A good deal of VOIP hype centers around Skype and Vonage, but the truth is that there are many other providers that offer some very comprehensive packages at attractive prices and with extra solid service packages.

ViaTalk provides internet phone service at rates that start out at $10 per month to $200 year for service that starts off with 500 minutes of calls per month all the way up to unlimited calls and a large set of features.

These plans like their competitors cover calls in the US and in Canada and ViaTalk is currently offering a 6 month free service plan, which as of today (Nov 7) actually makes the plan more attractive than Skype’s free offer, which expires in 2 months at the end of the year.

They also offer broadband phone service plans for businesses with rates based on the term of contracts.  Contract time frames can be as short as 1 month or extend out 24 months with rates that run from $35/ month down to $30/month respectively.

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“Hey Brother,  A nickel for your Spam . ..”

“Sure, I’ll sell you my spam for a nickel!”

“No Brother, you owe me a nickel for your Spam.”

“Oh Yeah, Why is that?”

“I’m your Wireless Carrier!”

____________________________________

As we continue our series on Broken Technology, we turn to some of the lingering problems that exist with mobile devices from mobile phones to PDA’s even to MP3 players. 

Many of these devices are not very secure and very vulnerable to spam, viruses and worse.  A short while back a batch of Ipods shipped with virus preloaded on them from the manufacturer.

More and more mobile users have been hit with spammy text messages that can be charged to their bill if not disputed.  Even if they are successfully disputed it is a very inconvenient process not to mention a spam text message coming in the middle of the night can literally cause you to lose sleep.

Its not just text messages either, more telemarketing calls are taking place on mobile phones, whether its from online databases grabbing mobile information or firms running dialer operations, or even a recycled number that brings a new cellular subscriber the ghost of past users callers a voicemail.  No one wants to purchase a new cell phone, setup a new mobile number take it home and wake up to a 3 am call for a booty call, well maybe most people don’t.

McAfee and Symantec have both rolled out virus scanning software for Symbian and Windows mobile platform devices, but the reality is that many phones from the major phone providers do not protect their phones out of the box.

The issue of security could prove to be one of the drivers that move more people to VOIP technologies that have more capabilities for opt in user groups for receiving both phone calls and text messages.

Phone carriers are working to deploy some software over their networks to scan for viruses but these services will only work on a few phones in those networks. 

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Choosing a solid Table PC is not an easy assignment by any stretch. Checking with other people that mind map with MindManager Pro 6 can shed some light on what works for them and what gives them some issues.

There isn’t really a definitive place where the conversation is picked up in most of the users groups for this community. However, it could be possible for MindMappers to use the same site and provide their own personal reviews on that site in a way that we can all turn to a default location when it comes time to make a purchasing decision.

Tablet PC Reviews might be a good place to start. I especially like their ‘Most Popular Table PCs Review on their menu bar.(image left)

There are already some great reviews started here, so maybe all of us MindMappers might settle on this site as a solution for some of our Tablet PC Reviews to further all of our attempts to get the best gear to get the job done.

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Its only 6:30 pm on the East Coast and no one is making claims that the election has been stolen yet, however there are a few reports of technology failing in the voting system.

Voting Machines have run into problems in several states including New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania and maybe the most impacted thus far Indiana.

Problematic claims of poll workers that were unable to connect cables and delaying the voting a bit seem to be the most predominant. 

Indiana had a more serious situation taking place.  Their electronic voting systems were programmed with the wrong ballots, a minor thing as everyone knows that the ballots are a pretense anyway. 

Just kidding, the systems forced voters to stand in line for several hours as manual votes were taken as a backup.  An Indiana judge ordered that the polls in this Eastern state should remain open until 8:30 PM this evening in order to allow the Indiana electorate to get a complete 12 hour voting opportunity to vote.

There is definitely a great deal of opportunity for voting technologies to be improved significantly in the years to come.

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On occasion bloggers, website designers and even people that participate in discussion boards need the ability to track how many people actually click on a hyperlink and follow that link to its ultimate destination.

Bingr.com provides a means of taking a hyperlink, and encrypting it essentially with a generic looking URL that will redirect to the address of your choice and track the fact that the link was used.

The service is free and provides hyperlink tracking intelligence for 30 days. At the end of the 30 day period, the tracking stops but the link will continue to work.

I tried the link for myself and liked the result. I took a link to my Softduit website that shows users how to setup their own online store. The link is rather long and ugly as you can see below

http://www.softduit.com/business_building_offer_ external/EasyOnlineStore.html

I then converted it into a short little Bingr link that looks in URL form like the following:

http://bingr.com/eemgvb

I can now take that new link and insert the link on any portion of text.

For Example: Check out the solution for setting up an Easy Online Store in less than 30 minutes!

It’s a piece of cake. You can even set the report to be public or private. Now, I’ve just set it up, but here’s the layout of the report so far (after I’ve tested the link once.)

Plus, you’ll notice that if you click the picture above, I’ve added the link that I created once again, but this time I used a newly created Bingr link:

http://bingr.com/pymjwg

So now I have the capability of tracking either the text link or the picture link and I can compare the results. If you want to see the results of the image link yourself, you can view those results at

http://bingr.com/report.asp?CC=pymjwg

There are other ways to track links when you own the blog or website yourself, but when you are working on a community blog or forum you don’t always have the luxury of performance stats. So this could be a very useful way to track the activity on a link that you post in a group or even in an email for that matter!

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