I am one of those who’s been paying about $40/month for traditional long distance phone calls here in the US. I have long known the benefits of VOIP but the cost difference wasn’t that big for me to leave my convenient setup with AT&T - DSL + Long distance phone. Plus, I was just plain lazy to switch.

Recently, when I heard about MajicJack’s VOIP service I thought it was one of those shady deals that I’d end up getting swindled. It was the price of the subscription which is a ridiculously low $20/year that made me wrinkle my eyebrow and say ‘Is this for real?’

With that information in hand, I just found out that AT&T offers an Internet-only DSL or naked DSL as opposed to a DSL service requiring a phone line. So, I immediately jumped in to try out the obviously cheaper alternative, MajicJack to see if I can really save some money. I have been testing this out for a couple of weeks now. I am impressed enough with MajicJack to share it with you.

MajicJack Overview

• It is a TicTac sized box with a USB connector (with 1ft extension cord) on one end and a phone jack on the other end.
• Costs about $40 for the first year to purchase the MajicJack box including a years subscription and $20/year thereafter
• Unlimited long distance calls to US & Canada but no international calls yet although I have been seeing 2c international call ads in the dialpad, I can’t find further information at the time of writing this.
• Self-installing software from the MajicJack device itself. No CDs!
• Software runs on Windows XP & Vista only. No luck for Mac/Linux users at the moment.
• Phone numbers available in a lot of area codes in the US
• You provide your address during setup to get a phone number assigned to you as well as have e911 configured.
• Just plugin your home phone to the phone jack on MajicJack and you are all set with a new number.
• You get a dialpad as well in your computer should you want to use it with a headset.
• You get all the features like call waiting, caller id, voice mail, voice mail by email, etc.
• You can get your current number ported to MajicJack as well but the information on how to do it could be better.

My Impressions

• The call quality is not bad with my 1.5Mbps connection but if I am watching streaming video, the voice does break. But, this isn’t MajicJack’s fault but limitation with my available bandwidth. I am thinking of bumping my Internet speed to 3Mbps by paying $5 more per month.
• For MajicJack to work, you have to have your computer on but if your computer is turned off, the voicemail still picks up the call and sends it to your email. I think this is acceptable that if I am not at home or have the computer turned off at night as long as I get the voicemail but we leave the computer on all day anyway.
• If you don’t get a phone number in your area, using a GrandCentral number is an option.
• If you installed MajicJack in your laptop, you can take your MajicJack phone number anywhere you are traveling as long as you have a broadband connection.
• I have read reports of people plugging MajicJack into their home’s phone jack in the wall and have all the other phone jacks activated to be used with other jacks including faxes. But, it seems you need to have your landline disconnected before this can work as the additional pulses in the line will interfere. I haven’t tested this yet as we are yet to disconnect our landline.
• At the moment, you could potentially get a second MajicJack number and ship it to your family/friend abroad and make US phone calls for free! I am not sure if it’s legal so don’t quote me on it if you try it.
• Love the ease of use and the plug and play nature of the device making it very portable.
• It’s hard to find much information about it on their website but you can get a pretty good idea about the service here at DSL Reports forums. And their, free trial numbers is a joke as you can easily tell that’s fake!

MajicJack is not for everyone but if you are willing to accept a few limitations that’s inherent with many VOIP solutions, you could end up saving a lot of money in phone bills. It’s true that it smells like a service that could go under any time but to me the cost savings is big enough to switch to it. Mind you, my wife and I have our cell phones as well so our dependence on our home phone may not be the same as if your only phone number is your home phone.

Even if the service should fold in a month, I wouldn’t have lost anything by paying $40 for the first year as that is what my one month of landline phone service costs! And I bought it in a nice deal at 1saleaday.com for only $30.

Would you try it?

Hello newcomer, did I say welcome to ShanKri-la yet? Before you move on, just wanted to thank you for visiting and we hope you come back and see us again!

My wife and I were looking for some information recently to open a checking account for her. Although I am happy with the place I bank at, we wanted to see what other options we had to open an account for her. We were interested in looking for one that offered services like Debit Card rewards program & one that didn’t charge for using other bank’s ATM.

When I opened my current bank account, I just went to the bank websites which I knew were in my area and looked for some information about various accounts they offered. Sometimes they were easy to find and sometimes they weren’t. Sometimes I would call the local branch to get information on their offerings. I didn’t know that some banks had so many branches around town just because I hadn’t noticed them at all.

This time around in our search, we came across a pretty cool tool at Find Better Banks. You can get a nice comparison of banks around you and their various offerings by answering a few simple questions. Here are the steps you would go through to find information on potential banks you could go with:

Step 1: Location

You just give your street address and zip code and choose an optional distance you want to look up banks in.

Step 2: Features you want

Here you get to specify what kind of features are important for you and you have three options to choose from - Don’t care, Nice to have or Must Have. You can influence your results by choosing an appropriate answer for each feature. It also has helpful description if you aren’t sure of what something is.

• Interest on balances
• Overdraft protection
• Online Bill Pay Services
• 24-hour automated telephone banking
• Email alerts
• Mobile banking services
• Download activity to Quicken or MS Money

You could even choose to find discounts & freebies such as

• Unlimited check-writing
• Debit card reward program
• Non-bank ATM Fee Rebate
• Free additional linked deposit accounts
• Free or discounted check printing services

Step 3: Estimate your fees

Depending on your usage and teh type of account you have, you are probably incurring some kind of fees annually. This step helps estimate the fees you spend usually and compares it with the other offerings. Some of the things that influence the fees you pay are:

• If you direct deposit your paycheck
• Your lowest daily balance
• Number of times you use ATM in a month
• How often you find yourself using another bank’s ATM
• In a year, the number of times you overdraw
• If you want overdraft protection

Step 4: Compare Bank Features

Now you are taken to page that lists the banks that matches your selection criteria sorted by estimated annual fees. It also shows how closely every account matches your preferred features in percentage. It also shows how far the closest location is for you as well as shows the number of locations within 10 miles of your address.

If you’d like to see individual features and fees for the banks listed, there are a couple of tabs at the top of the table to easily switch views back and forth.

Step 5: Choose a Bank

On choosing a bank of your interest, you’ll see extensive details about taccount you are looking at and contact information. It even has a Google Maps link showing the closest location in a bank.

With this cool wizard, it was easy for us to see which account matched our needs the closest and made our decision-making in a usually painstaking process, a breeze.

With more banks being added every week to this tool so with time I see it as being an authoritative entity in this niche. This is a simple and effective tool that answers a most sought question by most consumers shopping for a bank account.

The interface is not your flashy web 2.0 kind of look and does not have a funky logo but it is designed to be easy to use and it does the job very well.

How would you go about hunting for a bank account usually?

Can you spot a fake email when you see one? Especially, one that might be trying to steal your PayPal login information.

Here is an email that I received, at first look, from PayPal. It warns me if i didn’t sign in and update my billing information, my account might even be deleted!

As authentic as the email might seem - notice the phishing attacks are getting better, the English isn’t as broken as we would see, there is a big giveaway if you know what you are looking for.

Clue #1:

Look at the URL of the link they want you to click in the email. It is made to look like a AOL.com address but all they are doing is using aol.com to redirect it to a IP address which has paypal.com word in the url.

Clue #2:

If you failed to sense something is amiss in the link, you can still spot a major flaw. After you click on the link in the email, if you looked at the Location bar in your browser, you’ll see the url as http://201.155.199.155/icons/www.paypal.com/managament/cgi/. But, look how identical the web page looks like compared to an original PayPal page.

The URL shows that it isn’t a paypal.com address you are at. You are at some other server that has the words paypal.com in it’s URL. This should send a big red warning signal to you. IP location software points this server to be located at Cordoba, Mexico.

Once you have missed the second clue, it is very hard to turn back after that because they have copied everything from the real Paypal login page except they have their own PHP script behind the login form. All the links in the fake page actually point to the PayPal’s website as is common in most phishing sites.

Here is the fake PayPal login page:

(fake PayPal login page) 

Here is the actual PayPal login page:

(actual PayPal login page)

Once you enter your login credentials and hit Login, you have just given access to your PayPal account to someone else.

Clue #3:

There is another subtle clue that may not be apparent. The page has some extra characters that is totally out of place but hard to spot. I don’t know if it’s a typo or carelessness or if it’s a code for the phishers but mostly likely a typo.

How can you protect yourself from phishing attempts?

You might not be using PayPal but there are many phishing attempts everyday at many financial websites such as Bank websites, Credit Card websites, etc. And it will pay to be careful when you access your accounts from emails such as this.

Here are a few things you could do to protect yourself:

• Look for the clues mentioned above and as you can see they are nothing special but just common sense.
• If you really believe the email could be a real one, just login to the website from your own bookmark to the website or by typing the web address in the browser instead of clicking the link in the email. By practicing this all the time, you wouldn’t even be vulnerable for that one time when you might be tired or not so alert or sleepy and click the link in an email.
• Use a secure browser such as Mozilla Firefox, which has a phishing filter and shows a warning when you access a known phishing site. Internet Explorer 7 and newer browsers also have a similar feature so it pays to upgrade your IE 5/6 to newer versions.

If you are Internet savvy, this is all too familiar to you. But, we all know someone who may be unaware that such attempts are made everyday and we should try to educate them so they won’t be caught unawares.

I am usually very skeptical when it comes to make money online programs. However, when my friend Garry Conn mentioned about it in his blog and after talking to him on IM, I have decided to give this a go.

PepperJamNetwork is a affiliate marketing network that has just launched but brings a lot of experience to the table being a affiliate marketer themselves. Having meddled with just Google Adsense so far, I am excited at this new platform of monetization here and elsewhere in my other blogs. PepperJam has a nice and trendy interface going for them and have a nice array of various advertisers already in their network that I can see fit this blog.

If you are a newbie to the affiliate marketing network arena, PepperJam has a nice FAQ section that answers a lot of questions in detail. Plus, the PepperJam accoutn comes with a chat facility and a knowledge vault that helps in this area as well.

This could be another one of those programs that comes out with nothingto show for, but I wouldn’t know that and I don’t want miss out on getting in early.

I don’t like to pepper my posts with referral links and I am transparent about things I do here. If you are interested in joining PepperJam, you could be nice to me and use the referral link below to sign up for it. Yes, they offer $5 for every sign up you refer so don’t forget to blog about it after you sign up. I hate to sound like a make money commercial, hey if it’ll pay for a nice dinner once in a while, why not give it a shot right?

Web 2.0 technology. Pepperjam Network. Sign Up Today!

Wesabe has been my favorite online money management tool for a long time. if you haven’t heard, you can read my review of Wesabe and in fact check out others reviews tagged with the same name.

If you are a Wesabe user with an Internet enabled mobile or someone looking for an online money management application that has mobile support, you are in luck. Wesabe Mobile was just released this week.

With Wesabe Mobile, you can

• Check account balances
• See recent transactions
• Enter cash transactions
• Keep track of your travel expenses on the go
• Ability to enter minimal information to identify the transaction & clean up later from your computer
• Phone browser needs to support SSL (which means your stuff is encrypted unlike SMS based money management services)
• If you are a Blackberry user, consider using Opera Mini.

The biggest hardship with tracking your expenses are the cash transactions that trickle out of your wallet. You have no clue what you did with the $40 cash withdrawal from the ATM after a week. Wesabe Mobile cuts that gap for those with a data enabled cell phone.

I don’t travel as much or have a data plan on my Sony Ericsson W810i. But, I am sure this will be useful to my iPhone/Blackberry wielding readers.

> Instructions for Wesabe Mobile

> via Wesabe Blog

I am sure you are trying to shop that last minute Christmas gift online so it reaches someone by Christmas. If you shop at Amazon.com, would you like to find out how to find secret discounts at Amazon?

I have found 2 sites that share this money saving discounts and the timing can’t be better.

Secret Amazon Discount

Secret Amazon Discount works by offering you a search interface where you put in your search keyword and choose the discount you are looking for. (10% to 99% off) Amazon keeps track of their price drops and this tool helps you find those items with price drops.

It offers you a comprehensive result with discounts. You can also sort the results by relevant results or price like how Amazon lets you do it. The good part is that the results are browseable in your familiar Amazon.com interface rather than some other site. As you can see, it does let you search some international Amazon sites as well.

JungleCrazy

JungleCrazy is another great site to find Amazon.com items with deep discounts. I liked the tag cloud view this site offers as soon as you enter. On mouseover, it shows the product details and the discount % plus the rating a product has received.

Clicking on a product takes you directly to Amazon’s product page where you can find out more details about the ne you are interested in.

PriceAdvance

I know I said two services. But, who’s counting right? While you are trying to save money at Amazon.com, how about getting a price comparison from other businesses as you are shopping for an item?

PriceAdvance is a Firefox extension that can be enabled in the status bar when you want to compare prices as you shop. It works by comparing the item you are looking at with other retailers and showing you the prices elsewhere right that instant. This absolutely beats having to go to sites like Pricegrabber to compare prices yourself.

PriceAdvance works currently at major sites like Best Buy, Circuit City, Walmart, Amazon, etc. Although, reviews elsewhere have reported that they have some kinks to work out where it sometimes fails to show discounts offered or not show the current price, etc. A very interesting idea though and I am about to give it a try.

[via Lifehacker]

If you are in the market looking for a solid 4GB USB Drive, Buy.com has a 4 GB Kingston DataTraveller USB Drive for $24.95. If you sign-up for a (free) new Google Checkout account, you can get it for $14.95 with free shipping.

This is the lowest I have seen for a 4GB USB Drive and Kingston makes some really good ones. Even if you don’t need one, it could be a nice Christmas gift.

Or, you could get a 2GB Kingston DataTraveller USB Drive for $14.95. With a new Google Checkout account, you could get it for $4.95 with free shipping!

If you are wondering, what you could do with a USB drive, check out my 12 Must Have Portable Apps for your USB Drive for some ideas.

If you are into finding nice tech deals, check out the right most sidebar from Buxr. I have started to keeping an eye on it as they are pretty spot on in deals like the one I have mentioned here. This is not a sponsored post or am I asking you to click on those ads but this has to be one of the most useful ad widgets I have ever had.

It’s Thanksgiving week here in the US next week and I will be posting lightly next week. I have scheduled a few posts to go live next week when I am away but I will resume my regular posting once I get back after the holidays.