As a foreword, I’d like to advise that this article is a bit technical. If you have queries or would like more details, drop a comment and I’ll be happy to provide further explanations.

I’ve recently come across a softphone that works on Linux, iPhone and Android phones: Linphone. It’s open source and free of charge.

I’ve only tried it on Linux Ubuntu so far (if iPhones and Android users want to give it a go, I’m all ears about your feedback) and I definitely enjoyed its “ease of use” and quick setup.

One of its other features that is interesting for tech-minded people is that you can handle calls with command lines. This feature can be turned into something powerful when used in scripts.

If you’re not a Blueface customer yet and are simply looking for information about Linphone, do not hesitate to check out our services. We’re providing residential phone services and business VoIP solutions, as well as other extra services. Maybe you can give Blueface a go along with Linphone.

Here is a quick setup guide for the Ubuntu client :

1. Install the dependencies from Synaptic Package Manager: speex, libosip2, libeXosip2
2. Still from Synaptic Package Manager, install : linphone
3. After installation, you can find the app in your menu : Applications > Internet > Linphone
4. To setup your Blueface account, go to the menu : Linphone > Preferences > ‘Manage SIP Accounts’
5. There you need to add a new “proxy account” :

Your SIP Identity will be : sip:YOUR_BLUEFACE_SIP_USERNAME@sip.blueface.ie

SIP Proxy Address is : sip:sip.blueface.ie

Registration duration : 113

From there you should be able to call out using your Blueface account.

If you want to use the console interface, you need a few more steps:

1. Quit the client if you have it open, to make sure your SIP settings won’t conflict.
2. Open a terminal and run : ‘linphonec’ (notice the ‘c’ at the end)
3. You need to add your SIP details again, for that run the command : ‘proxy add’
4. You’ll be prompted for the same parameters as mentioned above, for the graphical version.
5. Follow the prompts and validate.

You should start seeing successful registrations messages.

To call, run the command : call <number>

For example : call 012222222

Don’t forget to end the call, by running : terminate

One draw back I’ve noticed is that the same configuration file is used by both the GUI and the console and both interfaces tend to erase the configuration of the other, so you can only use one, basically. The config file is in ~.linphonerc.

You can get more information about this tool from this page: linphonec

Do not hesitate to drop a comment if you need help in setting this up. If you are working on an application that makes use of this commands feature, let us know!

Guillaume

Did you know that you can get Blueface’s great international rates on your mobile? For example, you can call to Thailand for only 1c / min.

All you need to do is register your mobile number online via your gomobile tab. Then you can make calls to hundreds of destinations for only a few cents per minute.

Step 1: Dial the myGOmobile access number – 01 524 20 29

Step 2: Enter the number you wish to dial

Step 3: Experience great Blueface rates on your mobile.

And YES, we are cheaper than Skype!

Blueface

Blueface is thrilled to announce that they have given away over 500,000 minutes with the free Irish calls for life offer.

The plan includes unlimited calls to Irish landlines with the purchase of the €199 offer. There is no need for a computer or smartphone, all you need is a good broadband connection.

More than half a million minutes of calls have already been made FOR FREE! thanks to this revolutionary offer.

If you need to make international calls, Blueface has fantastic rates to hundreds of destinations, this includes popular call destinations such as the UK, USA, India, Poland, China, South Africa. Simply top up your Pay as you Go balance and away you go.

You can also keep your existing number by porting it over to Blueface. Find out more about Number Porting now.

Contact us if you have any query, our team are always available to provide help and advice when choosing a call plan.

Blueface

Hi everyone!

Christiano Ronaldo, skill, speed, strength and enough ability to ‘draw the foul’.

We salute Portugal’s flying winger! And we want you to salute him too!

So next time you see the No.7 taking a dive, rejoice! If you’ve updated your account with Pay As You Go credit you’ll get a 10% bonus! The promotion will be valid through this weekend all the way up to kick off of Portugal’s Round 16 World Cup game. We’ll have another promotion in time for the final, so even if you’re team isn’t winning, even if you’re being driven mad by the sound of the vuvuzelas you’ll always be winning with Blueface! Just remember to top up your account before kick off.

Now that’s something to Vuvuzela about!

What are the chances of the No.7 actually diving? I would like to draw your attention to exhibit A: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1LiWYJswZw

All you need to do is top-up your Pay As You Go account and if Ronaldo dives during the game we’ll give 10% bonus credit!

You can top up anytime over the weekend, Monday or Tuesday morning. But All top ups must be purchased before the game kicks off.

So get to it! Top up your account, watch the game and get rewarded!

To Top Up login to Blueface.ie and from your Call History page select the Top Up amount.

Blueface

What is an Entrepreneur? It all depends on who’s talking. Members of the political class, media, industry, academia, and the general public have a variety of perspectives on entrepreneurship.   Often, it means something altogether different for each cohort.  The unfortunate thing about entrepreneurship, however, is that it is sometimes completely misunderstood, and worse still, entrepreneurs themselves are viewed as having almost enigmatic and somewhat obscure personalities.  Are they mad, attention seeking, unscrupulous, greedy, independent, ingenious or terrifying?  Or are they simply misunderstood?

Our perspectives are often driven by a textbook definition which can be a linear interpretation of what it means to be an entrepreneur.   From a leadership perspective, we apply a “great man theory” lens to entrepreneurs.  We assume that they have some magical, charismatic and mystic quality that makes them entrepreneurs.  At some levels, we believe that entrepreneurs are born, not made.  They take risks that the ordinary man or woman would not take.  Why?  Because they have some extraordinary genius that makes them, well, entrepreneurs…

Personally, I would like to challenge that thinking.  Firstly, I would argue that having met a range of highly successful entrepreneurs in Ireland over the last few years, that each one of them would attribute their success to the team they have around them.  People are key.  In fact, the most successful would put even more emphasis and value on the people that surround them; their attitude, their teamwork, their energy and their competence.  The most successful companies of all time have built high energy “hot spots” (check out the book by Lynda Gratton) and which are built around cultures of performance.  High performance people create high performance cultures.  The problem is that “culture” is a very esoteric and fluffy term.  From the start-ups and SME’s that I have seen, the culture of a business is created and built by people working in the business.  Culture is more than the original founder, although they have a huge impact on the business.  But it’s more than them.  It’s a collective thing, a way of operating and set of behaviours, all of which are reinforced by the team.   The entrepreneur is more like a team captain.  They are not the team, they are a part of it.

Secondly, in my opinion, entrepreneurship is about innovation.  It’s not all about the next big thing.  It’s not all about revolutionary, game changing technology.  We can be entrepreneurial in existing businesses.  We can find new, better and more innovative ways of doing business and serving our customer.  Some of the most recent successful, enterprising ideas have been centred around business model innovation like DELL or Amazon or Ryanair.   I can safely say that the majority of entrepreneurs don’t see visions of the future and then arrive back on earth to prepare a business plan and seek funding.   Business, as in life, just doesn’t work that way.   Entrepreneurship is about serving a need or a gap and fixing it.  I would even go so far as to say that most inventions have been a reaction to a gaping lack of something and a clear, identifiable need.  It’s not about sitting on top of some mountain somewhere and strategising.  It’s about knowing your customer and their needs and doing everything in your power to serve them and address those needs.   Entrepreneurship firstly involves identifying gaps and weaknesses in the current order of things.  But coupled with this, entrepreneurship involves actually doing something about it.   This is what differentiates entrepreneurs and this is potentially why we elevate them to celebrity status.   But we forget that sometimes these entrepreneurs weren’t so visionary, so talented or so lucky.  Sometimes they needed to make a living.  They had to take a risk which led them down a path they might not ordinarily have chosen.  They committed themselves to a course and a trajectory, which either worked or did not.  But it’s safe to say, they almost never went it alone.

Alan Foy

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” – Henry Ford.

Mr. Henry Ford  I salute you, but we at Blueface feel a little differently about our customers! We’re a communications company, customers are our business and only through interaction with you, our customers, will we be able to continue to deliver the products that you want and services that you need. We’ve embedded a short survey, which should take no more than 5 minutes to complete, on our customer call history page and we we be very grateful if you’d take some time to log into your account and complete it anytime over the next  4 or 5 days. The survey has some basic questions about what services you use, what features you’d like added and how we can improve your experience online.

This information will be used to develop new products and services as well as helping us improve the services we currently have on offer. We’d like to thank you in advance for taking the time to do this it will be of great use to us over the coming few months.

To take the survey, please go to : Customer Satisfaction Survey

Regards,

Alan Haverty

Blueface

Calling all Entrepreneurs!

Blueface are sponsoring The Entrepreneur Show which runs on Friday and Saturday (April 23rd and 24th). This is a fantastic event which Blueface are delighted to be involved in. There are some great speakers lined up including some of the Irish and UK dragons; there are a host of companies exhibiting and of course some tremendous prizes on offer too!

Take a look at: The Entrepreneur Show

Blueface are also launching a new product at the show which has been designed specifically for the Irish Entrepreneur. It is yet another revolutionary product and one which I think will raise quite a few eyebrows!

We have a stand at the show where we will be very pleased to meet with existing and new customers – we will be on stand E3 which is just inside the main entrance and over to the right, next to Google’s stand.

Oh – did I mention we’re giving away an iPad?

See you there!

Feargal

The ability to set the SMS Sender ID of any SMS sent via our website, as your private mobile phone number (rather than : ‘blueface’) has been requested by various customers either on our forum or on support emails.

It’s now possible!

The Sender ID can be set as your own mobile phone number after ownership has been verified. We obviously cannot allow anyone to send SMS with any ‘Sender ID’, that could lead to SMS spoofing and identity thefts problems.

The verification process is very quick and simple and is just the cost of a sending an SMS (a few cents):

1. Login in www.blueface.ie and go to the ‘Text’ page, where you usually send SMS from

2. Complete the form at the bottom, called ‘Verify my Sender Id’. You’ll be prompted for your mobile phone number, fill it and validate (remain on the page after validating!). A SMS will sent with a verification code. The SMS is charged the usual price for the destination (7c for Irish mobiles for example).

3. Within a minute you will receive the SMS. Enter the verification code on the page and validate.

4. A notification message should appear on the page saying that your number has been approved. Wait 10 to 15 minutes to the approval to be registered and activated. You will then be able send SMS as your own mobile number.

We hope this addition will make the SMS feature much more handy to use, especially for our business customers.

You can also send SMS to multiple recipients at the same time by separating the mobile numbers by a comma. In the future, we may add additional functionality to make sending bulk emails easier. Let us know if you would find this a useful feature.

As always, if you have questions or feedback let us know!

Guillaume

Hello everyone,

Blueface are delighted to be the first company in Ireland to provide Visual Voicemail, which is a New Free Feature , accessible from our website and available to all our customers.

This new feature allows our customers to listen to voicemail messages, download them and delete them easily and all these handy features are available directly from our website. The page displays information about each message: time of call, caller number or ID, message duration and have Play and Downloads buttons afterwards. This new feature avoids the hassle of having to go through an automated system (IVR) to perform the same. We’ve all been through the boring: Press 4 for next message, Press 6 to delete … This time is now over.

If your mailbox is almost  or completely full (We allow up to 100 messages per mailbox), you’ll see a warning message inviting you to delete some old messages.

The audio player is based on a plug-in piece of software. On most systems this plug-in will be Quick Time Player, for Windows users on Internet Explorer this plug-in will be Windows Media Player (Make sure to have Windows up to date ). If the messages don’t play properly, try to install the latest version of Quick Time Player. It can be downloaded for free on Apple’s website.

Currently, it works on all of the popular platforms and with all major web browsers. We’re improving the software so that it will work on iPhone, Android or Blackberry handsets soon.

We think this new tool is pretty cool, but we’d  love to get your feedback on it. Let us know what you think!

Guillaume

Hi everyone – following the launch of the Free Calls for Life offer, we are now pleased to announce that the replacement cost for a handset will be just €69!  There is already a 2 year manufacturer’s warranty on the units – they are made by ultra-reliable Siemens and we know they just keep on working. However if a unit does fail for some reason (see bottom of this post!), you can just replace it quickly and economically and continue to enjoy Free Calls for Life!

The reason we are using the Siemens Gigaset incidentally is a combination of reliability and dependability. We have used these handsets for many years and have had very few failures. In addition they are very easy to support. This all means that we can offer amazing deals like Free Calls for Life, as we know the hardware won’t let us – or you – down. And if it does ever fail, we can now replace out of warranty hardware for a very reasonable price – just €69!

As it happens, we had the first replacement request last week which we felt obliged to perform free of charge! A customer’s 2 year old microwaved the handset on full power for 30 seconds. We can confirm that the handset is now inoperable and can safely conclude that the units are not microwave ready. Please don’t try this at home!!

Feargal