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To Our Readers
AN e-mail came in this week from a man in San Diego who'd received a telephone call from his son in Japan. The interesting thing was the son didn't use a phone to call his dad. He used a computer at an Internet café and a web site called dialpad.com. PCs begin to pay off
Another interesting thing was that the call was free. Living out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, separated from the rest of the nation and world by distance and telephone bills, I found this item very interesting.
Telephone-to-telephone communication has been around since Alexander Graham Bell and computer-to-computer communication over phone lines predates the Internet by decades, but free computer-to-telephone voice communication from any multimedia PC with Internet access to any telephone in the U.S. over the World Wide Web -- well, that's a new wrinkle.
Until recently, our home computers were solely an expense. Sure, some folks bought tax preparation software and saved a few bucks and we've all saved a little on postage by sending e-mail. By and large, though, the home PC has been a sort of glorified TV set, video game and typewriter, not a productive member of the family,
Today, anybody who watches television is aware of the money-saving advantages of the computer to trade stocks online. Competing online investment companies, such as E*Trade and Ameritrade, offer bonuses, rebates and free trades as incentives to get computer users to sign up. After that, they charge as little as $5 a transaction. Compare that to the $30-and-up fees and commissions of traditional brokerages.
Not everybody invests in the stock market but virtually everybody uses the phone and most of us make long-distance calls. Free long-distance calls will bring families and friends closer -- just as e-mail did -- while saving enough money to make those Internet connections pay for themselves.
OK, you can't hear a pin drop on dialpad.com, but my sister in Ellsworth, Maine, says, for the price, my voice sounds pretty good.
John Flanagan is editor and publisher of the Star-Bulletin.
To reach him call 525-8612, fax to 523-8509, send
e-mail to publisher@starbulletin.com or write to
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, Hawaii 96802.