If you saw Andy’s tip for bad hair days, here’s a little additional info for the gals. Check out my video blog post: girl tips for video blogging on bad hair days.

Following on Peter Csathy’s post about how he uses SightSpeed for business and personal communication, Andy shares six tips for making video calls. In a nutshell, 1) Get over it, your hairdo’s not that bad 2) Get a hat, 3) Come as you are, be comfortable, 4) Have good lighting, 5) Learn to multitask on camera, 6) Don’t worry about multitasking on camera, it’s not considered rude.

Thanks Andy!

Hi and welcome to my blog about VOIP, voice over IP, Internet phone, broadband telephone, or whatever you feel inclined to call it. This is NOT a blog about women, or even necessarily about women who use VOIP services–I mean how boring is that. I called it The VOIP Girl because well I’m a gal. And I want to write about this industry. That’s about it. What really prompted me to get going however, is the fact that there are no women commentators on this subject. I’m curious to see if my perspective will be any different.

I want to write about how consumers (that’s you and me) are doing using VOIP.  I don’t necessarily care about IPOs, who’s buying who, and all that insider industry stuff. There are tons of blogs out there talking about all that. In fact I would say that is mostly what you’ll find when you look for VOIP commentary in the blogosphere. It’s great stuff, but really I’m interested in how ordinary folks are using Vonage, Skype, Gizmo, etc., and how is the free stuff stacking up against heavy hitter paid services.

Just a phew PhoneGnome tips to pass along:

What if your Internet goes down?

Okay, like my Internet never goes down except that it DID right at the exact moment I went to make a phone call. My PhoneGnome (actually the phone connected to PhoneGnome) wasn’t giving me any dial tone. According to David Bekenmeyer, top gnome over at TelEvolution, PhoneGnome takes a few minutes to detect that Internet has disappeared. DO NOT panic. Wait a few minutes and your PhoneGnome will switch over to PSTN mode and give you dial tone.

But what’s with the Phunky Dial Tone?

If your Internet goes down and your PhoneGnome switches to PSTN mode, you’ll hear a phunky sounding dial tone, higher pitched than normal. It’s not a malfunction. You can make regular landline calls just fine. The PhoneGnome folks thought that a distinct dial tone would be helpful in alerting you to the fact that Internet calling is temporarily unavailable. If you find this feature alarming rather than reassuring, let them know. The TelEvolution support gnomes are very receptive to feedback so your ideas are welcome.

Why is there a ring delay between my PhoneGnome and the other phones in the house?

This I noticed right away. When I receive an incoming call, the upstairs phone rings twice before the PhoneGnome starts ringing. It was bizarre to hear the ringing out of sync. Almost sounded like two separate calls coming in. What’s happening is the PhoneGnome needs a bit of time to collect caller ID and other information before passing the call through. The best way to solve this is to put all your phones in the house on PhoneGnome. For $19.95, you can buy a Whole House Wiring kit that uses the Line 2 wiring to distribute PhoneGnome features to all your phones in the house. If messing with wiring isn’t your thing, an easier and inexpensive option is to buy a cordless telephone with multiple handsets.  Connect the cordless phone base station to PhoneGnome, and deploy the extra handsets around the house.

 

 

On Monday, Gizmo Project intro’d Gizmo Call, a super easy way to make calls from your browser. They say no traditional software download and installation is required, but you do have to install a Flash plugin (that’s kind of software isn’t it?) But, to get people using it, they’re offering five FREE minutes of calling anywhere. If you register with Gizmo, you get 10 minutes free. After your 10 minutes are up, you switch over to CallOut credits (roughly 2 cents/minute within North America). Pretty darn cheap.

See these other reviews from:

Andy Abramson, VoipWatch

Garrett Smith, Smith on VOIP

GigaOm, Om Malik

Luca Filigheddu

Russell Shaw

Here’s some other tips I dug up about using GizmoCall.

- If you are calling another Gizmo user, which is technically a free call anyway, the “timer” will count down and the reset itself to the original value after the call so you won’t be using free minutes for free calls.

- Two-number Caller ID costs $4 per year. Once you’ve paid for this service, make sure you are still logged in and click the Caller ID tab. The page should reload after a few seconds to show the Mobile and Home fields. Enter the numbers (either one or both) you want to use for caller ID.

- To have a call history, you must register with GizmoCall. Registration is free and you receive 10 minutes free when logged in (only 5 minutes when not logged in).

More info about Gizmo Call can be found here.

 

I got an email today from Carolyn Shuk from the Voxilla forum, a gal who’s been writing about VOIP for a few years.

In a recent post she talks about what happens when VOIP doesn’t work. Sigh. You can always make a call the old fashioned way.

“There’s just no limit to the rosy picture promoted by VoIP boosters. But what seems to get overlooked in the VoIP conversation is what people really want to do with it – I mean, other people, people who aren’t industry boosters. They just wanna make calls. Remember phone calls? Like “one ringy-dingy?”

Read When will VOIP stop batting 1000 

 

This week thevoipgirl.com went down in flames for the first time. I think it was out for a couple of days after I upgraded my WordPress template and then managed to hose my site. After the initial shock, depression set in since I have absolutely NO idea how PHP works. Thankfully the WP template I’m using is superbly supported by its creator and other code wizards. It turned out to be something wonky with the permissions in my index.php and nothing to do with upgrading (greek to me). So, the reason for this post, in a nutshell, is to recommend this highly customizable and well supported template. Check out Semiologic Pro by Denis de Bernardy. Cheers!

So where have I been? Somewhere between snowball fights, Christmas shopping, and my other job I missed the fact that there’s another VOIPGirl in town. But thanks to some blogger friends, I’m up to speed.

Did you ever play nicky-nicky-nine-door as a kid? You know, like run up and ring a doorbell and then take off, hide behind a bush, and wait for something to happen? Kind of like Andy Abramson, Phoneyboy and Ted Wallingford. Ding, Dong VOIPGirl!

But hey, that’s all right. I think the more of us (gals) there are writing about this geeky stuff (VOIP), the better off you (guys) are. Why, between Carolyn Schuk over at Voxilla, Cate O’Malley and myself (and I consider myself honored to be in such company), we’re kind of like the women of web dialing, a trio of VOIP trialers, the chicks of click-to-call, the ladies of lose-your-landline …Well you get the idea.

So welcome Cate. The posts are flying over there at VOIP News so check her out!

Hi and welcome to my blog about VOIP, voice over IP, Internet phone, broadband telephone, or whatever you feel inclined to call it. This is NOT a blog about women, or even necessarily about women who use VOIP services–I mean how boring is that. I called it The VOIP Girl because well I’m a gal. And I want to write about this voice over ip. That’s about it. What really prompted me to get going however, is the fact that there are few women commentators on this subject. I’m curious to see if my perspective will be any different.

I want to write about how consumers (that’s you and me) are doing using VOIP.  I don’t necessarily care about IPOs, who’s buying who, and all that insider industry stuff. There are tons of blogs out there talking about all that. In fact I would say that is mostly what you’ll find when you look for VOIP commentary in the blogosphere. It’s great stuff, but really I’m interested in how ordinary folks are using Vonage, Skype, Gizmo, etc., and how is the free stuff stacking up against heavy hitter paid services.

Thanks for stopping by.

Leanne Tremblay
VOIPGirl

Yes, I just bought a new headset. So when I read about Jajah’s new No Headset movement, I thought, ‘forget it Leanne, you can’t win’. They even have a web site:  http://www.noheadset.com. You can check out flicks of people trashing their headsets. (I’m not going to slapshot my shiny new $100 headset thanks.)

However, my take on this campaign can be summarized by their new tag line "If You Liked Skype, You’ll Love JAJAH". It’s a way to put themselves in the same league as Skype but also to differentiate in a way that says we do what Skype does and we do it better. Unlike Skype, JAJAH lets you make internet calls using your regular desktop phone, which is great. But, don’t some people choose headsets because they want to be "handsfree"? If that’s the case, blowing up your headset would be BAD. Whatever.