I had an example here but I removed it.

Go on admit it, you’re po’d that Google Voice (GV) is available to people living in the United States only. It may be for friends or business interests, whatever the reason the ability to call U.S. telephones (both fixed and mobile) for absolutely zip, zero, nada appeals to you. Conversely, U.S. residents can also contact you without incurring international rates.

Having your own U.S. phone number gives you a “presence” in that part of the world and to those who might call that number, you are for all intents and purposes, answering as if in the U.S.! And to make it even sweeter you get to select exactly where in the U.S. your number is located. New York, San Francisco or Biloxi, Mississippi , it’s up to you. Then when you dial using GV, the Caller ID displayed to the recipient shows the number and geographic region you selected. If only you were in the U.S. to take advantage of it .

But wait! for four easy payments of $26.99 + shipping…. ok, ok I’m kidding… I couldn’t help it.  Here’s how you do it for free…

If you know a little about SIP and VOIP continue reading, otherwise grab your nearest geek and ask that person to read this post!

The very first hurdle you have to clear is to request a GV account. Do that by going to the GV invitation page and use your gmail account where requested. In a few days you should receive an email back inviting you to Google voice service. “Hold on!”,  you say, “don’t GV know I’m not in the U.S.? Why bother?”  They don’t check at request time, that’s why, and it’s not going to know as I’ll explain.

Fast forward a few days and great, you have an invite, but in your haste you clicked the link they gave you but got a message saying Google Voice is only for U.S. residents currently. You got that message because the geo-location of your I.P. was recognized as non-U.S. so the next thing you’ll need to do is login to a proxy within the U.S. before you can proceed any further. You probably already know some working proxies in the U.S. and if you do please mention them in the comments below for the benefit of us all. If you don’t you might need to use a commercial one for a while which costs very little in any case. If you read my post about Pandora on my blog you’ll find the one I used mentioned there.

On to the next gotcha. Before you try to use your GV invite check before you click the invitation link that you really are on a proxy. Use a service such as WhatIsMyIP to verify the location is reported as within the U.S. And another big one – clear your browser of cookies, very important! If Google finds it’s own cookie(s) in your cache reporting a locale other than the U.S. it will go by those and not the proxy location. So just make sure your cookie cache is cleared.

Now if you’ve done all that, go ahead, click the invite and GV will guide you through the setup of your number, your voice mail settings and all the other features (including free send/receive texting!). It’s all well-documented at the GV site which will become visible to you at this point.

Hold your questions for a moment now, I’ll deal with them shortly, just stick to the steps in this guide and it’ll become clearer to you as we progress.

If you’ve been following along in a set by step manner, you’ll find another big Gotcha at this point. GV requires a U.S. number for forwarding purposes and for validation. Curses! Why didn’t I tell you, this is a chicken and egg situation and a waste of time! Well it’s not.

Now there may be lots of argument about big government going on in the U.S. at the moment, but for purpose of this exercise we love them and more particularly the Federal Communications Commission or FCC. Because of a quirky FCC requirement regarding rural phone line availability companies such as IP Kall exist. Basically IP Kall get a subsidy every time one of the phone numbers they control connects a call. And it didn’t take them long to figure out that if you used SIP for the call termination, more and more people could use their service and they would get correspondingly large subsidies. People who have a U.S. landline have a billing item for a “universal access fee” and we’re taking advantage of that program’s largess here! But that’s another story.

Go ahead and sign up for IP Kall (or similar, if you find others please leave them in the comments) and make sure it’s working. By working I mean that you can dial the number it assigned you and it rings back to your PC or ATA. Now you have a U.S. number that’s located in Washington state on the west coast, which in and of itself is quite useful, but not as useful as a GV number.

Go back to your GV setup and put the IP Kall number as your forwarding number. Google will now dial that number which will then ring at whatever device/softphone is logged into your SIP account. Google will ask you to key in a confirmation code and then you’re good to go! Be careful that you have the correct DTMF settings too, you might have to play with that a little.

If you so wish you can then go the GV dashboard and add a free Gizmo account as a forwarding number which is also very useful as it can forwand an incoming call to SIP, Skype or GTalk.

Once you have all the setup done you can dispense with the proxy, in other words, GV does not check location during usage, only at signup time. In addition, the IP Kall number will expire after 30 days of inactivity, but with GV you can dial it for free so there’s no excuse for that.

How you use it after this is up to you, I like to use it via the SIP client on my Nokia E71 as well as  my Linksys PAP2 ATA.

In summary:

• Obtain GV Invite
• Sign up for Gizmo5
• Sign up for IP Kall
• Register GV using a US proxy
• Enjoy!

Remember Google Voice is still a Beta product and subject to change. All comments welcome.

By PAUL BOUTIN of  The New York Times

OPRAH Winfrey granted pop superstardom in April not to another fraudulent memoirist, but to Twitter, the online social network that has lured both Hollywood celebrities and basement amateurs away from their blogs.

To the Internet hipsters who discovered Twitter in 2006, Oprah’s inaugural tweet — FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY, she typed — was the end of the era, the shark jump. But that’s like saying the Beatles were over after they appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

Twittermania has only begun. In the days after Oprah’s show, Twitter’s traffic growth is accelerating. The ratings service HitWise now ranks twitter.com as America’s No. 38 Web site. It’s about to rocket past CNN and Wells Fargo.

Because it’s kept simple, most users figure out Twitter quickly. If you began tweeting the day of Oprah’s show, it’s a safe bet you already know how to DM a private message to a friend, and how to R.T. a joke worth retweeting. You search for #swineflu every few hours, and know it’s called a hashtag. You’ve learned how to follow Demi Moore and block online marketers.

Assuming you’ve got these basics down, there are many less obvious tips and tweaks to get more from your tweeting. All of them are easily found on Google, but check out the online version of this article to get links to each Twitter tool.

Advanced Search

Twitter has some powerful search options, but good luck trying to find them. If you use the search box built into Twitter’s Web interface, it won’t tell you there’s also an advanced search tool, and special characters — “operators” in search jargon — that you can use to search for, say, “Bush OR Cheney since:2009-01-20.”

To find the Advanced Search, scroll to the bottom of any page at twitter.com and look for the link “Search” hiding there. Click it and you’ll be taken to search.twitter.com. Click the Advanced Search link. I suggest bookmarking the Advanced page on your browser. There’s another link there that lists all search operators, like “within:10mi.”

Twitter via S.M.S.

Twitter’s architects deliberately limited tweets to 140 characters, so that they could be sent and received as short message service text messages (S.M.S. allows 160 characters, but the Twitter people left room for user names.) Still, many newcomers are unaware they can operate Twitter by texting. Login at twitter.com and click Settings at the upper right of the page. Go to Devices and add your phone.

At first, you’ll get nothing. That’s because, by default, updates from the users you follow aren’t texted to your phone, so you don’t run up a bill. Instead, the interface at twitter.com adds buttons next to each user you follow. so you can turn updates to your phone on or off.

You can tweet from your phone by texting a message to 40404. You can also text commands to Twitter, like “help” or more important, “off.”

Twitter/Facebook Integration

Are you a Facebook user who also tweets? Wish you could type only one status update, and have it appear in your profile on both social networks? Go totwitter.com/widgets/facebook and click the button at the bottom of the page that says “Install Twitter in Facebook.” You’ll then have to click through a few pages of configuration.

You can use the connection in either direction. I suggest updating Twitter and letting it pass the tweet along to Facebook. It takes fewer steps, and you’ll be kept within the 140-character limit.

Favorites

Another well-hidden feature. If you like a tweet and want to preserve it for eternity, mouse over it. A star-shaped icon appears at the right of the tweet text. Click that. Afterward, you can click the Favorites link on your home page to see all the tweets whose stars you’ve clicked, no matter how long ago you saved them. You can also go to other users’ pages and browse through their Favorites.

Sharing Photos

You can’t send photos through Twitter, but you can send the URL for a photo hosted on a Web site. TwitPic plugs the gap with a Web site that both holds your photos and creates URLs for them. You login to twitpic.com with your Twitter username and password, then upload a photo from your computer. You and other users can then share the picture by going to the TwitPic page for your photo and tweeting from there. TwitPic forwards them to Twitter with the correct photo URL automatically appended.

Desktop Twitter Apps

If you’re still using a browser window open to twitter.com to tweet from your computer, try using a desktop (or laptop) client instead, to make sending and reading tweets more like using AOL Instant Messenger.

On Windows machines, Digsby is an application that displays Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and all of your email accounts in a long, tall window that looks like a buffed-up A.I.M..

Mac users can try Twitteriffic, which has been praised for a visual aesthetic that resembles Apple’s slick Aperture photo editor.

Both these applications tuck Twitter into the side of your display. If you’d rather it cover your whole screen, try TweetDeck, a free program that runs on both PCs and Macs. Instead of one column of tweets, TweetDeck breaks out multiple columns for different kinds of tweets and different groups of friends. It has plenty of extra features, too, like photo uploads to TwitPic, a Facebook tie-in and a ticker of stock market tweets.

Phone Apps

Like desktop apps, Twitter clients for smartphones are also proliferating faster than reviewers can track them. And again, there’s no obvious Best in Show. I suggest TwitterBerry for BlackBerry, Tweetie for iPhones, and Twidroid for G1 Android phones. Why? Because these three make it easy to post photos from your phone’s camera to TwitPic without thinking about it.

Another Phone Use

TweetCall is a recently introduced voice-recognition system that takes calls to 1-877-TWEETCALL from your phone, converts your spoken words to text, then tweets the result through your account.

TweetCall correctly parsed “How was the amuse-bouche at French Laundry?” But it still misses words and can’t parse my friends’ user names. The company claims that in a few weeks, the system will have many more Twitter-centric features including support for user names and hashtags.

Sneaking Office Tweets

Spreadtweet is a cheeky desktop app that mimics a boring Excel spreadsheet. Coworkers who don’t look too closely won’t realize your spreadsheet’s rows are actually tweets. I use it at home because it packs a lot of tweets into a small space, with no distracting visuals.

OutTwit is a more serious application that adds Twitter support into Microsoft Outlook. You can send and read tweets from inside Outlook, and then archive, group and search them as if they were e-mail messages.

Save Time for Tweeting

TweetBeeps.com does what the I.T. guys call alerts. Once programmed, it will search Twitter once an hour and shoot you an e-mail if it finds, say, the name of your company or the latest batch of #swineflu tweets. TweetBeeps saves you from spending your day hovering over the Advanced Search page.

Then again, who am I kidding? One of Twitter’s primary attractions is that it gives obsessive webheads something to reload that updates faster than Google News. All these power tools make using Twitter more flexible and more fun. But they aren’t going to send any of us scurrying back to work any sooner.

If you liked the free Pandora streaming music service but are no longer able to tune in then this article is for you.

Pandora is a music service much like Last.fm but it is more faithful in playing artists and genres that the listener may be interested in. In short, Pandora is more compelling.

When Pandora first started out it was usable to anyone with an internet connection but the music industry objected, citing the issue of royalty payments. Agreement was finally reached for listeners in the United States, but other countries such as Ireland were SOL. Now when a listener attempts to tune in a check is made on the listener’s I.P. address, and if it is not recognized as U.S. domiciled the listener is prevented from accessing the service.

Enter Ultrareach. Ultrareach is simplicity itself. There is nothing to install, just a single executable that you click on to run.  What it does is selectively give either your Internet Explorer or Firefox browser a U.S. based I.P.

Ultrareach is a project supported by academic institutions and freedom of speech advocates to allow those in countries where content filtering is rampant to bypass that same filtering. So, it’s clean, no malware and it’s free.

My preferred way of using it is to surf the web in Firefox as I normally do, but with Ultrareach running, I use Internet Explorer to listen to Pandora, and keep the browser minimized. Streaming quality is fine and there is no delay in visiting your regular web sites or using internet services as the Explorer browser is the only program affected.

Aha! you say, perhaps I can get access to Hulu.com content too, as it too requires a U.S. based I.P. Afraid not, they’re wise to it. I’m told HotSpot Shield works fine for this purpose but I haven’t seen it for myself and I have another method of getting to Hulu. HotSpot Shield is something of a misnomer btw, it is not just for WiFi access points.

Let me know how you make out.

Part 1.

OK, VoIP – you’ve heard of it and maybe you’ve dabbled with it, but you also know that what you don’t know is likely to come back and bite you, usually when money has already changed hands and not long after your 30 day money back offer expires.

If you’re like me when I started investigating – you’re probably overwhelmed with the myriad of acronyms and models, the complexity involved, and in the case of the heading above, all of these from just one vendor. Well I can relate,  been there etc. so read on…!

The VoIP market is a bit like the Wild West, there’s a land grab going on, the only difference now is that the prize has been renamed “mindshare”.  There are plenty of players, all touting how “their’s” is the best solution, claiming dubious “features” as benefits and exploiting user forums for their devotees to evangelize on their behalf.

It all ends up as a pissing contest with the poor user being pulled in multiple directions, F.U.D. (Fear, Uncertainty,Doubt) being planted by rival companies to the point where it’s almost impossible to try and get some sort of measured and objective advice.

I don’t claim to be a GURU but I thought I’d share my thoughts and what works in Ireland, doesn’t cost a fortune and is robust enough for you to basically forget about it once installed.

There are of course many ways to to take advantage of VoIP from your broadband connection, this article describes some of the options from Cisco/Linksys who are a major player in the domestic market place and work reasonably well with broadband, as known to an Irish end-user.

Linksys PAP2T

I limit the article to the options that do not require a PC or laptop to run and can use your existing wired telephone by means of an ATA or Analog Telephone Adapter. It means you can fall back to Eircom/BT etc (POTS or Plain Old Telephone Service), or VoIP, so you’re not stuck if the VoIP fails which is a generally a smart way to start out.

First important thing to note for us Irish people with our so-called “broadband” connections is that for many of you the experience is not going to be pleasant. If you got suckered in to one of those “free broadband with a bundle” type deals or “low-cost” or some such you’re likely to get exactly what you paid for – not a whole lot.

VOIP requires bandwidth somewhere in the region of  100Kbbps sustained in both directions (between you and your ISP) to ensure a smooth conversation.  If your connection can not provide that rate the conversation becomes garbled, chopped and you’ll end up frustrating yourself and the person you’re calling. Now before you say but I have a 1 MB or more connection remember I mentioned both directions, many ISP’s don’t tout the upload speed because quite often it’s only 128Kbps. And when you factor in contention, signal quality and overhead it’s not uncommon to be only getting 50Kbps or even less on these budget packages. Your deal doesn’t seem like such a deal now does it?

Back to the hardware. You need an ATA. Linksys have four models – the  PAP2, PAP2T, SPA2102, and the SPA3102. In fact they have more (through acquisitions) and they are still trying to get the product mix right, they probably only need two models for the Irish domestic market. You may also hear the make Sipura bandied about, that was one of the acquisitions but you can disregard that info as it’s “encapsulated” into the four models described here.

The workhorse, the one that was the original disruptive technology is the PAP2. This made VoIP in the home widespread and is the grandfather on which other models are based. Although still widely available in the market place it has been superseded by the the PAP2T. The PAP2T adds more memory, fax capability and better compression. If you have a choice always take the PAP2T over the PAP2. But PAP2 is perfectly acceptable too.

The SPA2102 and SPA3102 are not just adapters but also feature built-in routers. These may be of interest to users whose ISP only only provide a single port router. A single port router has only one RJ-45 ethernet jack. The PC is connected to this jack for internet connectivity. The SPA2102 and SPA2103 have two RJ-45 jacks. One gets connected to the ISP router and the other to the PC so although the VoIP device and PC share just one connection they can operate independently of each other.

If you already have a multi-port router on your connection then all you need is the PAP2 or PAP2T.  When researching your best price on eBay/Amazon etc. you might discover variants on the PAP2T such as the PAP2T EU and PAP2 NA and sometimes the word Vonage.  All things being equal what would really suit you is the PAP2T UK. The two letter suffix describe the plug the adapter uses, Europe, North America and UK. Others like CA  refer to central America, AS for AustrailAsia etc.  But they all work here since the transformer will take 110v-240v. Don’t buy a Vonage PAP2 unless you *know* you want one. It’s proprietary to a voice provider  in the U.S. and U.K. markets and likely not what you want.

So what about 941′s 962′s & Co? They are also VoIP devices but they cannot be used with POTS, i.e. they can’t plug in directly to your Eircom wall jack. They are more suited to an office type environment. But you should be aware of them as they do have their uses in a SOHO setup too. Maybe I’ll do an article later on their benefits, but for a novice stick to the PAP2T as it’s inexpensive and straightforward in it’s usage.

In summary;

The SPA-1001 has been discontinued and was replaced/renamed the PAP2.

The PAP2 has been discontinued and is replaced with the PAP2T.

The PAP2T is the latest model VoIP adapter from Linksys.

The SPA2102 is the latest model  router/adapter combo from Linksys.

The SPA3102 is the latest model router/adapter combo from Linksys with LAN Passthrough.

-NA or -EU means that the device is not associated with a particular VoIP provider (unlocked). Devices without -NA or -EU usually have another -XX designation and are locked to a specific VoIP Provider, e,g, -VN Vonage.

If you are looking to purchase used equipment, make sure it is a -NA or -EU model. Other models are not truly “unlocked” and will not be supported by Linksys or other providers.

• SPA2000: Basic phone adapter that allows two phones or fax machines to be connected to an Ethernet network in order to make and receive telephone calls or faxes.
• SPA2100: Similar to the SPA2000 with the addition of an Ethernet Router. Functions of the built-in router include QoS.
• SPA3000: Has only one phone adapter port, but can be used for POTS backup for strictly VoIP systems.
• SPA3102: Similar to the SPA3000, but includes single LAN output that can be used to connect to a computer. This is handy if the user only has a modem and no router. The SPA3102 connects to the LAN socket on the modem. The computer, which is traditionally connected to the modem, now connects directly to the LAN connection on the SPA3102. The SPA3102, effectively, is an ATA and single output router in one box.
• SPA9000: An IP PBX system that allows an Auto-Attendant configured, Hunt Groups, multiple IP phone extension, and POTS connectors. The SPA9000 also has basic router functions, port forwarding, QoS, and DTMF functionality.
• SPA901: A basic IP phone with only one line. Often referred as a warehouse or kitchen phone.
• SPA921: A single line phone with LCD display screen.
• SPA922: A single line phone with LCD display screen, but adds a single port built in switch.
• SPA941: The flagship of the SPA phones. It incorporates a 4-line IP phone and an LCD display.
• SPA942: Similar to the 941 aside from the additions of  Power_over_Ethernet ability, back-lit screen, and a single port built-in switch.
• SPA962: Similar in appearance and functionality to the 941/942. Features a six line, 2-inch color screen.

Note: This is the first of a series of articles intended to assist users move to VoIP. Your comments and feedback would be appreciated and will help me cover the aspects you wish to see. This is a draft article which will be updated with links and definitions over time.

Never tried LinkedIn? In this video podcast from Business Week,  Arik Hesseldahl demonstrates the social networking Web site and discusses how you may find it useful.

Play Standalone