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Yes, I said it. Voice over Internet is stupid. Yes, I know that it's free, or at least very cheap. I wouldn't be saying that it's stupid if I was the guy who came up with Vonage. Still, a am sitting here with my arms folded, rocking back and forth, thinking that voice over internet is stupid.

I didn't say VOIP is stupid. VOIP is cool. SIP, IAX, proprietary protocols, those are all pretty cool things, but, from the prespective of a business man, you have to understand that using voice over the internet is very, very lame.

Would you like to make money by selling your voice, one sentence at a time?

The holy grail of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) programming seems to have been, at least since the mid 1990's, a graphical user interface (GUI) for programming what is the furthest thing from graphical technology: Voice.

This is because IVR vendors are increasing going after the end user as their direct customer, and either ignoring developers completely or trying to create cottage industries out of marginally competent IT consultants.

Electrical Deregulation is now at hand. Third party verification (TPV) is required by many states and is critical to the integrity of customer enrollment. Steven Lendman of thepeoplesvoice.org writes, "Promising change after eight Republican dominated years, Obama betrayed the public trust by special favors given business at the expense of essential growing needs. Spurning them, in fact, he shows contempt for the things he rhetorically supports, proving he's no different from the worst of the bipartisan criminal class, serving wealth and power interests only."

Excalibur started out as the Telephony component of the CRM "PhoneZilla" for Net 1st National Bank in 1999. Predictive dialing support was added afterward along with hundreds of other features, reports and add-ons. Mediatel USA is releasing it as open source today for any developer or call center that wishes to use or extend it.

Mircea Teodorescu is the Smartest Man in the World. At least that is how all of the CallCentersAmerica crew know him. If something seems impossible, if we just can't figure it out, or if we don't even know where to begin, not surprisingly the first thought that occurs to everyone is, "Ask Mircea".

I was watching a television commercial recently where a health insurance company said it was saving trees by having a paperless office. Something about the commercial didn’t sit right with me and I wasn’t sure what it was. After reflecting on this for a moment I realized what it was.

The myth about saving trees by using less paper is a marketing device. The natural truth is that you don’t save trees by not using paper.

This is just interesting. I'm not saying you should do it, but 10 years ago you could do a web search for anything and probably find it. I remember searching for "serial numbers" and finding everything imaginable. You can't do that anymore.

Actually you can, you just have to know how to ask.

Call Centers America is looking for technical gurus of all disciplines from dialers to database management to assist site members in our new Free Tech Support area. Active participants will be promoted as service partners on the website. We currently have about a dozen skilled volunteers monitoring the forums. How do you join? Just jump in when you see a question that you can answer.