Authorize.net Issued Full Refund

After many emails and phone calls ending in a refusal to listen and act, Authorize.net did finally completely refund our setup fees. We applaud them for finally understanding that acting in good faith is more important than “policy”. Perhaps their policy will change?

Here’s a company that does everything they can to get you to sign up. If it doesn’t work out and you end up not using their services at all, they keep $120 signup fee after having done no work, furnished no services. They do this “because they can”, and I find it disgusting. Whatever you end up trying to do with online payments, avoid Authorize.net if possible.

Would it be that much trouble for a company like Authorize.net to examine the case on its merits and see that I am being screwed to the tune of $120? Yes, I signed up for their services, but no, I didn’t not receive any service of any kind. This was not their fault or mine. What is their fault is paying people to simply say “well, you signed this agreement” and not seeing that the agreement was unfair and in this one case, a case where we received zero benefit, needs to result in a full refund. So far, Authorize has deigned to refund two months of useless gateway charges which is better than nothing. The majority of the charge is the setup fee, for which they did nothing, invested no time or work, delivered no service.

Until this changes and they decide to pay me back the $120, I can only say: avoid using Authorize.net for credit card processing.

Authorize.net: “We are recording this call. You can not record it, though”

Authorize did issue a refund of setup fees for an account that did not ever serve.

Authorize.net: “We are recording this call, but YOU CAN’T” by VoIP Users Conference

May Thinkup Talk posted

Thinkup Talk #5 May 2011 by Thinkup

New Thinkup Talk Site

Thinkup Talk, the live, interactive podcast about Thinkup, has its own site now:

www.thinkuptalk.com

March Thinkup App Conference

Thinkup #3 March 9th, 2011 by Thinkup

Gina Trapani, Andy Baio and some developers join me to talk about Thinkup App. Try it!

Thinkup Talks: Gina Trapani, Andy Baio and a Cast of Thousands

The Thinkup Community assembles on the second Wednesday of the month to talk about our favorite project. Join us live sometime!

Thinkup Talks #2 January 12, 2010 by Thinkup

Gina Trapani, Andy Baio and some developers join me to talk about Thinkup App. You should try it soon.

Triple play: Freebox Revolution v6

Triple play has arrived in our home. Here’s the description of my day yesterday. First, Internet access was cut off. Normal, since I changed ISP, but what was abnormal is that I got it back at nearly 3 times faster download speed very shortly after, when I connected our new Freebox v6. I was expecting more of a hole in the connection and had a 3G+ key ready just in case.

Unboxing

Nothing to see here! Three boxes, each with a diagram of hookup on the inside lid:

  1. Freebox modem, router, server.
  2. Freebox player (set top box)
  3. Power supplies for the above which also connect the two via Ethernet at 200Mbps

I opened up the boxes, plugged in the server and powered it up. It has a LED readout that enumerated the steps it was going through in powerup, connect, syncro. I went upstairs and hooked up the player to our TV, using the included HDMI cable.  That alone sets the box apart from most of the gear I’ve bought. There was a second Peritel cable in case you have an older TV with no HDMI. I love HDMI for its combining of audio with the video.

Setup

As soon as the modem was plugged in, it went though its paces and I played with the Macs connected to it via Ethernet cable. It happend that the box router comes set with the same unroutable local address I use, 192.168.1 but the gateway was set to 254. I use fixed IP addresses on most of my equipment, so I had to first use DHCP on one to find the gateway. Once I did this, I could switch the computers back to manual fixed IP and set up two other important devices, our SIP phones.

Phones

Full telephony is part of the triple play, so I plugged the Siemens Gigaset S675IP in to the phone connector on the router as if it was a “normal” phone. It’s not: the Gigaset is a DECT/SIP hybrid, it connects to a phone line and has 6 SIP accounts. Our are set to providers in the USA and conference servers like ZipDX. I needed to reconfigure both the Gigaset DECT and the Polycom IP650 desk phone to talk to the new router IP. Both phones were now working.

WiFi

Setting up WiFi was a matter of generating a key, and might be the only daunting thing to a non-techie. However, I got through it and copied the very long string to USB. One thing I never found was a way to copy that key to the iPods,. It had to be typed in manuually; This was probably the longest operation of the day.

Media Server / Set Top Box (above)

Firing this up went through some configuration. First the screen resolution and trim, which is automatic. Then the detection of terrestrial digital TV channels. Finally I was ready with the full menu (see image below). I briefly tried terrestrial, which worked, but sucks because we don’t have an outside antenna. The digital TV over the Internet is perfect. Further, I was able to download a file at something like 15MB/s while watching TV. But then I moved to the media part.

Network Attached Storage

At first I was confused by how to connect to the server part, since there is a 250 gigabyte drive in it. Older versions used ftp, which I was ready for, but couldn’t find. It took my hours to realize that this box works as Network Attached Storage (NAS). Here’s the amazing part: it just appears as a drive automagically on Macs and even the Windows 7 laptop. I immediately copied some AVI over to it and lo and behold, it plays these better than my Macbook connected to the TV did on VLC.

Blueray / DVD

I’m not a Blueray fan, we don’t even have a full HD TV, so I didn’t try it and don’t care. However, inserting my American DVD in the unit gave me the “wrong region, fool!” error. I’ll have to look into the possibility of a hack, but I fear the region is in the firmware. Not about to mess with that. I put in a DVD I made here, which works in normal players, but it had no audio. I guess for now, we’ll have to keep the deregionalized DVD player we have.

DECT Phones

The unit has a built in DECT base. I haven’t tried this yet, I’ll be back to edit when I do. If you already have a bunch of DECT handsets, this might be a good way to go.

Remote control

It’s rubbery and a bit too much Philippe Starck (tarte à la crême du moment) for my taste, but it works.

The Internet access speeds are about 20Mb/s which is great, although I’d have liked an upload speed increase, too. It’s only a hair faster than the 768Kb/s we had before.

Build “Call Me” Web Widgets for Any Web Page

“Call me” buttons have been around for a long time but still have not taken off. Zingaya enables voice calls through any computer, right from a web page without downloading anything. The button for your page is built on line in a few minutes. Using Zingaya’s user-friendly interface you can leverage some great features:

  • Cost-effective, rapid deployment
  • The button has the text you wish, size and color are adjustable
  • The widget can be limited to use on particular sites (domain names)
  • Call recording can be enabled and automatic
  • Voicemail can be used, playing a file you upload to your account
  • A single widget can call several phone numbers at once
  • A complete call history is available
  • Multiple widgets and multiple lines on an account
  • Calls can be routed via SIP or Skype, or to regular telephones or cellphones worldwide
  • e-commerce sites can implement “Call us now” buttons in minutes

Call me buttons would be a good addition to existing customer support/sales channels for any website doing business on the Internet. They allow you to support customers worldwide, where toll-free and callbacks are usually country/region specific and can be costly and time-consuming to set up.

Zingaya technology is Flash-based, which brings up a few caveats: It will not work on mobiles without Flash (notably iPhone and iPad). Flash sometimes causes problems on Linux and the Flash player must be a recent version. Adobe’s Flash Privacy Settings.

Musicians’ Online Visibility

Internet visibility.

Talent, musicianship, soul, creativity… whatever it is you want to put out there, it has to be visible on the Internet. As I look around at all my creative and talented friends, I see that very few of them are able to easily point to their work on social networks like Twitter and Facebook or even in an email. Here are a couple on concrete free suggestions to fix that. If you read what follows, there’s no excuse for not having a significant online presence.

Your tunes.

Youtube is huge, but unless you have video or a good with slide show-type presentations, it won’t be your best vector to point people to. If you’re a little geeky, you can find a free player to put on a site, like this one. However, I think the best way to go is to stick to your music and find a site that shows it off best. I have used two sites I think are excellent: AudioMicro.com and Soundcloud.com. My current favorite is Soundcloud because it has some cool extra features. For example, people can comment at a specific spot in your song. It’s social so you can actually discover new music and have other creatives discover yours. Let’s say for a moment that you take my advice and join Soundcloud.com free.

Soundcloud

After joining and adding some profile info, you’ll upload a few tunes. Each song has a lot of potential info like exact tempo, key, genre and license. You can choose from a restrictive license to “do whatever you want”. I like to use the creative commons license that specifies credit for use, but who knows if people respect that? You have to realize that there’s a huge amount of music out there and by putting it online, you’re giving some of it away.

Posterous


One dead easy way to put stuff out as an artist is Posterous.com. All you do is join the site, choose a setup and publish. You can publish by sending an email to an address they furnish. The impressive part is that if you send an email with an mp3 song attached, Posterous will publish the text of your email and add a player for the tune automatically. The site I refer to above, http://sugarcane-harris.com is on Posterous is shown.

Posterous will also automatically publish a little gallery of photos you post. If you are a performing band or artist and have gigs and photos of those, this a great way to go, it’s easy and still free. Most importantly, you do not need to pay someone to help you because anyone, even drummers, can use these sites.

There are a lot of free ways to be present online, including Facebook – which I personally abhor – but also Tumblr, WordPress.org and a zillion others for the more or less geeky.

Summing up

If I had one piece of advice, it would be this: go join Soundcloud.com, put up about three songs. That whole thing will take you about 15 minutes, cost nothing and require an average IQ. If you want to go further, get a Posterous site and post stuff there. You can post a link on Facebook to a single tune on Soundcloud.com.

Using SIP for Online Conferences

Here is the fastest way to start calling conference free using SIP technology.

Go to the Blink web site and download Blink available for Mac, Windows and linux platforms.

To use Blink with Talkshoe, see this video.