Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Late last week, we crossed another milestone with Calliflower.  As customers have discovered the tremendous savings Calliflower can deliver for international conference calls, plus the rich and engaging Calliflower feature set, they have driven demand for new points of presence. We’ve been only too happy to comply, adding local dial numbers wherever we can in conjunction with our partner Voxbone. 

Today’s news is that Calliflower is now available in 30 countries, and more than 100 cities around the world.  As of today, we are providing dial-in access to Calliflower in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.  To see the full list of cities, visit the Calliflower website.  In many countries the service is an ordinary local dial call.  However, in some instances we’ve had to deploy a “national” number, which carries a premium charge.

Calliflower’s flat-rate conference call model just makes sense for international calls. For many customers it’s also the most cost effective for domestic conference calling as well.  For details, check out What are the real costs of free conference call services? on the Calliflower blog.  You might be surprised by what you learn. 

I was a little irritated at all the Skype for iPhone news that popped up over the weekend.  After all, Skype usually at least gives me the courtesy of a heads-up, and the opportunity to test drive their new software. Not a peep, however. 

And then last night, at around midnight, the first twitter reports started to emerge that Skype for iPhone was available on the App Store.  No joy for me.  I couldn’t find it.  I put it down to Apple or Skype choosing a rolling launch – not an uncommon strategy.

But this morning?  Well, the IM nets and twitter were all alive with reports that Skype for iPhone was available globally… just not here in Canada.  And the culprit?  A lot of fingers pointed at Rogers Wireless, but in fact patents are the real reason.  TMCNet’s Tom Keating was able to eek a little more information out of Skype, including the details that the patent problem is codec related. 

There have been, over the years, a number of very sharp vendors of codec technologies in this country. It’s not surprising that some unique intellectual property has been deeveloped here.  It is surprising, however, that a patent might have issued in Canada, but not elsewhere, unless that patent is fairly recent.

And it’s irritating to be cut off from yet another piece of technology that everyone else in the world can access over intellectual property issues… again.

Humbug.

For some time now, Calliflower has had two versions – a premium conference calling and webinar service, and a free conference calling service.  Today we added advertising to our free conference call service.  Users of the free service will now see a banner add below the call participants, and a skyscraper to the right of the call. 

So why did we do this?  After all, Calliflower has had a free conference call service since first launching on Facebook in September of 2007.  Well, our free service has been funded by a share of the long distance charges that users pay in order to access it.  The carrier that bills you for that call gives some of the revenue that they receive from you to the carrier that hosts our bridge, and we get a percentage of that charge.  It’s an efficient mechanism which is legally entrenched in the United States FCC settlement and tariff rules that ensures the everyone can afford to run a service like ours and get paid.

Except that the big guys – the AT&T‘s of the world — haven’t been paying their bills. Not just for a short period of time, either. 

So we were faced with a choice.  Close down the free service, or find another way to fund it.  We’ve chosen to try advertising.

For business users who might not wish to have their users and customers look at advertising during the call, Calliflower Premium will remain ad free.  And for the teleseminar leaders, church groups, non-profits and others who use Calliflower’s free conference call service today, we hope that the advertisements are discrete enough that they don’t interfere with your enjoyment and use of the service.

Naturally, we’ll be listening very carefully to all of your feedback, good and bad, on this move.  Let us know your thoughts.

This morning started like any other, and then rapidly blew itself to bits.  I’m not disappointed, though.  In fact, I’m rather pleased at the way that the whole thing has played out.

At 7:15 AM, cup of coffee in hand, I sat down to my PC to find email from iotum Chair Randall Howard letting me know that sometime after midnight last night Calliflower Mobile for iPhone had been released to the Apple iPhone App Store.  Perhaps Apple notified us, I don’t know. In any case, our development director, Noam, is on vacation this week and we were all in the dark.

By 7:30 we had a plan, including drafting a press release and letting folks in the industry know that we had released.  At 8:22 I forwarded the release internally, and then hit the treadmill for a run, which I cut short after 35 minutes.  There wasn’t anything worth watching on TV anyway.

At 9:07 we discussed feedback on the first draft briefly.  Randall and I debated the merits of asking Apple for a quote for the release. In the interests of timeliness we decided not to.  I’ve worked in and with big corporations – by the time you get a quote drafted, up the corporate hierarchy and approved by legal, it’s a two day process.  We didn’t have two days.

An hour later, the second draft was done and over to Andy Abramson’s team at Comunicano.  And by 11:30 AM, or 8:30 Pacific Time, Sue Huss had the release out, in between dropping children at school.

It’s a testament to the professionalism of the Comunicano team, and the ability of small players like ourselves to react quickly.

And Calliflower on iPhone – well, let me just say that you’re going to love it.  We’ve remained faithful to the Calliflower experience on the web, while taking full advantage of the iPhone experience giving you the hands down BEST mobile conferencing experience ever.  Here’s a few examples of what I mean.

	Here’s the login screen.  It’s a faithful replica of the colors and people on our web page.
	And here’s the public calls view.  It’s a scrollable window, and each of the calls can be accessed by touching the chevron on the right hand side of the screen.  Across the bottom, you can access controls to view upcoming calls, view previous calls, and create a new call.
	And here’s the “in-call” view.  Just as you can on the web, you can see everyone who is currently on the call. To mute a line, just tap the person’s image on the screen.  To unmute, tap again.  Below the participants, you can also see the chat wall.  Below that you can access the agenda, recordings and controls for the call.
	Tapping on the controls icon at the bottom produces an overlay.  Here you can see the moderator controls allowing you to mute and unmute all lines, or start the recording.  And if you touch the text entry box at the top, the iPhone keyboard will pop up allowing you to add text to the chat wall.
	And of course, just as on the web, if you make a recording of a call, it’s accessible immediately afterward.  The clip can be downloaded and played immediately using the iPhone media player.

There really aren’t any compromises, except that if you’re a Calliflower Premium customer you won’t be able to share documents on your iPhone.  At least, not yet.  But you can still use the network of international conference calling numbers, and all the North American local dial numbers.

To try Calliflower on your iPhone, go to the AppStore and search on Calliflower, or simply click this link.

Let us know what you think!

The Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance has announced today that they have adopted Calliflower as part of their Web 2.0 Office. As part of the agreement,  not only will CATA use Calliflower for its own calls, CATA will also market Calliflower to its 28,500 members, becoming the first official reseller of Calliflower.  This is our first step in building an affiliate marketing channel for Calliflower, and CATA is our first affiliate member. 

We first started working with John Reid and the CATA team last summer as they were building a showcase for Web 2.0 office technologies that they described as the “Bedouin Office”.  The momentum to do this deal was really enhanced by their successful internal use, making for a really basis to launch Calliflower as a member benefit.  In John’s own words:

"We particularly like the Calliflower Web interface— it’s an easy to use, interactive dashboard that makes organizing and participating in multiparty calls simple and engaging. There is also a richer call management feature set compared to our previous service. We save thousand of dollars while adding Web 2.0 collaboration power."

In today’s environment what could be better than saving thousands of dollars, and getting more for your money at the same time?