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?

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 have mentioned previously that the one newsletter I love is the one from Buy.com. They truly give out some awesome deals!

I had purchased my Kingston DataTraveler 2GB USB Flash Drive from Buy.com a few months back. Now, it is again on sale for $16.95 with free shipping!

I have ordered another one to keep it as a replacement for my current drive when it decides to break. As I have it in my keychain, it goes through some pretty rough handling but it is looking good so far.

For those who have been wanting to try out portable apps or create a swiss army knife of portable tools, this is your chance to get in on a sweet deal. Or if you have been wanting to hold a blog contest, this is your chance to snag a cheap price!

How to get $10 off

I know I had mentioned $6.95 in the title and here is how you get it. Buy.com offers $10 off for new Google Checkout customers. If you already have used Google Checkout before, no worries. Take 2 minutes to create a new GMail account and use it to order this. You will get $10 off on this purchase. I use PassPack (review) to keep track of all the new accounts I create.

Enjoy the freedom you get with Portable Apps!

Farecast.com

Farecast.com is a fairly popular site that many of you might already know.It is an excellent resource to check before purchasing an airline ticket and get a buy now or wait suggestion.

Farecast analyses past historical data and provide recommendations on if the flight ticket price you are interested in is supposed to stay the same or rise or drop (even by how much). This can be handy when you are unsure if a good deal might come along after you bought the ticket.

Farecast also shows how high low the current price is to the previous average. As you can see, my flight to Vegas right now is $64 less than the average and it is predicted to rise.

Also, you can get an idea on when to travel to a place if your dates are flexible. Or you can find out where to travel on particular dates based on flight ticket prices.

Farecast has a beta version of Hotel room prices too. I haven’t tried this yet but it’ll be interesting to see how this will work for hotels.

PriceAmbush.com

PriceAmbush.com is a shopping service that tracks product prices and emails if the price product drops. If you think, the price of iPod Touch is high right now, go to PriceAmbush and search for it. Then just click on ‘Add Alert’ to enter your email address and target price.

Also, check out the cloud tag to see the top products being searched by folks. Here is a sample how a search for Canon Rebel XTi looks like.

What are you waiting for? If you already know what you are going to get your wife this Christmas, jump to PriceAmbush and set up an alert to watch for price drops.

Just what I was looking for to track my car mileage! I drive a 2000 Mitsubishi Eclipse with over 100,000 miles on it. It is running well and I try to guess its mileage with every fill up by setting up my trip meter with every fill up and making a mental note of the number of gallons I put in.

The problem with that is: I kind of know what the mileage is but I don’t know for sure. I could have kept track of it in a spreadsheet but that wouldn’t be cool would it. With my love for web applications, Mymilemarker is just what I needed.

Quick Facts

Mymilemarker is a simple web application and it offers

• Quick and easy signup
• Name your car or cars if you have multiple
• Enter date, odometer reading, the number of gallons you filled and price per gallon.
• It gives you a nice projection of miles that you will drive in a year, projected costs and average mpg based on your history.
• You can change the forecast time from the default one year to whatever you want, say, like 6 months.
• You can add every fill up using your Twitter account.
• You need to fill-in data about atleast 3 fill ups before it will start spewing numbers and projection graphs at you.

I like the simple approach taken by Mymilemarker. It just tracks my mileage data as well as my driving habits. Looking at projections out for a year could be very helpful for someone like me driving a car with over 100,000 miles on it. I have to plan for a replacement sooner or later. I think this little web application is going to come in handy for me.

Do you attempt to track your mileage? Do you know how much you will be spending on just gas alone in the year to come? You might be in for a surprise and I am hoping this will make me change my driving habits for the better. I will post an update after 2 more fill ups on the promising usefulness of this service.

[via SolutionWatch]