Advertisers pay for your international calls

If you are someone who hates making international calls using your computer(Skype,Yahoo...)???Then you gotta check this out. You basically call a gateway number on the site and it allows you to make your call after a brief commercial. Right now they allow you to call 80 countries without the commercial as a promotional offer. Check out the country list you can call at www.futurephone.com. The firm, which has about 30 employees to start, uses Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to route the calls for next to nothing. .

Technically, the call the consumer makes is not entirely free; one does have to have domestic long-distance service. But all of America pay monthly fees that allow them unlimited long-distance calls.

Where, by the way, are you calling when you reach their gateway number 712-858-8883? It turns out to be an exchange in Superior, Iowa, a town of 142 people on the Iowa-Minnesota border. The company has made deals with the township to route calls inexpensively..

The next obvious question is how the company hopes to make money without charging anything, and the answer is simple. Like many other Internet-based firms, they plan to work on an advertising model. They'll listen to a 10-second commercial if they can make a free call.

Tried the service for a call to new zealand, needed to wait for 5 minutes to get the line, but the interesting part is that, the connection was crystal clear and did not get interrupted or terminated. The company will have to work on load balancing the network when more people start pounding the gateway number though!!!

BooBox, is it going to woo bloggers?

Seems like a revenue zone for bloggers, where they can link the small image of the BooBox to the product they are talking about say for eg. a T.shirt, shoe and if the user clicks on the image, the link opens up the Amazon checkout counter where the purchase can be made. What this means for the bloggers is revenue based on commission if its directed from their site.

Seems like an interesting concept and will kick off, just like adsense. Anyone using adsense in their website would like to go for boobox. The downside is that, it only takes you to amazon.com and would be nice if this gets linked to a comparison shopping wesbite.

Is Geni useful??

Seems to be a kind of a concept, where you can have a family tree set up just like orkut and other social networking sites. Not sure how successful this idea will be because, the younger crowd is not too keen on connecting with the families, and ofcourse the generation gap for the elder people dont allow them to use the net as much as the teenagers.

Also noticed that there is a general flaw with the site, it does not allow relatives who are already members to connect using mail ids- For eg. I am not able to invite my cousin who is already havin a tree of his own.So basically, I gotta duplicate his tree onto mine. I did setup a whole network for my family, but nothing makes me keep going back to the site.. and not too happy about the non linking feature.. ..

New Ideaz

I have been trying to get my ideas in focus to start something pretty interesting for people who have new ideas and big thoughts just like you do, just to create a community where we guys are able to share our ideaz, discuss them and just see how people react to them. I am sure lot of you who are reading this are going through such a process. Here is the place for you to let loose.