Inphonite is sponsoring two AzMGMA events in Tucson.  Please stop by and introduce yourself.

May 12, 2009      12:00am
Arizona Inn, 2200 E. Elm Street, Tucson, AZ 85719

Tucson Central Monthly Meeting
“Red Flag” Overview
Carl Shultz and Diana Knight, Card Solutions, Inc.
http://www.azmgma.org/events_detail.cfm?pk_event=122

May 19, 2009      7:30am
Amber Lights Retirement Community, 6231 N Montebella Rd, Tucson, AZ 85704

Tucson North/Northwest Monthly Meeting
“Better Manage Your Retirement Plan with Education & Fiduciary Compliance”
Beth Bank, an advisor with the Stuchen / Levy Group of Merrill Lynch http://www.azmgma.org/events_detail.cfm?pk_event=123

You can register for each event from the links above.  For non-AzMGMA members the cost is $35.

The original idea behind InphoniteVoice was to be a simple subscription model. For example, a person would sign up for a subscription that would have a monthly fee of N dollars a month. That would give the subscriber some number of messages they could send per month. Seems simple enough - but what would happen if the subscriber exceeded their monthly allotment of messages? Alright, then we will just charge a small overage fee per message after they used up their allotment. Not too bad so far but then we added the capability to transfer calls. Now calls could easily become very long and we're paying long distance for two outbound legs. So then we added the concept of minutes for calls that lasted more then 3 minutes would cost an additional 4.9 cents/minute. So what started as an ultimately simple idea got really complicated really fast. A monthly bill would need to be broken out into bucket messages, additional messages, and extra minutes. The system would change 5 different monthly subscription rates with different bucket messages for each level. Each level also had different overage costs. Wow, it got complicated.

The new model is significantly more simple - credits. One credit equals 1 message - delivered. If a message exceeds 3 minutes in length an additional credit will be used. The credits never expire. Credits get cheaper as you buy more of them at once. You don't get charged for credits you don't use, as is the case with the subscription model. Why are credits 3 minutes? Why not change less per credit and then lower a credit to 1 minute? A credit includes the overhead of contacting a person. For example, in InphoniteVoice, if you created a rule that tries multiple numbers and if that person is not contacted until the 3rd number that's still only 1 credit. The 3 minute "clock" does not start until you reached your intended recipient. Our estimates is that you will be able to deliver nearly all of your notifications using a single credit per individual reached. The only time you may need to use multiple credits is when you are utilizing transfer functionality.

There are a few more advantages to using credits. It is now fairly easy to add coupons. In fact - here's a free coupon for you to try: FREE100. The first 50 to use the coupon will get 100 free additional credits. Also, every account has the ability to refer other people. If you refer someone then every time they buy credits you will get 10% of their purchase automatically credited to your account as credits.

The new model is now live so go ahead and give it a try. Don't forget to use your coupon!

Ever thought about what you can do to keep your computer running well? I'm sure we all have, and pretty often. There are a few things you can do regularly to make sure that the computer you run ReminderPro on is as healthy as can be. Here are my ideas:

Restart the computer often. While a computer is running programs, information gets stuffed away in memory. This is information that the computer needs temporarily to do its thing, and the space taken by this stuff is usually made available after the job is done. Nonetheless, programs like ReminderPro can stuff away quite a bit of this information. To clear this stuff out, we recommend that you restart the computer weekly, at least.

Defragment the hard drive. I won't go into all the technical stuff required to fully explain this, but let me just say that defragmenting your computer's hard drive can make a big difference in how the computer runs. It could be faster and more reliable if you defragment regularly, perhaps monthly. Certainly, it'll help avoid problems with ReminderPro. That said, you would defragment your hard drive by going to Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools and clicking on Disk Defragmentor.

Clear out temporary files. Personally, I've found that some frustrating things can happen if there is a "bad" temporary file on your computer. This can happen if a program you're working in locks up, or if a power surge restarts your computer for you. So if you have a situation when using your computer, you might wish to restart and then delete temporary files, just to try to keep things running smoothly. (Frankly, its a good practice to do this monthly, anyway.) Now, there are a few ways to delete temporary files, but the easiest is to go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools and click Disk Cleanup. You would run it against your C: drive (it'll prompt you). After it has scanned your computer, it will pop up a list of things you can "cleanup". The only one that needs to be checked off is Temporary Files. That said, it is a good idea to empty the Recycle Bin occasionally, and maybe do other things from time to time — especially if you need more room on your hard drive. But that is optional for our purposes here, so I'll leave that up to you.

Are there other things you do to keep your computer running? Please share them here.

Save the date.  The MGMA 2009 Exhibit Hall will be open October 11 - 13.

Be sure to stop by to see a demonstration of our newest hosted IVR solution - InphoniteVoice.

MGMA 2009 Annual Conference
Colorado Convention Center
Denver, CO
October 11–13, 2009
Booth: 1832

See you there!

I am pleased to announce the new Inphonite Wiki. The wiki will immediately replace our old knowledge base for ReminderPro and LabRetriever. It will also house the online documentation for InphoniteVoice as it becomes available. You can check out the wiki by going to wiki.inphonite.com.

An interesting feature that one of our customers asked me if our product, InphoniteVoice, can do is what I'm calling 'Click-to-Conference.' Essentially it would be the same as one of those myriad of inbound conference calls services where you dial a phone number and then a PIN. Click-to-Conference would allow you to have a widget on your web site and then, with the click of a button, dial your phone number and automatically transfer your call to the conference call. After the customer asked me this I thought about it and within 15 minutes or so built a working prototype. While it's cool is there a market? Would you buy this service? If so why, and how much would you be willing to pay?

Our Support Department has had some inquiries from users recently about decreasing the delay between a live person answering the phone and the start of the message playing to them. There are setting changes you can make, so I thought I would share.

Before I go through this, I want to point out that the setting is changed differently depending upon the version of ReminderPro being used. If you're not sure what version you are running, launch ReminderPro and go to Help > About and the version will be shown at the top.

That said, if you are using ReminderPro version 2 or 2008, you would adjust the Live Answer Handling option, located in the Setup screen, under the Other/Advanced tab. Due to the sensitivity of some of the options on that tab, you must press CTRL+F10 to view the options on that page. Also, please be aware that the setting is in milliseconds; our recommendation is to set it to 700.

Now, if you're using ReminderPro DX with a Pika telephony card, you would go to the same tab and press CTRL+F10, but you would then click the Voice Board Settings (Advanced) button. Look for the Speech End Time field, and set that to a value between 500 and 3000. Again, this is in milliseconds. So if you want the message to begin immediately after answer, set it to 500.

Finally, a note of caution. It is important to make sure you know what you're doing when you start changing settings like this. So if you have questions about these settings or something else you stumble upon, please be sure to contact our Support Department for clarification before making any adjustments.

Was this helpful? Is this something you've been wondering about? Let me know what you think.

TMCnet's Anuradha Shukla discusses a new report from Research and Markets that identifies "outbound IVR as a sector that will experience tremendous growth over the next five years."  It also mentions hosted outbound IVR, speech recognition and integration with email and SMS.  Here's the link:

Outbound Applications Rise Despite Economy

In the same article, Shukla also refers to a recent report from Forrester Research report entitled, "Proactive Outbound Notification Saves Money".  It covers the growth in outbound communications and consumer communications preferences such as mobile devices.

Happy reading!

I am please to announce the Inphonite forums. These forums will allow users of our products to post questions and get answers from the community and the Inphonite staff. For InphoniteVoice users this will be the primary mechanism of support. The InphoniteVoice forums will be actively monitored by our support engineers and development staff. As for ReminderPro, the primary mechanism to get support is to email us at support@inphonite.com or to call us at 1-888-367-5859. The ReminderPro forums are monitored occasionally by Inphonite support engineers. The forums are set up with the following categories:

• InphoniteVoice Discussons
• InphoniteVoice Announcements
• InphoniteVoice Questions
• Import Questions
• InphoniteVoice API/Web Services Questions
• ReminderPro Discussions
• ReminderPro Announcements
• ReminderPro 2008 Questions
• ReminderPro 2008 DX Questions
• ReminderPro 2.x and Older Questions
• Import Questions
• Other Products
• LabRetriever Questions

If you have any questions or comments about the new forums please don't hesitate to let us know!

The beta version of InphoniteVoice is now available for test.

InphoniteVoice makes it easy to create and send personalized messages. You can send one message or thousands. Sample message types include appointment reminders, emergency notifications, and automated phone surveys. InphoniteVoice supports phone, email and text messages. You can even use InphoniteVoice to enable your web site or CRM to support Click to Call. Since InphoniteVoice is a SaaS (Software as a Service), there is no additional hardware or software for you to install.

We invite you to test drive InphoniteVoice and then let us know your thoughts. To sign up, go to voice.inphonite.net. You can create an account and send up to 500 messages at no additional cost.

For additional information, browse http://www.inphonite.com

If you would prefer to see an online demonstration first, just click on my name above.