Do you ever find yourself on a really long conference call or stuck on the phone with your bank for what seems like forever? It happens to me more often then I’d like to admit and a few times I’ve gone over my cell phone minutes which is always quite painful. With all the offers for unlimited plans these days you’d think that would never happen, but I generally don’t talk that much so I don’t pay for them. Plus with my MUCH cheaper unlimited plan from Phone.com (only $21.88 per month) that I actually find very worth while I’ve been able to make all those annoyingly long phone calls from my iPhone using our Mobile VOIP app and never pay my cell phone provider a penny for them.

I could have unlimited calls on my desktop phone as well but I’ve never gone over my minutes there and even if I do it’s not an ungodly charge like with AT&T.

So now I make all my potentially really long calls on my iPhone and I usually use a headset to keep both hands free for typing during all that enjoyable hold time or listening in to conference calls. I’ve found it much nicer this way not stressing thinking I’m going to go over my minutes.

What do you do when your company in the US needs to provide customer support for a client in London? Or maybe daily calls from a business partner in Paris?. Or you have a small office in the Netherlands that needs to call your US office but can’t call abroad? These are common issues we hear about on a regular basis. Our world is nearly flat now, meaning distance and some times even time differences are irrelevant in terms of business. Conference calls happen all the time. I was on a conference call a few months back that started at 1am in Los Angeles but made perfect sense to start at 11 in the morning in Finland. Of course I was up and on the call, I was instant messaging with some friends in Europe, India and the US and none of this was amazing at the time. This is a perfect example of a flat planet.

Now if you’re providing customer support to England for something you sell you probably want a local +44 UK number. If you’re business partner lives in Paris but don’t want them to have to call long distance to the US you can set up a local +33 number for them to call but it won’t ring anywhere in France it can ring you at your desk phone, cell phone or any other number you’d like, or all of them. Lastly if your company has just a small office in the US and the main office in Amsterdam you can get a local Dutch +31 number for the main office to call to the US for those daily conference calls and they won’t have to make an international call, it’s just domestic. There is practically an unlimited number of use cases for a local phone number in a foreign country.

My favorite use of a local number is when a friend’s grown son and daughter in law went to England for a 2 week vacation and left the grand kids with my friend, he signed up to get a number in London from Phone.com so his son could call the kids every day and be the mean parent who tells them to do their homework and go to bed. My friend was so pleased with the service and with the price of only $4.88 per month for the UK number.

Phone.com offers Global Numbers for over 40 countries (as well as iNum – to learn about iNum click here) with options to get numbers from lots of cities in those countries. All the Global Numbers I looked at only cost $4.88/month which in most cases is significantly cheaper then even just a few minute call from a foreign country. So here’s the call to action, if you think this could help your customers, clients, friends or family you owe them at least a look around the Global Numbers section on our website.

Until recently I was under the impression that faxes were a dying technology but I was talking to a friend in the real-estate business and I found out that still to this day, in 2011 when everyone is preaching green living that he along with his coworkers still fax and print many documents. Emailing isn’t good enough and e-signatures don’t work in their business either. Same thing with mortgage loans and some federal documents. I’m not opposed to faxing by any means. I still have to do it every so often but I was a little surprised to hear that entire industries still utilize this old technology.

So I thought I would remind everyone that Phone.com offers fax service. The Virtual Office, Home Phone Plus and Virtual Number plans all allow you to send fax’s from the online control panel. It’s a feature on the left side in the menu bar. I’ve used it a few times myself to send directions and recipes to my in laws who don’t use a computer much anymore. On top of all this our Virtual Office service allows users to add a fax line and get fax’s directly into their email inbox and into their Phone.com inbox. From there you can print them or just look at them on the computer.

So if you still find yourself sending fax’s on a regular basis or just every so often don’t forget to use Phone.com. Plus we don’t take up any space like that old fax machine you might still have.

Once upon a time, in a land far away and long ago, I watched a demonstration of an early form of voice recognition. (Okay, the land was Texas – at Texas Instruments headquarters in Dallas to be precise – and the date was 1981.) It was definitely geeky, and quite funny to watch the frustration as TI’s engineers tried to get their baby to understand what they were saying.

Since then I’ve watched the technology mature, to the point where computers can automatically transcribe voice mail messages (a very inexpensive option on Phone.com). The service can be quite valuable in some situations, such as during meetings where getting the message is important, but picking up the phone and listening is definitely out of order. For those who are data bandwidth challenged on their cell phones, it’s also nice to be able to read the text, and not have to download an audio file.

But I do have to add that the industry still does have a bit of work to do to perfect the technology. Witness a recent transcribed voice mail I got which began: “Ties. So sit hubby Selangor hope you’re doing well….” The first word wasn’t ‘Ties,’ it was ‘Hi.’ I’ll let the reader guess what the rest of the message was, and the only hint I’ll give is that despite the word ‘hubby’ it wasn’t from my wife.

But hey, you win some and you lose some, and most of the transcribed voice mails I’ve gotten have been just fine, such as the transcription of this recent one from my wife: “I tried to call you but I don’t know you might have been sleeping. So maybe you can call us back. Bye.”

Stuart Zipper is the past Senior Editor of TelecomWeb news break and a contributing editor to Communications Technology.

Click To Call Buttons are a little HTML code that you can drop into many places. It is a convenient way to allow customers, clients or anyone else to call you without them ever having to dial your number. You program it in advance and when they click the button they input their phone number and then the magic happens and they are connected.

The code can be put into websites, blogs, email signatures and anywhere else that will accept it. Many companies use it to keep customers from having to dial them, making the customers life easier. It’s great for encouraging people to call you which is usually what people want.

The Click To Call buttons are a free service with Phone.com’s Virtual Office, Home Phone Plus and Virtual Number plans. It may be time to consider a small update to your site, including your own Click To Call button.