The internet is one of the greatest inventions of mankind. The World Wide Web bridges the entire world, connecting the millions around the world with its virtual threads. Among the greatest contributions that were developed in the field of communications.

Our species needs to keep in touch with our loved ones. With the expanding world structure, many members of our family were migrating to other countries. There began to be a need for us to be able to get in touch with them more easily. [Read more →]

A gadget called the Skype USB to RJ11 Adaptor lets you make and receive free Internet VoIP calls using your regular home phone — and your cell phone. The device plugs into your PC’s USB port, and has a place to plug in your home phone. Once you set it up, you can use your home phone to make free calls to anywhere in the world.

(Note that this is not a review — all claims are made by the company and have not been verified by Yours Truly.)

The adaptor does a lot of neat tricks: 1) record calls; 2) forward Skype calls to your cell phone; 3) make Skype calls from your cell phone; 4) make three-way calls that include both Skype and conventional callers; 5) toggle back and forth between a regular landline call and a Skype call; 6) and other things.

Best of all, it’s cheap: just $54 at EchoStore.com.

Skype and Skype watchers have been saying for some time now that a surprising proportion of the low-or-no-cost VoIP service’s customers are using it for business. This is probably truer in Europe and the Far East where phone companies often charge for local calls, and long distance typically costs more than it does in North America. But the idea of using Skype for business is evidently starting to catch on here as well.

Robert Lane and his far-flung partners at RNC Services, a small Web development and e-commerce solutions firm, may be the thin end of the wedge. The company is nominally headquartered in northern Maine where Lane lives. It also has six employees there, but it’s really a virtual company. One of Lane’s partners is in Florida, the other in Sacramento, Calif. And Lane is talking about relocating to the Caribbean for six months and running his business from there.

RNC is probably typical of businesses using Skype in that its partners and employees are all heavily computer-centric. If you ask Lane what it is he likes about Skype, besides the cost savings, he says, “It’s just the convenience of having it on my computer. It’s nice especially when you’re in an airport—you can plug the headset in and start taking calls.”

RNC switched to Skype for most of its internal and external calling at the beginning of this year. The partners make about 60 percent to 70 percent of all calls on Skype now. Call quality and reliability have for the most part been acceptable. Lane uses a $25 USB headset from Plantronics. “I can probably think of about half a dozen times when we dropped calls or couldn’t carry on an intelligible conversation on Skype,” Lane says. “And most of those times, it was because we lost the Internet or power.”
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