The primary objective to a business is to earn a return on their investment, a profit for the shareholders. The first element necessary for this is to have a product or service for sale and then receive money for it.Gizmo Project offers this in terms of calling in and out of their VOIP network. They also offer a great bonus for consumers and that is free calling within their network. However, if 100% of their customers used the free calling they'd have no revenue.
I've been a customer since Oct 2006 (when I first sent them money). As I've posted before here they were slow crediting my payment another time, so I was unable to place calls.
The technological side is pretty good. Voice quality is excellent.
My father setup an account with his main interested being calling out. He failed at adding funds to his account.
Last week I setup an account for my wife on her PDA (Nokia 770) and then immediately added $10 to it from my verified paypal account (the same one I've used since Oct 2006 to fund my Gizmo account). The funds were immediately available.
I tried to do the same for my fathers account. On the first try I got some incomphrensible response. When I tried a second time I was told that my paypal account wasn't verified (it was). Same for my third try.
I used their customer service system to ask for help. A week later those are unanswered. Yesterday I complained to the PR dept and other emails.
At that time I was confused from all the paypal transactions and thought the payment I made for my wife's account was actually for my father and that a $10 payment had been made by but not applied. That email got a response that everything was ok with that payment.
It also seemed to indicated that maybe my fathers account was locked because he original attempt to pay by credit card failed.
I got the bright idea to make a new account for my father and fund that, as was so easy for my wife last week. No dice. The new account tells me that my paypal account isn't verified.
Of course my paypal account is verified and has been funding my Gizmo account with minor troubles since Oct 2006, and my wife's since last week.
Since Gizmo seems bound determined to keep my father from being able to call out, it is time to search for an alternative for him... and since we'll want to be on the same network... the rest of us too.
Gizmo's technology may be "open source" and function well, if their customer service and especially their receipt of money doesn't also function well they have no long term viablity and their investors should be very worried.
Calling Edward G. Sim....
