I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the uptake possibilities for T-Mobile’s new Talk Forever VoIP-type service.

It’s now live in Seattle and Dallas. Basically, your additional costs above the T-Mobile HotSpot@ Home Foreverwould be $50 for the router and then  $10 per month for unlimited local and long distance calling.

I think the fortunes of this offering will largely depend on its configurability, actual simplicity and quality of service. Plus, this offering ideally should appear on a single bill with your T-Mobile cell service.

My colleague Matt Miller- who covers mobile AND lives in the Seattle area, is set to try this out. Given where Matt is geographically, and topically, Matt’s thought Hot Spot @ Home Forever- and has these questions:

• Can I trial this service with a given number and then port my existing home phone number if it passes my tests?
• Can you choose just one or the other of the two HotSpot @Home services if you don’t want both services?
• Since this is a T-Mobile number, if I call home from my T-Mobile cell are these call free since it is essentially T-Mobile to T-Mobile?
• What is the cost of the router if I don’t make a 2-year commitment and are there any minimum service commitments?
• I understand there are some basic phone features included, but what are the specific functions/operations of voicemail (such as can I access my voicemail via the internet, can I have messages email to me, etc?)
• Will adding this service void the grandfathered family text messaging plan I have now (all 4 phones have unlimited text messaging for US$10)?
• Since there is a WiFi router as part of the service, can I also use a VoIP wireless phone too?
• Can I receive incoming faxes or send faxes with this service?
• I heard there are two SIM card slots in the router, what is the second card slot for?

Matt will post these answers, I am sure. And then I will grok them and get back to all of you with my reax.

Technology described in a newly published Apple Patent application would let podcast viewers and listeners request personalized podcasts from podcast content creators whose podcasts they subscribe to.

The Patent app is entitled, “Creation, Management and Delivery of Personalized Media Items.”

The Abstract furnishes a basic understanding of what is being proposed:

Improved techniques to facilitate generation, management and delivery of personalized media items for users are disclosed. Users are able to influence or control content within a media item being personalized. In one embodiment, personalized media items are podcasts. Users are able to influence or control the content in or with a podcast. In other words, a podcast can be created in accordance with a user’s needs or specifications so that the content within a podcast is customized or personalized for the user.

Additional passages and art from the accompanying Patent app literature further describes how this would be done. Let’s go there now.

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Wayne Anderson, from the south Chicago suburb of Antoich, was frustrated that - how shall we say this- his efforts to cancel his Vonage service wasn’t handled with the smoothest business process best practices.

Wayne was so p.o.’ed that he wrote into Stephanie Zimmermann, who writes”The Fixer,” action line column in his hometown newspaper the SouthTownStar.

Here’s what Wayne wrote:

Dear Fixer: I signed up for Vonage phone service last spring, and it was connected. But after one week, the service was so bad I called to cancel. My phone would ring twice and then stop. The person dialing me would hear it ring and then go dead, so they would have to redial.

I was running my business out of my home at the time, and I couldn’t get the calls, so I called Vonage, and it tried everything to keep me.

But I said “please cancel” and switched back to AT&T. Just recently, I noticed a $5.99 charge on my credit card from Vonage, and I found out the company had been billing me since I signed up and had never canceled.

I called and questioned the charge. In so many words, Vonage told me: Tough luck. I asked for a supervisor, and I was told there wasn’t one there. I come to find out Vonage’s call center is in the Philippines. I was told there was a $49.99 charge to cancel the service. I said I wasn’t paying it.

Then I sent e-mails to everyone in the system who I thought could help, and I got a phone call. The person said he was a second-level supervisor and that he was canceling my account and I would never hear from Vonage again. That was fine for a month.

I just got a letter from a collection agency for $49.99. I called and contested the charge, and the agency said it would contact Vonage again but said it wouldn’t help.

It looks like Wayne did the right thing. Stephanie was able to cut through the clutter and apparently solve the issue:

Dear Wayne: You gotta love the collection agency’s promise to contact Vonage or your behalf even though it wouldn’t help. Now, there’s honesty. We had a little better luck. We told your story to Vonage’s Meghan Shaw, and she was able to get that pesky $49.99 wiped off your account. They’ve also requested that this be removed from collections.

Readers, I do know that Vonage makes it a witch (Mom raised a gentleman) to cancel. Have any of you had similar problems to Wayne Anderson’s?

If you want to geek out on Skype user metrics, Jean Mercier is your guy.

Today, Jean posts some juicy Skype data on Skype Journal.

Turns out that on Sunday, February 18, at about 19:00 GMT (that’s 2 p.m. ET) Skype logged 12 million concurrent sessions for the first time ever.

There’s something to be said for the timing of this threshold. Took place on a Sunday. Since few business calls are made during that time, this points to Skype’s predominance as a consumer service.  I mean, Skype like to talk of their small and medium business relevance, but I just don’t see it yet.

Jean also notes that:

In the past the peaks were somewhere between 16h and 17h GMT. Now it occurs about two hours later. This shows a recent growth in the Americas. Or, in other words, they are catching up with the usage rate of the Europeans.

On that, I agree.

Do you?

I suppose that in the annals of marketing mishaps, this one rates merely a mention.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t entertaining, though. And since this is Wednesday/”Hump Day,” I thought entertaining would be good.

As I show you at the top of this post, I just received an email from Dell Small Business, touting their President’s Day Sale.

Only problem is, this is February 20, and President’s Day was February 18.

I then looked at the message header, and sure enough, the message was sent out at 12:43 a.m. on February 18:

There might be a temptation to blame my email provider Comcast. At least in my experience they don’t do mail holdups for two days. Two hours every once in a while, but not two days.

Pure experiential speculation on my part, but I would not be surprised if this two-day delay was precipitated by glitches at Dell Small Business, or their email services provider.

I checked the sender address, and got www.ema11.net. The web site addy redirects, but the page just hangs.

What gives?

From the Consumerist website comes this account of a frustrating experience by Apple Store shopper “Ignacio.”

Seems that when Ignacio was hopping at the Apple Retail Store in the Stonestown Shopping Center (southwest San Francisco) he tried to charge a purchase on his MasterCard, but upon presentation of the card, was asked for I.D.

He refused, and the store did not allow the charge.

Not only was Ignacio offended, but he thinks this request is illegal under California state law.

Ignacio then wrote this note to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, as well as to William Rhodes of Citibank (which issued the MasterCard in question):

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You may have heard of Internet registrar and hosting service Go Daddy. We’re talking more than 27 million Internet domains under management.

With all of these accounts, you could accurately expect Go Daddy to receive a significant amount of customer calls per day. Stuff like, “how do I point my DNS server to the right address,” “why is my web page not loading, etc.”

With more than 1,100 customer service agents at three call centers, customer service back-end robustness is obviously a key issue for Go Daddy. So is scalability.

Satisfying these imperatives is a key reason why the Go Daddy Group, Inc. has chosen NICE Systems to provide NICE Perform for three VoIP-based contact centers for over 1,100 agents.

The NICE solution comes with built-in analytics. These analytics can track the common reasons a customer is calling, identify trends in terms of the time of day specific types of calls are placed, speed up average handling time, and identify areas where additional call center agent training is needed.

With that info, best practices can be added and refined.

Last week, Skype announced they attained the 100 billion minute level in terms of  free Skype-to-Skype voice and video calls since Skype launched in 2003.

As a representative of Skype just pointed out to me, frequently cited research that estimates the number of humans who have ever lived as 100 billion, that 100 billion level equates to one minute of free talk for every man, woman and child that has ever walked the Earth!

Playing with these numbers even more, my source points out to me that:

Skype has only been in business for about 4.5 years (approximately 2,365,200 minutes). Yet people have used Skype to talk for more than 69,444,444 days (more than 190,258 years). Go back 150,000 years, if a woolly mammoth and a sabre-toothed tiger had started talking for free on Skype, they would still be chatting away today… and with more than 40,258 years to go!

OK, whatever.

Segueing from wooly mammoths to more contemporary meat sources:

It took McDonald’s nearly 39 years to serve 100 billion hamburgers (from 1955 to 1994). And it’s taken Skype just over four years to hit the 100 billion free minutes mark, which is pretty amazing!

For even more perspective on this milestone, check out the Skype Blog at

You know Mozilla’s email component as Thunderbird, a utility easily integratable as a service extension of Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

But no more. Today, the Mozilla Foundation announced Mozilla Messaging, a new open source development initiative incorporating Thunderbird 3. Not merely a new Thunderbird build, but an effort to recast Thunderbird as front and center of a collaborative messaging alternative.

From reading the blog of Mozilla Foundation’s Mozilla Messaging’s CEO-designate David Ascher today, it sounds as though VoIP integration could be a Mozilla Messaging initiative.

David writes in part (bold face is mine):

It is worthwhile considering what the right user experience could be for someone using multiple email addresses, multiple instant messaging systems, IRC, reading and writing on blogs, using VoIP, SMS, and the like. What parts of those interactions make sense to integrate, and where? I don’t believe that stuffing all of those communication models inside of one application is the right answer. But the walled gardens that we’re faced with today aren’t the right answer either. There is room for innovation and progress here, and we need to facilitate it.

In other words, when it comes to VoIP in Thunderbird- the Mozilla Foundation is thinking about it.

A Fierce VoIP reader provides the site with a copy of an “inducement letter” Verizon is sending customers who want to leave their phone services for the inducements of cable-delivered VoIP and other grener pastures.

The site points out these letters are being delivered to customers in a parallel time frame during which Fierce VoIP editor Tom Burton notes that Comcast, TimeWarner and Bright House Networks, have lodged an FCC complaint charging that:

Verizon has been trying to stop customers who ask to have their number ported to a cable digital voice service. This, they say, breaches FCC rules that bans incumbents persuading customers not to swap carriers.

Notes like this one - and the number-porting activity raised- make it obvious that Verizon is mounting a defense by going on the offense with their current subs.

Makes you wonder, though, where the tiny type - the type that reveals fine print details- might be.

BeatPhone is a third-party “beatbox” iPhone app that let’s you use a jailbreaked iPhone to create beeps, blips and beats via the iPhone.

Sound samples can be generated in .wav, .aiff, and many other audio formats.

And here, in a post made on YouTube by HirnW of Australia, some folks with time on their hands have assembled to fashion what likely could be the first-ever BeatPhone, iPhone uh, “concert.”

Just within the last few days, BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion and Motorola have sued each other for Patent infringement.

Motorola’s big issue seems to be a feeling that in most of its 8xxx series models, RIM’s method of storing contact info in wireless emails, and its ability to recognize incoming phone numbers are tantamount to infringement.

RIM fired back, accusing, by implication, Motorola’s Q email phone of offering thumb keyboards awfully similar to several BlackBerry models.

RIM also says that Motorola’s patent royalty fee structure is “exorbitant.”

I have to tell you that some of the capabilities each company is suing each other about seem rather established, and yes, generic to me.

Hate to use the “t” (as in troll) word, but this really sounds like a neh-neh fight you sometimes see in and around sandboxes.

What do you think?