to Hostenz, Seqeuro (and the payment systems) and Zamekrasy, got a website up for Ville (in Finnish, I won’t link to the dev version, but it will go here), started on the Fushigi and new Mochan sites for Anna… and now I just have to continue on this road to finish everything. Next in line is Fingeekit (I’m actually going to change the service completely from 24/7 computer service – boring – to something else similar but not the same), not to mention of course SoftwareAL (which will actually get a new, better fitting name, because the software is no-longer strictly about education).

So what else was I going to talk about? Oh yes, Fortumo. Forumo is a premium SMS service provider to the baltics and, oddly enough, China. In Finland (and I imagine the rest of Scandinavia, in particular) these things where you send an SMS for some kind of information or an entry in to a prize draw are rather popular. I’m planning to capitalize on that – right now it’s a matter of 1. making sure my offering is, in fact, appropriate and 2. integrating it in such a way that it actually works for me instead of… not.

Liigapörssi makes use of this kind of thing to purchase “trades” (effectively a trade allows you to buy and sell the players on your imaginary hockey team and shift them around and such), and I managed to assist in connecting Drupal (the core of all my web development projects for the last couple of years) to Steam (formerly FlyerOne) even though the documentation was out-dated and there were a few other issues – but it seems to work now so thats cool. For those that are interested, the other payment option I worked heavily with on this is Verkkomaksut. I wonder if I could integrate those in to…. hmmm… ideas forming.

Anyway, this blag starts to get convoluted and boring so I’ll stop now, since I really am starting to run out of ideas to talk about… and I think no-one wants me to start on my personal life, do they? I thought not.

‘Till next time.

Masa

Fring. It rocks. Get it.

Fring rocks. I must have wanted to download it to my old Nokia 6151, but forgot about it… anyway, now I’ve got the Nokia E51. Anyway, they sent me an email to say it is ready for my device through some special Java port, but found its natively supported on the E51, so I downloaded it.

Now, I mentioned that Fring rocks, I should probably say why.

It replaces EQO in that it allows me my MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, AIM etc on my mobile BUT, what makes it rock even more is that it also supports Skype: in and out. Now, given that I have a 2Mbit connection to my mobile with Elisa (and unlimited data), this means that I don’t even have to call my Skype to Go number anymore, unless I’m out in the middle of nowhere.

I can just use 3.5G data access, and it seems to handle SkypeIn nicely, which is great, since I have 3 SkypeIn numbers on my normal Skype account (Finland, New Zealand and Japan). It doesn’t yet replace Gizmo though, because Gizmo also allows a Tokyo local number, which, for people in Tokyo, is cheaper to call. I think. But the SkypeIn number for Japan is 050 (VOIP), so I guess it costs about the same as calling a mobile. But depending on my Audience for GoSuomi, I’m not sure if it is worth the extra cash for renting the phone number per year from Gizmo – unless, of course, I have one number in Japan for CNM Ltd and another for Seven Poles Ltd.

So then I would have 2 Japan numbers, an NZ number and a Finnish number (plus mobile). If I could be fucked working with US clients anymore, I would also get a US number, but since the US Dollar sucks, I don’t really have much motivation to work with them. Speaking of which, I should update my Japan number… but yeah. There is now NO excuse for people not to be able to contact me: All these phone numbers, IM, Skype, and IMAP to my phone for my main email accounts plus the Gmail app!

Now that I think about it, I should chain the phone to my person!! If you have a relatively new phone, seriously, check out Fring. I just got a 110€ phone bill from Elisa (I talked about 1000 minutes MORE than my plan is for, plus international calling… but it’s still far less than my bills from Sonera – I was paying about that much for FAR less usage. Just a pity that Sonera is the carrier for the iPhone in Finland :S)

Rock on… I’m going to see how Fring affects my battery usage – Jaiku had an apparent detrimental effect when I left it on one time a couple of weeks back, though I may also have spent quite a lot of time talking so… can’t be sure. Need a second battery. I’ll report back in the comments.

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