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. 

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.

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.

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!

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?

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. 

My first impressions of Windows 7 are pretty positive. 

I installed the software in a separate disk partition on a desktop PC at my home.  This PC is an Acer M5620 desktop with the Intel Q6600 Core2 Quad processor, four gigabytes of memory, 500G SATA hard disk and a dual-head ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro graphics card.  The Windows 7 installer is nearly identical to the Windows Vista installer, which means that the process is pretty painless.  You can start it, and go have coffee or a run, which is what I did.

The installation missed a few key drivers. 

• It failed to detect my HP Color Laserjet CLJ1600 printer. The Windows Vista x64 driver for the CLJ1600 worked just fine, however.
• It had no drivers for the Intel ICH9 family of host controllers, which meant that the system management bus had no driver whatsoever.  Sevenforums.com, however, had a link to a full set of Intel SM bus drivers for Windows 7. 
• It misidentified my Samson C01-U condenser microphone as an “other” device.  Interestingly, although Skype can see the C01-U as a microphone, Windows 7 provides no volume input controls for it. 

Beta performance is really no better than Windows Vista, and perhaps a little worse. However, this is beta code.  Microsoft has a history of delaying optimization of the code until just before release. 

• Windows Experience Index score under Windows Vista is 5.1 for this hardware, but just 2.9 under Windows 7.  The offending score is hard disk performance.  I assume that Windows 7 is simply missing an optimized version of a low level system driver such as a bus driver or hard disk controller.
• Boot times were noticeably poorer under Windows 7 compared to Windows Vista, despite Microsoft’s claims to have optimized this aspect of the experience.  I timed both Windows 7 and Vista from the point of pressing the enter key at the dual-boot screen to the login screen, and from the entry of a password into the login screen to the point that the Start button became active.  Windows 7 scored 52 seconds from cold start to the login screen, and 17 seconds from the login screen to the start button active.  On Vista, however, the times were 34 seconds and 12 seconds. 

Visually, Windows 7 is very similar to Vista, with some small improvements.  For example:

• The task bar and system tray have been optimized.  Gone are the text labels in the task bar. Each icon on the bar represents a single application, and if an application has multiple tabs, the pop-up preview for that application shows all the tabs. Right clicking on the icon produces a “jump list” which has all of the recently accessed documents for that application.  Support for these features must be implemented by the application, which means that few of the applications you use on a day to day basis will benefit immediately.

Display tabs opened in IE 8

Jump list for the file manager.

• The system tray now has a small pop-up so that all of the items that run as background processes, but aren’t required day to day, can be hidden on a menu out of site.  An on the right side of the system tray, beside the clock, is a small vertical bar that can be used to minimize all windows, or if you hover the mouse pointer over it, it will turn the Windows transparent so the desktop itself is visible.

System tray with pop-up.

• And why would you want to make the Windows transparent?  To see your gadgets.  Gone is the Windows Vista sidebar.  Now gadgets can be installed anywhere on the screen in their minimized or maximized forms.
• Windows that are opened now have some new behaviours.  When you drag a window to the left or right, eventually it will snap to the side, consuming exactly 50% of the desktop.  If you drag it up to the top of the screen it will maximize.  Dragging it down will make it minimize.  If those new behaviours seem superfluous, it’s probably because you’re still using a mouse.  Windows 7 includes support for touch screens, and these new Window gestures are clearly targeted at the finger-pointing crowd. 

There are lots of other small changes throughout.  Suffice it to say, if you’re a Windows Vista user, Windows 7 isn’t going to feel like a radical change.  Rather, it will seem to be a logical and useful refinement. 

Software compatibility seems to be quite good.  I installed Office 2007, Windows Live Sync, Live Mesh, Skype, Tweetdeck (plus Adobe Air), iTunes, Safari, and Firefox and experienced no problems.  The major problems I encountered were:

• Google Chrome (my preferred browser these days) just flat out doesn’t work.  Windows 7 warns of compatibility problems, and indeed there are.  Chrome doesn’t display any web pages, at all.  Period.
• Browsing to Google Analytics with the IE 8 beta included in Windows 7 caused IE 8 to crash.  The black bar in the image below is IE 8’s attempt to render the performance graph.  The same page was easily rendered in Firefox and Safari however.

IE 8 failure to render Google Analytics page.

• In general, IE 8 beta has intermittent compatibility problems with web sites under Windows 7.  For example, it renders several of the pages in our own Calliflower conference call service incorrectly.  Users of Windows 7 will want to use IE 8 as the primary browser in order to use the tabbed display of open sites in the task bar, but have a backup like Firefox or Safari (but unfortunately not Chrome).

Some of the built-in Windows applets and features also get updates.  For example:

• Paint now sports a ribbon interface reminiscent of Office 2007.  This is a welcome update.  Paint hasn’t fundamentally changed since Windows 3.1.
• The printers window has now been rechristened as the “Device Deck” and shows all of the devices attached to the computer. 
• Windows Media Center has an updated look and feel as well, with an apparently more internet-centric focus. 

There are some new applets as well:

• A handy snip tool that lets you quickly capture images from the screen.  This is way more convenient that shift-print-screen, paste into paint, followed by select / copy, which is the way most people do this.
• A handy ISO burner.  If you download an ISO file (for example, the Windows 7 beta DVD!) you can now burn it directly to media without needing to buy a copy of Nero or some other DVD burning tool.
• A sticky note tool that lets you tack notes to yourself on the screen.  Again, way handier than opening notepad, which is what I do now.

Power management improvements seem to be on the way with Windows 7 also.  Although the Acer has the hardware to support sleep states, Windows Vista never supported it well.  I would regularly find the PC hung over night and need to reboot it in the morning, unable to return it from the sleep state. I was pleasantly surprised this morning to find that Windows 7 has no such problems.

Security is also apparently a focus.  The new “Action Center” consolidates UI for security and trouble shooting into one system tray icon.  When clicked it produces a window enumerating all of the fixes and issues that it has found. 

Note that Microsoft is working with Kaspersky, AVG, and Norton to provide anti-virus support for Windows 7 users.

So should you install Windows 7 beta?  If you’re a savvy PC user, comfortable with searching for drivers that may not be in the current release, and don’t mind dealing with a few small bugs, by all means.  It’s stable, compatible with the software that most people use on a day to day basis, and provides some nice enhancements to the Windows Vista experience.  Do, however, install it in a separate partition if you can.  Don’t start off by upgrading a Vista PC.  And back-up before you do anything. 

There’s a small history lession in all this.  If you can remember back to the dark ages of the PC industry, in 1990 Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0.  A technically ambitious product for its time, it was the first version of Windows to incorporate protected mode memory management.  Needless to say, it wasn’t perfect.  Not until Windows 3.1 – the “dot” release — shipped in the spring of 1992 were the complaints about 3.0 were finally put to bed.  Windows 3.1 introduced some minor user interface changes, but fundamentally it was the release that fixed the Windows 3.0 problems. 

Sound familiar? 

Based on what I’ve seen in the last 24 hours, when Windows 7 eventually ships it should put to bed the complaints about Windows Vista once and for all. Windows 7 is the “dot” release to Windows Vista.

1. Help homeless people.
2. Test the effectiveness of social media awareness campaigns.
3. Promote an upcoming conference.

Well, if you’re Lee Dryburgh, you craft an experiment.  Lee’s trying to construct an opt-in mailing list for the eComm 2009 conference.  He’s calculated the cost of buying and filtering an opt-in email list, and will donate that cost to the Shelter Network instead, using social media techniques instead to achieve his goal.  

He’s asked a group of social media gurus (see the list below) to help, and he’s asked the rest of us to “blog this, Twitter this, email this to friends, IM it, Facebook share it, Digg it, Reddit – anything and everything across the social media space that you think could be effective.”

Adam Broitman, Ayelet Noff, Ben Grossman, Brian Reich, Brian Solis, Carlos Hernandez, Chris Brogan, Chris Heuer,David Berkowitz, Eric Weaver, Gradon Tripp, Greg Verdino, Howard Greenstein,Laura Fitton, Jeff Pulver, Jeffrey Sass, Jeremiah Owyang, Jeremy Vaught, Jim Benson, Justin Levy, Rebecca Bollwitt, Robert Scoble, Robin Good, Steve Rubel,Susan Etlinger and Tim O’Reilly.

So far eight of these folks have responded!  Good on you Lee.

So how about it folks?  Let’s blog it, twitter it, email it, IM it, share it, Digg it, Reddit….

Specifically, three announcements were made:

Nokia unveiled the 5800 XpressMusic (press release, datasheet).  It’s the first mass-market device from Nokia with touch-screen technology.  As you can see from the video, it looks very familiar, being a Symbian OS with touch capabilities built in.  At the same time, it has some familiar elements of other touch screen interfaces we’ve seen such as easy fingertip transitions.  You might also note in the video that at times the demonstrator seems to be pushing on the screen.  The 5800 XpressMusic also includes haptics to provide tactile feedback to the user. Check it out.

Comes with Music (press release, backgrounder) is Nokia’s new digital entertainment service.  When you buy a supported Nokia device, including the NSeries, any of the XPressMusic phones and some other mass market phones, Nokia gives you access to the Nokia Music store at no additional charge for an entire year.  Download (and keep) as many tracks as you like. This is not a subscription.  You get to download and keep as many tracks as your heart desires. Tracks are delivered in Windows Media format, with DRM.

S60 5th Edition (press release) was also introduced.  This latest operating system release includes support for new displays, the touch UI, a widescreen mode, a variety of new sensor support, and updated applications and browser support.  Wonderfully cool things are possible with the new sensor support, like being able to stop the ringer by picking the phone up and putting it back down face down.

A touch screen phone and operating system were not unexpected.  After all, Nokia had to respond to Apple’s phenomenal success with iPhone.  However, the gutsy decision to give away the music goes straight after Apple’s cash cow, iTunes.

Scorched earth is a powerful offensive posture.  One wonders what kind of deal with the devil RIAA Nokia had to agree to in order to gain the rights to distribute all those tracks for no money… and what the impact will be on their bottom line.

Look for 5800 XpressMusic devices with North American standard radios to land here Q1 2009. Exciting times are ahead.

Related links:

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic aka the Tube released plus first hands-on

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic: Hands-on With Nokia’s First S60 Touch Phone

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic hands-on

After studying feedback from over 350,000 users, including 50,000 new skype users, they’ve returned some features that were missing from Skype 4.0 beta 1, giving it a more familiar look and feel.  Here’s Skype’s Product Manager for their Windows products, Mike Bartlett, to explain more.

I’ve been using the beta privately for the last couple of days.  The changes, while subtle, absolutely do improve the Skype experience.  My favorite is the compact view, which is a return to something more akin to the familiar old Skype user interface. See below:

The bottom line? According to a conversation I had with Mike earlier this week, they’re seeing more users using more types of communications, including a dramatic spike in video usage.  Perhaps more important from a corporate perspective, they’re also seeing a spike in users choosing paid-for premium services.

Join me tomorrow morning on the SquawkBox where Mike will be our guest.  And if you want to take the beta for a spin beforehand, download it here when available.