Volume 4, Issue 1

A Technology Newsletter for Your Business

Gryphon Guardian

The
Text Box: Gone are the days when the local Bell telephone companies had control of the entire industry through their monopoly control of the local subscriber loop. The good thing about those good old days was that there was no confusion. But, there was no confusion because there were no choices! Now the opposite is true. There are so many choices that there is a lot of confusion and there are also many misconceptions. We’d like to try to clear some of them up. First of all digital phone systems and VoIP are not the same thing. The two are completely separate and you can have one without the other or you can use them together. A digital phone system leverages the local area network that most small and medium sized businesses already have by using it for voice as well as data. You replace your old fashioned PBX by adding a server running telecommunications software that chops voice traffic into packets and sends it over your network with your data. You get advanced call features that, for about a third of the price, in the past you would have had to pay big bucks . You can also spend a lot less for handsets, which today are really nothing more then hard to work proprietary computers, because the digital phone system’s advanced features can be accessed through a windows application running on the desktop or laptop computer you already have. So you can enjoy call control that you could only have imagined with the old PBX systems. You can drag and drop calls to different phones or voice mail, popup a list of calls or voice mail messages, double click on any voice mail without having to listen to them all, set up business rules that route calls, etc. Text Box: Digital Phone Systems & VoIP Where Are They Now?

May June  2005
Text Box: Have you heard? Google has run into trouble with the French! A report in the May 20 issue of The Week says that intellectuals in Paris fear that Google’s plan to scan millions of books from the library collections at Harvard, Oxford, NY Public Library, Stanford, and the University of Michigan to make them available over the Internet will entrench English as the dominant language on the Internet. US based Google offered to help the EU create a European digital library but their proposal is reportedly mired in bureaucracy. After reading the above, we only felt smug and superior for a few minutes at which point we read that the US TV network which captured the most viewers between the ages of 18 and 34 for 19 evenings this season was Univision – they broadcast in Spanish!

Volume 4, Issue 3