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Saturday, December 10, 2016

Free Surfing 3.0 over at RingPlus

I just got an email last month to let me know that my great ad supported RingPlus plan was coming to and end, so I did nothing until yesterday when the 7 day holding plan also ended, however the Bottomless Mad Bottomless Orange Upgrade for $9.99 is not a bad choice as it is unlimited and now there are no ads on the outgoing calls.  Process was really easy and there was no interruption on service.  There are still 3 free plans, but not as generous as the old one was.

Friday, October 7, 2016

MoonLighting.com

Signup was painless and took 20 min, mostly cut and paste from LinkedIN for me.  I got a call from them the next day offering an enhanced service, but it was mostly an informative call about completing my profile with a Bio and I found out they are a small startup in Charlottesville VA with about 30 people and Ross was recruited from the site itself, yay it works.  I haven't yet signed up for the enhanced services, due to a pending job application, however this was recommended to me by Micheal and I will definitely leave my post out there until I run out of billable hours.  The site is at ~300K users now and growing fast, they are on target for a million next year, according to Ross.  Now to see if I get any hits without the "enhanced services."

Saturday, August 20, 2016

RingPlus First Clubhouse opening (Event)

I got talked into this R+ thing by my crazy fregan friend who was as I on Fi, a great carrier for travel. I have used R+ for 2 months and the coverage Sprint gives me is adequate for my needs, the data is great and the voice sucks on some calls due to bad routing at Sprint for 3rd party calls, I had the same issue on Fi.

I went to NOLA Restaurant & Bar
 in Palo Alto to the RingPlus Clubhouse event and had a beer with Karl the CEO.

RingPlus was offering the Club Sandwich Free Plan Free/mo. 6,000 Talk, 6,000 SMS, 6,000 MMS, and 6,000 MB LTE at RingPlus event. I talked to the Karl, who promptly and openly answered all my questions about growth, prospects and business model.

They have 17 employees and 160000 subscribers.  I even met a 4 year long subscriber at the event.  Everyone seems to be happy with this deal, but the big question for something like this is how long can they survive on ad revenue?  I was assured that this business model is working for them and they have interest in the ad inventory on the ringtone so Karl sees a sustainable business.

I rather think that it would be cool if Karl did some Crazy Eddie style commercials on YouTube to help spread the word.  However this might be more for the community to do, as they are pretty much not advertizing that they exist and rely on social media to spread the word. In fact I am fulfilling my social media requirement right now, by posting this. However they don't seem to censor the boards they got where  users help other users or ask questions of the staff.  In the end we all win, advertisers,  R+ and the users.

If you are in Los Angeles, they are doing another Clubhouse. This time they are offering: Free/mo. 6,650 Talk, 6,650 SMS, 6,650 MMS, and 6,650 MB Full-Speed 4G LTE Data on new activations.

Sunday August 21th, 6:30pm-8:30pm 
DeSano Pizza
4959 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90029

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Free Taxi or carpool

On your cellphone install Uber invite code 1f4m6, Scoop Promo: RALF8D4, Lyft: RALF4

PS I have sold my car and now free to bicycle to work.  I use Scoop on a rainy day and Waze Rider(2 free rides for signing up) and Uber as a backup.

Monday, June 20, 2016

Free Cell Service

Seems too good to be true, but it is, RingPlus will give you free cell service, ad supported during the outgoing ringtone.  You don't loose any time and it is really free cell service.  There is a initial top up fee that most plans have, depending on when you sign up there are different promos running and you better have an unlocked Sprint capable phone ready to do this, or sometimes they might have some inventory to sell in their store or Classifieds but these phones are not as great as what you might get on eBay.  Just last week there was a Nexus 6 for $180 on eBay.  You can order SIM cards from Sprint.com right they will work on RingPlus, or they also have them on eBay. The setup is easy, if you have a compatible phone, just enter the ICC ID and IMEI on the RingPlus website and service can be running in minutes.  There is a higher tier of Member Plus where you get some extra services like support, otherwise you can pretty much find all the help you need by googling the forums and it is a community of users helping other users.  You are expected to do social media to spread the word, which I guess I am doing right now.

Anyhow all in all it is a great deal if you don't mind listening to a short ad until someone answers the phone.  If you have good Sprint coverage where you are going to use this, it should work great for you.  On the downside the voice calls have some lag and are not of the highest quality, however are usable.  You can also connect your SIP phone to the ring plus number for more calling possibilities.

There is a history of the company and a WikiPedia page now, based Karl's post, "RingPlus grew from 5,000 to over 91,000 subscribers in a year ",this is the fastest growing carrier in the country right now.

2/21/2017: Update, our accounts were moved to Ting with a $35 credit.  So my first sentence stands, it was too good to be true we didn't meet the target of 500,000 users to get the ad inventory.