It seems people are catching onto Stuart Henshall’s trick of playing with your Skype name to get it at the top of people’s buddy lists. Two people on my list have put period marks at the beginning of their profile name, messing with the alphabetical order to get their names above all my legitimate friends. This … Read more
Here’s another podcast of a piece I did for the BBC’s World Service ‘World Business Report’. This one’s on presence, a favorite topic of mine; Download it here. (Thanks, BBC, for allowing me to republish it as a podcast. I’m told the WBR appears in the U.S. on WBUR and other stations in the NPR … Read more
The IVR debate rumbles on. Could automated voice phone systems be better than just having a human answering the phone? Is it better to cheat the system? Paul English’s cheat sheet has appeared more than 100 TV and radio stations in a month. One company, Angel.com, has been fighting back, first with a pretty harsh … Read more
The new Skype is out today. I’ve not played with the video — the main selling bit for most folks — but for me the best bit is the ‘status’ bubble. They’ve stolen a trick out GoogleTalk’s book, which has these easy-to-change status bits: and are now in Skype: It may seem merely cute, but … Read more
Paul English’s website about about getting around ‘interactive voice response’ phone systems (where you talk and a computer listens) is already triggering industry rebuttals, like this one from Angel.com – Top 5 Reasons NOT to Zero Out of an IVR System (via Dan Gillmor): If you’ve visited Paul English’s website, you’ve learned how to “zero out” of … Read more