Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Ever wonder why voicemail systems seem to universally use the 7 key to skip to the next message?   I'll give you a clue… the 7 key also includes the letters PWRS underneath it.  Yes, "S" is for "skip".  That was pointed out to me in 1985 when yours truly was a student programmer working on the Meridian Voicemail system for Nortel.  It was a quick mnemonic hack that enabled the geeky programmers (like me) to remember which keys did what on the voice mail system. Fast forward 20 years, and we're still using 7 for skip. It's still geeky and it still sucks. 

Voicemail systems are the cockroaches of telecom — primitive, stupid and they just won't go away.

Thankfully a crop of new telecom startups have appeared trying to address this. The latest I've seen is Pinger Voicemail, which, if it were available in Canada, I'd probably switch to immediately.  With Pinger Voicemail users can:

• Record unique, personalized greetings for each of their friends, family members or co-workers.
• Receive visual voicemail showing envelope information about the sender, message duration, date and time for each voicemail.
• Manage their voicemail accounts and access and reply to their messages from the web.
• Reply to and forward messages directly from their voicemail without making separate calls.
• Store voicemail messages forever.

The best part, though, is that you don't have to change your phone number to get it.  Simply dial 408-916-5008 to switch your voice mail from your carrier provided voice mail to Pinger.  It's free, and if you don't agree that it doesn't suck, they'll help you switch back to your old voicemail system when you're done trying it.

Pinger Voicemail was announced yesterday and is available to customers on AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Alltel.

Hot on the heels of our Super Tuesday aftermath SquawkBox session with Jesse Hirsh yesterday comes CNET's Declan McCullagh with Obama loses Silicon Valley to Clinton: Is anyone suprised?. The point that McCullagh makes is that online popularity doesn't necessarily translate to the ballot box — a point Jesse made yesterday when he said:

Ron Paul, if the Internet were the electorate, would be the president.  He has such incredible, fanatical, motivated, passionate supporters out there. In the last quarter of 2007  he raised more money than any other Republican candidate. He set records with more than $6 million in a day,  all of this spontaneous and autonomous and outside of the control of his campaign.  These are crazy red-neck Americans who are totally dissatisfied with the political process as a whole and he's their Ross Perot 2008.  It's incredible the sophistication of their efforts, the tenacity, the pervasiveness. If only he wasn't such an idiot!  If he was a better candidate to make more with the millions he has he wouldn't be a write-off. 

Ouch! 

Go listen to the rest of our conversation with Jesse.  His observations on how the Clinton and Obama online campaigns differ are pretty interesting.