The podcast is not dead! I’ll get another episode out soon. Likewise with more entertaining calls.
We are working on some exciting enhancements to the service and to the web site. I hate “talking” about it – I would rather just announce it when we’re done. I’ve worked for too many startups that endlessly talk about cool stuff and never deliver. So I’m waiting until it’s finished before I post/tweet/announce. It’s driving me crazy that I cannot tell you about it yet.
I do want to tell you that we’re working on two new features. And if you’re a subscriber to the Jolly Roger Telephone Service, you might be interested in:
- Enhanced whitelist/blacklists. We are a few days away from alpha-testing the ability to intercept or ignore numbers based upon patterns, rather than the entire number. For example, if you’d like to allow only areacode 312 and have bots intercept all others, we can do that. Or if you want bots to intercept 800 numbers, or if you get international calls and want bots to intercept all calls from a certain country code, we can do that too. For now, we have to do it for you, so feel free to send an email to support@jollyrogertelephone.com and ask us about any special whitelist/blacklist requests. We will be providing a web interface soon for you to manage this yourself. But we would like to understand the kinds of filters that you’d like so let us know.
- Email suppression. Some of you have asked us to stop sending emails for certain types of calls. For example, if you have whitelisted a number, then we should stop sending emails when we see a call to that number. The reason we currently do this is because there’s no web interface. So if you break up with that boyfriend and want bots to intercept his calls from now on, you’d have to find an old email from Jolly Roger Telephone to blacklist him. But if you’d like, we can now suppress those emails. Just tell us the code (in parenthesis) at the end of the subject line and we can turn those off. This feature is available now. If you get a lot of calls, the Jolly Roger service can be kind of email-chatty. Sorry about that.
There are four of us watching the ticketing system now, so send us a note at support@jollyrogertelephone.com and one of us will take care of you!
Thanks as always for sticking with us!
Roger
I just saw your text talk, and thank you for doing this! I’d rather hurt the telemarketers, especially as they are more than happy to threaten if they think it’ll make them any money, but this is the next best thing. I get 2 or 3 robocalls on my cellphone each day. The FCC is responsible for preventing this (and should guide the technology path towards a solution if they can’t fix it), but they have failed at that job.
Is there any way I can contribute? I’m happy to chip in a few bucks, or provide some voice samples.
Thanks Chris! I’m really flattered, and I’m sorry to hear about your mobile phone.
You can sign up for the service if you’d like. I have a team of people helping me now! We have a new offering for mobile phones too. It’s still in beta but it is working well for most people. http://jollyrogertelephone.com/call-for-beta-testers-new-service-to-automatically-protect-mobile-phones/
And help spread the word! That’s the most helpful thing of all! Thank you so much!
Roger
Surely you mean: Sorry I’ve been so quiet, there’s a bee on my arm …
Thanks for all your good work. Hope it becomes available in Canada eventually, but even so, it’s good to know it’s out there.
Thanks Norman!
If you have unlimited calling to the US, then you can use the service from Canada. The calling plans are very different in Canada so we’re careful not to say we support it. The bots are in Seattle, Washington, so you can definitely get to them. Does that work?
Roger