dial

EarthLink rocks, J.D. Power says

Despite financial woes, EarthLink is kicking butt in the broadband market, according to a J.D. Power and Associates customer satisfaction survey published Wednesday.

EarthLink, which said last month that it would lay off nearly half its staff, got the highest customer satisfaction ranking for delivering broadband services in the East and South regions of the United States. It also ranked second in the North Central region of the country.

Frank Perazzini, director of telecommunications at J.D. Power and Associates, said that what's impressive about EarthLink's performance in the survey is that it bucks conventional wisdom.

"… Read more

Only2Clicks does eye-friendly start pages

Only2Clicks is one of the few Web services I've seen lately whose name tells exactly what it does. The concept is pretty straightforward--set up your favorite Web sites, and the service will load them up in a grid, with photo thumbnails for each. You can add and remove any number of sites, and the thumbnails will be refreshed each time you reload the page. You can also re-organize the links with simple drag and drop. The idea is to set Only2Clicks as your start page, so you'll be able to quickly eyeball each site before figuring out where … Read more

A new use for Speed Dial!

Earlier this month, New York enacted an Air Passenger Bill of Rights. Among other things, it requires that airlines make minimal provisions for passengers stranded on the tarmac for more than three hours. If you've done any traveling with kids, you probably know how difficult it is to both pack light (a key strategy for successful travel generally) and to pack enough stuff so that if there's a delay, you can keep the little ones occupied. The New York law bounds the problem a little bit: if your longest leg is 6 hours, you can be relatively assured that your outbound leg from a New York airport won't add more than 3 hours to that. But as the US Customs and Border Patrol SNAFU at LAX confirms, airport authorities don't seem to get particularly concerned about tarmac waits of 6, 8, or 10 hours, be they outbound or inbound. I think that when traveling with children, that's a bit much. What's a parent to do?… Read more

JaJah's iPhone app hobbled by Safari

JaJah is an emerging "dial-around" service. From your computer, you tell it who you want to call, and it dials your phone, then the other party, and connects you to each other. The advantage of using a dial-around product like this: cost. JaJah charges 3 cents a minute for international calls.

The iPhone's strong Web browser should make it a great platform for JaJah, and JaJah just created a special iPhone version of its site, FreeYouriPhone.com. You use the slick interface and big screen to initiate a call, then wait a second for the iPhone to … Read more

Can't wait for iPhone voice mail? Use Callwave now

CallWave is about the coolest free cell-phone utility I have ever seen, and it goes a long way toward making me not care so much about the "visual voice mail" that Steve Jobs touted for the upcoming iPhone. The CallWave service, which is live now, replaces your standard carrier-provided voice mail with a much better system, and it lets you pick up incoming cell-phone calls on any other phone or even your PC.

I've been using the competing GotVoice service since I first wrote about it in May to get my cellular and home voice mail messages … Read more