The blog has been fairly serious of late.  I thought I’d share this to lighten the mood a bit.  I’m absolutely loving Flight of the Conchords at the moment, it may be the best show since Seinfeld.  Check this out…

Leave a Comment

Following on from yesterday’s video on how to download Telkom phone statements, here’s a video which we’ve put together showing how to get started with Phone Statement Analyzer. [Read more →]

Leave a Comment

We’re hoping to have the next version of our new Phone Statement Analyzer product available for download by the end of next week.

Initial response has been very positive, the only challenge / niggle seems to be actually downloading phone statements from Telkom / Vodacom / MTN.

In order to assist with this, we have published documentation outlining exactly what you need to do in order to download your statements.  This is surprisingly tedious, hopefully the telecoms companies will streamline this process sooner rather than later.

I’ve also knocked together a video tutorial showing how to download a Telkom statement.  This video was shot using Windows 7, so if you’re on XP or Vista this might feel slightly unfamiliar.  Hopefully this will help some of our users – we’ll be adding similar videos for MTN and Vodacom as soon as possible. [Read more →]

Leave a Comment

It’s heading for 3am, and I’ve just finished some work for a client.  I thought I’d blog about it quickly, as an example of what sort of things my company does when we’re not building commercial products.

A client phoned me a couple days ago, urgently needing the ability to copy files off one of their staff member’s computers.  Let’s call him “Bob”.  But there was a twist…

They couldn’t physically spend time on Bob’s computer, so they couldn’t push the files from Bob’s laptop to their server.  They also didn’t have access to all of Bob’s folders, so they couldn’t pull the files off Bob’s PC from another machine on the network.

Hence their decision to call us.

Here’s what we did… [Read more →]

Leave a Comment

Last month I announced a new product which we’ve been working on for some time now, called Phone Statement Analyzer.

We designed PSA (Phone Statement Analyzer) to help users manage their phone accounts, focusing on quickly and easily answering questions such as…

• “Why is my phone bill so high?”
• “Who am I calling most frequently?”
• “Who in my family / business is making most of the calls on my bill?”
• “What component of my bill was for personal use, and what was for business?”
• etc.

However, since we released PSA we’ve received a lot of feedback from users asking us to help make sense of their statements.  It seems that a fair number of users don’t understand how the cellphone companies calculate the amounts on the statements, or what those numbers mean.  After spending the past few weeks trying to assist these customers I don’t blame them.  We’ve even seen a number of statements where the totals don’t add up, or where the same calls appear on the statement more than once!  Scary stuff.

So we’ve built a new report into PSA to help identify statement discrepancies.  I thought it might be helpful to blog about how PSA can help you to identify some of these issues on your own telephone statements.  Please note that PSA only currently supports South African phone statements, if you’re in another country please feel free to contact us to discuss adding support for your country / service provider.

Right, first you need to download and install Phone Statement Analyzer.  You can download a free trial of the software from here.  Once you have installed PSA, run the software.  You will see the main screen, as follows…

[Read more →]

1 Comment

There are now a significant number of developers using the Organize365 source code in their own applications.

Organize365 makes use of most of our commercial accessories, but also makes use of 7 libraries which we have not yet released publicly.  These include J-Buttons, J-Predict, J-SQH, J-Translate, J-WinMessages, J-TimeZones and J-RTF. Until now developers who purchased the Organize365 source code were emailed these 7 accessory libraries, with instructions explaining how to register them into the Clarion IDE.  This process has now been simplified significantly.

All of these “unreleased” accessories are now bundled together nicely in a single installer, called the “Organize365 Accessory Pack”.  This installer will now install all of these templates, and register them for you within the Clarion IDE.

[Read more →]

Leave a Comment

Phone Statement Analyzer is now publicly available.

You can download a free trial version from here.

I’m really excited about this project.  With Phone Statement Analyzer we’re aiming to achieve the following objectives:

1. It must answer all the big questions, and intelligently assist customers to make better choices in order to save money, but at the same time it must be easy to use.  Users should be able to install and use the software without any learning curve, setup screens, having to read documentation, etc.  It should add value to their lives within the first 30 seconds.
2. We want to support all the major networks in South Africa – so far we can import statements from Telkom, Vodacom and Nashua Mobile.  MTN, CellC and Virgin will follow.  This has been particularly challenging because unlike the banks, South Africa’s phone companies don’t all provide comprehensive CSV statements.  So we’re having to import non-uniform data from a range of formats, including PDF!

Our first goal is to grow our user-base, and to nail down the import functionality.  Once we’re confident that we can import all the phone companies statements reliably, we’ll then turn our attention to developing more sophisticated features for the product.  Please download it and try it out, and please let me know what you think.  Thanks.

Leave a Comment

Earlier today we released beta 17 of Phone Statement Analyzer.  It’s come quite a long way since beta 14 was released a couple of days ago…

Phone Statement Analyzer now tells you not only which numbers you called, but who those numbers belong to (assuming you have the details in your Outlook address book).  We’ve also tidied up a lot of stuff (the splash screen, help, docs, graphs, etc).  And this morning we sped up the import procedure significantly – my test data (over 3,000 phone calls) was importing in 31 seconds, but it’s now doing it in under 2.  Nice.

So, what next?

We’ve added a bunch of idea of things that we want to implement next to the Features Page.  We desperately need to get hold of statements from MTN, CellC, and Virgin Mobile.  If you can help with this please let me know.

Once we have added support for MTN, CellC and Virgin Mobile (to Vodacom, Telkom, and Nashua Mobile – who we already support), then we can start working on the bigger questions, like “What do I want to know about my phone calls?”.  Hopefully we can get to that point by the end of this coming week.

Leave a Comment

Last night we released a new version of Phone Statement Analyzer (download here).

Along with numerous minor improvements and changes, the most significant new feature is that you can now import Nashua Mobile statements!

We’ve also expanded the product website with several new pages, including a Features List, FAQs, and User Comments.

We’re still looking for additional testers if you’re interested in trying this software out for us.

Leave a Comment

Similar to our Bank Statement Analyzer product (licensed by Nedbank in 2009 as Personal Money Manager), we are proud to announce the imminent release of a new product called Phone Statement Analyzer!

This product is not yet available publicly, but we are looking for beta testers (and may be giving away free licenses in exchange for valuable feedback).  Please click here if you’re interested.

Leave a Comment