Entrepreneurial Ramblings

I still see the need for land lines – they are superior in terms of quality and far better for actually having a conversation where both parties can hear one another and for folks with home offices and long distance relatives, call quality can be important and using a cell phone exclusively is not an option for many. Land lines are also a little better for your health than mobile phones (or so we think).

But now, it’s time to kill the ridiculous home phone bill without losing the home phone quality.  I’ve been thinking about eliminating my home phone bill for 3 years now and this past weekend was the time when I finally did it.  Even on Time Warner’s All the Best Package with cable, internet and phone service bundles, you still end up spending $20 a month on a home phone, or $240 per year.  Chances are that you already use a digital phone service from your cable provider.  If you don’t, then your already wasting an additional $300 a year on an analoge line and taking the steps in this post will then save you over $540 a year.  Read on to learn how.

If you have a wireless router in your home, you are already half way to killing your home phone.  You just need to take one final step to eliminate your home phone bill forever, without sacrificing the land line quality you are so accustomed to.

The final, bold step is to get a Skype number ($2.99 per month or $36 per year ) and a Skype landline phone.  These physical Skype phones run for about $170 (free shipping included) for a nice one and they do not require a computer to function, just a live wireless connection and a router with an available Ethernet port.  So now you’re out just $206 for a your first year of Skype home phone loving and just $36 per year thereafter.   Compare that to $240 per year for the cheapest home phone service you can find (Even Vonage is $15 per month or $180 per year – Ugh!).  Sure – once every 5 years you’ll probably need a new physical Skype phone but that’s not too bad considering you’ll have saved yourself around $1K over that 5 year term.

The final trick is to get a Google Voice number and make it forward to your Skype phone.  Give our your Google Voice phone number as your home number for life and you’ll never have to switch home phone numbers again – ever – not even if you move out of the country!  With Google Voice, you even get free voice mail and voice mail transcriptions.   The hilarious Google voice mail transcriptions are worth the switch alone.

After you’ve made the move, feel free to dig a hole in your backyard and bury your old home phone there.  Or, you can save a little more money and drop it off at your local Salvation Army for the charitable tax donation, just be sure to get a receipt.

Saving 5 minutes a day by eliminating a meaningless routine task will add 76 days of free time to your life. 76 days to do whatever you choose. 76 days = 1,824 hours. I just added 76 days of free time to my life. Here’s how you can do it to…

ELIMINATE VOICE MAIL, which on average, wastes around 5 minutes per day, every day. I have not checked my voicemail in over a month now and I feel oh so free. It’s amazing and I encourage you to try it too. Voice mail is a total waste of time. You have to call your own number, enter a PIN number (in the case of Verizon) and then listen to someone else’s voice recording and then react to it.  Wouldn’t it be easier if your voice mails were just emailed to you?  Or perhaps texted to you?  Or both?  Well then can be, and for FREE.

Here’s how you can eliminate voice mail from your life forever…

Step 1: Sign up for Ribbit.com. It’s FREE.  If they are not accepting new users at the moment, ask me for an invite code. I’ll gladly share one with you (I have at least 3 more that I can share).  If you prefer a paid service, you can check out YouMail or PhoneTag (2 LA based companies).  YouMail and PhoneTag both run around $5 per month I believe.

Step 2:  Let Ribbit hijack your existing voice mail.  All you have to do is enter a long funky number into your phone, Ribbit will then call you and take over your voicemail, send you a PIN to enter on the site to confirm, and your voicemail is now officially linked to Ribbit.  You can remove it anytime and go back to old school voice mail by just logging into your Ribbit.com account and deactivating the service.

Step 3:  (Optional) Upload your contacts to Ribbit.com so the transcriptions will show the name of the contact (not just their phone number) when they are sent to you.

Step 4.  Set up a custom voice greeting.

Step 5:  Tell Ribbit to both email and text all new voice transcriptions to you when new voice mails arrive.  If you want to actually listen to the message, Ribbit gives you a specific phone number to call within each message (just click the number and most smartphones will automatically dial) and you can actually listen if you choose to.

If you follow steps 1 to 5, you will have eliminated the useless act of checking voice mail forever and saved 76 days of your life (5 minutes per day for an entire lifetime).  If you need a sign up invite for Ribbit, let me know and I’ll be sure to invite you and move you one step further to a more fully automated life.

UPDATE: Last week I experienced my first Ribbit faux pas where one voice mail message was not emailed / texted to me (my phone was off at the time but the message never did come in).  The message was saved out the Ribbit.com site but it was not emailed / texted to me.  I guess that’s what I get for using a free service.

Purple Foot, originally uploaded by AudioMicro.

Four weeks ago I injured my foot on a routine basketball play. This photo was taken just one day after the injury occurred. As I get older, it seems that I my body just can’t take the physical stress it used to. This arch injury occurred while playing defense and my man didn’t even have the ball! I wish there was a good story behind it like a missed dunk, but no. It’s been 4 weeks now and while it’s no longer purple, the arch of my foot is still sore. Hopefully I’ll be back on the court soon, probably another week or 2. I think playing indoor basketball is easier on the feet. The blacktop outdoor courts in LA were fun, until this happened.

I didn’t know you could get ad free Pandora without paying $36 per year until I decided to BUY A SONOS. If you haven’t heard of Sonos, you’re not the only one.  I didn’t know about it until I read Jason Calacanis‘ blog and I just happened to be in the market for a home stereo at the time so I thought I would give it a shot.

-Photo: Sonos Zoneplayer

There are pro’s and con’s to my experience with Sonos to say the least, but over all it’s good…very good.  I’m a happy owner.   The biggest upside is AD-FREE PANDORA streaming throughout the house anytime we want it, and we can control it all wireless from any computer and my wife’s iPhone.  I’m not sure if the lack of ads is on purpose, or if it’s just a glitch in my household, but it’s been one whole week of music streaming in my house and I have not been served one single advertisement from Pandora (fingers crossed).  The biggest downside to the Sonos is its COMPLICATED SETUP PROCESS (I won’t bore you with it but it’s a total pain if you do not have the right router / networking hardware).

In short, Sonos is an easy way to wirelessly stream audio throughout your home and to stream music wireless to your stereo from any computer, an iPhone, and best of all, you stream the music from pretty much any music service the web – like Pandora (my personal favorite), Last.fm (not bad), Napter, Rhapsody, AM / FM Radio and even International Radio.

Here’s why I really like it…it’s affordable ($399) and the sound quality is great considering the size of the speakers (it’s as small in size and about equal in quality to a Bose wave radio).

With a Sonos, you do not need to have your own local .mp3 collection to have access to tons of streaming music (particularly Ad Free Pandora).  This is huge.  You can easily stream cloud based music services and control them in a pretty slick interface (the Sonos Desktop controller and iPhone app) and pump the music through your home.  You can wirelessly add additional Sonos speakers (called Zoneplayers) and stream audio through any numbers of rooms or even outside, wherever you have power.

At first I was skeptical because I’ve experimented with the wireless iTunes streaming capabilities of Apple’s Airtunes hooked into a home stereo.  However, there is one main problem with this approach – the need for the following items / abilities:

1.  Local set of music (i.e. huge local library of content on your computer’s hard drive or an external hard drive, which are prone to failure over time), and

2.  The inability for AirTunes to stream music services (other than your local .mp3/CD collection) though AirTunes. This issue may one day be solved with LaLa Airtunes integration, but for now, it remains an outstanding issue and Sonos solves this problem by enabling streaming of pretty much every web / cloud based music service out there.

APPLE SHOULD ACQUIRE SONOS

Given my experience with Sonos, the company seems ripe for an acquisition by Apple one day. If Apples want to gain market position in home entertainment and compete with Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s Playstation, then this acquisition makes a lof of sense.  The only issue being that I am not sure Apple has ever acquired another hardware manufacturer before; there’s always a first time for everything right?.   The Sonos product line is already designed to look just like Apple’s products – white and minimalist.  Perhaps it was designed this way intentionally by the folks at Sonos to set themselves up for a potential Apple partnership one day?  I think Apple should acquire them, work out the networking bugs, and push the Sonos to Apple fans as a home entertainment/ streaming music solution.  Sonos would fit well into Apple’s present product offering.