January 2007, Week 4 -- Talk Gets Even Cheaper

   Talk is cheap, and getting cheaper. We took a look at VoiceStick, a memory stick that does phone calls. It turns out to be very popular with soldiers overseas, but anyone can use it.

   It's literally a memory stick, a 64MB thumb drive or flash drive or whatever you want to call it, that plugs into a USB port. The company's special software resides on that stick, or you can download it separately. Either way, it's another way to make low-cost Internet phone calls, but with a lot of features we haven't seen before.

   As with other so-called VoIP services, calls to other VoiceStick users are free and other calls are 1 or 2 cents a minute. The calls can be made to any phone, not just Internet phones.

   The most unusual feature is a piece of software called the I2 Bridge. With this, you can register your land line or cell phone number with VoiceStick.com   and then use any phone, wherever you are, to make low-cost calls through the VoiceStick service. The key difference here is you do not have to be at a computer or be somewhere with wi-fi Internet access to do this; any phone will do. In fact, if you use a T-Mobile service with unlimited calling to five numbers, you can use your VoiceStick number as one of them, and from there, call the world.

   The lowest level service is free, but you must register with a credit card or PayPal. You get $5 worth of credit to start out. You can call most major cities for less than a cent a minute, though calls elsewhere in the United States are 2 cents a minute. For $10 a month you get 400 free minutes in the United States and Canada; for $20 you get unlimited minutes in the United States and Canada; for $25, you get unlimited service to major cities in 40 countries.

   We liked the fact that you get a free VoiceStick phone number that sticks with you anywhere you travel, though you have to be at a computer or have Internet access to receive calls. The service provides call-waiting, caller ID, voice mail, call forwarding, conference calls and other features at no extra charge. 

Can You Hear Me Now?

   A Web site called TestMyVoIp.com tests your high-speed Internet connection against several sample cities, like London, Boston, Vienna, Sydney, etc., to see how well your call would go through. If the rating is high, you can probably count on a clear call overseas.

Travel is So Broadening

   We were browsing a travel Web site the other day and got a lot of help from Yoono, a scrolling toolbar that fits onto Firefox. Scrolling across the top of our browser window were related sites, such as Gridskipper  and SeatGuru , which we'd never heard of, along with the more familiar names like Travelzoo, Expepdia  and Travelocity.

   Yoono would have scrolled related Web sites across the top no matter what subject we were browsing. If you're on a news site, you will see suggestions for newspapers, news magazines, etc., and you can click on any of them as they scroll by. On the left-hand side of the screen are links to articles, video clips and blogs related to the subject matter you're looking at.

   Yoono is free from Yoono.com, but it only works with the Firefox Web browser from Mozilla. Firefox, which works with Windows, Mac or Linux, is the second most popular browser after Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and it's free at Firefox.com.

Crush That PowerPoint Presentation

   We tried out a specialized PowerPoint compression utility by the name of NXPowerlite ($45 from NXPowerlite.com). Old hands will note that there are lots of compression utilities, and some of them are free. This one is for Windows PowerPoint presentations only and has some extra benefits. (Microsoft reports that there are 30 million PowerPoint presentations made every day, by the way. Wretched excess, we say.)

   There's a free utility that comes with Windows XP and we used it to reduce a 1.7 megabyte PowerPoint presentation to 1.4 megabytes. You can use this utility to compress any file or folder by right-clicking on its name and choosing "send to compressed zipped folder" from the drop-down menu that appears.

   We also tried compressing the file with WinZip 11 ($30 from www.download.com) and got about the same results as the free one in Windows, a little less than 20 percent reduction. But using the "normal" setting in NXPowerlite, the file size was compressed from 1.7 megabytes to 972K, a reduction of 43 percent. Using a higher compression setting gave us a reduction of 55 percent.

   All this matters because reducing file size saves storage space and transmission costs. A remarkable benefit (we thought it was remarkable, anyway) was that the PowerPoint file compressed with NXPowerlite retained its native format. That means it appears as a PowerPoint file, and can be opened immediately, without decompression. We couldn't tell the difference between the compressed presentation and the decompressed one.

Learn to Speak Geek

   We had an interesting brief conversation with the president of a high-tech company recently, and it explains why engineers believe they speak English but are mistaken.

   We were having trouble with a backup drive and called for tech support. What we got was the president of the company himself (it's a small company). "Ah," he said. "I see what the problem is: Just rename the 'delete(underline)me.exe' file to 'backupkey.exe' and move it to the root."

   Sure. Anybody can follow that. We'll pass it on.

NOTE: Readers can search several years of columns at the "On Computers" Web site: www.oncomp.com. You can e-mail Bob Schwabach at bobschwab@aol.com and Joy Schwabach at joydee@oncomp.com.