Answering Service Blog | American Inbound

Newsfactor.com posted an interesting story today about Indiana becoming a hotspot for call centers.  Eight of the 13 largest job deals last year are call center related, and many companies that outsourced their customer service overseas are deciding that Indiana (not Indian!) call centers can better serve their customers.

There are several reasons for this.  Time zones in states like Indiana allow them to manage calls from both coasts easily.  There is also the idea of the Mid-West disposition.

“The perception is that Midwest states have a more friendly base of people and a common-sense way of dealing with the world.”

Come to think of it, I know of a great answering service in Indiana.

Text messaging or SMS is a topic of nearly everyone’s dinner table. 

Answernet has written up a great article detailing the history of text messaging.  It all started with the pager.  Here are some protocols used over the years.

• Telocator Alphanumeric Protocol (TAP)
• SNPP (Simple Network Paging Protocol)
• WCTP (Wireless Communications Transfer Protocol)
• SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol - Email!)

If you have never heard of Skype, you should look into it.  They provide free long-distance calling over your computer or cell phone.   Skype uses VoIP (voice over internet protocol) and an internet connection to transmit voice, text, and video.

All you need is an internet ready computer, or access to a wifi for your cell phone.  Go to skype.com and download their software. 

TMCnet and Dialaphone have both mentioned there are ViOP services other than Skype.  Travel to their posts to read up on these applications. 

Microsoft announced this Tuesday that Internet Explorer, the most common PC web-browser, will be made available for IE mobile compatible cell phones. 

This comes right on the heals of Apple iPhone and their respective browser, Opera.   Internet Explorer will come preloaded on compatible cell phones by the end of the year.

This is great news.  Of course, I wonder how this version of IE will fare on Acid Test 2.