The Bristow’s dot COM

I just received an invite into the Google Grandcentral Beta program. I must say that this is the most amazing thing that I have seen Google provide for free. Grandcentral provides a free local telephone number that is yours for life. From there you can setup this number to ring up to 6 different phones. Real phones, not just VOIP phones. The service can ring all six phones for you at the same time if you want, allowing you to choose which phone you want to accept the call with. And if that feature alone isn’t cool enough there are plenty of other things you can do. You can even change the ringing sound that callers hear when they call you. Oh and maybe best of all you can have different voicemail greetings for all of your contacts. And I shouldn’t forget that if someone calls you and you never want to have them call you again you can add them to your blocked list. And the features go on and on…. (click here for a current feature list)

If you want to check Grandcentral out I have a few invites that I can give out. If you want an invite just leave a comment on this blog and I will give out as many as I can.

And if you want to call me you can use the little gadget below…..
( The way this gadget works is you type in your name and your phone number. You will receive a phone call and so will I. Then we will be connected, so you won’t be using a microphone and speakers on your PC to make this call, you will need an actual phone to use this. )

Why you might want to actually use this ‘call me’ thing above: Let’s say you don’t have a phone with long distance, or you simply don’t want to pay long distance to call me. If you use this button above you will receive a phone call rather than placing a call. And if you happen to have a phone provider that gives you unlimited incoming calls then this call won’t even use up any of your minutes. It truly is very clever. I just hope I don’t start getting strange calls from random people around the blogosphere…. Oh and another reason you might want to use this is if you have been trying to get in contact with me and don’t have my phone number you can still call me.

Update: You don’t need to call me to get a GrandCentral Invite. I appreciate the calls, but to be honest it is sorta creepy to get random calls from people I don’t know. So if you want an invite just leave a comment on this blog post. Fill out your email address and let me know your name. (Your email address will not appear on my blog anywhere.)

Over the weekend I had an interesting encounter with Microsoft. Friday evening at about 11:00pm I was checking windows update for any new patches to grab and the update site asked me to validate my copy of Vista. I have jumped through these hoops several times before so I clicked the validate button. To my surprise Microsoft said my copy was not genuine. Then a system pop up alert appeared alerting me that I have been a victim of software piracy and that the Aero user interface had now been disabled. So my background disappeared and the transparency settings for the GUI vanished. I called Microsoft and walked through their validation process over the phone and received a code back to type in to validate. After typing in the code my system still remained marked as ‘not genuine’. So I quickly began searching the net for a reason and or solution to what was happening. I didn’t find a reason but I found a multitude of fixes. I also learned about ‘reduced functionality mode’ which I would begin to encounter in as little as three days. This got me nervous. When microsoft talks about ‘reduced functionality’ it essentially means ‘no functionality’. So I backed my system up and then on Sunday re-installed Vista and some ‘fixes’ so that it would then remain genuine. (I was thinking about moving back to XP and then decided to stick with Vista). I installed these ‘fixes’ with the hope that I won’t want to have to deal with this whole ‘windows genuine advantage’ stuff again in the future.

Now here is where this entire thing becomes a bit humorous. Monday one of the top stories on news.google.com was about a Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage server outage that marked thousands of PC’s as being non-genuine. (mine was one of those) They have now released a fix and have asked everyone affected to re-validate. (now they didn’t call anyone or even place an announcement on the genuine advantage site, this announcement is on their discussion board… yeah clearly the most logical place for such an important announcement…) So now I need to re-install Vista again with my proper license and re-validate. Because now I am in the boat of when or if Microsoft comes out with a windows update that prevents my ‘fix’ I could be in the same situation again because my Vista install truly is not genuine at the moment.

And now a message to Microsoft:

Microsoft, isn’t this whole Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) actually supposed to be an advantage for your customers? I am currently failing to see it as anything more than a method for you to keep tabs on me. It looks like software pirates were the ones with the advantage over the weekend since WGA doesn’t affect them. Maybe your anti-piracy strategy should involve a one time piracy check after the install instead of a constant piracy check every time you want to get a windows update.

This could be revolutionary.

Web technologies are currently transforming and a wide array of Web 2.0 applications can be found all over the web. A web 2.0 application is essentially an application that you use through your web browser to perform a task that would have required software to be installed on your PC. A good example of this is Google Docs & Spreadsheets. If you need basic word processing or spreadsheets (excel) then you no longer need to download OpenOffice or purchase the very expensive Microsoft Office. It really is amazing. New updates are transparent to the users as you get the latest version of the software each time you go to the Google Docs website.

While I was browsing for cool web 2.0 applications I came across a website called Zoho. They have 15 web 2.0 apps and they are all free. (some have extra features for a small fee) You can essentially replace Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint with some free web 2.0 apps from Zoho. This may not be a great situation for Microsoft in the future. Zoho also has a tool called creator. This is the slickest web 2.0 app I have ever seen. I was able to create a web 2.0 contact form for my website within minutes. The form emails me and stores the results in a database. I didn’t need to know any programming languages, it was all drag and drop. I believe Zoho is really onto something here and I see some serious potential for web based application creation tools in the future. (I you are interested in seeing the basic Zoho Creator form I made you can click here.)

If you are interested in web technologies I would highly recommend checking out what is going on over at Zoho.com

I wonder how long it will be before Zoho gets bought by google, yahooo, ask, or microsoft……..

I have discovered an amazing technology. It really isn’t new, but until recently it wasn’t popular enough to really get on my radar. It is called SIP. It is a VOIP technology that is open. Open means that any SIP network can interconnect with each other. Cable companies, phone companies, Skype etc. provide VOIP services. But they are typically closed services, meaning you can only connect to other users of the same service for free and then pay them to call regular phone numbers. The genius of SIP is that all calls to any SIP network are free. This means if someone signs up with a different SIP provider I can still call them for free via SIP using my chosen provider. In addition there are many SIP providers that provide very inexpensive and sometimes free calls to select countries. And there are a few free services that provide a real United States phone number that will ring your SIP phone from the normal (current) phone network. And did I mention that this technology is 100% mobile. What I mean by this is that I can take my service to anywhere in the world where I can get onto a broadband internet connection and my phone will ring just like I am at home. Unless you were to tell someone that you were out of the country they would have no idea. So this means that people who travel a lot can have a US based phone number that will ring regardless of where they are on the planet.

So essentially what I have found is a way to have a real phone number that can receive an unlimited amount of incoming calls for free, no matter which VOIP SIP provider I choose. And I have found one provider that currently allows 300 minutes per week of calls to any US based landline or mobile number. So this means 100% free calling for me, since I won’t be calling outside of the United States. But even if you do call outside of the US most VOIP SIP providers offer amazingly inexpensive rates.

So what companies I have I signed up with to do this?

1. VoipCheap - this is the SIP provider I am using for free calls to US numbers.
2. IPKall - this company has provided me a free call-in number. It is a Seattle, Washington number,
3. SipNumber - this company has provided me a free call-in number. It is a Des Moines Iowa number.

I also bought a Sipura SPA-2000 ($35.00 on eBay) so that I can use a normal phone with these services and not need to use a computer to make and receive phone calls.

Services like this could really end up ruining the normal phone companies.