BradPace.com

First off, in case you don’t know, Skype is a Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) service that lets you chat for free from any PC to any other PC with an internet connection. You just have to have the Skype software on both systems. After that you just click on their name and you can have a call. You can also have a text chat or a conference call with up to 5 people.

Skype is the best solution out there. When communicating with my web development team in Mumbai India I had many opportunities to use skype and the other major PC-to-PC VOIP options. I used Yahoo, MSN and GoogleTalk trying to get the very best connection possible. You just can’t get further away than India. It has an 11 hour and 30 minute time difference from Utah (12 hours and 30 minutes during daylight savings). Plus our team in India frequently had bandwidth and latency problems with their Internet connection. So many times we tried all 4 clients on a single night to get the very best sound quality possible. No other solution even came close to the call quality that Skype offers. Google talk was the very worst! Yahoo was pretty good and in second place.

Over the last year I would guess that I have spent 250 hours speaking with my team in India. Many of those on conference calls with 4-5 people (several from India and several from the US). The conference call feature works perfectly. Anyone can talk and there are no duplexing problems (ok rarely). I would say that 95% of those calls where crystal clear with no noticeable latency. We did have a few problems when the connection was very slow. Also I had a bad cable modem at home and continually got dropped from calls until I was able to replace my modem. But that was a hardware problem. I never once found the problems to be with the Skype system and never found the service unavailable.

The call quality is incredible. I use a stereo headset with a built in microphone. The calls come through in both speakers and make the calls sound in stereo. The quality is better than any phone I have ever used. Better than a cell phone (that’s not hard) and even better than a land line.

Tonight I tried to talk to my friend Gulshan in Mumbai and could not connect using our normal PC-to-PC method. It is a holiday there and everyone must be on their PCs sucking up all the bandwidth. So I tried the “Call Phones” feature. I added $10 to my skype account and used the skype software on my PC to dial his mobile phone in Mumbai. We spoke for over 40 minutes and the sound quality was great. Much better than if I had called him on my cell phone. Also the 40-minute call cost less than $7! I was very happy with this service and will use it again (I have to use up my last $3).

You can also get a phone number from skype that would allow a regular phone to call you on your PC. I have not had a need for this yet but I can see how it may be useful. It is simply much more convenient to talk with a headset connected to your PC than to talk on a cell phone. It is easier to answer and to dial. It is also easier to keep track of your contacts. You can also get voicemail messages on your PC and you can even record your entire call and save it as an mp3 on your hard drive.

I think the phone companies should be worried and even the cell phone companies. As free Wi-fi continues to spread there will be more and more opportunities for services like Skype to flourish. The day someone figures out how to offer free wi-fi to everyone is the day that voip will rule the world. And it will be good for everyone.

I have decided to write a series of posts about my favorite technologies. These will be broken down by how often I use them (daily, weekly, monthly). These are not work related technologies just personal stuff. Here I list “some” of the coolest the technologies I use everyday (in no particular order):

• Yahoo toolbar – I love this thing. It has a quick link to my MyYahoo page, my yahoo email, and best of all my bookmarks. This is how I manage all of my bookmarks. I can access them from any computer and they are all stored on Yahoo’s servers. I will never loose a bookmarked site and I have several hundred sites bookmarked.
• Yahoo mail – I have a Gmail and Hotmail account as well but have liked Yahoo the best. I have been using this email account for 10 years. I do get a bunch of spam now but it filters about 90% right into the junk folder. It has great search features and tons of space.
• Roboform – I hate filling out forms on the web. Roboform stores all your form data and will fill out these forms with the click of a button. It also stores credit card info and makes online purchases easy (Becki would say too easy). It also allows for multiple identities like home, work, or my secret identities . This is one of the few pieces of software that I have actually purchased and I feel it is worth the $30.
• MyYahoo – This is my default home page for all my browsers. I have customized this to show local weather, sports scores, stock tickers and movie show times. I also use this as my RSS feeder. Which means that all the blogs I follow are summarized here. This saves a ton of time and makes it easy to find just the information I want to read. I have about 20 blogs that I follow on a daily basis that are listed on MyYahoo page.
• ITunes – I don’t have an ipod but I do use itunes. I have ripped all my CDs into my itunes collection and have purchased a ton of stuff from itunes. I also use this to automatically update the podcasts that I follow. This works great. I use itunes everyday to listen to music and this is my main mp3 player.
• Firefox – I have converted 100% from Internet Explorer to Firefox. This is a great product and I find that the tabbed browsing feature saves me a ton of time. I often have 10 or more web pages open at once and Firefox handles this well.
• Treo 650 – This is my cell phone / PDA. I have had it for almost a year and it has worked great. I love having everything in one device (cell phone, PDA, games, mp3 player ect). I think I will always be a one device guy.
• Alerts – This is a very general technology but worth talking about. I get daily alerts from several websites everyday or almost everyday. I am obsessed with reading job descriptions and understanding the local job markets. Not because I am looking. I just love to know what is out there and what fields are hot. Everyday I get alert emails from monster.com for job searches I have entered. I also get alerts from Ebay with new listing that I may be interested in. I have alerts setup in Google to inform me if there has been news on various subjects that I am interested in. I love “push” technologies like this that provide me with the information that I want.
• Google Search via Blingo – The Google search engine is simply the best. But I do access it via a service called Blingo. They have the same Google results but there I have a chance of winning a random prize. I have not won yet but Kris my coworker has won several times. What the heck it is worth a try. If you want to sign up go to www.blingo.com.
• Google Desktop Search – This is an app you download from Google and it provides a better way to search your hard drive. Windows search does not compare!
• Instant Messanger – I am always running several IMs at any given time. I use Yahoo Messanger and the MSN Messanger. At work we use one called Pandion that we use all the time as well. I love this technology because it saves me alot of time.
• Skype – This tool makes it easy talk with others for free over the Internet. I do use this mostly for work and talking to my web development team in India. But for a guy like me that is always at a PC it is a perfect solution. I have a headset at home and at work that I use and Skype works perfectly. It is actually better quality (usually) that a standard phone.
• TV remote – And lastly the greatest technology of all is the TV remote control. I just can not function without one of these and sadly as much as I try to cut down my TV watching I do still use the remote every day.

Doing what I do (Internet marketing, web development and design) I have often though I could do my job from anywhere in the world (with a PC and an Internet connection). I know not everyone has a job like mine, but I think that more and more do purely “virtual jobs”. By that I mean that I never produce anything that is a physical product in the real world (other than back pain, headaches and bad posture I mean). If you think about it many people provide a service, training or something non-physical if you think about it. Even though I work with cutting edge technology, I still work in a traditional work environment. I don’t want to get into that too much but I want to focus on the benefits of the virtual worker.

Here are some benefits and problems that a virtual worker could fix:

1. Urban Sprawl – It is amazing to me how much Utah has changed in just the last 10 years. The Salt Lake Valley is all but filled up! Utah County, which used to be in the “country”, is all but filled up as well. In Spanish Fork it is amazing how many new homes, stores, and schools. This can only go on for so long.

The virtual worker could live anywhere they chose. They could live in a small town away from the city or in another country and still work for the company they chose. These types of workers could be a real asset to these remote locations and boost local economies. Personally I feel that the big city is a bad place to raise a family and I won’t go into that now. But just for environmental, economic, social and security reasons I think outside the big city is the better place to live.

1. Time and resources saved – I spend almost 2 hours a day commuting to Salt Lake every day. I know many people who just wish they had a 1-hour commute each way. Not only does that eat up 8 hours of my week, but it consumes resources like my car and fuel for my car. I do car pool 3-4 times a week but I still just imagine those toxic fumes pouring out of my Civic’s tail pipe every day.

It is not only the time on the road but a virtual worker gets that time back and can do productive things with it. They could work for 2 hours a day more, they could spend more time with the family (my top choice), or they could get more involved in their community (service, classes, politics for example).

1. More productivity – Personally I feel that when I work from home I am more productive. I have a secluded office and a great Internet connection (thanks SFPN!). With fewer distractions that at work. I admit it takes some getting used to and some self control. But with modern technology and tools it is easy to keep track of what virtual workers are doing. With cell phones, web browsers and PDAs it is easy to waste time at work as well so most people are learning to effectively manage these distractions.
2. Better communication – Some may say that communication is the weak point in the virtual worker. I would argue the contrary. I have been managing a web development team in Mumbai India for over a year and have never met a single one of them. With tools like instant messenger, email, voice over IP, cheap phone service, and video conferencing you can communicate more effectively than ever. And many of these tools have built in tracking of what was said and done. Many times here at work I end up having a 30-minute conversation with someone that could have been done in a 2-minute email and still been productive. People today are getting better and better at multi tasking and are getting used to communicating in many different ways and with many different tools.
3. Lower costs – The virtual worker saves the company money in expensive rental space and equipment. I just need a computer, headset, and cell phone and I am ready to go. I have a desk, chair, printer and Internet connection already at home. It doesn’t get any cheaper than that.

I understand that there are problems and concerns with the virtual worker that I have not addressed. Maybe I will do another blog posting about that. But in our world economy and ever increasingly technical society it is just a matter of time that it is a very common thing for millions of virtual workers to be plugging away at remote locations every day.