Alec Saunders SquawkBox

The nature of meetings are changing, my friends.  As work styles have changed, so have meeting styles.  Once upon a time, we used to all gather in a room to converse.  More recently, groups of us have gathered in different places, crowded around a speaker phone and talked with people in far away places crowded around similar boxes.  And today, one of the most common scenarios is to have everyone in a different place — a symptom of the trends toward globalization and telework.

Meetings aren’t singular events.  They’re part of a repetitive cycle that moves business initiatives forward — organize, prepare, facilitate, share information, follow up and so on — that we have dubbed Active Conversations.

Users have told us that their overwhelming unmet need was not to have another point solution, but to have a single tool that could manage these complex Active Conversations. And when we looked at the market, most of the innovations being introduced are actually isolated features in search of integration solution — coordination, the audio call itself, document sharing, and text messaging to name a few examples.

Today at Under the Radar, we’re introducing that complete solution.  We’re making three announcements.

First, Calliflower has gone mobile, and is now accessible wherever you are. You can download it now for free until the end of the year from the Apple app store.  Apple willing, it will be in the store at any moment.

Second, Calliflower Premium is also launching today. Its signature feature is drop dead easy document sharing.  Clientless and seamlessly integrated with Calliflower, it supports collaborative markup, and… because Calliflower Conversations are active conversations, it creates a persistent record of those documents, annotations and markups for later reference.

For $50 dollars per month you get the document sharing plus local dial in numbers, unlimited conference calls and two conference accounts that you can that you can use at anytime. Every additional user on your account costs just 25 dollars more. Users can have a third party organize the meeting on their behalf and can conduct two separate conference calls simultaneously. And the first 30 days are free.

The pricing model for Calliflower Premium is truly disruptive.  In our trials, customers are saving hundreds of dollars per month on their conference calling usage, and they love the new features.  It’s a dynamite combination.

Third, with your Calliflower Premium subscription, you also get access to our global dial-in network.  We have 8 countries here today, but we’ll be rolling more out as fast as possible.

So, there you have it.  A mobile application, a new premium version with a disruptive pricing model, and a global expansion.  We’ve been really busy for the last few months, but this particular combination of document sharing, unlimited flat rate calling and a mobile application are just what customers have told us they wanted.  Let us know what YOU think!

One of the hallmarks of this US Presidential Election has been the incredibly effective use of the internet by the Obama campaign.  This particular video, by moveon.org, lets you send a customized message out to your slacker friends… the ones who might not be planning to vote.

Viral video is nothing new of course.  However, this one is spreading like wildfire.  Why?  MoveOn encourages you to load your Yahoo, AOL or Hotmail address book into their site and send custom messages to ALL of your friends.  As I was watching the site, the counter online seemed to be sending out 100 new custom videos every 5 to 6 seconds.  Over 13.5 million videos sent so far.

Over the last week we’ve had several large (100+ participants), but private, conference calls happen on Calliflower.  Without violating the privacy of the parties involved (no, I won’t say whether it was Democrats, or Republicans, where they were calling from or when), it appears that youth campaigns in this presidential election have discovered Calliflower conference calls.  With Calliflower’s integration with Facebook, these live conference calls are an ideal adjunct to the groups, fan pages, and other features already provided by Facebook.

Need to organize a conference call for a large group of people?  Check Calliflower out on the web, or try Calliflower conference calls on Facebook.

We discuss the Wall Street Journal Business Technology blog piece on whether virtual worlds have a place in business communication.

We also talked through some of the latest insanity from the entertainment industry:

Quote Unquote records is a label that provides it’s music under a creative commons license. For the last week, their website has been down, the target of an RIAA copyright complaint.  Naturally, they’re furious, but their ISP isn’t putting the site back up.

And… Blu-ray is bombing.  Because of the economic downturn, consumers simply aren’t moving to the new, and more expensive, format.

The RIAA now wants to avoid trial in Maverick v. Harper.  They’re worried, apparently, that a trial might undermine the bedrock of their copyright infringement cases, which is that “making a file available on a P2P network” constitutes infringement.

And finally we discussed the US election, and Barack Obama’s promise to appoint a CTO for the USA.

On the Calliflower Conference Call: Dan York, Jeb Brilliant, Bill Volk, Sergio Meinardi, Mark Hewitt and Phil Wolff.

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 Squawk Box October 20 [41:48m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This morning we talked about some of the stories that are emerging about the use of technology in politics.  Barack Obama’s use of SMS to announce Joe Biden as his running mate, Microsoft’s deployment of a voter registration application on XBOX, and the novel ways that cellular phones are being used on the convention floor.

The other topic?  Tomorrow is Skype’s 5th anniversary.  How has Skype changed your world?  the communications industry?

On the conference call today: Dan York, James Body, Jim Courtney, Bill Volk, Jonathan Jensen, Sheryl Breuker, Jeanette Fisher, Dave Brown

 

 Squawk Box August 28 [37:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download