New York City entrepreneurs are invited to an event that includes a TV casting, a rooftop party and free professional portrait photography.  It all goes down, rain or shine on June 26 from 6:30-9:30pm at The DL located at 95 Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002.

Lemonade Heroes is producing a television series for a national broadcast television network about entrepreneurs in New York City.  They are in search of interesting company founders with great stories.  This is your chance to get on camera and be cast in their upcoming TV SERIES!  

If you are a friend of Phone.com and are one of the first twenty people to register using this link, you will get free admission to the event.  Who doesn’t like free?  On top of that, Phone.com is offering a special promotion that you will not want to miss out on so be sure to attend if you are a founder.  

With just a little thought and research one can easily trace the evolution of the technology behind today’s VoIP telephony back to the earliest days of communications over wire – the telegraph. The dots and dashes that made up the Morse Code used in early telegraphy are directly analogous to the binary on-off that’s behind all things digital today, including VoIP. It’s simply a matter of the speed that the signal moves, and the way and how its interpreted.

So it’s with a deep sense of history that I read this week of the impending death of telegraphic communications.

Now many Americans, being very provincial, think the last telegram was sent, via Western Union, on Feb. 2, 2006, with other countries around the world following suit. But the world doesn’t revolve around the U.S.A. The truth is that telegraph service has continued to live on in India, with Indian government-run BSNL still delivering an estimated 5,000 telegrams per day. Now, that’s due to come to an end on July 14, BSNL has announced. Indeed the announcement is said to have precipitated a rush to the Indian telegraph office by people seeking to secure a piece of history.

And just as a matter of interest, it seems the first telegraph system was built by British colonialists in India, back in 1833, in the Calcutta area. The inventor was a surgeon named William O’Shaughnessy, and that was 11 years before the legendary event in which Samuel Morse wired “What hath god wrought?” from Washington D.C. to Baltimore in Morse code, an event that most Americans think marks the invention of telegraphy.

As to what has killed the Indian telegraph system, the answer is the cell phone. According to India’s Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) there were 861.66 million mobile connections in India as of February – a number almost three times the size of the entire population of the United States! With such a mobile user base, it’s hardly a surprise to me that telegrams aren’t used that much any more. The result is that BSNL’s telegraph service has been running deep in the red.

And of course for written material, e-Mail can easily replace telegrams – if you have an Internet connection. While the percentage of businesses and households in India with broadband is still not a majority, it’s getting there fast. India has the fastest Internet traffic growth globally and is expected to have 348 million users by 2017, according to networking giant Cisco’s latest Visuals Networking Index (VNI) forecast (Phone.com offers Cisco VoIP hardware, including its analog terminal adapter (ATA) and a very attractive entry-level VoIP phone).

As for VoIP in India, it remains highly restricted by laws that protect traditional landline companies. But use of PCs to call to numbers outside of India is legal, and I would guess it’s only a matter of time before the Indian laws change and open a vast new market to the VoIP industry.

Still I will always remember the old days, when I would drop off my newspaper stories at a Western Union office in some remote place in the U.S., or perhaps at the post office in another country, to be sent via telegram back to the city room.

Small Business Week is an event of national significance, is organized annually by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA). The 2013 event marks the 50th Presidential proclamation of National Small Business Week.

For me it is a bit like Father’s Day which we just celebrated yesterday, or Mother’s Day. We don’t really need a special day (or week) to tell our parents how much we love them. It is Father’s Day every day. I guess for all of us serving the small business community it is Small Business Week every week of the year.

That said, this special week, and especially this year celebrating 50 years of such support to small businesses across the US is significant.

60% or more of new jobs every year in the US come from small businesses and more then half of US workers either own or work for a small business. At Phone.com we’re grateful to you for everything your SMB does for us and our society. From mechanics to car sales people, from contractors to real-estate developers our local economies thrive because of you.

This week isn’t just about celebrating you, it’s about supporting you and our local economy. Please don’t just read this post. Go out this week and take a pair of shoes to be fixed or clothing to be mended at a local small business. Buy gifts for your friends and family this week from an online retailer that may not have a HUGE presence but sells high quality merchandise. And remember if you have to spend a few extra cents you’re supporting your neighborhood and maybe even your neighbors. I know I can go online to buy brand name products from a big name retailer but I try on a daily basis to shop with the small retailers and stores I’ve never heard of. There’s nothing wrong with shopping with the big name stores but balance it out and support small businesses.

As the president said in his message honoring National Small Small Business represents core values of our country.

At Phone.com we wanted to help celebrate National Small Business Week by providing a free second phone number to any new customer who signs up this week. Get a second number for your business and use it as a fax number or get a toll free number. You all know what you need.

To get a second number please enter coupon code NSBW during signup.

Happy Small Business Week from the Phone.com team

Being a father myself and the victim of some “interesting” Father’s Day gifts I thought it would be appropriate to share and give our own Father’s Day gifts. In that case what better gift could we give our readers then a discount or a free phone number.

In the spirit of giving… The first 3 people to post to our Facebook page a picture of a “special” Father’s Day present from this year or any other will get $10 off their next bill. Additionally anyone who shares (to our Facebook page) a fun story about about being a Phone.com customer and running their small business will get a free phone number. (This will run until this coming Wednesday)

Let’s see those “wonderful” Father’s Day presents and hear some stories! Happy Father’s Day.

It’s decision time again around my house. Time for the wife to get a new cell phone (not quite as urgent as my need a couple of months ago, after I dropped my old phone in a parking lot and a car ran over it). But these days a new phone involves an agonizing decision, given that the long-term price of a smartphone rivals that of a powerful desktop computer.

At least with the desktop your choice of operating system remains pretty clear: You get a Windows-based machine, or you pay somewhat more and you get an Apple. Every attempt to unseat those two over the years has failed. Not so in the world of the cell phone.

In this corner we have Apple and the new iOS 7. For now, Apple is the king of the heap, but remember not so long ago it was Blackberry that was the king – and these days Blackberry is desperately trying to make a comeback with some slick stuff released and more already “previewed.” More, the latest two generations of Android-based phones have been rated as roughly equal to – some say a tiny bit better, other a tiny bit worse – Apple’s best. And finally we have the Windows Phone, whose latest iteration, Windows Phone 8, is blazing hot. I know, because that’s what I have, and it looks like after a half dozen tries Microsoft has finally figured out a winning smart phone formula. Given all of that, Apple’s perch may indeed be precarious.

But, as good as Windows Phone 8 is, it still can’t begin to match the applications base that both Android and iOS have built up. And don’t forget the old saw in the PC world: He who has the most applications wins. Microsoft knows that, and its working like crazy to get an applications base built up for its phone software.

Now my wife’s thinking goes like this: A Windows Phone is more likely to integrate seamlessly with what’s on her Windows-based desktop. But an Android-based phone may synch best with her tablet, and from her Android tablet (and Windows Phone 7) experience she knows that there are more Android apps that she wants than there are for Windows Phone.

Oh, and price isn’t an issue: The Android and Windows phones she’s looking at cost roughly the same right now (Windows because of some big marketing concessions on the model of HTC phone I’m toting, Android because she’s looking at a Samsung that’s one generation back).

And comparing features doesn’t help much. From what I’ve seen, both are great, indeed all of the contenders have their strengths (and weaknesses). Windows Phone 8 does browse a slight bit faster (assuming you can get LTE, which I can) than the others. On the other hand, Microsoft recognizes that Android may well become the market leader, so it is quietly backing Android software to link to desktop Windows.

Ah, and Apple, in its latest technology previews, has more than hinted at integrating VoIP compatibility right into its operating system, its demonstrated it in public. But somehow I think VoIP is coming to every operating system, and it won’t be long before my cell phone, via its wireless data persona, is an extension of my Phone.com small business phone system. After all, my Windows laptop already is.