ComTech News

My company Cerion Optimization Services just issued press release on the impact of under optimized wireless networks to carriers, customers and investors that states that wireless network optimization could increase revenue for carriers like Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, Alltel, etc. by over 3 Billion Dollars annually.  

The release mentions a downloadable report on Wireless Network Optimization on the Cerion Website.  I read the report and found it to be a mix of high level engineering concepts along with enough information for investors that would like to better understand the impact of this issue financially.

And if 3 Billion sounds like a huge chunk of change to be loosing, according to the report Globally the loss is about 36 Billion.  I would this is enough money to even make people like Bill Gates and Michael Dell squirm.  The soulution is to optimize the networks at the core and we have been quite successful in revovering lost revenue in fact on the "About Us" page of our website we state that, "our business model has been so successful that we guarantee our initial service offering, or we refund the fee".

If you want to know more about wireless network optimization  and request a copy of the report,

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, Alltel, network optimiztion, wireless network optimization, telecommunications, telecom, wireless networks, technology investing, communications, cellular, cell phone service, global wireless networks

Note: This Was a Sponsored Post 

Popularity: 5% [?]

I just noticed at the Sci-Fi Blog they had a review for the new Bose earbuds for your ipod.  If you know Bose, you know they like to brand everything differently and try and achieve a higher quality image.  So they call their earbuds "in ear headphones".

The interesting part of the blog post is that Bose is actually upgrading the earbuds.  The new earbuds will have multiple ear pads with different sizes.

If you purchased the original Bose earbuds and find they are ill-fitting at times, this should be your answer.  Just order your free Bose Earpads here.  They'll send you a replacement set of small, medium, and large earpads.  The web site also lists a stabelizer unit which they expect to be available in June 2007.  What the heck does that mean? You got me.

I do like my Bose earbuds and I find that are infinitely more comfortable than Apple's earbuds.  I can't believe anyone can stand those Apple earbuds for more than a few minutes.

What do you think?

- Ben Fitts 

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After a wonderful year at Sage Telecom followed by a few months of misery during a buy out I recently made a career switch and am now working as the Director of Marketing Services for Cerion Network Optimization Services.

Cerion is a great company but what really made me want to work for them is the people.  In particular one of the founders and Chairman of the Board Neil Franklin who was a former client who became a solid friend was a real draw.  Neil is one of the most brilliant business people I have ever met and allows my creative energy to flow freely and is willing to try unconventional tactics because he understands how big companies are getting beaten every day in the online world.

One of my first tasks at Cerion is to get our leaders blogging each with their own blog.  I have started with Neil because he always has something to say and it is usually not only accurate and interesting but entertaining as well.  Take a look at Neils Blog,

The Mind of a British Entrepreneur in America 

Make sure to subscribe to his feed as well.  I know some of the subjects he has planned and it should be both an education and a riot at times.  It is so great to be with a company that not only encourages unconventional marketing but actively participates in it.  Next up are blogs for one of our PhD's and our CEO.  

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, neil franklin, entrepreneur, business, sage telecom, web marketing, blog marketing

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List building is always stated to be one of if not the most important facets of online marketing.  With out list building and lead capture for all intents more web based businesses fail to build the most important thing any business can ever build.  That is of course a customer base!

Think about it specifically if you sell information products, make most of your revenue with contextual ads or sell affiliate products you really don't have a true customer base.  Some one else is paying you to build their base for them.

Why?  Many times because they don't know how to do it themselves but mostly because they are smart and know they are building a long term asset with your efforts.  Nothing wrong with that and there is a lot of money to be made doing this.  However, if you also build a list at the same time you will find that you get to build your own base at the same time.

Take my site about Chris Daughtry for example.  The site is low tech, no fancy graphics but it ranks well in google and people love the personal voice I put into it.  Yet if I lost my ranks on the site tomorrow I still have my "base" which are 25,000 plus "members" of the site on my email list.  If I want traffic to the site, one email gets thousands of visits over several days.

You simply must build a list, do anything and everything to get real valid contact info.  Give a free report, a free product, promote the convienience, what ever it takes.  Build your base and control your destiny.  

Use automtion too!  Take a look at the upper right corner of this blog.  See the opt in form, if you join our list on this blog every time I post you get an email, just a simple notification to tell you I made a new post.  Now I don't do anthing other then post!  The blogs feed sends a ping to Aweber which I use for my list building and he system send the email for me.  

As simple and affordable as this is to do it is the number one thing I see major corporate clients not doing.  I watch them spend 20-60K on design work, thousands on advertising and then not add lead capture and incentives to visitors to opt in.  It makes no sense and can cost millions of dollars in lost revenue over time.  If you only do one thing right online, make it list building it is that important.  I would go this far, if you site/sites are not capturing leands right now, STOP do nothing more at all until you fix that,

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: list building, aweber, lead capture, web traffic, seo, sem, internet marketing

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Last night we beta launched MarketingICE.com which is an Internet Marketing Training system that I put together with Ben Fitts and Mark Barrera.  We had a good launch with a ton of free opt in members and quite a few that took advantage of our discounted beta rate.  So far the platform has been stable with very few bugs popping up.  What I learned though is priceless.

I now have a new respect for people that build businesses.  I have been involved with the formation of a few businesses, helped take one public, helped to sell another  I have technicly owned my own company for a long time yet I have never "created a business" this way before.  From designing the product, building the product and creating the message around it.  Down to things like the agreements with partners, working like crazy to make an idea real and more.

It takes a special person to really build a business and we still have huge mountains to climb, I still work a job and that job actually has me building several other companies at the same time.  It can certainly put stress on you, yet I really love what I am doing.  I would have to say I am enjoying myself more then ever before.  If you have ever thought about really creating a business from the ground up, this is my advice.

1.  Surround yourself with great people.  With out Ben and Mark I could not have created MarketingICE they are full partners and also good friends that makes me a lucky man.  Find great people and take good care of them it is the only way you can succeed.

2.  Don't expect it to work the first time out and don't think it is going to be easy.  That is going to make the failures a much bigger deal then they are.  Stuff will break, "great ideas" will fail, don't worry drive on and adjust.

3.  Don't wait!  Do it now, you are not getting any younger.  Life and the market reward those that risk and work hard.  If you are going to fail get it done right away so you have enough time left to try again. 

I think I have learned more in the past 70 days then in the past 7 years!  I plan on taking this weekend off and spoiling my wife good!  She has earned it,

~  Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: business development, seo, sem, internet marketing, marketing videos, seo training, sem

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Well this is certianly going to be my only post today because tonight at 8:30 Central time we launch our beta version of Marketing ICE (Interactive Creative Education).  We know there will be bugs, which is why we are going to be offering all of those that attend a highly discounted rate.  In fact Ben Fitts and I talked last night and honestly we may be offering way more then we even planned to.

Marketing ICE is the most in depth training course ever created because it is an ongoing course that is developed almost daily.  Unlike other training courses that are static, created one time based on what the instructors think you should learn.  Marketing ICE builds training around fundamentals that everyone needs to learn and then listens to our members to build new lessons tailored to their needs.

You also have direct access to our instructors via a private members only form.  I am not big on hype the truth is simple, you will not want you competitors to know what we are teaching.  

We only are letting 100 people on our call and 160+ have already registered.  In our experience 40-60% show up for webinars so that means we are leaving the registration page up for the rest of the day.  It also means if you do sign up you need to get on the line as early as possible to ensure you get in.

If you have a friend who will be attending you may want to get on instant message with them in advance and if one gets through and the other does not the one who did could three way the other in.  We do expect to fill all the lines so again get on as early as possible if you want to be in our Beta group.  You can register for our webinar here.

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: seo, seo training, internet marketing, marketing training, marketing ice, video training, online marketing, sem, search engine optimization

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I just found what I feel is the best free conference call service on the market today.  The service is called FreeConferencing Powered by Live Office.  The service provides on demand calls for up to 250 participants.

The way the service works is simple…

• You just sign up and are assigned a bridge number and a pin
• You log in and get your participant pin
• Provide the participant pin and bridge to your group
• Tell them what time the call will begin and that’s it

You can also provide a pin for guest speakers that will let them speak when you have others muted.  There is a simple click to change button that will generate a new participant pin and guest pin anytime you want. 

There is no real downside other then your callers have to call what will be a long distance number for most callers.  There are premium upgrades available if you want to provide a toll free call.

Now if all of this was not enough there is even more, in fact more that is free.  You also get an online call manager where you can take questions from callers or block, mute or expel individual callers.  You can see how many callers you have and where they have called in from.

Cool huh?  Well I am not done it gets even better!  All you calls are also recorded free of charge and you can download them in MP3 format.  That will let you use calls for podcasting or streaming from a website or many other uses.

Until I found this service I was using FreeConference.com and it is a great service, however FreeConferencing by Live Office is a lot more powerful and flexible.  So I have a new conferencing service, if you have any need for conference calls you should check them out right away,

 ~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: conference calling, web conference, conferencing, liveoffice, freeconferencing, free conference

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If you are serious about building a blog you need to be bringing your readers back again and again.  While many readers may subscribe to your feed a huge number of Internet users are still not using RSS.  The way to bring these visitors back is with email.  We do that here at ComTech News and I do it with my other blogs with a paid service but I just found a free email marketing service that is specificly made for use by bloggers.

The service is called Zookoda email marketing and it is beyond cool.  

Zookoda enables you to:

• Manage email newsletter subscribers.
• Enhance your blog with custom newsletter subscription forms.
• Design eye-catching newletters to match your blog design.
• Schedule recurring broadcasts for each day, week or month.
• View real-time open, bounce, click and unsubscribe reports.
• Access mobile users by emailing blog content in text format.

And it does all of this for free!  In fact I could not even find a paid upgrade option after looking a great deal to find one.  

The system automates email updates to your subscribers with the frequency and options you want.  Rather then doing away with RSS feeds it embraces them.  Zookoda uses your blogs RSS or Atom feed to provide your email content.  This way your visitors get updated as frequently as you choose with summaries of your latest blog posts.

I set up an account with Zookoda in a matter of minute and I am already working on adding it to one of my new blogs, there is a strong possibility it will replace my other email service at least for RSS blog based email updates.

The system is fully compliant with SPAM laws, all opt ins are via a double opt in process and it comes with all the features of typical higher end email marketing systems.  The interface is fairly intuitive and we plan to make some training videos of how to set it up for our Internet Marketing Training program over at MarketingICE.com.

Take a look at Zookoda I can tell you that it is quite impressive and best of all it is free.

~ 

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Regular readers may have noticed that we recently added a page to our blog called SEO Training.  This was to promote the pre launch of a new company we are launching soon called Marketing ICE.

Well on Tuesday March 20th we are having a special Webinar for up to 100 Beta Users.  These users will get first crack at their choice of the free members area or a massive discount on their first month to help us Beta Test the new system.  

See full details about our Beta Test Webinar,

Seats for this Webininar are VERY LIMITED so sign up today or you will have to wait until the live version of the site opens up. 

Again you can sign up for our Beta Launch Webinar at http://www.marketingice.com/members/betatest.php 

~ Jack Spirko 

Technorati Tags: seo, sem, internet marketing, marketing ice, internet marketing videos, seo training, internet marketing training

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I know, I know every expert and every internet marketing guru says start with what you know.  

If so perhaps there is a good reason to do so.  I actually did start with what I knew and that was a blessing and really helped me in the long run.  Unfortunately at the time the concept of making money online was very foreign to me.  The fact that I could get money just because I put content online made no sense.  Why would anyone give me money?  

So my first site was built only for the desire to create a site about something I enjoyed.  I had just read the book “The Celestine Prophecy” by James Redfield so I built a site called Celestine View about of course the Celestine Prophecy.  

After I built it I even taught myself SEO and at one time my site actually outranked James Redfield’s own site.  In time I added some sections about other similar authors including James Kavanaugh and Richard Bach.  To this day this site gets quite a bit of search engine traffic.  

I still don’t sell anything there in fact other then adding some adsense to it and adding some links since the site has a high Google PR the site still looks pretty much as it did when I first put it online in 2000.  

I could easily tune up this site, add some links to sell books, create a mailing list and make it at least a little profitable.   

So Why Don’t I Do It?  

Well, I actually love to teach people that is why I do courses in internet marketing.  I mean sure it makes me money but as a professional marketer I can sell anything I want.  (That is not bragging it is just stating the truth).  I do internet marketing because I love it and because honestly each time I write a course I learn more and get better too.   

So Celestine View has become for me a teaching tool and more importantly proof that I indeed practice what I preach.  When I created Celestine View I had no problem writing the content, I just wrote what I though and what I believed.  My voice therefore carried itself through, my sentiments were felt and to this day I get wonderful emails thanking me for this site.  

If I had this course you are reading right now before I started that site I can promise you over time it would have made me tens of thousands of dollars.  

Still I think leaving it as it is has huge educational value.  

The site is so clearly amateur; the design (although complimented often) is in my opinion horrible.  The red text on black alone makes ones head and eyes hurt.  Still it does prove my point.  

If you start with what you know you will lay a foundation and unlike what I was facing at the time I built this site you have my course to guide you and make sure even your early projects are done properly and will make you money.  

Now one more point, recently I was working with a young man I know online named Bobby.  He has watched me grow my many businesses online and finally asked me to help him.  Bobby did not even know how to make a website.  I told him well first learn to build a site build it about anything you like, don’t worry about making money just put together a site once you do I will show you how to monetize it.   

First though you at least need to learn how to build basic pages and there is no better way to learn then to do.  So I sent him to WebMax Studio (which is a pretty good site builder for those with no software or design experience) and said pick a subject and build a site.  

I even told Bobby his first site would probably suck, just learn from the process.  Later that night he pinged me by AOL instant message and asked.  "Do you think I could make money with a site about coffee"?  (My honest answer was well duh of course that is an awesome topic).  The problem was he did not “get it” so I did not want to compliment him on his topic I wanted to keep him on mission.   

That mission build a damn site and learn from doing it, so he could get the basic skill set and I could take him to the next level.  So I shot back, “just build the fricken site Bobby, I could make a site about diapers and make money from it”.  

My comment was meant to do two things.  

First make a point to him to just pick what he liked, stop worrying about money.  We would take care of that later.  I wanted him to get building and get learning.  

Second to be kind of a joke so it would be well received and yet drive my point home.   I picked the first ridiculous topic that came into my head; [imagine me making a site about diapers].  

Then while Bobby was working, I decided to see if my statement was true.  I checked what people were paying to buy clicks on Yahoo for the word diaper.  

ARE YOU READY FOR THIS?  

At the time people were paying over $1.50 per CLICK for the word diaper!  

If people were paying that much for diaper traffic then indeed one could make money with a diaper site.  

So please believe me when I say start with what you know.  It will serve you well and you will be able to make money on it no matter what it is that you know.  What I find so, um, what is the word, oh I know, MORONIC is people selling courses and information on how to build a business online BEFORE they have ever made any real money themselves.  Unfortunately there are a lot of people doing it! 

Don’t do this, start with what you know, form a real plan, take the steps I have given you and no matter what the subject is you can make money from it.   

More important though is what you will learn.  If you are trying to learn to market online that is enough to have to learn, you don’t need to be learning a new subject at the same time.   

Remember I have left Celestine View in its’ present form just to show you how serious I am about this.   

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: internet marketing, web content, online income, making money, copy writing, niche marketing, seo, sem

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This mistake is another silent killer, another marketing cancer that slowly kills your profit silently because you can’t measure the cost.  All the while you are taking your time away from your family, from your other pursuits and giving up your leisure time to build a business online.  

 ~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: internet marketing, marketing, time management, scheduling, marketing mistakes, sem, seo, search marketing, web site marketing

Popularity: 3% [?]

Now this one is just a killer and really a silent killer because you don’t really know how badly it affects you.  It is like a cancer deep in your marketing bones slowly eating away the marrow of your profits.   

So what things do people fail to automate?  

When I first released this series called Top Mistakes of Internet Marketers I did it as a free ecourse and promised my site visitors that I would send them a lesson a day for eight days, then that I would add four more lessons.  I kept my word and it was easy to do.  Why?  Because I wrote all the follow up one time, put the system in place and my visitors very action of requesting it caused the promise I made to be fulfilled.  

Now if my visitors had asked for this series and after two days had yet to get my first lesson, how would they have felt about me?  

A lot of marketers try to save a few dollars by doing email news letters with their email program and just send out what they want when ever the whim passes.  With automation I have people on day one, day three, day five, etc all at the same time and I do nothing daily to make sure the emails get sent.  In short no matter how busy I am my technology keeps my promises for me.  

Sure it took me two days to write the course and set up the follow up system but I did in ONE TIME and now it will continue to serve me and my visitors for many years.  In fact here I am reusing it for content on one of my blogs, think about that.

Again at only 20 dollars a month I can not recommend a better tool for this then Aweber.  If you still don’t have a follow up system I recommend you go get an Aweber system now.  

Most sites have a contact us section where a user can submit a question or concern.  When your visitors do this they want to know it worked.  Simply by creating a thank you page you can let them know this.  You should also set up an auto response that gets emailed to them telling them your average response time to questions.  

One more and very often overlooked step.  Quite often web masters take a lot of time to write very good FAQs or help sections.  Simply noting the link to that section on the thank your page and acknowledgment email will often get the user an answer and they may have already bought by the time you get to responding to them.  Never assume the visitor found your FAQ or Support Center, always point them to it even as you promise to get a human response to them.  

Now I don’t mean that you should just feed other peoples content into your blog, there is a place for doing so but generally it is way over done.  I am talking about your personal posting.  Most people go to their blog, log in, compose the post and then submit it.  

Did you know you don’t have to do this?  Most blog software (including the very popular blogger) have a feature where you can write an email, send it to a secret address you set up and poof in seconds it is added to your blog.  You can even format text and create links with your email program and they will show on your blog.  

I actually have a few Blogs; sometimes one post is a good fit for three or four of them.  So all I do is open my email program, open my address book, select the Blogs I want to post to, make my post, click send and done.  Four Blogs updated in seconds.  

Think about this!  You take the time to write two or three great news letters a month and they are about your subject matter, key word rich and may get some decent rankings if they were online and not just in an email.  

What most people do is send their newsletter in their follow up system then duplicate the content and put it online on a section of their website.  Actually most people want to do that but don’t get around to it and many times if you view their past newsletters online the most recent one is over a year old!  

Now would it not be great if you could set up a blogger blog, email your newsletter to that blog (as described above) and your blog would then send your newsletter to your email list for you?   

So just by composing one email with out even going to your blog or to your follow up system you could put your content online and sent it to your list in seconds.  If it were this easy don’t you think you might be better about sending your newsletters and getting that content online?  

Well it is easy, again we are back to Aweber but if you have Aweber you can simply set up a blogger blog just for your news letters or announcement list, tell Aweber what the rss feed of your blog is (don’t worry if you don’t know what rss is you don’t really need to right now and the video at Aweber shows you exactly what to do, it takes only seconds) and any time you make a post, Aweber will send it to your list or lists for you.  I use this on this very blog right here.  See the opt in list at the top right of this blog, if you just enter your name and email there you will get notified each time I make a post to this blog. 

I know you are probably thinking that sounds way technical and hard to do.  I promise you it is EASY.  If you can send email you can do this.  Best of all Aweber provides you with online movies that show you step by step exactly how to do it.  Are you beginning to see why I am such a huge fan of Aweber?  

The Lesson on Automation  

The reality is that most forms of automation will make your life easier long term.  However, they often take extra time to learn how to us and set them up.  That time is always paid back in greater leverage and higher profit.   

You are never wasting time in setting up automated systems even when it seems like you could be doing something more productive in the short term.  Set up and learn to use all automated process as early in the game is possible, the best time is BEFORE you really need them.  Then remember to keep looking for ways to automate your processes in any way that you can.

 ~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: email marketing, automated follow up, internet marketing,   seo, sem, marketing, email marketing

Popularity: 3% [?]

For about a month and half now I have been including posts on this blog that are sponsored by advertisers using a service called PayPerPost.  When I first started doing posts for them it was paying on average 5-7 dollars per post.  Given I could find an interesting subject, make a post and be done with it in about 10 minutes this was not big bucks but it was worth doing.  I mean I need to keep my blog active anyway right, so being paid for doing so is not a bad idea.
Back at the beginning a post that paid 10-15 dollars was big bucks and usually had a lot of requirements to qualify for.  Now recently PayPerPost released something called segmentation that breaks down Blogs by things like Google PR, Alexa Rank and some other factors.  This has let advertisers put more requirements on posters but the effect has been much more profitable blogging for people with authoritative Blogs.

Right now for instance there is a post available that will put 1000 dollars in your pocket if your Blog has a Google PR of 8.  Now there are not too many PR8 Blogs around but it sure shows the potential.  I have taken opportunities thus far as high as 45 dollars for a single post.  I have also started to see a lot of opportunities for between 15-50 dollars and quite a few in the 75-100 dollar range.

After being online for about 10 years I have to say PayPerPost is at the moment the easiest way for the average person to make at least a little money.  Rather then chase quick money schemes or get a second job just go out and blog for money with PayPerPost.  I still don’t see any full time income coming out of this in the next 6 months; however, just about anyone can start a blog, build it up and easily make a few hundred dollars a month and for those with authoritative Blogs doing a few posts a week can easily produce between 500-1000 dollars in extra income a month.

If you have not checked out PayPerPost yet you really should.  It is an excellent way to add some revenue to your online and blogging efforts.  The best part to me though is the quality of the advertisers.  There are a few that really don’t fit my blog and I just don’t blog for them, yet the ones I have selected have been top quality and provided some excellent content for ComTech News.  Plus since all bloggers are required to have a disclosure policy it keeps everything above board which is great for blogger, advertisers and readers alike.

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: payperpost, paid to blog, blogging for money, internet marketing, make money online, work from home, blogger, blogging

Popularity: 5% [?]

Well, the master of link bait (Rand Fishkin) has done it again and earned a link from me.  Rand has a poll running on SEOMoz about the most over looked aspect of search marketing.

I personally wrote in my own answer, which was "Only Providing One Positive Outcome for a Visitor to Take".  In my series on the top mistakes of Internet Marketers this was one of the mistakes I pointed out.   You can read that article here.

In surmation though I do think it is the biggest mistake marketers make.  No matter how good your conversion is there will always be the majority of your traffic that will not convert by the ideal method, (buy or become a lead, what have you), effective marketers will make sure they have alternate methods to harverst and make use of this less qualified traffic.

So go on over and vote and give your two cents.  While I wrote in my own answer, Rand sure picked some common and big mistakes that even pros make.  

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: rand fishkin, seomoz, linkbait, seo, sem, search marketing, internet marketing

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More and more people are working from home at least part of the time or working while traveling.  A lot of users turn to a laptop for such demands but for many people that may not be an option.  Perhaps your company is not willing to provide a laptop computer or perhaps you need more processing power then most portable PCs offer.  If so you will need a service that gives you access to your desktop computer, its files and its processing power.

I just learned about a service called RemotePC that offers Remote Access to your PC from anywhere.  Like a lot of people I had heard about a service that works much the same way and considered getting it.  While I have a laptop for day to day use I am one of those people that has a desktop for some more intense applications, like video editing and other processor hungry stuff.  

The problem with GoToMyPC is that it is pretty expensive at 20 dollars a month and frankly I just did not need it that bad.  RemotePC however is only 4.95 a month!  Enough to make a tightwad like me willing to open his wallet.  The really cool part though is beyound just doing the typical remote access the 4.95 account even lets you do desktop sharing with up to 10 users for interactive meetings.  

Effectively this means for 4.95 users get both the features of a service like GoToMyPC.com and GoToMeeting.com for about 1/4th the cost of one of them.  Pretty hard to beat that!

So if you need remote access to your PC or have a need to do Desktop sharing take a look at RemotPC,

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: remote pc access, gotomypc, remotepc, desktop sharing, remote internet access, telecommute, flexible work environments, home office

Note:  This was a sponsored post.

Popularity: 4% [?]