Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

Innovation: Ready for the number crunch

Nuala Moran
Saturday 22 October 1994 23:02 BST
Comments

Your support helps us to tell the story

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.

Your support makes all the difference.

FACED with the chore of changing all the telephone numbers in its databases in preparation for Phoneday, the telemarketing company Printware has devised an automatic number conversion program, writes Nuala Moran.

In case the advertising blitz has passed you by, all dialling codes in the UK have changed, and from 16 April next year the previous codes will no longer function.

The change has been sold as a simple matter of putting a 1 after the 0 of the area code. In reality some cities, including Sheffield, Leeds and Bristol, have completely new codes, and international numbers have changed from 010 to 00. Mobile phone numbers and 79 special telephone services, such as Freefone and information lines, stay the same.

'We manage a number of telemarketing databases and realised there was no way in which we could even hope to manually change all the numbers we store,' said Kevin Jones, managing director of Printware in Southsea.

The company is now selling its Phoneday software package for pounds 199.

Phoneday can process 1,000 records per second and is compatible with popular database systems such as Dbase, Paradox, Access, Clipper and Telemagic.

It will clean up databases by listing invalid numbers. This will help companies that never caught up with the last code change, when London prefixes became 071 and 081.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in