Alec Saunders SquawkBox

It’s release time!  Our team has been cranking away on an update to the Calliflower conference calling and document sharing service for the last few weeks.  We’ve made some subtle, but important changes that I’m excited to share with you.

First, we’ve done some things to improve the searchability of conference calls created with Calliflower.  This is the beginning of a wholesale change in how we think about and expose public content, including the conference calls, text chat, and any shared documents, to the web. Previously, all conference calls had been behind the Calliflower login “firewall”, which prevented Google from searching and indexing them. Now, upcoming public calls and past public calls can be accessed without having to have a Calliflower account or to be logged into a Calliflower call.  In fact, those calls are also viewable when in progress, although to participate or listen, users will still have to be logged into Calliflower for the time being.  The same is also true for access to the shared documents – for now, you’ll have to be logged into the call.  

Because Calliflower conference calls can now be indexed by search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo, they are discoverable by people looking for information on particular topics. To help speed up how quickly those calls are indexed, they will also become part of the sitemap of the Calliflower site. Our hope is that this new approach will provide substantial value to our users by helping potential participants  more easily discover conference calls of interest. Our goal is that if you’re holding a teleclass on weight loss, for example, searchers looking for this kind of content will be able to find it within 24 hours of your creating the call. 

Second, we’ve upgraded the document sharing features to include Office 2007 and Mac Office 2008 formats.  At our launch, if you were using those products, you had to down convert your files or save to PDF.  Now you won’t have to take those extra steps.

Thirdly, we’ve overhauled the sign-up process and our website in order to simplify the experience of becoming a Calliflower user.  It was simply too hard.  We watched, listened and responded.

There also numerous bug fixes, including adding Google Chrome as one of our supported browsers. More users are now using Chrome to access Calliflower than are using Safari.   We’ve also made some changes in the interests of usability, such as bumping up the size of fonts on the pages in order to make them more readable.

Let us know what you think!  And see if you can find the Easter egg hidden in the application… hint, it’s a certain vegetable. 

Everyone is looking for a business model these days.  If you don’t have one, you’d better get one in a hurry, unless you’re twitter, of course.

Monday Dopplr did just that, rolling out an online store that allows you to buy things that will make your travel experience better.  For example, you can buy a subscription to Monocle Magazine, travel guides, or  Pat Phelan’s MAXroam SIM to take the bite out of international roaming charges.  Pat’s company Cubic Telecom is partnering with Dopplr, providing them with a Dopplr SIM and website to manage their mobile usage.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Dopplr’s moment of long wow
• MAXroam partners with Dopplr

It’s a sign of the times, as Palringo launches a suite of location services targeted at letting friends know the locations of other friends.  Starting today, users looking down their contact lists see not only the location of their Palringo contacts—typically a town name—but also how far away those contacts are from them.  And in a future update, Palringo will add the ability to be able to locate those friends on a map. 

Dodgeball meets IM.  It sounds a lot like Loopt to me, but I can’t compare as Loopt isn’t yet available anywhere but the US. 

We hosted Lee Dryburgh, the organizer of eComm, on the January 26th SquawkBox conference call.  A wide ranging and well attended conference call, we discussed the origins of the eComm Conference, what to expect from this year’s conference, and highlights of previous years.

Along the way, we also managed to talk about Open networks, telecom and Skype, whether interoperability really matters at all, and the communications continuum idea that folks like Jeff Pulver have been actively promoting. And we managed to convince lee to dust off his crystal ball, and prognosticate on the future of telecommunications. 

eComm will be March 3-5 in San Francisco.  Early bird registrations are open for just two more days – until January 30th.  If you’re in the communications industry, you owe it to yourself to attend this event.

On the Calliflower Conference Call: Jonathan Jensen, Dan York, Jim Courtney, Lee dryburgh, Martyn Davies, Mark Hewitt, Mike Pruyn, Brad Jones, James Body, Ken Camp, Sheryl Breuker, Warren Bent, Todd Spraggins, Jeanette Fisher, TJ Snell, Sergio Meinardi, and Tim Panton.

 

 Squawk Box January 26, Guest Lee Dryburgh [57:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Is there a trend underway?  Mobile startups everywhere are looking beyond cheap voice calls as generous minute packages have niched these players into providing cheap international long distance and not much more.  Om Malik profiles several this morning, including the newly “rebooted” iSkoot.

The conditions are right for these companies.  As first Apple, then Google, RIM, and Nokia all announced new mobile applications “stores”, the shackles imposed by carriers on software developers have gradually loosened.  The iSkoots, Truphones and mig33’s of the world were formerly left to their own resources to gain distribution – cutting deals with carriers, or doing downloads over the air.  Neither option is all that profitable, nor easy for the customer. The environment is now changing.

Having weathered the downturn with large cash reserves, these folks are now starting to deliver real value added service on top of the infrastructure they originally built to provide cheap calls.  And with these fat cash reserves, they’re poised to capitalize on the economy as their less flush competitors experience the … ahem… downside of the “free” business model.  It’s downright Darwinian.

A trend? Definitely.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Fring lays off 10, shows Skype’s partnership with iSkoot pays
• Blackberry StoreFront Accepting App Applications