Posts Tagged ‘postcards’
July 12th, 2009 | 
Author: Prohibitive international call charges mean that it can be painfully expensive to make calls to Pakistan from the UK. If you’ve got friends and family living in Pakistan, you may find that you talk to them much less frequently that you’d like to. Luckily, new VoIP technology means that cheap phone calls or even free international calls to Pakistan are now available to everyone.
Have you got friends and family in Pakistan? If so, how do you stay in touch? Letters, postcards and email are great, but they’re just not the same as a proper conversation. People are often reluctant to pick up the phone to call friends and family in Pakistan, though. The tariffs are simply often too high to justify the call, they feel. And even if they do phone, they can’t really relax and enjoy the conversation, because they know that with every minute, the phone bill is soaring. It’s the same with international calling cards – you can’t concentrate on the conversation because you’re worried about how much credit the call is eating up. So, to save money, people will often avoid phoning their friends and relatives in Pakistan, or only do so rarely.
There is, though, a way to make free international calls or cheap phone calls to Pakistan – by avoiding traditional phone lines altogether. It’s possible thanks to modern Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, which makes calls over a broadband connection. VoIP turns spoken words into digital signals that travel across the internet, then turns them back into speech at the other end.
There are two main ways you can use VoIP to make free calls or cheap calls to Pakistan.
1. PC to PC’
In this set-up, VoIP software turns your computer into a telephone. You, and those you’re talking to in Pakistan, must both sign up to compatible VoIP providers such as Skype or MSN. If only works if you’ve both got a computer or laptop, a broadband connection, a headset/ microphone/ speaker (which may already be on your computer).
This system may suit you fine. It’s certainly the cheapest option, as it enables you to make free international calls. But it does have its limitations. You and the person in Pakistan both need to be at a computer, and you both need to have signed up with compatible providers. You can also use PC to PC system to make calls to other landlines or mobiles in Pakistan, though you’ll be charged for these by the minute. Bear in mind, too, that the quality of the call probably won’t be as good as that of a regular landline or mobile phone.
2. Phone to phone
If you want greater flexibility of making cheap phone calls using a traditional home telephone (instead of through your PC with headsets), it might be worth thinking about signing up with a VoIP provider that allows you to do this. What usually happens is that you opt for one or other of the call plans the provider offers. Depending on the call plan, these offer free calls to various countries – or you can get a really basic call plan that simply includes unlimited anytime calls to the UK.
Because they use VoIP technology, these service providers can also afford to offer highly competitive international tariffs for calls to other countries. So if you find that Pakistan doesn’t feature in any of the call plans offered, don’t worry. If Pakistan is the only international country you want to call, you can simply sign up to the service provider’s most basic call plan. As soon as you’ve signed up, you’ll have full access to the provider’s full range of cheap international tariffs, including Pakistan. If you’re likely to call other international countries, check to see whether they’re included in any call plans. By comparing the call plans and international tariffs, you should be able to work out what’s best for you.
With this phone to phone’ system, you’ll get a special adapter from your VoIP provider. By using this adapter to connect your normal handset to your computer or router, you can effectively take advantage of VoIP technology – but use your normal phone to make phone-to-phone’ calls to Pakistan. The only difference is that the calls go through your existing broadband connection – and not through a landline. It means that you can simply pick up the phone and dial a number in Pakistan. The person you’re calling doesn’t need to have a computer, or broadband. The call quality is so good that the person you’re calling won’t know you’re using VoIP.
So if you want the pleasure of being able to make long, guilt-free, cheap calls to Pakistan, VoIP might be the way to go. You’ll never worry about your phone bill again.
Costas Kariolis – Online Marketing Manager of Vonage UK. Vonage are leading low rate VoIP providers for home & small business users. Offering cheap calls to Pakistan via an internet phone service for a set monthly fee.
For interviews, quotes, images or comments contact:
Costas Kariolis
Online Marketing Manager
E-mail: theteam@vonage.com
Article Source: Making Cheap Calls to Pakistan with VoIP
Go Green, Use Green, 100 percent Organic, or Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle are common catchphrases you see in bold prints and commonly hear from environmentally friendly groups in New York City. Despite being the most urbanized city in the U.S., New York has eco-friendly groups that absolutely uphold the convictions and idealisms that they promote. In fact, the principle they are endorsing is not their own responsibility, but each and every one’s duty to protect our natural resources. Everyone and everything is encouraged to go green, including the printing industry. The revolutionary transition to the computer age has likewise made a similar shift in how printing gets done—prints made by the traditional offset printing press versus new digital printing technology.
Paving the Way for “Green” Digital Printing
Information technology brought us significant changes in almost all aspects of our lives, including printing services that paved the way for the development of digital printing. Environmental awareness has caused all of us to find ways to have less of an impact on the environment. Digital printing compared to traditional printing is a much less wasteful print process. While it does not totally eliminate the need for traditional printing presses, digital printing provides a cost effective alternative which is more environmentally friendly for businesses today. Digital printing offers high quality, fast turnaround printing for booklets, postcards, brochures, catalogs, or business cards with much less impact to the environment. In the past we have all been guilty of overlooking the consequences of the choices we make in our daily lives, but in the long run we must make more “green” choices. Digital printing is a more “green” alternative to other forms of printing and a good place to start in our quest to make more “green” choices.
Win-win Solution
Digital printing employs processes that involve more eco-friendly operations. Less waste is produced and recycled materials are used thus leading to minimal or no harm at all to the environment. It also encompasses the use of inks that do not utilize highly volatile organic compounds, which are the primary cause of air pollution as the compounds easily evaporate at room temperature. With the use of environment-friendly print processes, less air emissions are processed and there is less material consumed. It is a win-win situation with digital printing. Printing costs and wastage are reduced and at the same time elicit a positive impact to our environment. So go green with digital printing in New York. It will help conserve and preserve resources, and the Earth in entirety.
Go Green Act
Environmentally friendly groups in New York embrace the environmental responsibility that the digital printing has introduced to the printing industry. The onset of digital printing displays the social awareness and consciousness they have undertaken to avoid the detrimental effects of pollution and depletion of natural resources. Here is why digital printing is a go green act.
v The digital print process does not require the manufacture of a printing plate.
v The ink utilized in go green printers do not utilize highly volatile organic compounds that may cause birth defects and cancer.
v It uses recycled paper or post consumer waste products that saves landfill space and reduces energy and water usage in the paper manufacturing process.
Influence Graphics is the best digital printing shop in New York that promotes environment-friendly products. Printing jobs are done with less waste and less damage to the environment because Influence Graphics is a totally digital print shop.
At Influence Graphics, you are assured of digital printing services that consider go green and eco-friendly printers. It believes in reducing, reusing and recycling.
Article Source: Go Green with Digital Printing in New York
To obtain fast loading web images users often need to crop their pictures to fit the rules imposed by webmasters to speed up their website. Images used nowadays have often a very high resolution and loading them takes a huge amount of time. This is why webmasters usually restricts their dimensions and require the user to crop their image to ensure its fast loading. This calls for a picture crop tool – and although there are several online image crop scripts available – the most efficient and complete solution is offered by Kroppr.
Installed on your domain, it will allow your visitors to rotate, zoom and crop images in real time without extra load on your server.
The utility of Kroppr goes beyond the mere functionality of an image rotation crop script like “wallpaper resize and rotate script”. It is extremely user-friendly and it does NOT require any additional plug-ins (such as Java or Flash) for rotating images. While many other online image crop scripts are difficult to use due to the limitations of their interfaces, Kroppr uses slides to help the user resize and zoom the image. Rotating the image, or just a part of it, is also a very user-friendly operation due to its visual approach. This is why Kroppr is perceived as a usable avatar or wallpaper maker, helping users to manipulate images in order to create avatars, wallpapers, calendars, postcards, etc.
The dimension of the images is not a problem while using Kroppr because the script adapts itself to the image size. It is also useful when working with small thumbnail images that link to bigger images because the script will crop and resize the big image and not the thumbnail, allowing you to obtain a high quality result. Although it’s an online image crop tool, Kroppr allows you to save the resulted image to your hard drive for later use. It also allows you to reset all the changes and start cropping again.
One of the biggest advantage of using Kroppr as your image rotation crop script consists in the simplicity of its installation. The graphic tools needed for it to run properly are already installed on any common hosting server so there is no need to pay extra to allow Kroppr to run on your domain. Depending on the graphical packages installed on your server (ImageMagic, NetPBM, RSVG or GD2), this crop script will always choose the best solution that will ensure the quality of the resulted image and a minimal server load. All these advantages will transform picture cropping into a simple and fun operation that can be performed by any website visitor.
Forget about complicated and difficult to install picture crop tools! Allow your users to manipulate images on your website while guaranteeing the fun and simplicity of the operations required
Find out more about Kroppr – the online cropping tool for your website – by playing with our demo script here.
Article Source: Kroppr – online image cropping tool for your website