Looks like GetALife360 is yet another “we have an office in the U.S. but we’re really in the Phillipines” personal outsourcing service. On their homepage, they state:

honesty is our only existing policy

That’s why I was particularly surprised to see one of my most popular posts pasted on their site verbatim, with no attribution. Our lawyer made a call and in less than an hour it was removed.

You might be tempted to call it an honest mistake, but as of right now, they still have the post they stole from AllBusiness.com sitting on their home page. Apparently they’re considering these matters on a “case by case basis”

UPDATE: They’ve now taken down the AllBusiness article as well.

Have a great weekend everyone!

I won’t miss the TV much, but I don’t think you understand the demons you have unleashed by hauling off my 24-inch iMac (that thing you probably thought was a huge iPod) and the external hard drive (to which you forgot the power cord).

I’ll make you a deal: bring me back that hard drive and we’ll call it even, okay? There are thousands of photos and hours of video footage from the first two years of my daughter’s life on there. They won’t mean anything to you, but they mean everything to my wife.

Regards,
-Jed
p.s. thanks for at least leaving my guitar.

Thank you Bandwagon. Thank you Flickr (I wish we used you more). And a future thank you to Undercover.

1. Set the “busy”, “no reply”, and “unreachable” calls to forward to GC- don’t just set “all calls”
2. Set the “no reply” time to 5 or 10 seconds; anything longer will have your callers listening to rings for more than 30 seconds before they can finally leave you a message
3. Your phone will now ring twice in a row
4. Your phone company will take minutes off your account for forwarding- and you could even potentially end up with a double charge

As you can see, this isn’t for everyone. But until I find out the full details of pricing and such, I’m just a little hesitant to lock in and announce to the world that I have a new permanent number.

Okay, on to T-Mobile’s HotSpot @Home service. The phones that work with the service have wi-fi built-in, and allow you to make free, unlimited calls over most wi-fi connections, including free access to any T-Mobile HotSpot (i.e. Starbucks). But they also work just like a regular mobile when you’re not under a cloud of wi-fi goodness. This has two really cool benefits:

Go where mobile can’t

Basements, skyscrapers, stairwells. We’ve had plenty of mobile phone near-dead spots in our various apartments. But I almost always have a decent internet connection.

Go where mobile can’t afford to

This was the main reason I picked up one of these phones before we headed to Mexico. Combining Grand Central with this phone allowed people to call my same ol’ number (AT&T), it would forward to GC, and GC would pass it off to my HotSpot @Home phone. Voila! Free calls from south of the border without lugging along a Vonage phone or asking people to call my Skype number.

Before you rush out and buy one, let me just say that the service is very obviously in its infancy. Call quality can get iffy and the phone doesn’t always automatically connect to my various saved wi-fi networks.

That wraps up part 2. Our last stop will be an overview of the booming market of voice-to-text transcription services.

If you’ve got an interesting GC trick to share, please drop it in the comments!

In a nutshell, Grand Central gives you a new phone number that can be used to manage calls and voicemails with a bunch of slick features. General info and reviews about using the service can be found elsewhere, so I’m going to dive right into some lesser-known techniques.

Keep your old number

I’m not anxious to spread the word that I have a new phone number- at least not until I’ve used GC long enough to trust it and love whatever pricing arrangement they ultimately implement. GC pitches the service as the “stay with you forever” number, and perhaps it will be. But for now, I flip things around a bit; I forward my main mobile number to GC.

Talk to your computer

Gizmo was one of two tools I used to get free phone calls during our 2 months in Mexico. It’s a lot like Skype. All you need is a decent internet connection and a laptop with a built-in mic. Just initiate a call from within Grand Central and it’s all free; no $.85 per minute roaming charges. I did end up buying $10 worth of Gizmo credit for making calls to Mexico-based phones, which came in handy on a few occasions.

Golden for Small Businesses

Somewhere in the terms and conditions it clearly states that GC is only for personal use. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that the reason is because it’s free beta software and they don’t want people abusing the system by having unreasonably high call volume or counting on rock-solid performance. That being said, I set up a GC number for one of our “muses”. My business partner generally handles the couple of support calls we get each week. Whenever he’s going to be unavailable, he just makes one click and the calls get routed to me. Note: GC used to disallow forwarding two different GC numbers to the same phone, but they’ve finally relaxed those restrictions a bit. It’s equally useful that we both have easy access to voicemails and recorded conversations.

Round trip

So what becomes of my main mobile number now that I’m forwarding it to GC? Actually, I forward back to it (as well as to Gizmo, my other mobile phone, and possibly a landline if applicable). If I want, I can make and receive all my calls on that primary mobile phone; everybody sees the same ol’ trusty number on their caller ID, but I get all the good lovin’ of GC for incoming calls. tip: make sure you have GC send you an SMS when you receive a voicemail- otherwise you won’t know you have one until you check your email.

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In part two we’ll cover the Hotspot @ home offering from T-Mobile