PhoneSeal
Analyzers Are Free
To
further help you make a good purchase decision, the Analyzer
from each PhoneSeal Suite can be downloaded separately for free:
- PhoneSeal
Analyzer Standard
- PhoneSeal
Analyzer Advanced
- PhoneSeal
Analyzer Professional
These will demonstrate for you all the same features from that
product suite, but will not make corrections.
Visit the PhoneSeal pricing page for
pricing information for the full suites.
Feature
definitions
- ASCII
file access
- ODBC
Access
- Multiple
Phone Numbers Per Record
- Separate
Area Code Fields
- You
can add your own phone number formats
- Counts
and Lists
- Ambiguous
Number Lists
- Area
Code Splits back to 1990
- File
and record-specific date handling
- Starting
Date For Applying Area Code Splits
- Starting
and Ending Dates
- A
publisher's dream: Future phone lists
- Can
use ZIP code to add area codes
- Can
use ZIP code to resolve area code ambiguity
- High
speed engine, great for large files
- Reverse
area code look-ups (Desktop only)
- Simple
batch processing
- Incongruency
messages
- Duplicate Output
for Ambiguous Numbers (text only)
- More
updates
1.
ASCII file access
All
PhoneSeal suites will read comma-separated and
tab-separated text files with any extension (.txt, .csv,
and so on).
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2.
ODBC Access
ODBC
stands for Open DataBase Connectivity. The majority of database
vendors, such as Microsoft Oracle SyBase and IBM support ODBC.
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3.
Multiple Phone Numbers Per Record
Typically
people have a voice number, a fax number, and sometimes a mobile
number or more. PhoneSeal can handle up to six phone numbers
per record. (If you have more than six, you will need to run
PhoneSeal more than once.)
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4.
Separate Area Code Fields
If
you have one field for the area code and another field for the
rest of the number, PhoneSeal can combine the two fields, perform
the correction, and then update the area code field separately.
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Some
of you have contacted us with various phone number formats that
PhoneSeal doesn't support. With PhoneSeal Professional, you
can add your own formats. This is very useful if you have special
nonstandard prefixes (say for international codes) or extensions,
or anything else that would make the number unrecognizable as
a phone number.
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6.
Counts and Lists of Corrected and Ambiguous Numbers
PhoneSeal
will tell you the total number of phone numbers it found, the
total number that were corrected, and the total number that
were ambiguous. In addition, PhoneSeal will provide complete
lists of all the ambiguous numbers found and the all numbers
that were changed, with old number and new number.
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7.
Ambiguous Numbers Lists
Ambiguous
numbers arise because area codes can split multiple times. See
ambiguous numbers page for a complete
explanation.
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The
regular PhoneSeal suite tracks area code splits since January,
1995. PhoneSeal Professional tracks area code splits since January
1990.
Interesting
aside: We get asked why we don't put the same database into
the standard PhoneSeal Suite. If you think about it for just
a moment, you will realize that the standard PhoneSeal suite,
which doesn't have Time Traveler, assumes that ANY number in
the file could date from pre-1995, and logs any exchanges that
have had double-changes in that area code since 1995 as ambiguous.
If we take the database back to 1990 for the regular PhoneSeal
suite, then the number of ambiguities in PhoneSeal would rise.
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Most
of the new features in PhoneSeal are geared towards reducing
the amount of effort you need to put into correcting your telephone
numbers. To explain this next feature, we need to introduce
the concept of "ambiguity". To get things started, here is a
quick example to explain how numbers become "ambiguous", and
why it's a problem.
If
you put the phone number 205-296-1111 into PhoneSeal Desktop,
it will report:
According to our records:
If phone number 205-296-1111 is older than 5/13/95, it has
changed to 334-296-1111.
If phone number 334-296-1111 is older than 1/7/02, it has
changed to 251-296-1111.
If phone number 205-296-1111 is older than 9/27/98, it has
changed to 256-296-1111.
With
no further information, these numbers must be called until the
correct number answers.
In
our testing, we have found that about 0.3% of telephone numbers
are ambiguous in our files, but it varies quite a lot. This
varies depending on the area: some parts of the country have
had more turmoil than others.
In
a database of 10,000 telephone numbers, we would expect roughly
30 ambiguous numbers. This would only take a matter of minutes
to call through and correct.
But
in a database of 1,000,000 numbers, we would expect about 30,000
ambiguous numbers! Now we have a major administrative problem,
and file correction and resuscitation becomes very labor intensive,
and very expensive!
It
is estimated that it costs between $6 and $14 to manually correct
a telephone number, by the time you add burdened overhead costs
(management, rent, electricity, and so on, on top of the cost
of the actual person doing the telephoning). This gets expensive
fast. It is also very slow. Very large files take months to
correct.
This
is where Time Traveler shines. It is date-sensitive. If you
give Time Traveler the date when the phone number was "known
good", PhoneSeal Professional will go back to that particular
date, and look for any changes that would have affected that
phone number as it travels forward in time.
Which
reduces the ambiguities down to none! (Usually -- in rare cases
you can run into 612 and 914 numbers where the split was drawn,
not just between exchanges, but within them as well. But the
ZIP Checker, described below, can help resolve these).
Time
Traveler allows dates to be used on either a per-record or per-file
basis. So Time Traveler can correct files where the date is
kept in each record, or alternatively, where an entire file
dates from a specific date, like, say, July 1997.
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10.
Starting Date For Applying Area Code Splits
If
you know that no numbers in your file or database were entered
more than, say, 4 years ago (all numbers were entered in the
last 4 years), then you can tell PhoneSeal to use only splits
for the last 4 years.
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11.
Starting and Ending Dates
PhoneSeal
Advanced and Professional allow you to put both starting and
ending dates on the file. This is useful if you know that information.
PhoneSeal
Advanced and Professional will use dates from your file or database
itself. The date can either specify the exact date that the
phone number was updated, or an upper bound (the last date the
whole record was updated) or a lower bound (the date the whole
record was created.)
For
more information, see
* FAQ on Date Bracketing
* Comprehensive Correction Process
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The
PhoneSeal Professional list of area code splits contains information
on changes that will take place in the future.
PhoneSeal
Professional allows files to be converted to a date up to 6
months in the future. This is a very useful feature for paper
publishers, who are often editing their publications months
in advance of the actual distribution date.
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Some
of you have databases where some of the phone numbers are missing
the area code. Maybe the person entering the number assumed
you knew their local area code, but you don't know anymore.
PhoneSeal Professional now has a built-in list of ZIP codes
and their area codes. It'll assign area codes based on the ZIP
code, and even check to see if the new phone number has been
involved in recent splits.
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PhoneSeal Professional can also use ZipChecker
to correct ambiguous area codes.
If you don't have a date per record, ambiguities will still
happen. PhoneSeal Professional has the option to use ZipChecker
to choose the correct the area code where there are ambiguous
area codes.
ZipChecker and TimeTraveler features can be used together. In
that case, the ZIP code is used only when ambiguities remain
after using the date.
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When
you're only processing a few thousand or tens of thousands of
numbers, processing speed is not very important. However, when
dealing with millions of numbers, what took 30 minutes on a
smaller file turns into a nightmare! We had one customer who
ran PhoneSeal Analyzer on a file with 6.5 million numbers, and
it took about 39 hours!
For
PhoneSeal Professional, we rewrote the area code translation
engine using advanced techniques in the software. With the new
"fast" engine, that 39 hour task takes less than an hour. With
text (.txt) or comma separated values (.csv) files, PhoneSeal
Pro is about 30 times faster. On indexed databases, PhoneSeal
Professional is about 10 times faster. The database manager,
which is beyond our control, slows things down.
If
the phone number fields in the database are not indexed, PhoneSeal
still runs very slowly. So for speed, either use text files
or add indexes in your database to the phone number fields.
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Reverse
lookups show the splits a current number has gone through in
the past. Enter the current number, and PhoneSeal Desktop Professional
will give the history.
If
you enter a current telephone number, it shows whether that
number is potentially the derivative of a past split.
Desktop
Professional uses the same area code database as the rest of
the PhoneSeal Professional suite, which goes back to 1990.
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With simple batch processing,
you can specify a number of files or databases to be processed all at once. This
is useful if you have phone numbers in many files or databases, rather than just
one or two.
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Incongruency messages
usually indicate that you have a phone number and zip code mismatch.
These messages appear in the error log along with other error messages. What actually
generates them is an "incongruency" between three databases. The first two are internal
to PhoneSeal: The area code split database, and the area code/zip code database.
The third database is yours: your phone number and address data. In an ideal world,
the three would always match up, and an incongruency error would never occur.
We originally added the incongruency messages to test the accuracy of our data --
the incongruency messages serve as a "reality check" to make sure our area code split
data and zip code data match the real world. This is why the error log header tells
you to send us the incongruency messages. In practice, we find few people send
us incongruency messages. In practice, the messages usually indicate that you
have a phone number for one office and a zip code for a different office. Or
if the phone number is residential, it usually means the person moved, and the
address was changed but the phone number wasn't. Or some other situation where
your addresses and phone numbers become mismatched. Many people find PhoneSeal's
ability to find these numbers in big databases very valuable.
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In the case of
an ambiguous number, PhoneSeal can output the same
row of data multiple times, with each row having a different area code. This is
most useful for people with predictive dialers, as it will instruct the
predictive dialer to call all possible ambiguous numbers, and remove the
numbers that don't work automatically.
This feature
works only on text files, so if you are using a database system you will need
to export to text, correct your numbers, and import back.
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With
PhoneSeal Professional, PhoneSeal is updated with new area code
splits and new ZIP codes 6 times per year, rather than 4, and
you get both area code split and ZIP updates.
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choose which PhoneSeal product you would like information on.
