Please note that the following datelines are not associated with Seattle Voice Systems LLC. They are independently owned
and operated and are used as examples of familiar services, for those uncertain of the concept of a telephone dateline or
chatline. |
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- questpersonals,
- the night exchange,
- the night line,
- the confidential connection,
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- livelinks,
- telemates,
- talksalad,
- lavalife,
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- manline,
- womanline,
- interactive male,
- voice male,
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- grapevine,
- friendsation,
- talk121,
- connections chat
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Not to be confused with an "internet dating site" or "internet chatroom"... a telephone dateline (also referred to as a "telephone chatline") is a telephone service which allows callers to:
- record personal voice ads (mailboxes) in various categories & age groups,
- listen to other's recorded voice ads,
- send and receive voice messages (in response to voice ads or previously exchanged messages),
- or meet with someone live over the phone by exchanging realtime messages and/or engaging
in live, private conferenced connections (via the dateline's live chatroom features).
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Face to face meetings may occasionally be awkward, whereas a telephone dateline system, in a relaxed (and private) fashion, encourages conversation between callers. The service allows callers to meet others in their local calling area (or coast-to-coast) and exchange voice messages... or engage in live, private conferenced connections... with the potential of developing relationships. Callers always remain anonymous to one another, exchanging no personal or caller ID information, unless done so intentionally.
Internet dating services normally require photo uploads and short keystroke messages to correspond between men and women. On internet date sites users sometimes upload fake photos or misrepresent their true gender.
telephone datelines allow live, revealing conferences over the phone. No keystrokes required.
In short, it takes much less time to meet and communicate with someone over the phone and determine if you'd like to get to know each other better. You can establish a person's true gender and demeanor almost immediately. What may take days or weeks to learn about another person over the internet may take no more than 15 to 30 minutes on a telephone dateline/chatline service.
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- A voice server (computer, voice telephony cards, dateline software) is set up at a home or office location. The voice server may be a half-height tower PC or a rackmount system.
- T1 or E1 phone lines are installed (demarcation) and activated to support live call traffic into the voice server.
- A business bank account (merchant account) for deposits and a payment gateway account for credit card processing are established.
- Finally, creating one or more small web site(s) to publicize your dateline service and promote call traffic. Other advertising media are optional.
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 Professional telephone datelines normally consist of an "Ads" mailbox section (a.k.a. the voice personals) and/or a live "Chat" section (a.k.a. the chatroom).
The "Ads" section of the dateline allows callers to:
- post personal voice ads (describing themselves
and the kind of relationship they're seeking),
- review the voice ads of other callers (in different
age groups and categories),
- exchange non-realtime voice messages,
- block/unblock other callers from contacting them.
The "Chat" section of the dateline allows callers to:
- exchange realtime voice messages with other
callers,
- engage in privately conferenced connections with
other callers,
- block/unblock other callers from contacting them.
Both the "Ads" & "Chat" sections are normally
supplemented with additional options, as well.
Professional telephone dateline systems generally
adhere to a common architecture (conveyed in the
flowchart to the right). Features, navigation and
phone keypad (DTMF) assignments may vary slightly.
For example, some datelines require callers to setup
a mailbox, pick up messages, or establish a temp.
account prior to accessing the main menu.
Note: Both the "voice personal ads" and "live chatroom" components of a dateline/chatline are equally popular. However, callers accessing the "live chatroom" typically
remain on the system for longer durations than do callers accessing the "voice personal ads".
If your bandwidth (number of digital phone lines) is limited, you may want to limit the duration of each call, allowing more callers access to the system. To encourage numerous but short calls, you may want to initially run the system as a "voice personals" system... disabling the chatroom component until more bandwith (digital phone lines) can be added to the system.
One the other hand, If you intend to charge callers by the minute and your only concern is maintaining heavy call traffic around the clock, you can activate both components ("voice personal ads" and "live chatroom").
Our software does allow the activation or deactivation of either component (voice personals & chatroom) at the discretion of the dateline owner...at any time. In default mode, both components are always configured as "active".
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Oversight of a telephony dateline is often influenced by the following:
- number of advertised datelines
Our software allows multiple advertised phone datelines to be run from a single program,
- number of advertised dateline web sites
Multiple web sites may exist for a single phone dateline... or for multiple advertised phone datelines,
- monitoring of caller activity
"Chat greetings" monitoring and "voice ads" approval may be manual or automatic in our dateline program,
- accounts maintenance
Requiring purchased membership accounts is optional. Some dateline owners offer free usage to callers, while generating revenue from advertising or from "CABS".
Subscriber (membership) billing methods often consist of one or more of the following:
- Block-of-time billing - A block of minutes is purchased prior to usage (purchased by automated credit card processing or automated phone company billing)
- 900/976 billing - Per-minute billing or block of minutes billing by phone company. Charges are applied to subscriber's monthly phone bill.
- Flat-rate billing - Monthly fixed-rate billing for unlimited monthly usage, normally with per-call time limits.
Non-membership (free usage) methods often consist of one or more of the following:
- Advertisement revenue - Our software allows voice advertisements to be inserted and played in key areas of the program. Like radio advertisements.
- CABs revenue - phone company CLEC->ILEC CAB monthly billing (contact us for more information).
NOTE: There is no need to manually process individual or batch credit card transactions. We've built an automatic credit card processor into our dateline software. As a result, all individual credit card transactions are instantaneous (a turnaround time of 2-3 seconds per-caller) with immediate results (approval or decline).
Case 1 - A small dateline business
Successful telephone datelines have been installed and managed from homes, apartments and small offices. As long as the phone company is able to install the required ISDN PRI T1 or E1 spans at your location.
In it's simplest, manually-configured, form a dateline may require no more than an hour commitment each day to audit (approve/reject) new voice ads, leaving the owner(s) free to do as they please during the remainder of the day.
If the dateline is configured to run automatically, requiring no human intervention, no time is actually required on a daily basis. However, it would be wise to invest the time to observe geographic call traffic, hourly call patterns, statistics, etc... and constantly expand or improve your marketing of the service.
Simply introduce a new (small) dateline into the market, bringing it up in the "Ads" only mode (voice personal mailboxes). Because callers tend to spend less time on the system, per-call, in "Ads" only mode, more callers have access to the system throughout the day. Once the subscriber base has grown and revenues support additional phone line installation, the live "Chat" section can be activated. Phone line bandwidth into the system should be sufficient at that point to accommodate longer duration call traffic in the "Chat" section, as well as short duration call traffic in the "Ads" section.
Most marketing today is done via the internet. It's far more cost effective then any other media and you're able to reach a global audience. Multiple web sites highlighting the same telephone dateline is not uncommon. Because our software allows multiple telephone datelines to be run from the single executable program, it's also possible to advertise what appears to be competing phone datelines in multiple web sites. All call traffic goes through the same dateline software.
When designing your web site, use an online web page validator (available at http://www.w3.org/) to verify and optimize your source code (html, css, javascript, xml, flash, etc...) and be sure to adhere to guidelines required by the search engines for "best ranking" on a keyword search.
Hardcopy advertising is expensive and doesn't have the marketing impact of the internet on a global scale. However, It does prove to be more effective if the intent is to reach a local market... very quickly. It's always a good supplement to web advertising if expenses are curtailed, your ad layout is polished and the newsweekly page-placement is effective. DO NOT advertise in a conventional newspaper unless you're reasonably certain of positive results at a cost effective price.
Try to limit the size of initial hardcopy advertisements in the local "Alternative newsweekly" publication. Advertisements should be visually competitive in layout and size, but as inexpensive as possible to minimize monthly overhead costs. Advertisements should be placed in the "dateline section" of the "Alternative newsweekly" publication... not elsewhere where they won't be noticed. You're paying good money for your advertisements. Make sure that you receive a complete complimentary copy of each "newsweekly" you place your ads in for review of ad positioning and reproduction clarity. For a list of domestic (U.S.) "newsweeklies" refer to the web site link: http://aan.org/alternative/Aan/NewsweeklyDirectory
Television advertising is risky and quite expensive. Especially on cable networks, where your commercial may become a "needle in a haystack" of 50-500 available channels offered to channel-surfers. Comcast is one source for scheduling television commercial campaigns, including the ability to "storyboard" and produce the television commercial for you, if necessary. Be careful to place your commercial on adult-popular networks around adult-popular syndicated programs. The time-of-day your commercial is run may be dictated by adult entertainment advertising requirements (normally after 10pm... or after 1am in some markets). Remember... a telephone dateline is categorized as adult entertainment. The preamble of your telephone dateline always states "you must be 18 years of age or older to use this service...".
Always observe your call traffic around the time of an advertisement campaign, whether it be hardcopy or television. If you don't see an increase in call traffic during these periods, your ad/commercial is probably not effective visually or placement wise.
NOTE: Most large dateline services begin as a small dateline. As the small dateline becomes established in the initial market, expanding into other markets becomes a viable option. With growth, day-to-day operations will become more organized and the business will, gradually, take on the appearance of a corporate model.
Case 2 - A large dateline business
Large dateline businesses are normally centralized, located in a large office space and organized into several "departments". Some of the "departments" might include:
- the obvious - payroll, accounting, etc...,
- marketing - to handle competitive advertising & promotional campaigns for all established markets,
- graphics - to handle all hardcopy and promotional advertisement artwork,
- production - to storyboard and handle all television commercial productions,
- programming - to maintain or modify the dateline software for existing and new installations,
- studio - to record/maintain voice, music and sound tracks for all dateline systems,
- call center - to provide customer support and maintain subscriber accounts,
- monitors - to screen and approve/reject chat greetings and voice personal ads,
- outsourced - home based or staffed personnel contracted to provide additional services.
Most large datelines provide both personal "Ads" and live "Chat" features. Voice "Ads" and "Chat" greetings may be automatically approved or may be manually monitored for content (centralized monitoring of all deployed datelines). It's common to provide a nationwide (800) phone number for customer support and account maintenance/subscription orders
(for all deployed systems). Some support online credit card/checking AVS verification with realtime (individual) or periodic (batch) uploads to their credit card gateway. We have this technology built into our dateline software.
Advertising may be "boiler plate" for all established dateline markets, or market specific to remain competitive at a local level. It's not uncommon for large established datelines to maintain "grandfathered account" agreements with local "Alternative newsweeklies" for favored or competitive ad placement. If you're new in the market, make sure that "grandfathered account" politics are not impacting the visibility or placement of your ads. |
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For DIGITAL T-1 / E-1 single or multi-span configurations
All of our scalable software products are designed for the MS Windows 2000 - Windows 7 server / advanced server operating systems using Pika Technologies PrimeNetMM T1/E1 boards & drivers).
We support:
- low-density configurations employing single-span T1/E1 (24 ports),
- medium-density multi-span T1/E1 (1000 ports),
- or high-density multi-span "daisy chained" rackmount configurations
T1/E1 (1000+ ports).
NOTE: For those unfamiliar with the term "port", "channel" or "timeslot", all 3 are essentially the equivalent of a phone line. An ISDN PRI T1 consists of 24-channels (23 voice lines + 1 data line). Typically, every 24th channel (or port or timeslot or phone line) is reserved for passing data (NON-NFAS provisioning). Four T1's (4 x 24 lines = 96 lines) actually consists of 92 voice lines and 4 data lines.
Our software products are designed to run on half-height tower or "industrial grade" rackmount systems employing the PCI (or cPCI) formfactor. Assuming the PCI formfactor, you'll require 1 or more available 13" full-length PCI slot(s) in your system to install the desired number of Pika Technologies PrimeNetMM T1/E1 voice telephony board(s). Your motherboard (or passive backplane SBC) chipset/device drivers must support the MS Windows 2000 - Windows 7 operating systems. If you have any questions about configuration requirements, please, feel free to contact us.
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Navigate the actual system - You're welcome to try out one of our demo dateline systems by dialing:
- Men and Women (360) 602-7002
We designed and installed the entire system. This system is a nationwide service.
In it's current configuration, men and women are able to use the system for free.
In order to test the live chatroom, have two callers dial on as male and female respectively, and select "the chatroom" from the main menu. This will allow you both to exchange real-time msgs. and engage in live 1-on-1 conferences.
For more in-depth information regarding our matchmaking software, dateline software, chatline software ...Click here to visit our main site.
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