Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Colorvision Phone Card

Color Vision Phone Card commercial by SDI. This phone card mainly targets Dominicans in the United States.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Total Call The Latest Ordered To Pay Up and Be Clean!

Total Call International a leading phone card provider located in California is the latest company ordered to pay penalties and clean up their cards.

In a civil case brought by the State of California, Total Call was ordered to pay $300,000 in penalties and mandated to be monitored for the next 4 years to ensure that they no longer charge "hidden and deceptive fees" which are against the State's false advertising and unfair competition laws. In order to remain in compliance Total Call must clearly disclose all charges on it's advertising materials and the cards themselves.

In response Total Call has already started removing some fees from it's products and has begun to revise all of it's marketing materials to get into compliance.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Poor Economy Hurting the Bodegas

While there is no doubt the economic woes of this country has hurt the telecommunications business, I never once thought that the small mom and pop stores would be feeling it as hard.

According to a recent article in the Charlotte Observer small bodegas in the south that used to do quite well with their money remittance products are seeing that business almost cut in half. One store they reference in the article used to do over $4,000 a day in money remittance and is now doing only $2,000 a day. The reason for this decline is that many of the communities who had high concentrations of migrant Latino workers are seeing those migrants going home and staying home since there are just not that many jobs anymore (mostly in construction and farming).

While calling card sales have not dipped as dramatically for this store, there is no doubt that those sales are down as well since most of those people that used to use the money remittance service also purchased phone cards.

The migrant worker population is much larger in the South and Western parts of the United States so the decline is felt much more in those areas than in the Northern areas where most of the immigrants are permanent rather than temporary.