Quick personal update – I just moved back to Toronto, hence my relative quietness on this blog for a few weeks. I’m still working at Peek, don’t you worry everybody. Its just that my wife and I are expecting our first born in the next few weeks.
Also, another geekypeek is going to start writing. Nick Taylor will be contributing the occasional post. Since Nick did a minor in english with his computer science major, you can expect much better grammar, more sensical articles and all that good stuff.
Ok – so since I am now working remotely, I wanted an affordable phone solution. I decided to go with a MagicJack and ditch my Vonage account. At $20/year, you really can’t beat the MagicJack pricing, and they also have Canadian numbers available.
I got my MagicJack. Annoyingly it wouldn’t work on my Windows XP laptop. So I had to phone tech support. They sent me a bunch of stuff to get it working and about 30 minutes later I was good to go. Great customer service I must say.
Well, funny enough, my first call was to the usual free conference bridge service we use at Peek – 218-844-3366. I dialed it up from my new MagicJack line and surprise, surprise it was re-routed to magicjack’s conferencing service! Crafty, crafty I must say.
Generally I like the MagicJack though. Its a product in the same vein of Peek – affordable, easy to use, and hated by Apple fanboyz on slashgear. And I like saving money.
Chris Davies | 21-Jan-10 at 4:29 am | Permalink
Ha! Imagine my surprise to see we got name-checked
SlashGear have never actually reviewed the MagicJack, but every time we write about it we get swamped with comments from disgruntled owners. Are they all Apple fanboys? Maybe, I shall have to commission a survey…
dan | 21-Jan-10 at 10:33 am | Permalink
Ha! Well imagine my surprise that someone from slashgear would respond to my blog
I was a bit harsh… apologies. I suppose I was thinking of this article – http://www.slashgear.com/magicjack-too-good-to-be-true-037751/
I know it shouldn’t but it irks me to hear people being so derogatory and uncivil in blog comments. Entrepreneurs like Peek and MagicJack are generally trying to do good – drive cost down, offer more competition, etc. A world of just Apple, Microsoft & Google isn’t all that interesting (or competitive for that matter).
Chris Davies | 21-Jan-10 at 11:45 am | Permalink
I agree that sometimes healthy scepticism can cross the line to undue criticism; that’s a balance everyone has to strike (and try to stick to). We try to keep an open mind about everything we write about, unfortunately we’ve also been told a fair few negative things about magicJack that made us cautious. If someone goes out and buys something because of (or in part because of) what we write then that’s a huge responsibility, and it’s one we take very seriously.
We definitely concur on looking at competition and entrepreneurial spirit as a positive thing. After all, it makes my job far more interesting