Heading back to Australia and SKYPE

I have a quick personal update today. I’m heading back to Brisbane Australia Wednesday so I’ll be offline for a day or two. Edward Chalmers my friend in Brisbane who has been manning the phones and checking the post office box for the Australian queries will be watching the email while I’m travelling.

It’s unfortunate Australia and Canada are so far apart. I’d like to live in both countries and if it was simply a matter of flying between say New York and Toronto it would be much easier. But it’s a 20 hour flight to get from one end of the world to the other. Anyone that has ever visited Australia from pretty much anywhere in the northern hemisphere I’m sure can concur with my situation. It’s not a fun trip and you don’t want to be doing it more than a few times a year.

I’ll be making the most of my flying time by reading some of the books I have piling up. I’ll also spend a bit of time working on a resource for this blog. I’ve been getting some questions regarding running and/or buying an online business so I thought it would be useful to put together a step-by-step case study of what I did to get my business off the ground. I’ll be looking at all the tiny details with the hope that you can learn and emulate what I did right and avoid my mistakes.

I find tips and story like advice from other online businesses and entrepreneurs to be very helpful. Often what other people write about business spark the best ideas for your own business so I thought I might give some of the kudos back. I’m sure many of you out there plan, dream or currently operate an online business and may find some guidelines helpful from someone that is currently walking the Entrepreneur’s Journey.

Lastly tonight I’m going to send out a quick recommendation for a piece of software you may or may not have heard of. It’s called SKYPE and I think it is one of the most exciting services currently unfolding via the Internet. It’s a voice telephony over Internet software that is completely free for software to software and also has a very affordable (about 3c AUD/CAD per minute) for Internet to landline calls. I’ve been using it in Toronto to keep in touch with family and friends in Australia and I’ve even used the paid service to contact clients in Australia. For example I made a call to a client’s mobile phone (cell phone) in Sydney from my laptop which was using wireless Internet access from my home in Toronto. It cost me about 10c to sort out the query. I’ve talked for about an hour using the service and it’s cost me about $2 so far. I’ve talked for countless hours using the free service. It’s still a bit buggy at times when talking Australia to Canada but considering the distance more often than not it’s pretty damn good.

I expect this sort of service to eventually replace standard landlines and in the not too distance future we will be having video calls over Internet networks at prices so cheap it will be ridiculous. The best benefit – this technology can be rolled out in third world countries using satellite and wireless Internet access points. It’s an exciting time to be working on the Internet!

Yaro Starak