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Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

phonejanitor.com

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Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#51

Post by michaelmcmillan »

pmtarantino wrote: post #47
aresant wrote: post #34

I think it's a stroke of genius to launch something so aesthetically terrible on HN / PH (aka the early adopter crowd). For a group of people that see a dozen bootstrap / sandwhich vid style launches a week this stands out, and got me to read 3 paragraphs of ad-copy. Other notable examples of this launch strategy, intentional or not, in recent memory were Pud launching DistroKid (1) and the team behind Magic (2) I th…

I think Tarsnap is another example of this.

I guess it's sufficient to create a service people want. Personally I don't really care if it's fancy SPA or a simple website with actual form elements. I just want software to work.

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#53

Post by TodPunk »

kdamken wrote: post #26

This seems like a cool service, but you may want to think about a site redesign. The bare bones look may appeal to the Hacker News crowd, but most people may hesitate to port their number over to a company with a site that looks so dated, which in turn makes you look less legitimate/professional.

I agree. We were doing a soft launch to convert some beta customers to actual customers and get feedback, and the site was on the agenda for this upcoming week before announcing it. Then cue one of those customers posting to HN and now we're kind of exploding a bit more.

Thanks for the added data point, you are heard loud and clear and we will do our best (we're not designers, we can't be good at everything)

Cheers!

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#54

Post by TodPunk »

300bps wrote: post #46

Anyone who is considering porting their current mobile phone number to your service should be aware that most mobile carriers will cancel their account if you port your number away from them. If you have a contract, you will then be billed the early termination fee.

This is mentioned in the faq about porting numbers, but we also address it when someone requests a port so they don't have a bad experience (this is why it's currently a support request rather than a UI capability, until we've got that workflow working for the customer's overall experience). We haven't had any mobile lines cancelled yet, but we've only worked with tmobile, sprint, and AT&T so far. It's usually best if you work with your carrier at the same time and we can provide some advice on that for those that request a port.

This might be more prominently featured as we go forward.

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#55

Post by nostromo »

Can it block unknown callers?

The FCC doesn't allow phone companies to do that directly. It drives me nuts -- it's always spam callers.

http://www.t-mobile.com/company/privacyresources.aspx?tp=Abt...

> the FCC has mandated that carriers allow callers the ability to block their Caller ID information and thus place “anonymous” calls. T-Mobile is obligated to honor the privacy of the caller in these circumstances. Of course, you may choose not to accept such calls. But we cannot block the call or override the privacy choice of the caller.

Thanks, FCC. Maybe this is a fix? If so, sign me up!

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#56

Post by hellbanner »

Looks cool.

I've found that asynchronous voice chat programs (WeChat got huge in China, then the West got WhatsApp, Nextel etc) make for much easier voice communication. There's zero overhead of waiting for a ring & voicemail message and a beep -- just press a button & speak.

I'd love to see this integrate with phone lines but I doubt the feasibility.

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#57

Post by austenallred »

ArekDymalski wrote: post #42
tghw wrote: post #39

Why this over Twilio? As far as I can tell, this does what Twilio does, but they're much bigger and more established. With my setup, inbound business calls get routed to the right person during the day, an automated message if we can't pick up at the moment, and a different message outside of business hours. Outbound calls from our personal numbers get forwarded through the business number our numbers aren't exposed.…

>It all takes less than 70 lines of Python/Flask. It's for people who can't write those 70 lines/don't know about Twilio/associate Python with an animal.

Or for those who know how to write python but don't have time to write a program for every problem they've ever encountered.

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#58

Post by TodPunk »

miles wrote: post #48
TodPunk wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not based on Twilio, they're quite expensive, it's built on Freeswitch and normal fully open SIP/RTP protocols and what we're doing isn't exactly complex yet. I don't have a whole lot of care about going open source or not but as far as our interface you can view source at https://phonejanitor.com/app/ and you might be pleased for the moment.

> It is not based on Twilio, they're quite expensive, it's built on Freeswitch ... I don't have a whole lot of care about open source Please pardon me for saying so, but it seems like you do care about open source, or at least leveraging it to save your business money.

Oh, sorry, I poorly worded that then (and have edited it to reflect as such to prevent further confusion, but your quote stands as good reference).

You are correct that I do care about open source. I don't have much of a care about going open source for our stuff. We make our money on service, not software, but I can see the appeal. Essentially I'm just "meh" about doing it myself here.

It should be noted I love the freeswitch folks and while I'm not involved in writing the C (that takes me back), I hang out in the IRC channel and help there when able. I've looked at the code (it's hard to use binaries with FS), but never had to submit a patch as of yet. They're rock solid and deserve every support contract the get!

Go ClueCon!

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#60

Post by wrsh07 »

manishsharan wrote: post #50

Remember the lady in texas who committed suicide? Those friends she tried to contact but couldn't reach feel horrible about missing her call. The problem with a service like this is that it will block calls from friends and family who are not whitelisted. Not to mention those dreaded emergency calls made by family members using a borrowed phone or public phone.

You should [pretty much] never blame yourself for somebody committing suicide.
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