First lets talk about what Skype is, if you already know skip this one.  Skype is a computer program that allows you to make voice over IP (VOIP) calls for free.  You download the program, you friend downloads the program, and you have a voice/video/chat/data connection for free.  Think AIM but on steroids.  You can buy phone head sets for Skype that allow you to walk around your house and talk like you are on a normal home phone but they are around $100.

Next, lets talk about Skype’s new contract plans.  Before, Skype was a free computer to computer service.  Then they allowed for such features as “Call Out” where you could call from computer to a land/mobile phone for a low rate per minute.  Then they added “Call In” or “On-line Number” where a person could call a number and get your Skype account.  Neat.  Now though, they have calling plans.  So starting at $2.95 a month, you can call out to any land line or mobile phone in the U.S.  for unlimited minutes.  WOW.  You can call from your computer (or Skype phone device) to any US land line for just $2.95 a month!? That’s great! But it gets better!

With the Skype App for the iPhone, you no longer need to be at your computer, or use a separate device.  You can load the app and call any of your contacts on the iPhone (US of course) for $2.95.  So if you have a home wifi router with broadband Internet, pretty much what you have is unlimited home calling for a small monthly fee.  If you start running low on mobile anytime minutes, you can just use Skype when your at home.

This setup rivals the T-Moble at Home service which requires that you buy a specific wireless router because with the iPhone you can use it anywhere you get Wifi (or if you jail break the iPhone you can use this over 3G, Edge).  Additionally, the T-Mobile service costs $9.99 a month in addition to the $65+ router and again, its only at your home.

Verizon doesn’t offer anything like this because Verizon is run by chimps.  They charge for every megabyte of data and don’t have any phones to my knowledge with Wifi connectivity.  To do this with Verizon would cost you more in data overages than the headache is worth.  For more information on why Verizon is the next Titanic/Enron/Worldcom, read my last post.

So that’s the deal.  Get an iPhone, get Skype, make unlimited Wifi VOIP calls for just $2.95 and save your rollover minutes for when you really need them! No more overages!

First and foremost lets talk about multi touch.  The iPhone has it, the BBStorm does not.  The storm can not recognize simultaneous touches or gestures which means no zoom pinch.  They tried to imitate multi touch with a single touch interface for functions such as scrolling, but the BBStorm is clunky and clumsy.  Its interface lags and doesn’t respond as crisply as the iPhone.  The layout is also counter intuitive and the shiny screen you see on the ads only extends about three options deep into the UI.  Once you select and icon, and then select another option, you are into a screen that looks just like the old BB interface which is just text.  Nothing is where it should be and everything is hard to find.

Next, WiFi.  Now I can’t speak for other service providers but I know that with Verizon based BBStorms there is no Wifi access on at your home.  This is the deal breaker.  Its laughable.  They don’t really mention on the commercials that the BBStorm has NO Wifi connectivity and that if you want to browse the web or get over the air sync functionality, you will need to drop another $50/month for 5GB of data bandwidth. (You could opt for 2GB for $39 but that’s just dumb).  With the iPhone, for $30 a month you get UNLIMITED data over the tower and you connect to your home Wifi for free unlimited data at higher speeds than 3G.

The BBStorm, is indeed a lame horse.  Save yourself the headache and get a phone that actually works the way it should, go get the iPhone.

A few days after I made the switch I received three calls with no voice mails. I thought it might just be some random telemarketer but decided to call the number back and it turned out to be Verizon. They wanted to know if the switch had gone okay. It struck me as funny that they would call just to make sure I was all right switching to AT&T, like great smiley customer service was going to convince me to break a two year contract and come back to their dismal service. I asked if there was a problem with my bill and he assured me there was no outstanding charges, as I was on auto payment. The call ended.

Two days after the call, I received a $143 bill from Verizon. I called them immediately and found out that when I split my family plan with my brother, they had entered me into a one year contract when I agreed to their terms of service over the phone. My problem with this is simple, they never sent me a paper document telling me this so it was up to my fading memory to remember that was said and furthermore, they had not made it transparent to the Best Buy representative that I was in contract so he told me I wasn’t. Had I known that I was 2 months away from being out of contract, I would have waited and avoided the charge. It makes sense right?

Well the Verizon rep. thought it made sense too and promised to have a manager call me back and sort it out. A manager did call me, but she didn’t sort it out. After an hour on the phone, all she could do is reduce the charge from $141 to $120 which is the minimum early termination fee. The fee that Verizon charges, unlike AT&T is not pro-rated. Verizon says that it is prorated but its not. Let me explain.

If you are an AT&T customer, and you sign a two year contract and cancel that contract after one year, they charge you half of the early termination fee. Half of the contract, half of the fee. Verizon on the other hand, only “pro-rates” five dollars per month. So if you cancel your Verizon contract after one year, they take $60 dollars off, which is not half of $180, its one third. That’s also a two year, in my case I had a one year contract, so even though I was 10 months into a 12 month contract, they still wanted me to pony up $140 of the original $180. Bull.

Well, to make a long story slightly less long, at the end of the phone call with the first manager, she said, “Is there anything else I can help you with today sir?” which is directly off the script, to which I replied “You can give my money back.” Surprisingly, she told me that if I found the representative from Best Buy who told me I was out of contract and had them call customer service, they would waive the fee. IDIOT! Why did you tell me that when we started!?

The next day, I called Best Buy, and found the person. Here is the catch though. They called Verizon, and they told me that Verizon said that they couldn’t refund the charge because it had already cleared and was no longer pending. Basically, we can’t give him his money back, because we already have it.

I called Verizon again to see what was up. Talked to another associate and she was no help. She said that a manager would call me back in ten minutes and one never has called back. If you deal with Verizon long enough, you will notice this trend of employees seeking to end problems by saying a person will call you back and that person never will. I have had this happen three other times with Verizon with different issues. When I called back I got another manager and she was no help. I was in my car and couldn’t really hear her but the gist of the conversation was, you have reached the end of the line and your not getting your money back.

I did get my money back. I went to Bank of America and they, as of now, have taken the fund back from Verizon for me. It is temporary so they could change their mind, but for now, I am winning. I would like to thank Bank of America, NOT VERIZON, for solving this problem with a strong assist from Best Buy. The employee and the manager of the Best Buy were great. Even though I didn’t buy anything from their store, they were advocating for me and said that had I bought the plan from them that they would have given me a refund for the charge of Verizon to make me happy. That, is AMAZING customer service because they realize that I have better things to do than make up stories about some crappy charge and that it really was an error of the company.

Do yourself a favor and learn from my experience. Verizon will screw you every chance they get for every penny you have. Stay away from their wireless plans, stay away from their mobile Internet plans. Their customer service is crap. The will not return your calls. They do not provide representatives last names or extensions so every time you call you will have to explain yourself again and their is zero accountability for associates who don’t follow through with their promises. Lastly, I would like to share one comment at the end of the phone call with the second manager. Again, reading from the script, she said, “Thank you for calling Verizon and we appreciate your business” to which I replied, “Because of crappy service like this, YOU NO LONGER HAVE MY BUSINESS.”

NuevaSync is a free web service that is here to help you make your iPhone into an even more productive device. NuevaSync sets up your Gmail contacts and calendar to get pushed to your iPhone like a Microsoft Exchange Server type system that large companies use to push their email to employees. With this account set up, you can sync mail, contacts, and calendars over the air to your device.

Apple has not opened the iPhone iCal sync with any calendars other than iCal and Outlook. So you used to either need a Mac or a copy of Microsoft Office / Outlook 2007 to take advantage of the calendar sync feature. So if you’re using Google Calendars or Mozilla Sunbird than you’re out of luck unless you set up your account at NuevaSync.

Apple has opened the iPhone to plug sync with Apple’s Address Book, Microsoft Outlook, and Windows Address Book. This is a great feature, but NuevaSync takes it to the next level with over the air completely instant wireless syncing to Google Contacts. Create a contact on your iPhone and less than a minute later its in your Google Contacts.

This feature, combined with another iPhone app called FEx (Friend Exchange) allows you to do the impossible, export and sync your Facebook phone book contacts to your phone and computer. Facebook doesn’t allow you to export your friend list as an address book because they want to keep your account in the event another service pops up. Using the Fex program and an iPhone, you are able to export data from contacts who match your iPhone contacts, download their photos, and numbers, and then when those contacts are downloaded to the iPhone NuevaSync will wireless sync updates Google Contacts.

I’ve set up my account and worked out some of the kinks to get my calendars and contacts synced perfectly.

The Story: Facebook Events > Google Calendar

I have a lot of events on Facebook that I want to see on my iPhone but there is no easy way. My solution was to export my events feed and import it into Google Calendar and then use NuevaSync push it to my iPhone.

The Glitch: Facebook Event Sync

The glitch with this was the Facebook calendar is set in Pacific time, and Google Calendar was set to Eastern time. This made all my events from Facebook appear in my Google calendar 3 hours later than their actual time. For events ending near midnight, they end at 3 am, which spans two days.

The work around:

First thing to do is to set your timezone to Pacific in Google Calendar and change all of your other events. Because you can control the times of your events, but the Facebook calendar is read only, it works. This worked for me because all of my other events were repeated events such as classes. I could easily go to the first event and change the time and apply the time change to all the other events. If all of my events were appointments not set in series, this would be very time consuming.

The Glitch: Google Ghost Contacts

I had about 800 contacts in my Google account. When I set up NuevaSync, I decided that I only really needed about 171. I deleted all the ones I didn’t want and like magic, my iPhone list was also down to 171. A few hours later, however, the list on both Google and the iPhone was back up to 800. My contacts had mysteriously come back to Google and then my iPhone.

The Work Around:

To make this stop, I first turned the iPhone settings for NuevaSync to not sync and thus erase all my iPhone contacts. It did. Then I logged into my online NuevaSync account settings for the iPhone and turned the Contact Sync off. Then I went into Google and imported a file of the 171 contacts I wanted and deleted the other 500 or so contacts. I gave all of these settings about a half hour to marinate and think about what they had done before turning NuevaSync online and iPhone sync settings back to active. It has been about 28 hours with out a reappearance of the ghost contacts.

I am currently trying to get a resume template for Microsoft Word 2007 on a Mac. Not only can I not automatically get the template which should be included, I am also not able to get the template through Microsoft’s Office download center because the download requires Microsoft ActiveX which is equally hard to install. Don’t try searching the Microsoft ActiveX download because you won’t get any valid results.

I’ve had similar experiences trying to help people with Windows Vista. I have a lot of experience working with computers. I am what some call tech savy which means I can partition hard drives, have an iPhone, and have installed Linux multiple times just for fun. I am a geek, and I have a hard time working with Windows, so I have no idea how normal people can do it.

I find Vista to be impossibly incoherent and lacking intuitive features. Furthermore, it’s more frustrating than XP Home, bulkier, slower, and more complicated. The Vista release represents zero improvement from XP unless you’re impressed by semi-transparent windows, fuzzy off focus windows, and the round start button.

So here is the deal, you have two alternatives to Windows Vista. The first alternative is to not buy it. Do not support Microsoft by buying a piece of useless software and buy a Mac. The commercials pitting PC vs Mac understate the incompetence at Microsoft. Your second alternative is in my opinion the best alternative because its free. Take your PC and install Linux Ubuntu. It’s the easiest to use version of Linux I have ever used and with version 8 you can install it on your PC inside windows and un-install it if you’re not satisfied. Yes Linux can be a pain to use and is very techie, but by no means is it any more frustrating than Vista.

The loop hole story starts with a free app called Fring, available in the App store.  Once downloaded, this App will let you make voice over ip (VOIP) calls to other computers for free using very run of the mill instant messenger technology.  You maybe have even used this before by placing a ‘call’ to a friend over AIM, Skype, or Google Talk.  The problem is that sitting at a computer to make calls over your speakers or headset is a bit geeky. With this program you can make that same transaction but on your end, you’re using your iPhone.  Slightly less geeky.

Now, here comes the really cool part.

Recently, Skype started offering a plan where in you can pay one flat monthly rate of $3 and talk to land / mobile phones for unlimited minutes for free over Wifi or 3G.  This means that if you have a Skype account you can make regular calls to any domestic mobile or land line for $3/month.

I know what you’re thinking right now… Why would I pay that money when I can just make regular calls over the air with AT&T? Well, the difference being the unlimited part.  It’s unlimited to any line or network.  Lets give a hypothetical situation:

Chris has an iPhone with AT&T.  He pays $69 a month for the basic plan and gets only 450 anytime minutes with unlimited nights, weekends, and data.  Chris talks to his GF for the first half of the month a lot and on the 15th of December noticed that his anytime minutes were running low.  Here he is faced with a conundrum.  Either stop talking to Gloria Girlfriend, or pay $0.45 for every minute he goes over.

But wait! What is this! Chris installs Fring for free, pays $3 for unlimited Skype calling, and he can now call his girlfriend over the 3G network as much as he wants without worrying about overage charges! Heck! He could even use this program and keep all of his anytime minutes in the bank!

Now if only AT&T would allow us to purchase a reduced price 3G data only plan for $15/month.  Then we could make unlimited calls for a grand total of $18/month anywhere we get cell service.

Any of these three scenarios could be you and have been me.  I’m a tech savvy and organized person yet my contacts are a mess.  I have yet to find a piece of software to serve as an end all solution for contact management.  Though I will say that I have had more success with the free solutions over the paid.

There are three big problems that I see with software today; usability, categorization, and conflict resolution.  The paid and free versions both have major short comings in conflict resolution.  Take this case study for example.

One thing that I absolutely hate about most contact software but really love about Apple is usability.  Apple’s contact software has a great feature that collapses unused fields when viewing contact summaries.  So if you have one contact with only one point of data, you don’t have to view the one hundred empty points of data in the file.  This makes getting the information you need quick and easy.  As a side note, Apple is one of the only companies to use a photo for the contact that isn’t a headache.  Apple also lets you add fields as you need them unlike many other programs that have fields for multiple items which you never use but are still forced to see.

I have a client who has approximately 7,000 contacts in his database and like mine, they’re are a mess.  There are provisions in the software to sort for friends, family, and business but they are weak at best and really are only effective if you check the boxes when the contacts are created. There is no streamlined way to go through the contacts after and sort them by category like family and business. This is further exasperated by the fact that Outlook actually has two contact programs, phone book and contact list, which do not communicate with each other.  They are completely separate and really frustrating because you never know if you filed the contact under the list or the book. Needless to say, categorization could use some work.

Facebook is the solution.  The brilliant thing about facebook is that you can actually find people on Facebook.  People manage their own contact information so its always current. If you need to send someone a message but their email has changed, it doesn’t matter.  Facebook has taken a lot of heat about distracting employees in the workplace but I think thats a bum wrap.  Facebook, when used responcibly, is an effective tool for maintaining contact relationships. You don’t need a number or email address to find a person, just their name.  Doesn’t sound like a big deal but I know of people who have 3 email addresses and I myself have about 7.  I’m constantly opening and closing accounts and if I didn’t have a Facebook profile, it would be impossible to keep with friends who do the same.

I imagine that fax machines were really amazing when their hay day. Can you imagine what people must have thought when the first digitally teleported documents over the phone line? I bet it paralleled the moment cave men discovered fire. It was in innovation that revolutionized document transfers and for this reason, many people still hang on to them.

Unfortunately for the fax machine, the increased speed of the Internet combined with affordable flatbed scanners spells doom in big letters.

The three big problems with the fax machine is their temperamental nature, the need for the receiving fax to be active, and the need of an additional phone line. I’ve been working on an all in one fax and it’s tricky at best. Trouble shooting and diagnostic requires a friend with a fax who can send you text faxes. To send a fax requires that the recipient has their fax in working order. A lot of faxes I’ve sent have not been received because the fax was off for the night. Lastly, most people get a dedicated fax line which carries a monthly service charge.

Solution, send your faxes as scanned documents attached to emails. That way the recepient can open them when they choose, you know it will be recurved, and you don’t have to waste anymore money on dedicated phone lines. Another great advantage of not having a fax is that people won’t think you’re a geezer for having an obsolete office relic from the 90′s.

Ubuntu: Need a computer for your small business? Maybe a few? Maybe they are running Windows 2003 and it stinks big time but you don’t want to / can’t upgrade to Vista.  XP is no longer sold and even if it was it would set you back a pretty penny for your computer(s).  Download Ubuntu, a free Linux based Operating System and cut your overhead.  Its very intuitive if you’ve ever used Windows XP, you can use Ubuntu.

Drupal: How about a fancy website? There are a lot of open source website management systems but Drupal (http://www.drupal.org) is by far my favorite.   Its open source as you may have guessed and is currently undergoing rapid development.  It has a ton of features which I could talk about but the most important one for the small business is the e-commerce module.  Download the module, upload to the correct directory, and you can have an e-comm website set up in a day or two if you are a novice.  There is a wealth of documentation to help you out.

OpenOffice: If you just downloaded Ubuntu for your computer, you wont need to download OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org) because Ubuntu ships with it. Open office is an office suit that replicates all of the functions of Microsoft office yet its free.  There are equivalents for PowerPoint, Word, Access, and Excel. You can set up all your cubes to run OpenOffice and save a bundle on licenses.  Now that’s what I call cutting your overhead!

Mozilla: Many people have heard of Mozilla’s (http://www.firefox.com) hit browser Firefox, but how many have tried Sunbird or Thunderbird? Sunbird is a robust calendar program that has many diverse features.  It will allow you to track appointments easily.  Thunderbird is a great Microsoft Outlook alternative that has all of the same features but additionally it has 1000+ awesome because its open source.

Between all of these programs, you have a basic office workstation up and running with out spending a dime on software! Beat that Microsoft! I will remind you however, that even though all this software is free to download, it does have a cost.  Developers really like it when you tell them about any bugs you experience, and they also really like it when you donate to the cause.  Once your firm gets on its feet, send them a fat check out of appreciation for helping you start your startup.