Notice to PhoneGnome customers
Today, at 3PM PDT, we received a notice from one of our data center
providers that they will be ceasing all operations on August 31 - 2
days from now. A significant portion of PhoneGnome operations are
hosted by this provider and it is unlikely that we can rehost these
services in only two days.
As a result, some PhoneGnome customers will experience service
interruptions; we request that you remain patient as we work to
restore PhoneGnome services. We will do our very best to minimize
service interruptions, but we request that you refrain from calling
or sending email as that may distract from our service recovery
efforts.
Friday 31 August 2007
Thursday 23 August 2007
GrandCentral could not port over numbers
This has got to be painful for a service that promises you one number for life. GrandCentral, one of the latest Google acquisitions, that offers you one number for life that rings on all your phones has been forced to change some of their customers’ phone numbers. Due to problems with one of their upstream providers, GrandCentral could not port over some 400 numbers to another carrier and was forced to assign these customers a new phone number.
Even though GrandCentral immediately informed the affected users and assigned them a new number this will affect the credibility of the service. Users were only given notice 10 days in advance and will no longer be able to use their new number as of 31 August.
“Having to change my number would be very disruptive and a huge hassle. The possibility of this happening has become my biggest hesitation with fully embracing and using my GrandCentral number,” said Ben Spinks, practice manager at Tipp City Veterinary Hospital in Ohio. “I have gone so far as to include it in my business e-mail signatures, but I am still nervous about getting my business cards reprinted.”
Even though GrandCentral immediately informed the affected users and assigned them a new number this will affect the credibility of the service. Users were only given notice 10 days in advance and will no longer be able to use their new number as of 31 August.
“Having to change my number would be very disruptive and a huge hassle. The possibility of this happening has become my biggest hesitation with fully embracing and using my GrandCentral number,” said Ben Spinks, practice manager at Tipp City Veterinary Hospital in Ohio. “I have gone so far as to include it in my business e-mail signatures, but I am still nervous about getting my business cards reprinted.”
Friday 17 August 2007
Yoomba spams your contact lists
Aggressive Yoomba - Early users of consolidation service complain Yoomba spams their contact lists with invitations to join up.
Some early users of Yoomba's new e-mail calling and chat service are complaining that the service spams their e-mail contact lists.
Launched on Thursday, Yoomba is a free, peer-to-peer VoIP client that lets any e-mail address owner place a VoIP call or begin an instant-messaging session with any other e-mail address, whether or not the recipient is also a Yoomba user. The service adds a button to e-mail interfaces allowing users to call or chat with anyone on their e-mail contact list.
But some users are complaining about how the service sends out e-mail messages to all of their contacts inviting them to use the service.
"It spammed my entire contact list... I call that a 'virus,'" said one reader in an e-mail, who asked not to be named.
Another user had a similar experience. At the prompt that read "Here are your closest friends on Yoomba, let them know you are on," the user hit the "next" button.
"Of course those were not in fact my closest friends 'on' Yoomba, but rather my entire contact list, which it proceeded to spam," said the user in an anonymous posting to the Network World Web site. "How embarrassing. Needless to say, I uninstalled."
"These guys put in this cute little feature where after install, it brings up a screen to add contacts. If you don't read carefully (or maybe even if you do ... I can't seem to get back to the screen) it spams all of your freaking contacts!!!," said the user in a posting. "Looks to me like it's just another IM/VOIP client, but with an auto add-all-your-contacts-and-spam-them 'feature'."
Some early users of Yoomba's new e-mail calling and chat service are complaining that the service spams their e-mail contact lists.
Launched on Thursday, Yoomba is a free, peer-to-peer VoIP client that lets any e-mail address owner place a VoIP call or begin an instant-messaging session with any other e-mail address, whether or not the recipient is also a Yoomba user. The service adds a button to e-mail interfaces allowing users to call or chat with anyone on their e-mail contact list.
But some users are complaining about how the service sends out e-mail messages to all of their contacts inviting them to use the service.
"It spammed my entire contact list... I call that a 'virus,'" said one reader in an e-mail, who asked not to be named.
Another user had a similar experience. At the prompt that read "Here are your closest friends on Yoomba, let them know you are on," the user hit the "next" button.
"Of course those were not in fact my closest friends 'on' Yoomba, but rather my entire contact list, which it proceeded to spam," said the user in an anonymous posting to the Network World Web site. "How embarrassing. Needless to say, I uninstalled."
"These guys put in this cute little feature where after install, it brings up a screen to add contacts. If you don't read carefully (or maybe even if you do ... I can't seem to get back to the screen) it spams all of your freaking contacts!!!," said the user in a posting. "Looks to me like it's just another IM/VOIP client, but with an auto add-all-your-contacts-and-spam-them 'feature'."
Thursday 16 August 2007
Skype Suffers Major Outage
Skype has suffered a major service outage that started from approximately 3am PST Thursday.
Skype advised that their engineering team had determined that the downtime was due to a software issue, with the problem expected to be solved “within 12 to 24 hours.”
The issue was serious enough to cause Skype to temporarily disable all downloads of the Skype client.
Skpe has had a very strong record of uptime previously and this outage is a first in recent memory. In comparison Twitter was down intermittently from 7pm PST Wednesday for around 6 hours, a fairy regular occurrence. Skype remained down at the time of writing as at 7:30am PST.
Friday 3 August 2007
Shame On You Rebtel
If they call anybody from their Rebtel address book they are diverted to strangers. If they then go to the Rebtel website to register a new "friend" to call - it is 100 % certain they will not call this friend but a complete stranger.
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