Alec Saunders SquawkBox

We had another great SquawkBox this morning, with as many as 21 people on the line.  My guests were Jon Arnold of J Arnold and Associates, and Jon's colleague and business partner Marc Robins of Robins Group.  The focus of the call was two fold.  We talked about the conferences people have been attending in the last couple of weeks — eComm, VoiceCon and VON.x.  And we also talked about the launch of Jon and Marc's new venture, IP Communications Insights.

One of the things that emerges in the call is that a lot of people are concerned about the future of the VON show.  People passionately want to see the industry innovation focus return to VON. It's good to see such strong support for VON from innovators in the industry. One of the things that we discussed was how to get the most out of a tradeshow.  As James Body and I both said on the call, the opportunities were there to have great meetings.  I'm pretty unequivocal about tradeshow investments.  If you spend the money to go to a show, and don't make the effort to pre-book the meetings, make the announcements and drive traffic to your exhibit, then you're wasting your time.  From my perspective VON was a quality networking opportunity and I made the most of it.

Enjoy the call.  There are lots of perspectives to be heard.

 

 Squawk Box March 26 [58:16m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I was just chatting with my brother Matthew last night about the problems we're having with Safari.  Indeed, he tells me that his company (the award winning Drupal site developer pingVision) has similar headaches.  And this morning, Computerworld reports the same — that many web sites don't work under Safari. Flash, in particular, seems to be a problem. That's been our experience also, as the iotum FREE Conference Calls application displays but doesn't function under Safari.  Our advice to Macintosh users has been to use Firefox. 

Microsoft's response was essentially "nobody uses Safari, so we're not working on it right now".  That may not be enough, however, as the only browser available on iPhone is Safari.  Suddenly Apple's choice to push Safari to Windows desktop is looking like a very smart way to push Safari usage numbers high and encourage developers to optimize sites for their red-hot phone. 

I finally had the opportunity to catch up with Fonolo's Shai Berger last week at the VON.x show, and learn what they're all about.  Fonolo's "Deep dialing" let's users skip the IVR tree of the companies that they dial in to, and just reach the person they need to reach.  A user starts by finding the company he needs on the Fonolo Web site, then visually scans through the phone menu and clicks on the appropriate point. Fonolo will then dial the company, navigate the phone system and call the user’s phone. When the user answers, he will be connected to the desired point in the menu. Furthermore, the user can bookmark this point inside the menu so that in the future, it is only a click away. With Fonolo, users can navigate the call-path options visually, on a computer or mobile device, then click to be connected directly, rather than plodding through the menus step-by-step.

It's like a search engine spider that catalogs the worlds IVR trees, rather than web sites.  What a clever idea!

In private beta now (sign up here), they expect to be out later this year.