About 30 folks attended our first Tech Talk which was held at the New Wilmington Borough building on Feb 23rd at 7pm.  This presentation kicked off the 2010 season of the New Wilmington Area Chamber of Commerce’s Higher Ground series, which is their educational seminar series. The slides from this presentation are available as a PDF download HERE.

Overview:

Topics discussed included 2 free ip-based ip-phone applications that can save you a lot of money: Skype and Google Voice.  While Skype is freely available and well established, gVoice is still in beta, and is available by invitation only.  But you can request an invitation and you should get one within a few days.  Once you DO get one you also will have 5 more invites which you can give out to others.  gVoice’s main claim to money-saving fame is that you can make as many wireless phone calls (within the US anyway) as you want and only use free minutes from your Verizon phone plan – all thanks to their wireless  “friends and family” plan.

We also covered free alternatives to buying copies of Microsoft Office for everyone in your office: Google Docs and the open source Open Office 3 office suite.  And as a bouns I reviewed my all-time favorite online app: Airset.

In addition, the concept of having your children buy the software you use on your PC’s might just be the ticket.  Many online stores have huge student discounts waiting to be had – all you need to do is have a student in your household, get some proof from the school to send to the eTailer, and you are all set.

Links to sites mentioned are here:
www.google.com/voice
www.skype.com
www.google.com/docs
www.openoffice.org
www.academicsuperstore.com
www.journeyed.com
www.gradware.com
www.airset.com