Skype will make you cheap

A couple months back, the lovely Christi and myself were approached by Kerri with the concept of interviews for our podcast, diabeticfeed. Hello Skype. I had known about Skype for some time now. Never used it. Phone call type things over the internet came and went (at least in my head) in 1998 with Dialpad. Dialpad was, at the time, a free-ride, crazy internet, "make money by giving it away" VOIPish service that allowed you to make free calls to any land line. The very idea of using your dial up modem to make phone calls and skirting the phone lines BY USING THE PHONE LINES was fascinating to me. My brother an I used it a couple times but we were mostly unimpressed with the quality and the fact that it took 30 minutes to have a 10 minute conversation because of all the dropouts. Dialpad circa 1998 over dial-up sucked. Bless them for trying.

Enter Skype - There were others, and there were and are many others, but Skype seems to be the only one that matters in a big way. So here we are in a remote undisclosed location wanting to do an interview with Kerri in Rhode Island (which is the size of Rhode Island - tired of that comparison) and Skype allows people to talk for free and the quality of the audio is very good. Lights went on I had an absolutely brilliant idea. Unfortunately most of my brilliant ideas have already been discovered, in this case, it was Doug Kaye of I.T. Conversations of how to effectively use Skype for interviews for podcasts. He even had a diagram. I can read diagrams.

So now Skpye has become the cheapo tool par excellence for creating interviews for the low to no budget of podcasting. Seriously folks, this whole internet thing is going to take off, I can just feel it.

Well if we an use it for podcasts, we could actually use it for making actual phone calls. Huh? Leave it to me to come upon the brilliance of a service backwards, first realizing some complicated way to do cross country audio interviews to, hey, just talkin'. With Skpye I could do it for 2 cents per minute (it's free now.) But I hate wearing headset/mic combos because it is, get this, not like using a phone. I went in two directions

Direction 1 - The Linksys CIT200 Skype (only) phone has been welcomed into my growing pile of gadgets. I spent $112 us a few months ago (I've seen it recently for around $80) so I can use Skype away from the computer and use the Skype service like a, well, a phone service. Genius. Call quality is pretty good for a wireless 2 GHz phone and I can go across the house without losing signal. Software installation was a breeze and it kind of just chugs along, working well. We also purchased a Skype-In phone number ($40 for the number for a year, unlimited calls, voice mail thrown in.) Since we both have cell phones, the fact that emergency service is not available is not an issue. I would have loved to have had this available back in the day when money was tight and most of the calls I made were long distance. It is a solid product.

Direction 2 - OK, have you ever found a product that the makers of the product seemed so ashamed of it that they did not even bother to give it a name, or a model number, or a serial number. And normally if you saw one of these nameless products you would pick it up in your hot little hands, think "Hmmmmm," put it back down, and get on with you life. Well I bought one, in box with big sans-serif letters that say "High Performance USB Phone." A wired internet phone, no brand, just product. Oddly it works, and well at that. After an exhaustive internet search, I have a model number and a company - the AU-100 and the company is ATCOM China. I was able to get the phone from geeks.com for free (with a rebate)(UPDATE 7/30/06 - I got my rebate, so it is officially free.). I can afford free. And if the rebate goes through It will actually be free. "You have to spend money to lose money," is what I say. You can find this phone on the web for about 12 to 17 dollars and if you spend more than that on lunch daily, brown bag it for a day, and get this phone if you want to make free calls across the US and Canada on a device that works like a phone. It just works. There is what looks like a display that is not a display; it is just dark plastic. The buttons only work on Windows with special windows drivers. So what - I'll dial with Skype. The computer, any computer, sees it as a generic USB sound card, works with Windows, Mac and Linux (yes - I tested all three), doesn't care which VOIP software you use and is cheap. I'm cheap.

So now that Skype has decided to give away free land-line calls to America and Canada till the end of the year and I can take advantage of it fully with out headset/mic ala Janet Jackson. You have no reason at all not to call your mother now.