The easiest way to get a free phone line for your business is to sign up for Google Voice.
If you have an iPhone or Android device, you can make and receive phone calls through your Google Voice number – or do it all over you computer. I have been using Google Voice over WiFi while traveling internationally, which allows me to make and receive calls to/from the U.S. for free.
Product Development
I have begun developing Feltpad’s first product that will be marketed as a web app / service. The product will involve the use of mobile devices and give people the opportunity to interact in new, fun ways. The target release for v1.0 is March 2012 and we will bring more updates to this blog as time moves forward.
Arduino
Inspired by Pockit and J.S. Joust to make a game without screens, I started work on an Arduino-based game that uses sound and light. The current version of the game has 2 buttons and tests your reaction time to seeing an LED light up or hearing a tone from the speaker. Future ideas include having a plastic case, 4 buttons, and several additional LEDs.
Cool Stuff of the Week
“I’m Watch” looks cool but pretty much the exact same interface as iPod Nano.
Twine brings you a step closer to The Internet of Things
I have discovered that Amazon Web Services (aka Amazon Cloud Computing / EC2) offers a substantial tier of service for free.
Just sign up for an Amazon Web Services account and you can get the following tier of services for free, every month:
- 1 EC2 Linux Micro Instance (web server)
- 1 Elastic Load Balancer
- 15 GB data processing
- 10 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage
- 5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage
- Full List and Details Here
Be aware that you will have to startup the server and setup everything (Linux Users, PHP, MySQL…) on your own. On top of that, it can be a bit of a task to figure out the ins and outs of Amazon’s certificates & keys – but it is worth it.
Feltpad is using this free service tier get started with Project Aquaman, our first web-based service. This free tier is enough to get the service up and running, allowing us to turn a profit before paying for any servers.
Thank you Jeff Bezos.