Well, this is one of the "down sides" of working with programmers in non-USA countries. Major ISP's in the USA almost never have a problem like this, but it's common in many other countries. It's the "wee hours" now and I just heard from our buddy Ahmed. They had a lengthy outage in their fiber Internet connection right at the time he and I and Jeff had a conference call scheduled to finalize set up of our first 2 campaign types (see previous blog article for details on Campaign Type A and B). Needless to say the meeting never happened and now I know why.
We re-scheduled the meeting for this afternoon, so I'll be tied up all morning in preparation (need to do a lot of database work). Our updated business contact database arrived last week and we need to scrub out the Do Not Call numbers from our in-house as well as the national DNC list. Another part of the scrubbing process is removing all kinds of other phone numbers that are either illegal to call or just don't make any sense at all, such as police, fire, emergency, hospitals, rest homes, hotels, large companies (over 50 employees) and the list goes on and on. At any rate, Jeff and I collaborate on that effort but it still takes hours to accomplish. The updated list has more than 18 million records, so it will also take several hours of processing time to roll through it and create our new "clean list".
There's more great news! We just picked up a political client in Utah. He is running for office to replace a deceased congressman here and he's one of our AMG Platinum Associates, Keith Harrison! We wish him well. He's going to use our system in his campaign, so I'll need to make some arrangements to do a simple announcement-style calling campaign for his robocall efforts. I'll post some updates on this effort here in the blog as we complete some dialing campaigns for him. That's our SECOND political client in 2 months, and we haven't even fired up the system yet. Can you imagine the business we'll have once we announce we can make 12,000 simultaneous calls and millions of calls a day?
At any rate, we know there's a lot of business to be had out there, and it's frustrating to go through delay after delay. But that's what it take to get our services off the ground, so we're plodding through it.
As I type this, I'm also online with a programmer in Beijing we work with (American name = "Jacky" as in Jacky Chan...they don't spell the same as we do). He's working on our bulk email server and I'm monitoring the process. When we got the voice broadcast server going, we broke the email server connection. So he's fixing it. So far, we've been online a couple of hours. I don't expect to hit the sack until 3 am or so at this rate. But once again, this is what it takes to start a company destined to become a billion dollar enterprise (nobody ever accused me of thinking SMALL!).
It looks like my blog update schedule is way off this week. I have been updating it mid morning every day. But with so many irons in the fire, it looks like this week i'll be writing my articles late at night. That's all for today. I'll report on our afternoon meeting in my next update.
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