Edited by Suzanne Bowen. While China Telecom and China Unicom state, “all VoIP phone services are illegal on the Chinese mainland, except those provided by telecommunications carriers China Telecom and China Unicom,” Las Cruces, New Mexico mayor embraces the idea in the southwestern U.S.A. state.

What more could a government contractor in IP communications wish than the mayor of a city to recommend VoIP for public safety and business continuity? That’s exactly what Mayor Ken Miyagishima of Las Cruces, New Mexico did.

He is encouraging the city government to take care of charges to install four Comcast voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) lines at the New Mexico State Police communications center. Recently Mesilla Valley Regional Dispatch Authority (MVRDA) experienced two outages in telephone service that forced the emergency dispatch system to become inoperable on December 14, 2010 and also again on December 27, 2010.

Hugo Costa, the MVRDA director, is interested but wants to study all associated and potential costs that could be associated with it. For example, Comcast cable service is not available in the area where MVRDA is located. Because of this, running lines to this area via Comcast cable would cost millions.

What’s wrong with this picture? Would the MVRDA be possibly better served by another voice over Internet provider whose service would not need extra lines?

“We don’t have a third layer, and that’s an expensive proposition,” Costa said. “It comes down to the consideration of how far can we afford to plan. No one that I’m aware of has a tertiary program.”

And one Techistan community member asks, “What is a tertiary program? What does this have to do with the problem?”

Costa added that the “political will has to go forward” in decisions like that. Councilor Dolores Connor, chairwoman of MVRDA’s board of directors agreed, but pointed out that city of Las Cruces and Do-a Ana County governments have failed to fully fund the Joint Powers Agreement they’ve each entered into with MVRDA.

“There has to be a willingness to put something like this at the top of the list,” Connor said. “…Whatever it takes, we should be willing to do it.”

Miyagishima said he doesn’t want to wait for governmental bureaucracy to slow down the process.

“I don’t want to wait until Friday,” Miyagishima said. “It’s imperative we move fast and put something in place.”

Steve Ramirez can be reached at 1 (575) 541-5452.

First published on http://www.lcsun-news.com/dona_ana_news/ci_17006375?source=rss … this article is a revised version with comments from Techistan community added in italics. Contact the Las Cruces, New Mexico government at http://www.las-cruces.org/.

NEW YORK, NY, 16 Nov. 2010 – Torridon Solutions is making it easier for business managers and executives, management consultants and project managers who use Swiftlight project management software to organize, collaborate, and stamp project plans with the unique personality of corporate brands.

Torridon today announced the release of version 1.2 of Swiftlight. The new software is available immediately.

For a video outlining the key new functionality in Swiftlight 1.2 , click here: http://www.swiftlightsoftware.com/Swiftlight-Project-Management-Software-NewRelease-Video.htm

“We believe in ease and clarity,” said Peter McWhinnie chief executive officer of Torridon. “Project management software should be easy to use day-to-day. It should also produce output that is clear and good looking, and that facilitates the transparency and communication that are central to effective project management. This new release makes Swiftlight even stronger in both dimensions.”

“We began by making it easier to share the content of project plans with other business software tools,” said McWhinnie:

* Swiftlight now exports to Microsoft Excel in CSV formats and to PowerPoint and PDF formats, allowing users to extract milestones, meetings, actions and other data for easy manipulation or sharing – and to instantly send Swiftlight charts, lists or tables into standard presentation or document formats.

* Swiftlight users may now also copy and paste from lists and tables directly into Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, or to Yahoo email and Gmail – “the powerhouse tools that are basic to business communication,” said McWhinnie, “making it incredibly uncomplicated to send task or other information when you need to collaborate with other users.”

“”Then we made it refreshingly simple for users to customize Swiftlight when they have to comply with corporate standards for colors and fonts, or wish to incorporate their own logos, or export to their own PowerPoint templates for presentations or project proposals.

“Project managers, planners and consultants want to follow company rules for corporate branding – and rightly so. If you are putting a plan together or inserting a timeline into a document for a customer you want it to match your style and branding.

“This is now possible with Swiftlight in a way that is pretty unique relative to other project management software; users are also able to create a file to use like a template and work with this systematically. They can do this at the organization level – or give different looks to different projects for different customers,” said McWhinnie.

“Swiftlight users have been asking for this capability. Consultants, in particular, work with multiple clients, and each client wants outputs that match their colors, their look and feel. consultants also have their own brand standards for how they present themselves to clients, so they need to be able to work easily with multiple styles and PowerPoint templates. Now, with Swiftlight, they can,” said McWhinnie.
About Swiftlight

Swiftlight is a project management software application that saves time, creates clarity and gets results for its users. It offers a planning structure, high quality visuals and outstanding ease of use, and is a great alternative to traditional Gantt chart software. Created to meet the needs of a broad range of business managers, executives and consultants, rather than just project management experts, Swiftlight is particularly well-suited to project planning and progress reporting for “smaller scale” or “less complex” projects, and for creating timelines and other outputs for project proposals.

For people who find Microsoft Project too complex, and managing projects in Excel and PowerPoint very time-consuming, Swiftlight can quickly generate clear, presentation-ready plans and progress reports for initiatives such as product launches, strategy reviews, operational improvement initiatives or annual planning.

For specialist project managers with larger IT, engineering or R&D projects, Swiftlight makes it easy to articulate and visualize “the big picture,” with outputs that can capture timelines, objectives, deliverables and measures of success all on one page. Swiftlight also provides links to MS Project to simplify project reporting.

For a video overview of Swiftlight, click here: http://www.swiftlightsoftware.com/Swiftlight-Project-Management-Software-Overview-Video.htm

Product details are posted here: http://www.swiftlightsoftware.com/Swiftlight-Project-Management-Software-Product-Tour.html

Swiftlight is designed for desktop and laptop computers configured with Microsoft Windows 7, Vista or XP. A single user license is $299. Customers may purchase the software here: http://www.swiftlightsoftware.com/Swiftlight-Project-Management-Software-Purchase.html.

The 30 day free trial of Swiftlight is available here: http://www.swiftlightsoftware.com/Swiftlight-Project-Management-Software-Download-Trial.html.

About Torridon

Founded in 2005 and privately held, operating from London as Torridon Solutions Ltd. and from New York as Torridon Solutions Inc., the mission of Torridon Solutions is to make life easier for managers and the companies they work for by designing, creating and distributing practical and innovative software for the world of planning, project management and management communication. Torridon Solutions has customers in 17 countries, predominantly in North America and Europe.

Dear VIP, you!

Quality beats quantity any day. When inspired, do it at that moment and not like clockwork … because you have to. This is why letters from the Techistan Editor in Chief (me) will be sporadic in appearance but with something to say and share when published. Anyone notice the concentration of news and opinions and innovations we share regarding IP (internet protocol-based) communications?

The provision of telephone service is in a volatile and exciting flux. At least one third of the content of Techistan is dedicated to voice, video and other IP and non-IP communications services. Our magazine, your magazine Techistan is not about creating the biggest behemoth commercial engine. It’s about collaborating with you to make the world around each of us a better place no matter where we are…

Which is where “telephone service” fits perfectly. The Internet itself, smart phones, other cell phones, mobile applications, GPS and other location services, and virtual phone lines make us all more equal than ever and bring all our VIP closer, whether on our physical side of Earth or the other.

Whether the reader is a user, provider, developer or entrepreneur in areas that involve telecommunications, each has probably had experience with porting a phone number from one provider to another provider.

In the recent cretaceous period that still insists to hang on, I moved from right on the Pensacola Bay to another location near the Pensacola International Airport. When I did, my POTS (plain old telephone service) provider refused to let me take my “phone number” with me even though I would continue using their service. What did I do? I ported the phone number to one our own *DIDX VoIP phone service provider customers, so I could continue to have the same phone number that all my friends, family, and business partners were familiar with. I dropped the POTS for good.

Enter … LNP. What is it? It is an acronym that abbreviates Local Number Portability. It is the empowerment of you and me to keep our local phone number even when we switch who we pay for our phone service.

The power is in your hands. Ask your voice (and sometimes video) service provider if they are a member of any organization that lets you port in or out your phone number and if yes, ask what is the geographical area that this porting applies to? (Remember, for example you may be porting out from ABC company and porting into Freedom company.)

Can we meet you in person? Check our recommended events in every corner of the world at http://www.techistan.com/2009/10/15/techistan-recommends-global-events/.

At Techistan, we aim to collaborate with you in promoting information sharing, necessary debate, deserving praise, business development and positively enriching social change.

We appreciate you.

Sincerely yours,

Suzanne Bowen
Editor in Chief
Techistan

Some websites to study about LNP:

Neustar, http://www.npac.com/

Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_number_portability

FCC, http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/NumberPortability/

DIDX, http://www.didx.net/lnp/

Voip-info, http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Local+Number+Portability

Meet our CEO Rehan Allahwala where he is scheduled to present on “From Startup to World Changemaker in the Cloud” at Hyderabad’s Cloud Computing Summit and Hong Kong’s Cloud Computing World Forum this month! You can vote for him at Mashable Awards 2010 now, too.

… Need to make your presence known to over 2800 individual and corporate readers of Techistan? Get your innovation in front. Share your news and announcements. Sponsor a beat. Place your logo among the online kinship Techistan from the East and West, South and North, online and offline movers and shakers. Contact the Techistan Team !

Young people everywhere as well as those through the senior citizen years have so much potential and with today’s user-centric and enabling technologies, anything is possible.

You will think you are listening to a young version of the smart, tech-savvy Barack Obama, Justin Frankel, or Rob Malda, but … in just three months, Cheikh Mbacke has over 8,000 customers on his calling card services over IP with DID from all over the world and a targeted audience of . We finally met up with him at the VIPeering Forum (http://www.tmcnet.com/voip/conference/v i-peering/vi-peering-agenda.aspx?buttond own=agenda) during ITEXPO West 2010 when he introduced himself to Suzanne Bowen, who was one of the speakers on the value of services leveraging e164 phone numbers.

He’s got more great ideas after attending this conference for more services that will meet the needs of customers in ways not met before.

Cheikh shares his respect for DIDX and how it enables him and thousands of others around the world in IP communications related business. He is willing to explain ways that DIDX can improve especially in regards to the steps to take in adding funds and then adding talk time and the relationship between the two on DIDs where vendors charge per minute from minute one or after a certain number of minutes.

We decided after our talk that an video icon in each area of DIDX to show how to use that area should be added. Links to Youtube are no problem.

He likes the choice on DIDX, lots of it but was hoping that more DIDX vendors would offer two choices on billing:
1. Buy DID with a certain number of minutes and channels and charge per minute after included minutes.
2. Or Buy DID with unlimited minutes and as many channels as needed.

He shares the ease of use. All areas of the world where he needs DID are available on DIDX and he is eager to see new areas, especially good quality Africa DID.

A lesson in user-centric, users rule, users drive innovation and improvement and businesses need to ask for criticism and improvement and follow up on the same. Like Cheikh says, “We go where our customers go.”