One of the areas of biggest change in the internet age is what's happened with telephones. I'll tack fax onto the end of it since it's a phone technology that sort of survived and in some businesses is still quite important. On a telephone used to be a fixed number at a fixed location, and for quite a long time on a fixed device. None of that's true anymore. Now we're the mobile generation. And I'm guessing there's temptation to say I can run my whole business from my cell phone, while your mobile device preferably a smartphone is integral in running a really effective cloud and virtual business.

I'd like to show you a few things that I think give you better flexibility and room for growth in your business than just everything happening on my mobile number. telephones and fax. There we go. So let's start with the basics. It used to be that someone calling you on your phone Went through the very invisible public telephone network, the PSTN public switched telephone network. And that was that fixed number calling to fixed number.

Now, of course, it's wireless. And you say, well, this guy can call me anywhere. But there's still a number associated with that call. One of the things that surprised me over the user running business is how persistent numbers are. If you have a telephone number, like save a wireless subscription now and you say, That's my business number, it's gonna dog you for years, you may change carriers, you may change numbers, that number is gonna be in a record somewhere or on a tax thing somewhere or in a vendor's file somewhere and someone's gonna want to get a hold of you. So managing your numbers is a little bit akin to managing passwords and usernames that I talked about in some of the earlier sections here.

So Let me start with my favorite tool, as a business guy with phone numbers, who doesn't want to be tied down who likes to be mobile, but who doesn't want to be married to one mobile carrier, and that is Google Voice. don't already have a Google Voice subscription. It's basically a built in option if you have a Google subscription for the time being. Google Voice is a free service from Google. You can end up paying for long distance and some other options. But the baseline Google Voice service, at least in the US is no cost.

It's actually pretty amazing. I was a subscriber to a little startup called Grand Central that got bought out by Google and kind of kept quiet for a year or something like that, and then reemerged as Google Voice. So I've been using this for a long time. Let me explain the basics of what happens when someone calls my business line and I actually use my Google Voice. Number, not my cell number, not my desk, not my Skype ID number. We'll talk about that.

As my business number, I have one number that I put on business cards, I have one number that I give out to people when it says when they say I want to be able to call you, when they actually make that call. They're calling up a telephone switch somewhere that routes them to Google servers in Google's data center somewhere. Google says, Oh, this is Matthew's phone number. What does he want us to do with this phone call? That's configuration that I'll show you in a sec. I have mine set up to do two things simultaneously.

I say when I get an inbound call on that number, call my landline I desperately call my cell phone at the same time, sometimes called the blast ring. Why would I do that? Well, if I'm sitting at my desk, both phones go off for sure. But I have the choice of which one to answer. If I don't care about minutes, or I'm on unlimited plan. I'm not answered on my mobile Phone.

If I'd rather be on a headset or something, it's at my fixed desk, I might answer it on my desk phone. He thing is I don't have to sink or forward or plan. If I'm in or out of the office, I habitually leave my cell phone in my pocket when I run upstairs to get coffee. Why? Because if a business car comes in for me, I get it. I'm not married to the thing that's on my desk.

I'm probably going to blank some of this out. But here's some of the basics of Google Voice. So I've got a Google Voice number, you can port you can move an existing number to become a Google Voice number takes some time. But if you've got a number, that you're very attached to that you've gotten cards that you've had for a while, you can potentially turn that into a Google Voice number. Thank you, Congress. That was a nice bit of freedom you did.

And then right now I say my Google Voice number forwards calls to all of these things. And I don't necessarily have them all on I can have Google Voice be my answering machine my voicemail as well. I don't actually opt to do that. I actually use my cell phone as the endpoint for voicemail for a variety of reasons. But it's a full blown, very capable voicemail system. I can record a greeting, I can actually get specify my notifications, I can have voicemails emailed as playable file attachments like mp3 or waves to email so I can listen to voicemail on my phone, or I can call in and get my voicemail.

There's a host of other controls including call screening, caller ID. I could specify groups and circles I can say my wife, my kids, my business partner can always reach me. Other people can only get me during these hours. There's widget so you can put a click to call on your website, etc, etc. Most of this is free which still just blows my doors. I have a number that I am in control of regardless Whether I changed home lines or business lines, or cell phones or cell carriers, I can stick with that number.

If anyone from Google is watching this, if you guys decide to charge for Google Voice, I will pay. Why? Because I value that number. And I value the control I have over that number. It's very much akin to what I said about domains you really want to own and control your own. I call this a personal level thing that's part of a business level thing.

You could say we'll get a Google Voice number for everyone in the company that gets a little bit muddy in terms of managing multiple calls, because it's still two or three or four or six or 10 separate phone numbers. And it get very muddy when someone left. That's not your number. You didn't pay for it. Do they get to keep it? Do they get to take it with them?

Do they get to use it, but at an individual, entrepreneur exact person in the company level, who's a huge amount of gain in grabbing Google Voice and making that your number. The other thing I'd add in there is that There's a host of draw a circle here very well. There are a host of tools in the mobile domain. for Google Voice. It's kind of an ecosystem. I use.

And I use an iPhone app called g voice, to listen to my messages to review messages, texts and stuff like that. It sucks everything out of my Google inbox, I understand that Google's own iPhone app has gotten quite capable, so I'm not knocking their alternative. The point is that there are tools that work with this system. It does stuff you can never do with a telephone. Back in the days of at&t and landlines, and all of that senior control through a web browser or through a Google tool like g voice. It's quite remarkable on another endpoint that I frequently use in my world of telephones and voice conversation, and I'll bring this back to bear when we talk about video.

Is our buddy Skype. Skype has been around for a very long time, I was a very early adopter, I suspect I've been on Skype for, I don't know, eight years or something like that. My company did a nice compact informative video, Skype explained visually that goes through all of the bits and pieces of what you can do with Skype. My purpose here is to talk about Skype as part of the telephone world. I use Skype on my desk on my desktop computer, which happens to be a Mac. And I really use it as my telephone, my office telephone a lot of the time.

My Google Voice number points into it. If someone calls my business number, I Google Voice number, my cell phone rings, my desk phone ring, and Skype rings, a lot of bells going off at once. When I call people outbound. I frequently typically almost call them through Skype. That's called Skype out. So I pay Skype a little bit of money, three bucks a month or something like that, to be able to make unlimited North American calls.

Why is it better than telephone? Maybe it is, maybe it's not. But it's integrated with my contacts on my phone, I can set up a one click call something off of webpages, or emails or any place I run across a phone number, I get to use a keyboard for dealing with the phone. Instead of punching on a mobile or punching on a handset. In addition gives me another level of abstraction and redirection. I can take that Skype in and I could tell Skype to forward the call.

That was actually very useful when I was overseas. If we have time to talk about the cost advantages of doing this sort of setup for overseas, we'll go into that but Skype is worth looking at. Obviously, they think Skype for first. The thing that scape got known for first was calls from computer to computer. And they carry some amazing percentage of overseas calls. At this point, I want to say it's like a third of overseas calls.

They're just straight Skype to Skype calls. And that can be just voice or voice and video, Skype got bought by Microsoft a year or so ago. I'm sure that'll lead to changes and hopefully additional capabilities in Skype. It's an amazing platform, my blunt opinion, Skype isn't as functional and straightforward and frankly, as stable as it used to be. We've migrated away from Skype for most video conferencing because it hasn't been satisfactory. Too many times.

Tacking price tags on to things like more than one to one. video calls have been annoying, you can find alternatives that don't cost us it. Frankly, it's probably a standard piece of the toolkit if you're running a virtual cloud based company, a lot of people have Skype addresses on their business card and so on. Skype as part of your I am in presence and virtual work environment can be very useful. I'll re address that when we talk about I am in presence. But you can think of Skype as, among other things, a piece of software that acts like a very capable telephone, on your computer, and the Skype client for most of the mobile platforms as well.

IOS for sure. Android for sure. Windows Phone, I don't know about Blackberry, I don't know about. So that's the basic thing with with phone for an individual. I do think getting a Google Voice number and keep giving yourself control of your phone number is well worth doing. It frees you up to change wireless plans.

It frees you up to change your office or desktop phone solution. It frees you up very much to change locations and to be able to manage that yourself through a web browser. Now as to fax I hate faxes, they're dumb vestige of telephone lines. Fax is basically a printer that's part on a phone line. And I wish they would go away and die. But because a lot of businesses don't seem to realize that digital signatures have been finding since 1996, under clinton, you still get people saying, fax this, sign it, fax it back, drives me out of my mind.

But I don't have a physical fax machine. I haven't had one for years. And I'll tell you how I've solved that problem with with online services and email. And I know there are alternative, similar solutions. It's just a much better way to run a railroad and run your business. So what's a fax call effects call is, in theory, at least one fax machine calling on a phone line to another fax machine.

And it doesn't actually send Data of facts is a picture is a scan or a digital picture that gets printed out on the other end of a piece of paper or a large pile of paper used to be sitting on phone lines. So okay, so how do we get out of this rat race when it comes to the digital era? for years and years and years, I've used a service called fax to me FX number to me.com. I know there are alternatives on the market. These guys are lucky. I don't think they market that much, but they've been awesome.

I use them for a couple of reasons. One, the service is for the most part, pay as you go. We get very few faxes. So my fax bill once a month is nothing if I need to send a fax out. If I get incoming faxes coming in, I get them. But on my bill isn't that big, and if I don't use it much, it's not.

It's like a couple of bucks a month. The two key services I've used For the longest time on facts, to me calm one is an inbound Fax Service. I've had the same fax number in place for years. If someone sends a fax to that number, I'm in control of defining the email addresses I choose email, the email addresses, the actual fax document comes to. So if you take a piece of paper and stick it in a fax machine, and punch in my fax number and send it to me, I get an email on my phone, on my desktop, whatever we talked about email in an earlier section on the get used to have mine as a PDF. The great thing is, it's a digital file.

I can stick it on a disk, I can put it in Dropbox, I can put it in Evernote, I can hang on to it, I can throw it away. I don't have to kill any trees to read the thing. I can even sign it and send it back without ever printing it. I'll show you that. I'll show you that trick at some point. My partner loves that thing on and it comes in through facts to me too much Email.

The other thing I use fax to me for the other service of theirs that I use very, very frequently is outbound fax. If someone says, fax me that purchase order with your signature of fax me that statement of work with your signature. I'll do the signature digitally, which I promise I will show you. And then I take the document can be a Word doc could be a PDF, you could even be a spreadsheet or it could just be an email, and I stick that in the email message, and I email it. The protocol. That fax to me uses is number at their domain.

So if your fax number was 360-555-1212, I would email your fax number. Soon fax fax to me Quantum, I can get copies of it if I want them. But I never have to print anything out kill a tree. I can do it from my phone, which is very, very useful from someone else's computer, which is very, very useful. The lockdown controls that I use say, only people can only people sending from the following email addresses can use the service that way you can't use my send Fax Service from your email address unless I liked you. But it's darn convenient.

And as I said, those are costs that much I like I like flat faxes being turned into digital information. I've had relatives who ran fax centric businesses, and we're burning through toner cartridge and all that other stuff and just shake my head like why why why why why would you do that? If you get a lot of faxes. Take a look at Evernote, which I'm thinking I'll talk to in a later lesson on there's an Using OCR optical character recognition in Evernote and if you get a lot of faxes in as PDFs and can dump them into Evernote, then bonus Evernote will actually read them and make them searchable for you, which is just a huge asset. So personal phone line, Google Voice and lots and lots of endpoints fax for your small to medium cloud based business. Take a look at an online Fax Service like fax to me.

Effects there are others out there do the research define your own needs but do not take a fax machine and pay for a phone line and park it on the phone line in a fixed place. Why would you do that you want everything everything everything to be digital in your business. Last couple of notes, one of them lightweight, the others a little bit speculative, speculative, on at a company level. If you want a phone number or phone numbers that aren't attached to a person. You don't want to publish your cell phone number as your business number if you plan on succeeding and growing. Why?

Because there'll be a point at which your phone ends up being the switchboard. And then what are you going to do? I unit, you can make a wireless phone into a switchboard. You're stuck between Telling all your friends you got a new number or trying to get people not call a business number and it'll never work 100% there are other ways to solve the problem of getting a business phone number. But the most flexible, fast and cost effective solution that I've found. I'll be it kind of geeky is this amazing company called Twilio?

Twilio is pitch in a nutshell is they make the telephone as easy to pair telephone world as easy to program as the web world and they sort of marry those two things together. It's a reasonable description. The service is technically quite deep. developers do astonishing stuff with it. I haven't even scratched The surface so if you've got a telephone centric business, you owe it to yourself to look at Twilio for lots of reasons. What I use Twilio for is this.

If I decided that we wanted to have a New York office and with a New York phone number, it would take me maybe 60 seconds to log into Twilio. The login would be Twilio at company name, calm Matthew of company Comm. Go look at the email section. If you don't understand that, I log into Twilio. I go to the dashboard. I buy a number in that area code.

And I'd be signing up for a couple of bucks a month expense. And I take that number and basically programming with a one line script that says look when someone calls this number, just forward the call to that number when someone calls this number, run this little bit of script here, which is published on Twilio site and say phone number equals x when my business partner goes On vacation, I jump in here and change that to my number. Why? So if someone calls the company, they actually call Twilio, Google Voice, Google Voice my employees, so I can answer the phone and help people out. When he comes back, we change it back to his number. That's it.

That's all she wrote. If you wanted multiple numbers, if you wanted one in each state, this is probably the least expensive way I know of. to get that you'd have to sign up to manage it. That's not necessarily trivial. If you get calls, you pay for them. If you get a lot of calls, you'd want to do the analysis whatnot that's worthwhile or not, but for presence and impression and control.

This is just an amazing asset for the business. I've spent phone numbers for a purpose and shutting down a month later, and it doesn't seem to be a problem. Last thing I'll mentioned in the domain of telephones is grasshopper I haven't used it. I don't have friends who've used it, but I've been around the block and heard a lot of stuff. And these guys have a really, really, really solid Rep. So if your business is really phone centric, and you expect to have multiple people, answering the phones or multiple departments dealing with phone calls, do not go buy a PBX.

Do not go buy a phone switch, do not go buy a bunch of office phones, get something that's in the cloud, like grasshopper, so you can configure and control it all. And then worry about the inputs like cell phones and desktop phones and Luma. on your own. Don't tie yourself to a piece of hardware for managing something like cell phones. Yes, I know the asterisk open source PBX is free. Don't do it.

Just don't do it. Don't go there. It'll end up being an IT job and you don't need that. Last last last bonus tack on shout out in terms of telephones. Boom. Oh Ma.

My home phone line for a number of years now has been a little box plugged into my internet connection from the guy At Luma, I ported the home phone that we'd had for 12 or 15 years to Luma. It still works fine. My phone bill went down to about one 10th of what it was a month. My parents just got an oma box for their home phone line. There are some good advantages to picking up an EU box for the business line for your desk. You can take it with you traveling, if you want.

And that means your office will ring. I mean, obviously your wireless phone does the same thing. You can make it blast ring to multiple handsets just like I described with Google Voice. The key thing is, it eliminates that copper phone line. Those are going to go away. Right the plain old telephone telephone system is on its way out.

You're going to be getting phone calls through the internet sooner or later. This is a way of jumping there and cutting down your phone bill and actually gaining a bunch of control in the process. The sound quality is also Really, really, really good. So if you're looking for a desk line, and you don't want to have a Skype guest line, do not call the phone company and get a copper phone line. Get in the box and park it on your terrific high speed as fast as you can get net connection. The only caveat or pushback I get with people about a voiceover IP office line is, yeah, but what if your internet connection goes down?

My response is twofold. One, my net connection goes down, up, I get an hour or two to think and not be interrupted, that I usually don't get to. Most of the time, my wireless phone will work anyway and because of Google Voice, for example, if you call in my net connections down, my cell phone's gonna ring Anyway, I'm probably using my cell phone for an outbound backup net connection, regardless, so I'm caught uncovered both ways. But don't let the hobgoblin of net connection dependency, get you down. You can run everything Going off that one line in Houma as a as a business line is a good solution for that. So that's it Do not be a prisoner of the telephone.

Do draw a picture as you build up your system of what connects to what and what points to what. And thanks for listening