NickStallman.net

Believe it or not, but I found it cheaper to get a second internet connection (TPG 512k 10gig limit) dedicated to VoIP, than to continue paying Telstra.

I mostly only call Queensland from New South Wales but the bill gets up to $70 to $80 a month. The main problem with VoIP is someone might call while I’m uploading a large file or doing other work. The solution to that is a cheap slow net connection solely for VoIP.

I’m saving $20 a month, and the extra equipment (VoIP ATA + cheap used router) and setup fees will be paid off in 6 months. After that its just lower bills.

Telstra simply cannot compete with 10c untimed national calls.

I’m very impressed with how Google Maps Real Estate has been going. Their coverage these days is extremely good and its only getting better. They are actually giving RealEstate.com.au and Domain a run for their money.

And RealSauce has released our floor plan drawer which is exciting. Its actually free to try out so anyone can fiddle around with it easily.

We released our floor plan builder the other day. It meshes in nicely with our interactive floor plans and I’m very happy with the setup. The response from real estate agents has been extremely positive.

In other news I’m working on a fresh version of our real estate software. Plenty of jQuery is being used to make it very shiny. Can I just say that jQuery UI is one of the most useful things ever?

I’ve been extremely busy these days.

One of my new projects is a Interactive Floor Plan builder for real estate agents, so they can do it themselves and save a whole pile of money. Currently firms which do them at the moment charge about $70 for them.

Real estate agents also have horrible email addresses. For some reason @bigpond.com is the most common by far.
So I’ve also been setting up a really professional email hosting server (anti-spam, anti-virus, very fast, IMAP, POP3, SMTP) to try and get rid of some of those addresses.

We’ll see where both of those go.