CallGraph.Biz Blog

We get a lot of queries on the Linux and Mac version of our clients. We have a linux client but unfortunately it is not upto the mark. So we have decided to take it offline and work on revamping it. We will re release it sometime early next year (going by our current schedules). A Mac port is also planned around the same time.

If you would like to get your hands on an pre-beta version, then please leave a comment below and we’ll inform you as soon as its done.

We added a small new feature today: now you can specify a different association password than your account password. By default both the passwords are same. But there might be cases where you want it to be different eg. when your account is being used by several people for uploading. This password cannot be used for logging into the account, only to associate your machines with your account. So you can share this password with all of your team and be assured that noone will be able to mess around with the uploaded records. Very useful if you want to track and monitor your team.

To change the association password, go to the settings page and specify a new password. And then associate your clients with the account once more. If any client uses the old password, then the uploads will start failing. Note that this will happen only if the association password is different from the account password. So if you do not change it then you are okay.

A brief note on passwords by the way. There was this news article sometime back; a rouge admin changing the password of a user because he did not like it. The bigger mistake here is that the passwords are stored in plain text which enables the admin to see what the passwords are. But in our system, its hashed. Even if we want to know what your password is, we cannot. We see only the string of characters which cannot be decoded back. So you can be sure that your passwords are safe with us.

Please let us know what you think of this feature. Comments/feedback are welcome.

We recently added a small but very useful feature to CRIMS: Autosuggest. This feature provides you with automatic suggestions on possible value when you want to share a call record or when you are doing an advanced search. Here’s some screenshots of it in action.

Its a small change but it helps immensely and saves a lot of typing. Thanks to Pat for suggesting this feature.

The nice folks at Soft32Downloads have evaluated Call Graph and given the 5 stars award to Call Graph.

To quote directly from their mail

I am sending you this email because your software product named Call Graph has been tested on 26 Aug 2008 and has been found by our team a high quality software product. Also, we were impressed by the cleanliness of your program. According to our classification and to our test results, we decided to grant your product, Call Graph , with a 5/5 Stars Rating and “5 stars award award”. This award means that your product is a Premium Software.

A big thanks to the Soft32Download team for their work.

We released a couple of changes to the UI that we had been working on recently and added a sidebar to the Call Record history page. This sidebar adds a table sorting, batch operations and advanced search functionality. Here’s an overview of these.

Sidebar:

The sidebar looks like the following on the ‘Call Record History’ page.

It has four widgets as of now: space usage monitor, batch operations sort table and advanced search. The space usage shows a graphical representation of the storage space used for your account, as the name suggests.

Batch Operations:

This widget allows you to select multiple call records and do things with them. Right now you can either share them with others or delete all the selected ones. We will add more options to this widget as we go along.

Sorting:

The call records view can be changed using this widget. Four options are available as of now: newest first, oldest first, ascending/descending order of duration and ascending/descending order of file sizes. Once you have sorted them you can use apply some batch file operations on them.

Advanced Search:

Advanced search can be used to filter the call records which match a specific criteria. The four filters available now are duration, filesize, recorded by and uploaded from. So if you want to list all the call records uploaded from a specific machine, then select the uploaded from filter and apply the name of the computer in the pattern part. That will list all the records uploaded from a specific machine. Similarly for recorded by. The patterns in the duration and filesize case can be something like ‘>10 MB’ or ’10 < seconds’ etc.

Once the results are displayed, you can apply either use batch operations or sort them using the sorting widget.

To illustrate the use of these widgets, suppose you want to list all the call records made to a certain person which are greater than 5 mins, oldest first. To do this, you first use simple search to list all the records with that persons name, then apply the the duration filter using the advanced search widget and finally apply the sort with oldest. The resulting page will have all files listed. Now if you want to share all of these at one shot, use the batch operations to select all of them and then select “Share All Selected” from the dropdown. Fill in the email address and call record will be shared!

New Storage Plans:

We also added four new plans: the 8 GB @ $5 p/m, 18 GB @ $10 pm and their yearly counterparts. The payment UI has also been changed and now you can check your status once you have subscribed to it, or cancel the subscription if you want to.

Transcription Rates:

The rates of our transcription service has also been changed to 50 cents per minutes instead of the per line. So for a call record of half an hour, the transcript price will be $15.

What’s Next:

As you would notice, the records table has become a bit cramped up because of the sidebar addition. So in the next iteration we are planning to change that. We are also planning to add a mail notification setting so that you can control how you receive mails from CG CRIMS. Watch this space for more.

Hope these changes are useful. Please do send us your feedback on it.

Today, we introduced a new transcript ordering process and UI. Transcripts are one of the premium features we offer and it is the cornerstone for our business model. Till now we had been offering the service for free. But starting today, we have changed our policy to offer only the first transcript for free. For subsequent orders, an advance payment is required. The payments can be made from PayPal as of now.

Ordering Process:

Here’s how the new process works (click on the images to see a larger version).

Once the uploaded file is screened by our system you will get a notification and a link. The link will lead you to the transcripts page. Its a new page and a new menu item.

Click on the ‘Order’ button to place an order. The system will detect if its your first transcript order and offer it for free.

In case this is not the first transcript order then the price will be mentioned and clicking the ‘Order’ button will lead you to the PayPal gateway. Once the order is done, it will provide a confirmation.

If you want to check your transcripts any time then click on the ‘Transcripts’ page on the menu. It will show all the ordered transcripts and the files for which it can be ordered.

Policy Changes:

Only the first transcript will be offered for free and the subsequent ones will be charged on a per line basis. The cost per line is 7 cents. The payment has to be made in advance and the transcript will be delivered within 18 hours after we receive the payment.

We have also relaxed the minimum duration criteria for screening of call records. Now all call records more than 1 MB are screened by our system.

Whats Next:

Ability to view the transcripts, download it, search through it, share it with others etc. If you have any suggestions please send them across.

Important Note:

If you have ordered transcripts in the recent few days then it probably has gone into a black hole due to the changes that were being done. We’d request you to place the transcript order once again. We’ll be mailing you individually as well regarding this.

Please let us know what do you think of these changes. Is this interface simple enough? Is the policy okay? Price high, low? We’d be glad to hear your thoughts on it. Thanks.

Several of our users have asked us how to increase the current limit of 1 GB of storage. So today we released an initial version of our paid storage plans. To keep things simple we only have two plans right now: a 50 GB storage option for $25 per month and a corresponding yearly plan of 500 GB for $250 per year. They have been designed with enterprises in mind who are into lot of calling. Think support, teaching etc. and need to monitor their calls. CRIMS with easy storage, search and sharing is a perfect solution for such needs. So if you are internet business involved in lot of Skype calling, do have a look at our plans. We can add a lot of value to your business.

To upgrade, click log in to your account and click on the ‘Upgrade Plan’ menu item.  Choose any one of the plans and checkout with Paypal. As soon as the payment is processed, we’ll add more storage to your account.

Also, these prices are not the final one. We are still trying to optimize our premium pricing so as to make it as much useful as possible. We might change it in the future. So please send in your feedback if you think its too high. Or too low for that matter. Also, we’ll be adding more features to the payment process to make it smoother. So watch out for further updates.

For our regular users, the 1 GB free plan is still there. So you can still use our system without paying anything!

The Call Graph web service is now open for everyone. Here’s a short introduction.

The purpose: it gives you storage, sharing, search and transcription services for your Skype calls recorded with our Call Graph Skype call recorder. Here’s how it works. You first sign up for the service, then download our Skype call recording client, associate the client with the your account on CRIMS and magically all your Skype calls will start appearing on the site. You can do various things with it after that, the most useful being search and generate transcripts.

The search is done through our keyword mining technology. We process the call record and generate a list of keywords for the call. The call is then indexed with these keywords. So if you used the word “Call Graph” several times during a call then both call and graph would become a keywords for it. Few months down the line if you want to locate this particular call, you just search for graph and you’ll get it back.

The transcripts are a bit more tricky thing though. The first pass is through a Automatic Speech Recognition engine. It processes the call and generates an output. Then we manually proof read the transcripts and correct all the errors. Right now the manual effort required is very high but we are hoping that as we improve the system we will be able to gradually reduce this manual effort.

Its important to note that we do try and protect the confidentiality of the call records. Even though its being heard by a person, we ensure that a single person does not go through the whole call. We use various methods to ensure that. Also, till you order the transcripts the call record is machine processed. So you have a control on which call records can be heard and which one’s cannot be.

Apart from these, you can also choose to just archive your call records and keep them for posterity. Or share them with anyone else without having to attach in your mail or upload it to some file sharing website.

We provide these services for free for the time being. Read up on our FAQ to know more. So please sign up and let us know what you think of it.