Phonetag

I used to have to check voicemail numerous times a day. I don't anymore. I subscribed to a service that used to be called simulscribe renamed to phonetag. The great thing about phonetag is it will transcribe your voicemail to an email and also send the wave file along with it.It makes my email box the one stop shop for all my communication. I do not have to waste any more time trying to listen to voice mail.

It helps keep me more effective and allows me to be more responsive to my clients. The service is not perfect in its transcription, but it works fairly well. The cost is only about $24 dollars a month and you get unlimited voice mail storage (good if you forget to delete your messages).

It is nice to have time savers like these to become more effective in my business. I would recommend you try it. Once you are on it, you will never go back.

PCI Standard

The credit card industry created the PCI (Payment Card Industry) standard to help better protect consumers. A security breach in March might expose some holes in that standard.

The amazing thing about this hack is that the data was stolen while the data was in transit. Most attacks are against a database or someplace were the data is idle.

They had 4 million credit cards breached and possibly 70 banks affected. The additional amazing fact is this attack seemed to go on for about months before being detected.

This happened at grocery stores in the Northeast and Florida.

I use my debit/credit card most of the time these days, which is tied directly to my bank account. If they would happen to compromise my account, It would be very bad.

I typically use a credit card on online transactions to prevent my bank account from being cleaned out.

This gives you something to think about the next time you are out shopping. How protected is your data at the merchant you are purchasing goods from?

Banking In Switzerland

When I was in Switzerland last month, I was asking my brother about how he pays his bills. The answer was interesting. When he gets a bill, it has a long number on it. He can than take that number and use a one-time pin pad to pay the bill electronically.

It seems that most of the bills in Switzerland are paid this way. It seems much more secure than the current methods the US has in place. But one has to keep in mind that we have a larger population than Switzerland and many more banks.

I suppose scalability would be the issue. But I still think it is a better method than we have in place today.