Protus Acquires Packetel Internet Fax Service AssetsProtus Acquires Packetel Internet Fax Service Assets

And what about that? Leave your comments below!

Protus, a leading provider of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) communications tools for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), today announced that it has acquired the assets, including the subscriber base, associated with the pFax Internet fax services from Packetel. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Based in California, the pFax Internet fax service is used by tens of thousands of small to medium business and corporate organizations. The subscription-based pFax fax-to-email service enables businesses to send and receive faxes. Protus, whose product offerings include the MyFax Internet fax service, my1voice virtual phone service, and Campaigner e-mail marketing service has established itself as one of the fastest growing and highest quality SaaS players in the market. The acquisition aligns with Protus’ strategic focus to accelerate growth in the Internet fax market, and further enhances the reach of Protus’ suite of productivity tools to SMBs.

RingCentral changes their site design!

Hi guys!

Got some news for you! Today I found that RingCentral have changed their homepage design!
It is more comfortable and easy to use than the previous one, I think.
Now it is easy to find necessary services and it seems to me that many useless info is gone from the homepage, but maybe it is just correctly placed now?
Due to the new color pallette of the page it became more comfortable to read and orient.
As for the main menu, it was also optimized and made like a dropdown menu, everything was sorted by categories, it allows to find necessary info by simply choosing right category tabs.
Fonts, keys and distance between headers were increased and it also makes the homepage more comfortable to use!
Sign up forms are united now and the sign up button was moved to the right part of the page and increased and is more noticeable now.
Also, I would like to note that the new design is modern and trendy, and it is so important in nowadays due to a huge number of sites.
It is clear that the site design change is the correct and necessary company step, because of the specificity of the product, many potential and existing clients come to the site to find information about the offered services and it is necessary to make the homepage maximally informative and comfortable. I think they achieved it!

You can find new design here. I hope this article will be interesting for you. I will be glad to receive your comments!

Enterprise Fax over IP Featured Article

Hey. Decided that this will interested. Enjoy!

In a recent TMCnet interview with Open Text, Senior Product Manager Geoff Anderson brought to light how fax over IP plays a large role in corporate compliance regulations requiring organizations to be more efficient and transparent. Ultimately, FoIP can more securely enhance service as well as ensure privacy and security. Part II of that interview is covered here. Without a doubt, enterprise fax over IP helps companies cut their communications costs, as it uses VoIP, or voice-over-IP technology for transmission of faxed documents. That means companies no longer need to use traditional phone lines to send and receive faxed documents. Globally, today’s compliance regulations call for companies to adopt a cohesive strategy to ensure compliance and control are a part of day-to-day operations. In fact, the number one driver for replacing fax machines with fax server software is most often regulatory compliance. In an interview with Geoff Anderson, senior product manager at Open Text, he explained how enterprise fax over IP helps companies remain in compliance of the standards that govern their business. According to Anderson, regulatory compliance is driving the growth of fax over IP and holds significant promise as this technology continues to evolve. “One thing is certain, the business need for safe, secure and reliable document delivery is not going to ebb. Many people have predicted that e-mail or e-mail like transmissions will overcome the need for fax transmission, but that has not been the case to date,” Anderson said. “Even using encrypted e-mail, the fact that the packets transverse the public Internet leads to potential sniffing, and even failure to deliver. I am sure you have sent e-mails that were not received. There is no audit trail to follow, and you end up shrugging your shoulders and resending. No encryption is unbreakable, and for some documents, credit applications, equities trades, mortgage documentation, etc., fax remains a strong mechanism for delivery.” At Open Text’s recent content world event, Anderson said he listened to a case study of a mortgage processor who received 2.3 million fax pages a day and, until 2001, they were using standard fax machines to receive these documents. “Imagine the security risk of lost pages in such an environment. By migrating to a fax server, and implementing customized cover sheets with routable information embedded in them, all their faxes are properly routed keeping the workflows moving, and not surprising, the time for approving a loan went from two-plus days to less than two hours, all with increased assurance of confidentiality. Think of all the trees that were being consumed by that number of pages being printed each day,” he said. Cases like this, according to Anderson, are everywhere. For example, recently there have been a string of high profile data breaches at credit card servicers. They are now redoubling their efforts to ensure security, and this is moving them to fax servers as a solution to enhance their internal security. As for the future, Anderson said Open Text is seeing a strong growth trend in FoIP installations, so clearly the technology has moved past the early adopters and into the mainstream. “The surprising observation that we have made is that often an organization has already made the transition to VoIP, yet still rely on their TDM connected fax solution. Now is a great time to leverage your IP infrastructure for both fax and telephony, and reduce your TDM PSTN footprint,” Anderson said. “One other advantage to going boardless and FoIP is the ability to virtualize your fax server solution. We currently support VMWare’s ESX platform for virtualization, and are planning on formally supporting Hyper-V solution by the end of 2009,” he explained. “Organizations are using these technologies to enhance the leverage of their infrastructure in the data center. Fax servers and FoIP in these virtualized environments provide outstanding scalability, flexibility, yet retain the security and features that regulators demand. As more companies adopt IP-based communications systems, security has emerged as a chief concern. Open Text Fax Server, RightFax edition ensures that its fax software yields secure and private document delivery, Anderson added. “Our 25 years of experience, and nearly 100,000 server installations attest to our feature set, and the security of the system,” he said. “The fact that 97 of the top 100 financial institutions rely on RightFax for their fax transmissions, attests to the security, reliability and regulatory compliance in our DNA. We are the natural choice for fax servers for any sized business from a small or branch office, up to multinational juggernauts.”

Yahoo courts partners in India

Some news about YAHOO. Enjoy!

Eleven months into the Yahoo board after a failed buyout bid for the portal company by Microsoft catapaulted her to the top of the Internet media company in a management shuffle, she is clear about what her company is and what is not.

“We are a media company with amazing technology,” she told journalists on Wednesday. “Half of our business is in search…but we are not Google.”

With a focused description of itself as “the centre of people’s lives online” — or a pivot to drive traffic elsewhere amid an explosion of content sites and social networks — Yahoo is now out to woo local partnerships in India, wearing on its sleeves a people-friendly brand, a heavy-duty technology infrastructure and its traditional leadership of online banner ads distinct from the Google’s search-led leadership.

“India is excitingly complex. It is really important that we feel local to in India,” Bartz (61), ranked 12th in the list of the world’s most powerful women by Forbes magazine, told journalists. “We want to partner with those close to the people, wherever they are,…however regional they are.”

Yahoo already has a partnership with Hindi language publisher Jagran group. It is also an investor in match-making site BharatMatrimony.com and in Tyroo.com that competes with Google’s AdWords in search-based advertising. It also has a technology centre in Bangalore.

Yahoo has a strong presence in India, with 72 per cent of the people online connected by Yahoo accounts. A recent ad campaign led to a 40 per cent rise in time spent on Yahoo India sites. With 96 per cent of Indian telecom operators in partnership with Yahoo, Bartz believes prospects are rich as mobile Internet takes off.

“Of course, Internet penetration is very low, but we view that as an opportunity,” said Bartz, who met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh earlier on Wednesday and discussed possible ways to offer technology to bridge the digital divide and take more people online, particularly the the Unique Identity project.

Processing 500 billion e-mails a month (80 per cent of that unwanted spam) and 9 billion ads served every day and $1 billion (Rs 4,600 crore) in free cash flow every year, the company still has plenty of room to be relevant, Bartz said, dismissing talk that giants Google and Microsoft were out to eat Yahoo’s lunch.

Bartz said half of Yahoo’s business was from search, in which it got a new lease of life in a battle against Google after a partnership with Microsoft’s search engine Bing. But she adds that people spend only three percent of their Internet time on search. The other 97 per cent is where Yahoo sees its big chances.

Bartz was earlier at engineering software firm Autodesk. On her second day there, she discovered she had breast cancer. She successfully fought both the disease and corporate troubles at Autodesk.

How to Tame Your E-mail Monster

Decided, that it is enough useful info to share it with you! Hope you will like it!

Ubiquitous, effective, efficient, simple, annoying, maddening, perturbing, frustrating, and indispensable. All are adjectives that can describe e-mail. Most of us have a love / hate relationship with our email.

Like a hammer, e-mail can be used to build or to wreck. E-mail is a tool that can be used to improve your communications or confound it. It can be a time saver or a time sucker.

Your effective use of e-mail will put your time where it is most effective. Many of us find that e-mail and the Internet can be a black hole, exerting an irresistible, almost manic, pull on our productivity.

Here is proof. In my last column I suggested that you should only check your emails every 90 minutes. My own e-mail and (to a lesser extent) the comment section of the Insurance Journal Web site was blue with disdain. Many told me they have to check e-mail every 90 seconds in order to keep up. From the name-calling you would have thought that I had questioned the virtue of the reader’s mother!

Ninety nine percent of the e-mail we all get can be addressed quite well, making clients quite happy, if we respond within a business day. If you can respond faster, great. Frankly, with many of the people I encounter, I’m just glad to get a reply without having to send a reminder!

Constant checking of e-mail saps productivity. Most of our work requires some level of concentration and attention. Being in the middle of 10 tasks means that you are constantly trying to figure out what is what, draining away time and contributing to errors.

Here are some more email time wise ideas:

• Happiness is an empty inbox. When you check your e-mail, empty your inbox. Your inbox is for new mail. You don’t leave mail in your post office box do you? When you get a new note delete it, reply to it, or put it in a folder for later reply. Trying to work from your inbox is like trying to manage your snail mail sitting in the mail room.
• Your e-mail address should not be from Yahoo or Hotmail – probably not Gmail either. I am amazed at how many professionals do not have their own e-mail address. Bush league. Skip the e-mail style gimmicks. Don’t add backgrounds, moving icons, or garish colors. Simple, clean, and neat.
• Use the tools included in your software. Most will let you filter messages. Some put messages into folders and others attach labels. Your software can take notes from your inbox and put them into folders for future review. My e-mail moves the newsletters I subscribe to to a “Read Later” file. I never touch them until I’m ready for them.
• Bing! Turn off the new-message indicator. You really don’t need to know that you have a new e-mail.
• Never send an e-mail without a descriptive subject. The subject line is what grabs your reader’s attention and helps you (and your corespondent) find the e-mail six months later. Be descriptive.
• Hold off on “reply to all.” Does everyone really need to see that you said thanks?
• Watch your tone. Are your messages perceived as curt? Explain yourself clearly. Never use “happy faces” in business e-mails!
• Include a signature file appropriate for the recipient and your business. Almost every e-mail you send should have all your contact info at the end. Phone, website, fax, mailing address at a minimum. Include some biographic info if you like – no random quotes – inspirational sayings – or Hotmail solicitations! Dump the smiley faces and the environmental pleas too.
• Temper your temper. Never hit send when you’re angry. Stick the diatribe in your draft folder overnight and re-read it in the morning.
• The pause that de-stresses. Set your software so that e-mail is delayed a few minutes before actually being sent. Most of us have had the experience of hitting the send button only to immediately want to add or delete something to the note.
• Touch each e-mail in your inbox once – reply, delete, or, if you have to, put it aside for further work. If you do put it aside you only get to touch it one more time.
• Use spell check. Why anyone sends an e-mail anymore with “teh” instead of “the” is beyond me. Use the technology you have available.
• Don’t rely on spell check. Their, there, and they’re all pass spell check. Only one is correct within a specific sentence.
• Short e-mails are almost always better than long e-mails. The habit of succinctness is vastly and overwhelmingly underutilized in today’s world of commerce.
• Limit the number of topics you cover in an e-mail. Everyone scans e-mails rather than reading them. Hit on a few topics. Use frequent and short paragraphs.
• Sometimes, a phone call is better.

HP Photosmart Premium TouchSmart Web All-in-One Printer

Today I offer you this article to discuss. Will be glad to find your opinion about this!

HP’s Photosmart Premium TouchSmart Web All-in-One Printer is a color inkjet multifunction printer with one truly new feature: the ability to access Web-based applications for viewing and printing items on the machine. It’s a cool concept, but it’s not quite polished: The initial apps have some frustrating limitations, and we found small bugs in the programs–and even in the device itself. Given the unit’s high purchase price ($400 as of 10/27/09), I was expecting a smoother start.

As a traditional MFP, the Photosmart Premium TouchSmart Web performed competently in our tests. Using default settings, it printed plain text and graphics at better-than-average speeds of 8 pages per minute and 3.7 ppm, respectively. (HP’s specs of 33 ppm for text and 32 ppm for graphics were derived from draft mode.) Print quality was fairly smooth and realistic, just a little grainy on plain paper.

The MFP includes a 100-sheet, letter/legal input tray and a 20-sheet photo tray, plus a 50-sheet output tray. The automatic duplexer is an especially nice feature. Connectivity is generous, including USB, ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. Slots accommodate CompactFlash, Memory Stick, SD Card, and XD-Picture Card, and the unit also has a PictBridge port. Ink costs are average, running at 4.4 to 4.8 cents per text page and 12 to 15.5 cents per four-color page, depending on whether you use the standard or high-yield inks.

The Web-based apps are underwhelming because they’re merely canned, limited versions of certain Web sites. For instance, in Google Maps, you can type in an address, view the location in map or satellite mode, and print the results in a few different layouts. (Driving directions? HP says that feature is coming.) USA Today’s app lets you select and print a type of news (such as sports or weather), but you can’t preview the contents beforehand. If you’re a Snapfish photo site user, you can view, print, and upload photos, but you can’t use the slideshow function–which would seem a natural fit for the MFP’s 4.33-inch, color LCD. HP says it’s considering this feature.

Those apps and a handful of other home-oriented ones arrived preloaded on our unit; you can download more from the HP App Studio site. HP says that a software development kit will be available in early 2010–now, that could be fun.

Note that the Web functions do not work unless the machine is connected directly to a network with Internet access. A typical installation via USB to your PC gets you nowhere (even if your PC has Internet access). This seems like an important point, but HP confirmed that it isn’t documented anywhere.

The LCD works intuitively as a touch interface. As a display, it has a few problems. On our unit, for instance, the preview feature for copies and scans kept stalling; HP says a fix is in progress. A message that appears after you change ink cartridges has oddly overlapping graphical elements, which HP acknowledges. The company is also checking on an error message that kept showing up in Google Maps displays even though nothing was wrong.

The Photosmart Premium TouchSmart Web All-in-One Printer definitely sets a new, if wobbly, direction for the category. I’ll be interested to see future apps, especially the SDK. I just wish that HP had worked out more of the kinks before shipping.

Try before you buy customer services

That is an interesting info! Read ad enjoy!

Smaller centres invited to play with the ‘big boys’ thanks to hosted technology.

Call centres up to 50-seats are being offered a risk-free way of testing new technologies before migrating to an IP (Internet Protocol) set-up, with a hosted version of CosmoCom’s contact management software from new firm, Quick Contact Centre (QCC).

The QCC technology is designed to unify phone, email, web, SMS and fax communications, and offers functionality such as intelligent skills routing, self-service IVR (Interactive Voice Response) and multi-contact call recording. Paul Titcombe, director at Quick Contact Centre said that with deployment typically taking less than 48 hours, the chance to pilot services without huge IT projects makes it a compelling product for centres with limited resources.

“QCC’s service is also the perfect solution for companies looking to run short term campaigns or trial contact centre concepts, while centrally managing and reporting on multi-site operations – including those operations of outsourced partners. Now the small-to-medium size contact centre can benefit from the same diverse and sophisticated features previously available to only the ‘big boys’,” says Titcombe.

Twelve per cent of internet users have no security software as two thirds of users lack fraud awareness

Here is a useful info about scamming. Read… and be aware!

As National Identity Fraud Prevention Week reaches it mid-point, a report has revealed that 64 per cent of people admit that they throw sensitive documents in the bin without shredding them.

Also, 12 per cent of people said they used the internet without having any security internet software in place. The research from National Identity Fraud Prevention Week and featured on the Metro website, showed that the threat of identity fraud is real and current, according to spokesman Tyron Hill.

Hill said: “People are either naive or they continue to ignore the advice that could keep their identity, their finances and their reputation safe.”

Jonny Wilkinson, security expert at Websense, said: “Twelve per cent is a worryingly large number of employees without adequate security software. It highlights a significant gulf between the protection in place and the protection needed in today’s Web 2.0 enabled world.

“A company’s workforce will regularly interact with a range of websites, social networks and other information-sharing programs. The exchange of data is constant and, especially in the current economic climate, data is power.”

However Phil D’Angio, Director at VeriSign, commented that despite the low numbers, UK consumers are gaining knowledge of online threats. “As ID fraud continues to rise, consumers are increasingly aware of the fact that they could be a fraudster’s next victim,” said D’Angio.

“Recent research commissioned by VeriSign found that 82 per cent of consumers are reluctant to shop from websites that do not display signs of enhanced security. It’s no longer enough to offer behind-the-scenes protection for your online customers – they need to see a visible commitment to their safety when transacting online.

“Customers need recognisable signs which prove that that if they buy from your website, you are taking every possible step to protect them against online crime. The proof is in the pudding – if they have any doubts over to the security of a site, retailers risk losing their custom as they seek safer places to shop.”