Monthly Main Meeting Highlights
November Main Meeting 2011
Our final meeting for this year was a big one. MyNetFone returned to talk about VoIP and the NBN and our friends from Gap Marketing presented the Acer ultra thin Laptop and the Kingston range of secure USB keys.
The change to our constitution was passed.
After the break Rene Sugo,
one of the founders of MyNetFone, returned with an update on telephone voice calls over the internet or VoIP. Rene also spoke glowingly about the effects the National Broadband Network is having on telephone communications.
MyNetFone has grown over the two years since Rene last visited us. They now have over 90,000 customers and are expanding into DSL.
One of the key changes is number portability. Rene informed us that the National Regulator has, just recently, not only allowed people to keep their phone number but now they may take it out of area. This means a phone number can be taken anywhere in the world. Your number can also be moved between phone providers. That means a phone number and be ported to MyNetFone and, if need be, transferred to a new provider when leaving MyNetFone.
Rene spoke about what a difference VoIP makes to Companies. By using
MyNetFone a company can expand it’s contact numbers easily using virtual
PBX. Traditionally, a company needed a physical box - a PBX to connect
all incoming calls to any internal extension. The PBX may even have
needed an operator. The PBX was also limited to the building it was
housed in. Other locations in the company required new phone numbers
Today with Virtual PBX a company can have unlimited lines, multiple
locations, and the whole setup is managed by an online portal. Together
with this comes fast setup. Rene spoke about this scalability of funtions
when at the start of the Queensland floods, the government asked him
to supply a 1000 phone lines for use by people stranded in the flood,
as their only possible connection was a mobile phone. MyNetFone managed
to have the system up in eight hours.
In the residential market MyNetFone have just doubled the included calls in all their packages,
and soon to be announced is an ultimate plan which includes 75 hours to 70 countries and 8 ¼ hours to mobile phone per month, for $39.95 a month,
along with new support for Smartphones and naked ADSL2 service.
Rene finished his talk with a run down on the NBN (National Broadband
Network).
Rene spoke about the timetable for the roll out with the old POTS (plain old telephone service with its copper wire) being completely replaced by about March 2013. As a technology POTS is outdated and cannot carry the amount of data a modern internet based communication society demands. Rene emphasised that this was not just about geeks downloading large video files or doctors been able to view x-rays on line. The benefits will be far wider ranging as the old system is completely replaced.
Next up Serge Poleyancik and Renato Catalan demonstrated a great range of technology from Acer and Kingston.
They started with the new ultra thin Acer Aspire S3.
This machine is looking to the Mac air market. It comes in a range of models from an i3 to and i7 chip and a range of hard drives from a 320 standard drive to a 240 solid state drive.
One of the cool features was ‘instant on’ allowing the Acer to spring back into life in 2 seconds. In deep sleep or hibernation, the Acer will preserve battery life for up to 50 days.
The Acer also has Instant Connect, remembering your favourite places and delivering a connection in 2.5 seconds. It is ultra thin at 13 mm or 1/2 an inch thin, and has a 13 inch screen.
Here are the details from Acer
USB sticks are these days as common as floppy disks were only a few years ago. The USB stick, however, has a much greater capacity but is still as vulnerable to loss as the floppy was. We have all heard the news stories of corporate and government employees leaving USB sticks on public transport with sensitive data on the stick. Kingston has a range of secure USB drives to overcome this.
First up Serge showed us the Datatraveller Locker. This little device
comes with two partitions and DT Security software for Windows to secure
the data. If you forget the password after 10 attempts the drive reformats
and all data is lost as the drive becomes unusable,.
The drive comes in a 4 to 32 GB sizes. The 16 GB is around $50
Next was the urDrive software.
A standard practice we should all adopt is to scan a USB stick for
viruses before we let the data on the stick loose on our machine. These
drives turn that idea on its head.
The Kingston urDrive has a set of preloaded software, themain attraction
being the Norton antivirus software.
Now it’s the USB drive that can be used to scan for viruses, and play
big brother, making sure that the strange computer is safe.
This range of drives also comes with Maxton 3 Web browser. All the temp
files and downloads are stored on the USB drive, leaving no signature
on the machine used to access the Web.
This set of USB drives with urDrive software has truly been made for
the traveller or any person who has the need to use a public computer
at an internet café or public library.
Details
of the urDrive software from Kingston
Last up was the Kingston WI drive.
This is a 16 or 32 GB flash drive with a built in Wi-Fi connection.
It has four hours of battery life and is an idea way to share your music
and video with any wi-fi capable devise. You can download a free app
from the app store so you can use the WI Drive on the iPad iPhone or
iPod.
Details of
the WI-Drive from Kingston
The Raffle
Thanks to the generosity of MyNetFone and Rene and Serge, the club
had a range of great prizes tonight.
Rene donated the Gigaset IP phone system and a one year connection to
the MyNetFone Mega Saver plan valued at $350
and Serge and Renato donated the Cool Master laptop cooler,
along with several Kingston Secure USB drives, and a collection of Kingston shirts and Western Digital Toy Figures.
The winners
Roger Foulds
John Burden
Clare Wagemans
and Russel Field was one of the first to take home a Kingston shirt and the Western Digital toy figure.
The door prize went to
Jack Brann.
