As I make preparations for my adventure to begin in September, I have been reviewing my needs for communications and the costs associated with staying in touch with so many people, and of course also making simple matters like booking meetings easier and more cost effective. Both of these are the most critical elements to the success of my trip, and aside from fuel and food (basically the same thing I know) will be a large part of the expenses. But I’ve found a couple of very cool tools that I think will help me out along the way.
Telephony:
Since I’ll be using cellular services for most of my communications, both voice and data, I have been trying to find a happy balance between long distance calling costs and Internet data costs. Both of these can get to be rather costly up here in Canada on the mobile networks, so it’s been a rough one to work out.
Well… I took a look at Skype after leaving it alone for quite a while, and find that I can get into a North America wide calling plan – inbound and outbound computer to phones – voicemail and more – for only THREE DOLLARS A MONTH! I’m sure I’m missing something and it will be a little bit more, but with the widespread use of wireless, along with a decent cellular data plan and signal, I should be able to use Skype for most of my Long Distance and National telephony needs, saving my precious voice airtime for local calls to contacts as I travel. So look me up on Skype as njwphoto and feel free to call! I’ll be setting up my subscription this weekend.
You can see my Skype status on the blog as well as on my About/Contact page on the main site. When I’m online, I’m taking calls. Hope to hear from you!
Scheduling and Meeting planning:
This is a new one to me with my first exposure being through a colleague that was trying to arrange a meeting time, and rather than back and forth emailing or calling, sent me a link to her availability calendar on Tungle.me. Yes that a .me - not a .com – and if you go to Tungle.me or click on the Tungle Me button on the sidebar, you’ll see my calendar that shows available times for meetings and so forth. All you do is select at least two options for meeting times and locations, and I get an email. You will have to sign up for a free account to get the best use of Tungle, but I’d recommend it if your life is busy and you want to share a calendar.
The best part is that Tungle connects directly to many calendar services including Outlook and works completely interactively and simply. In fact, it’s already making me believe that this is the easiest shared calendar software I’ve ever used.
Check out the Latest Skype and Tungle and be sure to use these services to connect and schedule events as I get into your areas!
Cheers!
They are both good solutions but I would recommend you to try Neatcall http://www.neatcall.com which not only finding the optimal time slot for any meeting or communication you would like to set with your colleagues but also connects you and your participants at the scheduled time