If I buy an iPhone with my money, I should be able to use it as long as I want to keep it! National Economic Direct Jeff Zients said, "the first time a We the People petition has led to a legislative fix."

In my opinion, if they know there was a "mistake to fix", they should do it on their own without taking People's effort and time away from something more productive!

Here is the link to the article: "Obama signs cellphone unlocking bill", The Hill

Nowadays, many of us have smart phones with calendar or alarm features. If you want to remind yourself of something, you can just go to the alarm setting of your iPhone and set the time to ring the phone. Easy, right?

Although people think this service is not necessary because of the reason I mentioned above, but I think this tool, Wakerupper, can be very useful for some purposes.

First of all, it is very simple to use. This page (image on the left) is the single page you need to deal with. Another nice thing about the service is to provide the "personalized message" field. Text-to-speech engine will read up your message for you, so the recipient of the call knows what the reminder was.

Most of us do not have access to set alert on other people's phone, right? So, instead of nagging a person to remember a thing, you can use this tool to remind them for some important (or unimportant) things that you wanted to nag them about. Sweet, huh?

After scheduling the call, you get the option to cancel the reminder, or receive the link to cancel your reminder call later.

I received a reminder call from local number. The personalized message was synthetic but understandable. The after the personalized message played, the recorded voice asked me whether if this message was sent me by error or not. I didn't go through the IVR menu since I actually have ordered the reminder.. but what will happen if it was a mistake?

I thought it will be fun to use this tool with our Broadcasting feature of Brekeke PBX. You can send out message (read by text-to-speech) to everyone at schedule time. You can use this for "meeting reminder" or "clean up fridge otherwise everything will be thrown away on Friday" reminder.

Reference: Brekeke PBX User's Guide - Broadcasting Feature (Section 1.11 pg.13)

First, you enter the 800 or 866 number you are calling, plus your phone number. Then you will receive a call to your phone number from the 800 number that you have entered. When you do this, you will hear Lucy's greeting and then just wait for "her" to tell you that someone has picked up on the other end.


For example, earlier this week, I needed to call one of the credit card companies where I have an account. Credit card companies are notorious for having some of the worst customer service telephone systems. So I gave "Lucy" a try.

When my call to the credit card company was finally answered by a live person, the representative on the other end was asking "Are you calling XXX Bank?" I wasn't entirely sure what the representative heard when she picked up my call — maybe Lucy was talking to her, too?? But she could hear me just fine, so I talked with her directly.

When I told the representative what I needed to be done, she put me back on hold. So I put her on Lucyphone again, then hung up my phone. When she returned to the line, I got a call from Lucy. I picked up the call and again I was talking to the rep. Very nice! 

There are many good services like Lucy that are trying to fill the holes that contact center telephone systems haven't been able fill on their own. Nowadays (at least in the US) the collaboration of computer and telephony services like this is something we have come to look for and expect.
 

Today, there are many options that people can use to make international calls for free. I recently found a website called EvaPhone that lets you make free international calls directly from their website. The duration of the free call depends on where you are calling. (Here is the list of countries and the length of time that you can have a free conversation.) You should note that —even though I couldn't find this info on their website— I've read that they only allow two free calls per day. So in total, I can have 20 seconds of free calling to Tokyo! But I can't complain — after all, it is free.

I wanted to try out this service, so I called a US number and it worked! It had some issues with DTMF, but I think you should be able to use it for regular conversations. Then I tried calling my old friend in Japan at 3:00 in the morning, but unfortunately it said, "This call direction is not supported," on the EvaPhone screen. Too bad, I couldn't wake the poor guy up!

Despite some issues that I have found, I still think this is a good service. The fact that you don't need to install anything to use the service is great. You just go to their website to make a call. I'm always suspicious of "free" services on the internet that ask you to install stuff on your computer anyway, so it's nice that this service doesn't require anything like that. 

Of course, using Brekeke products is also a very good way to make free calls. You can call anyone for free as long as the person you are calling has an internet connection with SIP capability. The product works as the same way as email — it doesn't matter where the person is physically located.

Besides the free calls that you can make, with Brekeke PBX in place, you can connect all of your family and friends under one PBX system. PBX might sound like a service that is designed for an office environment, but there are many ways that families can enjoy PBX as well.

Here are some examples of how your family can use Brekeke PBX:

• Your mom can use the call recording feature whenever she makes important calls —such as to an insurance company— and then save the recorded files in case any problems arise later.
  
• Your sister can have all of her "unwanted" calls forwarded to her voicemail (which can then be directed to her email inbox), but she will still receive all "wanted" calls directly on her cell phone.
  
• You can set up a conference call to coordinate everyone's schedule for your Christmas gathering or for any other holiday or occasion. Or you could just make a group call to everyone whenever you can't get together for occasions like this.
• Using the call monitoring feature in tutoring mode, you can help your friend ask a girl out for a date without her being able to hear your voice. What could possibly go wrong? ;-)

There have been so many occasions in my life when I have wished that I had Brekeke PBX features. The only thing you need is a PC to install Brekeke PBX, and a SIP phone to make the call. If you don't want to invest in a SIP hardphone (physical phone), then you can just use a free softphone (software application that you install on your PC or smart phone).

Here is the link to our Quick Start Guide for Brekeke PBX.