TIP of The Week: Use Facebook Messenger To Make Phone Calls

With all of the communication apps out there to choose from, what certain features do you look for?  Perhaps a few years ago it was message-sharing capabilities, but now more and more of these communication tools are reverting back to voice communication and improving the user-experience with voice-calling.  Some would say this is because voice-calling is growing again; despite being able to share personal messages containing graphics, videos, sounds, and gifs, people still have the need to directly interact with people by actually speaking with one another.

Messaging apps such as Viber and WeChat have addressed this need and provide voice-calling through VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol.  Little may you know though, social media apps such as Facebook are now doing the same thing through their own messaging apps.  Facebook Messenger is available to iOS , Android and Windows Phone users. Users can make phone calls to friends for free via Wi-Fi or cellular data.

VoIP is a method for taking analog audio signals, like the kind you hear when you talk on the phone, and turning them into digital data that can be transmitted over the Internet.  Advantages of this are:

• VoIP can turn a standard Internet connection into a way to place free phone calls.
• By using the free VoIP software that is available to make Internet phone calls, you're bypassing the phone company (and their charges) entirely.  This means not only are you not using your minutes, but also you can call people from other countries completely free.
• Call quality is more clear!
• If you lose connection with someone, unlike through a normal data connection, you will be automatically reconnected once you are back in Internet service range.

This feature has been added to Facebook's app for iPhone and carried over to Messenger for Android for 25 countries so far.  VoiP is what will soon be considered standard practice for phone call communication, so we all may as well jump on board with the technology now!

Hope you enjoyed our TIP of the week. J

TIP Technology Focus: CALLcheck - The Cloud Helping Your Communications

TIP Technology Focus: CALLcheck^TM - The Cloud Helping Your Communication

On the 5th floor of our West Ontario offices here in the River North neighborhood of Chicago, we have some of the brightest and most creative people in the mobile app space. Let's take a minute to see what they are currently up to, what makes them tick, and how they can see needs for TIP Solutions’ technologies in their everyday lives.

"Cloud technology has never been fully utilized for its greatest feature, communication", said Manuel Nunez, one of TIP's software engineers working on our soon-to-be-released CALLcheck app. While the cloud may be great for instantly storing photos, documents, music and other files...what if we used the cloud to manage our everyday life? Let's cover how it could help us with phone calls. As advancing cellular networks cover most parts of the world, they have their weak spots such as tunnels, on the subway, rural areas, and when you are in a plane. 

"On any given day I receive about 5-10 phone calls, and I'm flying about 2-3 days per week" said one of our team members, so we thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were able to never miss a call just because we were off the network? Think of the old pager from the 1990s; it would alert you whenever someone wanted you to call them.  CALLcheck now provides similar coverage for a gap where you currently have no visibility of your communications.

"The most frustrating thing when I fly is that I land and I have no record of who called me when I was on that flight, and it's quite inefficient for me to not know someone was trying to get hold of me unless they tell me that later. This is where our CALLcheck technology can come in”, said Manuel,  “not only do you get a notification of who called you when you get back on the network, but the caller immediately knows that you know they called. It's like a ‘secondary answering system’ where the call recipient will know who called, even when their phone was off the network even if the caller doesn’t leave a voicemail.” 

According to a recent study by Routehappy, a service that ranks flight amenities, 38 percent and rising of all US Domestic flights have WiFi. This figure means if you connect to a plane's wifi and someone calls you...you will know they called in real-time and you can email them letting them know you will call them back when you land. Talk about improved communication.  Look for the CALLcheck launch on both iOS and Android this August.  It will offer a FREE trial period, so stay tuned for more information about the upcoming launch!

Benjamin Cohen – Digital Content Producer