I’ve spent much of my career delving into telephone bills and proposals calculating the true cost of “this week’s offer” and I think the answer to the question is “NO”.

I was inspired to write this entry after looking at the “Free Laptop” offers that some of the residential broadband providers are offering at the moment.  Maybe the question should be “Is there such a thing as free?”

I am a very pedantic person and look into fine print and fine detail with everything I do that costs money and I do believe that somewhere and somehow you always pay for “free”.  I also believe that the true cost of free phone calls is rarely transparent and the advertising is often brilliant, even BT would have you believe that they are cheap.

Companies like Vonage offer free calls but charge a monthly fee for the service.  Many companies offer free calls between your offices and some even offer free calls to UK landlines.  On the surface of it it’s all true and if you only make B2B calls to your own offices and to UK landlines then this is without doubt the right thing for you.  However, if you call mobiles and 08 numbers (0844, 0845, 0870, 0871) then you’ll find inflated charges on those to supplement your free calls or a monthly fee or a commitment to buy something else.  Another way that cheap or free calls are achieved is to offer “Broadband Phone Calls”.  You may be familiar with Skype or Google Talk which are similar free services.  Whilst call quality is improving, I’d still question whether or not I’d risk making or receiving my business calls on a broadband phone service, for me it’s still just a little bit too risky.  Not so bad for speaking to colleagues but I suspect my customers would take a different view.

Race For My Wife was established to give boys and men a chance to do their bit for Cancer Research UK without having to get into training for distances of 10k or more. It is believed that much of the success of Race For Life is down to it’s attainability - almost anyone can walk or run 5k although Race For My Wife is slightly longer at 6k, due to the fact that it is held on the motor racing circuit at Castle Combe, near Chippenham in Wiltshire.

It is a great and great fun, fundraising event for Cancer Research UK and in it’s first two years has raised over £5000 with very low entry numbers. The plans for this year are to raise the profile and awareness of the event to encourage more people to take part.

You can visit the site at www.RaceForMyWife.org.

HTC have launched the HTC Touch Diamond and are about to launch the HTC Touch Pro.

They are what I consider to be two of the best smartphone or PDA devices on the market.

The HTC Touch Diamond with it’s TouchFLO 3D is a solid rival for the iPhone with the same kind of screen and fingertip control. Where I see it gaining advantage is that firstly, it runs on Windows Mobile so no additional software is required and you’re not restricted to iTunes - in fact, there’s little restriction, as a windows mobile device it will play WMA, MP3, video and more, all synchronised to your current Windows PC or Laptop. If you’re already a MAC user the iPhone may be the better choice. As a Windows Mobile user now I can assure you that moving stuff onto the device and organising it is a very easy process.

On top of all that, the GPS receiver is built in so you’re not just browsing maps or planning routes, you have full Tom Tom turn by turn navigation in the palm of your hand. The free or included Tom Tom software allows you to download one city map, so you’re looking at approximately another £65 to get the full Western Europe version with traffic and speed camera subscriptions included.

The HTC Touch Pro is more of a business tool and probably the most comprehensive and stylish mobile device on the market. With all of the functionality of the TyTN II including the slide out QWERTY keyboard, built in GPS Receiver, wifi and HSPA you can work at broadband speeds even if there’s not a hot spot around.

To summarize all the benefits - you can have:

• Your phone
• Your diary
• Your address book
• Your web browser
• Your email client
• Your picture viewer
• Your mp3 player
• Your camera
• Your video player
• Your games console

and

• Your sat nav

in one hand with one case and one charger.

Why would you want anything else?

LCC International were recently appointed to carry out independent trials of the mobile broadband services offered by the main UK networks.

A total of 28,000 tests were carried out over a period of 10 weeks in 140 locations across the UK.

Concentrating on page loads and download speeds Vodafone were consistently on top.

My own experience of using the Vodafone Mobile Broadband service has been fantastic. The coverage for 3g broadband speeds continues to grow and the service is quite “useable” at lower GPRS speeds too. I was really impressed last Thursday when I used it on the train from Newbury to London Paddington to update some websites and to add my last blog entry regarding Free Mobile Email. The image here shows my colleague’s picture of his laptop in an hotel room viewing You Tube videos over Vodafone Mobile Broadband!

We offer the full range of Vodafone Mobile Broadband products and contracts CLICK HERE for details. If you’d like to know more about the research & results and how you can be online almost anywhere by tomorrow, call us on 0800 970 2630 or CLICK HERE.

Possible?

Not only possible but here, now, working and reliable.

A while ago now, Google launched Google Applications which offer businesses of every size a full suite of hosted office applications. These include:

• Google Docs for word processing, spreadsheets & presentation software to rival Microsoft Office.
• Google Talk for instant messaging and PC to PC phone calls to rival Messenger and Skype.
• Google Calendar to arrange meetings, set schedules, and publish event information.
• Google Sites to share information & collaborate on projects.

And….

• Google Mail

Google mail is absolutely free and provides 6Gb of email file space for each account and you can have up to 100 free email accounts on each account/domain name.

The storage space pretty much means that you would never have to delete an email and amazingly each mailbox grows the more you use it. There are spam filters built in which in our experience so far are exceptionally reliable, I have had to visit my spam folder a couple of times to retrieve some messages that weren’t spam but haven’t yet received any offers of drugs, watches, jewellery or pornography in my inbox.

Access to email can be from any web browser via the google apps website where each user can log in to their own mailbox from any pc or handheld device connected to the web. There is an awesome mobile apps service for users of smart phones and PDA’s* and you can use almost any email client on a desktop, laptop, PDA or smart phone. Keeping the ethos of “free” we have chosen Mozilla Thunderbird** as our email client rather than going to the expense of Microsoft Office for Outlook or suffering the inadequacies of Outlook Express.

Unlike Blackberry, there is no need for additional software or servers and you don’t need to buy additional devices. Some devices however do make it easier to read and manage your email on the go but we consider these to be a replacement for your current mobile phone (see PDA* note below).

To top it all off, your mail is fully backed up by Google so, as long as you use IMAP rather than POP to read you email if use use something like Outlook or Thunderbird, you will only be viewing your messages and they will all still be held on the Google server and regularly backed up.

We offer a complete set up service including the Google signup and setup including the necessary changes to move your existing email addresses & accounts and device and software configuration.

For a demonstration or to get on the go with your free mobile email now, call us on 0800 970 2630 or CLICK HERE and we’ll contact you.

*PDA - Personal Digital Assistant or Palm Top PC such as the exciting range from HTC including the TyTN II, the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro.

**Mozilla Thunderbird - An email client similar to outlook but possibly more feature rich and more importantly open source and therefore “FREE”.

Newbury are entering a new era for the club and want a new site that will be easy to manage and update and one on which it will be easy for club members to add content. The additional goals are to streamline the site, incorporate their sponsor links and place them into more pages, make it easier to navigate around the site and to promote the club to a wide audience.

The site we’re building is a Wordpress Website which is blog based and perfectly suited to this kind of application as the Wordpress blogging technology makes it easy to use and update. This means that the club members responsible for keeping the site up to date with match reviews, match reports, club news and so on have a much easier job, save time and work in real time. Additionally, as all of the sitefunctionality is on the web, the users can log in from any pc with web access and work on the site. As soon as they hit the save or publish buttons on the user interface, the changes go live.

To help to promote the club to a wider audience it’s essential to keep the content relevant and up to date. In doing so, we are able to continue to improve the sites position in search results with search engines such as Google and Yahoo. There’s no quick way but given a little time to work on the content and design we aim to achive the common goal of putting the site on page one of Google.

If you’d like to watch our progress with the new site Click Here

We’re really pleased to say that we have finally got around to doing something about that and here is the new look site.

We hope you find the site informative and easy to use and that it motivates you to want to work with us.