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Recently I scheduled a PCT Seminar which will take place in Silicon Valley in October.  One question was, how to publicize it?  And I realized that one possible approach would be to mail out post cards to people in Silicon Valley who are registered to practice before the USPTO.

So the question was, how to accomplish getting post cards sent to these people?

In the old days, the way one would accomplish this is to go to a local printer, get post cards printed, put stamps on them, and mail them.  Or you would obtain a postal permit and go through the many steps required to mail such post cards without putting stamps on the cards.  And of course one would need to print address labels and put the labels onto the cards.

Regular readers of this “office tech” department of my blog can guess what is coming next in this blog article.  Of course it turns out that nowadays there are Internet-based ways to do this that are much more efficient and very inexpensive. Continue reading →

When I founded our firm a quarter of a century ago, I did some of the things that were absolutely mandatory in those days, for example:

• Contact Martindale-Hubbell to get the firm listed there
• Get a postage meter
• Get a fax machine and connect it with a dedicated land line telephone line

We used to pay a thousand dollars a year for our listing in Martindale-Hubbell, but we dropped that maybe ten years ago.  We got rid of our postage meter, which used to cost us a hundred dollars a month, maybe five years ago.  And now in 2018 we have dropped our public fax number.  Maybe you should, too.   Continue reading →

Over the years I have usually been very lazy, paying little or no attention to my cell phone bill.  Years ago I sort of got into a rut, clicking around to use whatever cell phone plan on AT&T offered unlimited data and unlimited domestic calling and unlimited texting.  Maybe a year ago I found I was paying $180 per month, and then I got it down to $120 per month, and then with a phone call I got it knocked down to $80 per month.  I thought I was doing pretty well, and then realized that there are MVNOs that charge a lot less.  I finally took the plunge and now it looks as though I will be paying $23 per month for unlimited talk and text and data.  In this blog article I discuss factors that I think you might want to consider in possibly switching to a less expensive carrier. Continue reading →

In this article I will propose that you buy your next cell phone from a different place than before, and maybe you will save several hundred dollars.  Oh and toward the end of the article I will say a word or two for iPhone users. Continue reading →

A few days ago I wrote a blog article asking readers all around the world to please try making a few test telephone calls.  I also sent out an email blast to our firm’s email mailing list, asking readers to please read the blog article and place a few test calls.  The goal was to test out some special telephone numbers in the 883 country code (called iNum numbers).  I was intrigued by the results. Continue reading →

A loyal blog reader asked:

What prevents the U.S. telephone carriers from ending the use of spoofed caller-IDs? It would seem possible to put an authenticated (tokenized) caller-ID system in place for in-country calls that maintains the originating number, or at least flags the displayed number with some symbol if it cannot be authenticated.

This is a very good question.  The answer might surprise him. Continue reading →

A decade ago some Internet geeks set up a new kind of telephone number — an “iNum” telephone number.  A regular telephone number always starts with a country code.  Calls to Switzerland for example use a country code of “41”.  Calls to North America use a country code of “1”.  Just by looking at the telephone number, you can see what country it is associated with.  But not iNum numbers. Continue reading →

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When I launched my law practice back in about 1994, one of my first purchases was Foonberg’s excellent book How to Start & Build a Law Practice.  The advice given in Foonberg’s book is timeless and enduring.  To this day I urge anyone who is launching a firm to buy and read this book.  Continue reading →

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A year ago I posted about a speed test.  Since then I have set up a new speed test that I like better.

Continue reading →

The other day I was in the hallway outside of our firm’s office, standing at the top of a stepladder, stringing some fiber optic cable through the drop ceiling.  A passer-by (a nice fellow from Redpoint Global, a software house next door to our office) saw the fiber optic cable that was being installed, and asked (he sounded envious) if we were getting gigabit ethernet.  I had to disappoint him — we were merely running fiber from one part of our office to another, not to the Internet.

But it got me thinking.  What does it cost these days to get a gigabit connection to the Internet?  I was astonished to learn that it costs less these days than it used to cost.  For $110 per month, I now have gigabit internet in my home.  I’ll describe the process and the results. Continue reading →