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Business Services Industry

Don't Miss A Thing

Entrepreneur, Jan, 2001 by Eric S. Brown

Simple solutions for making sure you get those important phone calls

These days, you don't necessarily need to show up to be successful, but you do need to stay connected. Universal messaging would be great, but first things first: Wouldn't it be nice if people answered their phones? It doesn't help matters that we spend less time in our offices and confuse our contacts (and ourselves) by handing out numbers for our home, office and mobile phones, each with its own voice-mail system. This month we look at three new solutions that help to integrate wireless and landline calls and avoid the voice-mail dead end.

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* SimulRing's Simultaneous Ring service: Typical call-routing "follow me" services dial each number sequentially, forcing callers to sit through multiple ring sequences that can last well over a minute. With Simultaneous Ring service (www.simulring.com), however, a single 10-digit phone number lets callers simultaneously ring up to three mobile and landline devices (five with a $5 upgrade). And all calls can go to a single voice-mail system. You can even train SimulRing to work through automated voice-mail systems.

Available now in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle, SimulRing should reach 100 cities early this year. The service costs $9.95 per month (or $14.95 per month for the upgrade), plus $29.95 for setup. SimulRing CEO Rob Meldrum allows that the service may seem a bit pricey, but notes that it can save you a bundle by eliminating cell phone voice-mail charges.

* Vox2's Vox.Link base station: When you come home and plug your mobile phone into its charging unit, the only thing that's mobile is you when you race across the house to answer it. With a Vox.Link base station, you can walk, not run, to the nearest landline phone to answer your cell phone calls. Based on standard home telephone wiring, Vox.Link plugs into any empty phone jack so that incoming wireless calls ring on every two-line phone in the house, with a distinctive ring to distinguish them from landline calls. You can also make outgoing cell calls without interrupting landline calls.

The easy-to-install $180 (street) unit is portable enough for vacation-home use or for schlepping between home and office. It works with most Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola phones and should be available early this year from major wireless carriers. Expect Vox.Link to accelerate the trend toward wireless displacing of landline services, says Ken Holberger, Vox2's vice president of marketing.

* EDial: Located at www.edial.com, eDial offers an intriguing alternative solution to locating roaming users: an Internet-based status sheet. EDial's smorgasbord of Net-hosted telephony services includes speed-dialing, audio-conferencing and instant messaging. To sign up, just download a contact-management speed-dialing application (also available as a Microsoft Outlook plug-in) and automatically link up to the eDial Web site (with a persistent link such as T1 or DSL). Here, you continually monitor a status sheet listing the whereabouts of fellow eDial users so you don't waste time dialing into voice mail. You can quickly switch your own status to alternate phone numbers, instant-message fellow eDialers, jump from messaging to phone sessions and set up voice conferences with up to seven users. "With the instant messaging, it's like a better version of call waiting and Caller ID," says president and CEO Frank Slaughter. "It really helps to avoid voice mail."

The main problem with eDial is that unless your contacts use it, it's little more than an overpriced (at $59.95 per month) speed-dialer. Even at current prices, though, it could pay for itself by improving the productivity of scattered collaboration teams.

Eric S. Brown, a regular contributor to PCWorld.com, is a freelance writer living in the Boston area.

Business Services Industry

Don't Miss A Thing

Entrepreneur, Jan, 2001 by Eric S. Brown

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