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Charge, a phone company with features for nerds

charge.co

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Re: Charge, a phone company with features for nerds

#91

Post by MicroBerto »

joosters wrote: post #61
DiabloD3 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is how you run a company, everyone please take note. User feedback is actually seriously considered and responded to in an acceptable manner.

It's great to see someone from a company pop up in a discussion to help out a user, but this is absolutely not the way to run a company. It leads to the Google approach to support, where you can only get a non-automated reply only if you raise enough stink by on social media, or happen to know someone who works there. Now, each individual case where an employee unexpectedly helps out is great, but this is NOT 'how yo…

When you have a page advertising "features for nerds", you damn well better be active in the Hacker News conversation about it....

Re: Charge, a phone company with features for nerds

#92

Post by nickpsecurity »

rsync wrote: post #34
joshbaptiste wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To get rid of VM notifications, I recorded 2 minute+ of silence as my VM greeting, zero VMs after that.

Ok, that's sort of workable ... EDIT: ok, actually not so much - if you are out of coverage area and your phone rings zero times and goes right to voicemail (that's how it works with carriers in the US) then the caller calls you and goes right to silence, and presumably they retry 1-2-3x and get frustrated ... not even sure this is the right number, etc. Whereas if the phone just rang and rang and rang, at least it w…

Maybe record a message from a text-to-speech program that says "Voicemail service is currently unavailable for a week of planned maintenance. Please try another time." Then, the person listening might say, "Down? And wait a week? Nevermind..."

Re: Charge, a phone company with features for nerds

#93

Post by nickpsecurity »

stanleydrew wrote: post #45
nathan_f77 wrote: post #31

Maybe I'm being too sensitive, but if a company calls me a nerd or a geek, then it sounds like an insult. So it makes me feel slightly bad, and is not a great first impression. I think advertisers should stop doing that. Also, why would a voice/messaging company write most of their software in Go, instead of Erlang (or Elixir)? That would make more sense to me. Also, those are not even features! Congratulations on yo…

Didn't mean to offend. We consider ourselves nerds, and mean it affectionately. And I will accept your sarcastic congratulations on "basic" SSL best practices with pride. I think you'll find that HPKP implementations are currently still very rare, and I do not consider it "basic".

It doesn't bother me but will bother some as we see. Maybe techie or something that's fairly neutral? Geek doesn't have nerd's negative connotations as much and is becoming mainstream. Probably something to use other than nerds in the label to show you're technical people helping technical people without offending anyone who hate that one label.

Re: Charge, a phone company with features for nerds

#94

Post by advertising »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #26

Free (or, no premium) international roaming and wi-fi calling on T-Mobile are now essential features for me. One thing I've always wished for was for my phone to have a routable IP address and not be behind NAT. A&A offers this in the UK: http://aaisp.net/telecoms-mobile-data.html

I've enjoyed that for awhile now as well with T-Mobile. Except being in Japan more frequently as of late, the 2g speeds for free are great for essentials (messaging, maps, email) but damn I'd love a better package for LTE speeds that isn't like $50 for 200mb or whatever it is.

Maybe I just need to do more research.

Re: Charge, a phone company with features for nerds

#95

Post by stanleydrew »

rsync wrote: post #78
stanleydrew wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charge CEO here. We can definitely disable voicemail for you. I actually have it disabled myself. Just send us an email to get it removed. We should probably just add a checkbox for it in the management UI though now that I think about it.

"Charge CEO here. We can definitely disable voicemail for you." Yes, but what happens when you disable voicemail ? ATT wireless can disable vm for me, it just results in weird behavior that confuses people... If I disable voicemail on Charge, and am out of coverage area (or have phone turned off) what does the caller experience ?

Just tried this. After a few rings you get a default message where some guy says "The person you have called is unavailable right now, please try again later."

We could actually set up some fancy forwarding to make this message configurable, similar to how Google Voice's voicemail works.

Re: Charge, a phone company with features for nerds

#96

Post by xdissent »

joshbaptiste wrote: post #32
rsync wrote: post #11

Can I have no voicemail ? That's a feature I really want and it's not easy to do. If you configure a mobile phone line without voicemail, it will not just ring and ring and ring (as I hoped it would) - instead, the caller gets a message that "the number you have dialed is not accepting calls at this time" ... or some other message (depending on the carrier) that makes it sound like you don't pay your phonebill or som…

To get rid of VM notifications, I recorded 2 minute+ of silence as my VM greeting, zero VMs after that.

My outgoing message is a close proximity iPhone recording of my 93 dodge dakota's door buzzer. Seems to also solve the VM problem, although the diligent VMers express confusion often. But those aren't VMs I'm interested in receiving, so it kinda works out.

Re: Charge, a phone company with features for nerds

#97

Post by post_break »

Nerds use data, and this pricing structure basically punishes them for it. I have unlimited data and 7gb tethering with T-Mobile and unless they do something stupid or close their doors I will just keep throwing money at them. I managed to snag it at $50 a month too.

Re: Charge, a phone company with features for nerds

#98

Post by stanleydrew »

joosters wrote: post #61
DiabloD3 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is how you run a company, everyone please take note. User feedback is actually seriously considered and responded to in an acceptable manner.

It's great to see someone from a company pop up in a discussion to help out a user, but this is absolutely not the way to run a company. It leads to the Google approach to support, where you can only get a non-automated reply only if you raise enough stink by on social media, or happen to know someone who works there. Now, each individual case where an employee unexpectedly helps out is great, but this is NOT 'how yo…

Phone support is a hard thing to do well. And we have a pretty high bar for support. So I know this sounds like a dodge, but we really are waiting until we can confidently roll out strong phone support to push it.

For now, whenever a customer has a problem that can't be solved via email, one of the founders will call.

Obviously that doesn't scale, so we need to figure out phone support, but we're aiming for what I call "Zappos-level" quality and that's easier said than done.

Re: Charge, a phone company with features for nerds

#99

Post by forgotmysn »

blhack wrote: post #54
jdc0589 wrote: post #3

For regular phone use, this seems like a worse version of Google Fi; granted, it supports more devices. Data is $3 more expensive per GB, and Sprint is your only option, vs Sprint or TMobile with Fi. Someone fill me in if I'm missing something.

Google fi turns me off because it seems to somehow be related to google voice. I turned on a google voice number like 7 years ago, and used it essentially as a spamcatch. I still want google voice for something things (and would happily pay a few bucks a month for it if I needed to). But I want google voice nowhere near my actual cell phone. I could decline to attach my cellphone to my GV number, but that means getti…

its more closely related to gchat/hangouts than gvoice

Re: Charge, a phone company with features for nerds

#100

Post by icelancer »

post_break wrote: post #97

Nerds use data, and this pricing structure basically punishes them for it. I have unlimited data and 7gb tethering with T-Mobile and unless they do something stupid or close their doors I will just keep throwing money at them. I managed to snag it at $50 a month too.

Is that plan available still? I am on their $30/month plan for 5GB but would switch to your plan in a second. Got links?
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