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Filed under: VoIP

NetZero will soon pull plug on voice calling service

My NetZero
NetZero, the one-time free ISP, which, in recent years has elevated itself to a discount dial-up provider, added voice service to its offering a few years go. This enabled its customers to make and receive phone calls over VoIP in much the same way Vonage and Packet8 provide such service.

Apparently, as Vonage discovered, it's not as easy as it looks on paper to make money competing with the local Bell. So hard in fact, that NetZero is canning their voice offering after many months of unsuccessfully trying to sell off their customer base to a competing interest. This is a harbinger of things to come in the fixed-location voice business, as even telco monster AT&T is losing wireline customers like crazy to cable companies and on account of people who have settled on a mobile phone as their "one solution".

So what's a NetZero customer to do? Well, there's always Vonage, if you must have a traditional phone in your home. But here at DownloadSquad, we prefer software-driven solutions like Gizmo Project, because it follows you wherever you go--on your laptop and on your cell phone.

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Featured Time Waster

Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

CiviballsI have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

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