Summer has landed and vacations slow down business but the bills just keep on coming in. How about cutting down the cost of at least one of them by a good margin?

Just above this window you will see "Got Skype?" along with my Skype contact name. This program and others associated with it are quite useful in everyday business and especially in the VO business. The 1021 code is simply the date I downloaded and installed the program on my computer. October 21.

This is a free telephone service offered by an E-Bay company which incorporates VOiP (Voice Over Internet Protocol). Right now it is free and you can telephone from computer to computer and until the end of this year you can call from a computer to a land line (regular telephone) anywhere in North America for free. The only hook is that both computers must have the program installed, unless of course you are calling a regular (land line) telephone number. The quality is excellent in the computer to computer sequence but less than excellent in the computer to land line application.

Since October I have been using this service and frankly have seen similar ones come and go over the years but this one actually works and is noticeably superior. The conversation quality is better than my regular phone whether I am speaking with someone in India, the UK, Chicago, Calgary, Vancouver, Washington or Halifax. As far as I know it will work anywhere in the world. All you need is a $10 microphone on your computer and either speakers or a headset and you are good to go.

Now if you want to have some fun you can also go and download another program which marries into Skype and enables you to record your conversations. Go to www.powergramo.com and you are in business. This is a free program as well which saves your conversation but you then need to convert to .wav or MP3. RTFM (Read The Frggin' Manual) and you will see it is easy to do.

An even easier recording program but costs $50. is www.skylook.biz which marries with Skype and Microsoft Outlook automatically recording your conversations in MP3 format and saving them in a folder in the Outlook email program.

So get Grandma, brother and friends overseas to download Skype and go blah, blah blah for free:)

The Interviews which we have done so far are available here and we're recorded using Skype and PowerGramo.

Few things are free but 2 out of 3 ain't bad eh?

All the best,
Rick Gordon