Sunday, February 12, 2012

Harvard University Students Set the Record for the Longest Phone Call!

A Harvard university group called "The Harvard Generalist" have teamed up with Ibasis and their rechargeable calling card program called Pingo to attempt to get into the Guiness Book of World records for what would be the "Longest Phone Call."

The rules, according to their website dictate that the students must keep the call going and actively talk in real conversations (no gibberish or yes no type exchanges) and taking no more than 10 second pauses between comments. The time to beat: 43 hours, 8 minutes, 55 seconds. That is one long call!!! Good thing they have Pingo flipping the bill ;)

In the end they managed to do it, talking for 46 hours 12 minutes and 52 second . Congrats Guys & Gals on one of the weirdest achievements I have ever heard about!

Check out the following article from their Harvard Student Newspaper, The Crimson... it appears they had a lot of fun with this world record attempt!

>Picture above from The Harvard Crimson Newspaper shows one of the students on the active call and it seems the students decorated the room quite nicely with lots of blankets and other items to keep the participants comfy!

FTC Reaches Settlement with NJ Based Millennium Telecard, Inc.

Just wanted to follow up on an earlier post about Millennium Telecard who had run a foul of the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive advertising practices. It seems as if both sides have reached an agreement where Fadi Salim, the principal of this company and two others also under investigation, has agreed to hand over 2.3 million dollars to settle this accusation of wrong doing (without acknowledging that they did anything wrong of course). The money will be paid over a 10 year period and the settlement will ultimately stop Mr Salim from misrepresenting the amount of minutes on a phone card in any of it's advertising campaigns.

The settlement is the biggest of it's kind and is sure to signal the end of what has been a dark period of prepaid calling, where the fees in many cases would out-bill the actual minutes on a card. It is important to note that they will still be allowed to have fees on their cards but they all must be clearly displayed on all printed materials and be easy to understand (better than nothing I guess).

I wonder if this government crackdown is at the beginning, the middle or the end?

To read the full article go to the Star Ledger Article here!

HW8BQSZJRXHP