Friday, February 25, 2005 6:46 PM
I discovered a cool feature on A9.com the other day. For those people that haven't seen A9 yet, it's Amazon's search engine. Many of the results come from Google, but it has a decent interface and ties results together nicely. You can have image and web search results (and other types) visible at the same time and show/hide them easily. Recently they entered the Yellow Pages arena (business phone listings for those outside of the USA). They added two interesting twists though. You can actually view pictures of listings in several major cities, and upload pictures for areas that haven't been covered yet. For certain cities you can basically walk down the sidewalk! It's a cool feature since it was done from a drive-by. Cars, pedestrians, bikes are all visible in the scenes.
The other feature they added was a Call This Business feature. This lets you look up a listing, then have A9 connect you either through VoIP or phone callback. What a cool feature! I haven't tried the VoIP option, but if you give it your home (or any other) phone number it will call you, then call the business. This is great for long distance, but it has an extra benefit for me. You see we recently canceled our home phone to use our cell phones exclusively. With 1000 minutes of calls I thought it'd work out OK. It's been pretty good so far. Drop-out in the basement is annoying, but having your primary number on you all the time is nice. Our plan included unlimited incoming minutes. I hadn't seen that feature before but I thought it would be a good deal. Using the A9 feature, I can make any business calls for free by converting them to incoming. This is nice for those times I wince when I need to call a local business number that would have been free on the land line.
I'm still evaluating whether or not the lack of home phone is working. Another trick is SkypeOut. This lets me make calls via Skype using VoIP to any phone for about 2.5c/minute. Since it isn't free I don't use it if I have cell phone minutes, but it's certainly cheaper than the 35c/minute that US Cellular charges after using up the plan minutes.