NEW FEATURE: Get Your Local Weather Forecast With V-Forecast

Posts: 34 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Sep 14, 2006 Posts: 34

Steve48 wrote:

Thanks, Luis. It may not be the most important feature of all time, but it's worth knowing about.

lol........good joke

Posts: 23 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Apr 22, 2005 Posts: 23

Im waiting for the first "The weather number doesn't work - Im cancelling" thread.

Posts: 1424 · Posted: Fri Sep 29, 2006 11:52 am Post subject:

Why did Vonage deploy this feature versus others that people really want? Because it is a service that costs Vonage next to nothing and likely earns them a few pennies.

I have thought a lot about services like these that Vonage could offer. They don't cost Vonage any serious amount of money, they are good for marketing the service as having superior features, but most importantly they make money from advertising revenue.

The V-Forecast line could have been developed by anyone, it didn't necessarily take Vonage R&D or budget to accomplish. It is clearly an advertising vehicle for Accuweather.com and therefore is making somebody some money. Similar services could spring up for all sorts of other services. The lower cost of Voip services versus traditional phone services means that making a profit from short ads is at least possible.

Here are some other examples of services Vonage could offer:
Movie listings (with pass through for purchases)
Traffic conditions
Horoscopes
Headlines/news
"Golden phone" type (call quality assessment) service
Restaurant directory (with pass through for reservations)
Airport information (delays, etc)

Basically any service that is typically provided by a portal like Yahoo! could be tailored for use over the phone.

Frankly I think the service is pretty lame. If it is a Vonage service then one would think it could use your service zip code to for the initial current conditions. Failing that it should have at least used the area code and prefix rather than forcing the user to enter it each time they called.

These are just the incoming services. Think of all the outgoing services that could be made available to Vonage customers.
Wake up calls
Flight monitoring
News alerts (sport scores)

Posts: 508 · Posted: Sat Sep 30, 2006 2:25 pm Post subject:

I can actually dial that number from my Vonage Canada Acct, but it still only lists US zip's.. it actually knew my mother in law's zip form a small town north of Columbia SC.. I was impressed it knew her zip.. lol..
interesting service, my wife said "oh cool" when I told her, so it impresses some ppl.. hehe

Posts: 2252 · Posted: Sat Sep 30, 2006 2:57 pm Post subject:

It is too bad that it does not cost $.99 a call. If it did, without a doubt; everyone in my family would call it 3 times a day. Wink

Posts: 241 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Mar 17, 2006 Posts: 241

I never knew they could say "accu-weather dot com" so many times in one minute. Lol

Also, the robot-voice lady has trouble saying "fifty." It comes across something like "fiffy" or "fffy"