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2. Foti This strategy worked until roughly 2006, when the Southern District of New York issued its landmark holding in Foti v. NCO Financial Systems, Inc., (170) which laid the [...]

The presence of voice mail services not only increases the likelihood of a successful communication between two callers, it also creates additional calls, which can increase telecommunications company revenue. If voice mail is available to both parties, a voice mail message spawns return calls, some of which may also be diverted to voice mail. These back-and-forth calls are a multiple of the number of initial calls placed by the initiating party. Because voice mail increases the number of calls made, it may be possible that the telecommunications company increases its profits by making voice mail available to its customers. Keywords: Voice mail, communication, multiplier, infinite series, profit JEL Codes: D21, L21, L96, I. Introduction In a recent issue of this Journal, Spiegel and Tavor (2011) explore the issue of optimal pricing for voice mail services. The pricing of telecommunication services differs from [...]

The uniqueness of phone calls and some other network instruments is precisely that communicating is achieved by the two parties only if the actual connection occurs. The sender pays an appropriate price for the call only if the communication is actually established. The voicemail service in the last decades increases the degree of communication efficiency, by increasing the percentage of successful contacts, by leaving recorded messages without further communication or by encouraging the receiver to call back the original sender. This service should be charged by telecommunication companies. The question is who should pay and how much. Keywords: Voicemail, negative pricing, optimal pricing, sender and receiver, reward to sender, I. Introduction The uniqueness of phone calls, mailing, chatting, fax messages and some (but not all) network instruments is precisely that communicating is achieved by the two parties only if [...]

Not long ago, retired journalist Margie Graham received the following message on her answering machine: "Hi, Mr. Rogers. This is Jane from Dr. Brown's office. We were able to change [...]

A study uncovers how miscommunication problems stemming from fixed-line telephony between generations can transfer into mobile phone usage. The frustration people often feel when dealing with voicemail and answering machine, which increases with mobile telephony where there is less chance of the receiving party being genuinely 'out' and unavailable, is discussed.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce VoxGrid, a mobile voice verification system intended for improving the security of the username-password authentication scheme. Design/methodology/approach – The system incorporates text-dependant speaker verification via mobile devices that provides for a three-factor authentication scheme for granting authorised access to certain websites or applications. The same speech recognition engine used by Google Voice Search is utilised to provide voice-to-text feature. All verification tasks are performed on a centralised server to minimise computing requirements on mobile platforms where feature extractions is executed using Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients. The resulting features are transmitted to the server instead of raw voice data to reduce network load. Actual voice verification takes place in the central server using Vector Quantisation. Findings – The initial results have indicated that VoxGrid is capable of providing an additional level of security on user authentications at a low cost and without using extra security tokens other than one's voice with a good enough performance given the limited resources available during testing. Originality/value – Past speaker verification experiments have been conducted but we see that this is the first time it is done on mobile devices with a client-server architecture using K-Means Clustering and Vector Quantisation. Future improvements on performance and testing could result in a more secure mobile computing environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Model Management addresses the problem of managing an evolving collection of models by capturing the relationships between models and providing well-defined operators to manipulate them. In this paper, we describe two such operators for manipulating feature specifications described using hierarchical state machine models: Match, for finding correspondences between models, and Merge, for combining models with respect to known or hypothesized correspondences between them. Our Match operator is heuristic, making use of both static and behavioral properties of the models to improve the accuracy of matching. Our Merge operator preserves the hierarchical structure of the input models, and handles differences in behavior through parameterization. This enables us to automatically construct merges that preserve the semantics of hierarchical state machines. We report on tool support for our Match and Merge operators, and illustrate and evaluate our work by applying these operators to a set of telecommunication features built by AT&T. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]