Another day, another airport/meeting/biz plan.
So, if you are bored, here is something to consider for your spare time: Blow up the voice conferencing space.
Simple use case:
You want to have a conference call with three people. Today, you send out a meeting request with the number, people accept and then at call time, people dial the number, enter the id/pin and do the call.
We can put a man on the moon and we're typing in all these numbers?
How about this:
In Outlook you invite people to a conference call. Everybody accepts. Then, when call time is ready, the alert pops up on your desk (laptop/desktop) and your Blackberry and your home computer. Whichever one you select, has that device/location initiate the call.
The 'system' pulls the the attendees phones together behind the scenes and the call happens. No dialing numbers, etc.
Yes, there are ways to do this today, I know. But it is not mainstream and there are a ton of other smart things you can do/add to this.
In the words of Jason and Mike: Conference call dialing must die!
Amen!
This reminds of the underlying technology (at one point) used in Alec Saunders iotum application. Using "presence" to pull conferences together, the integration between Tungle and Calliflower [ http://www.calliflower.com/ ] and Exchange would be great.
Scheduling across the corporate boundary is still a huge difficulty. Tungle is ok, but the requirement to install software to use is less than desireable. There have to be better ways to do this.
Posted by: David Crow | August 12, 2008 at 12:00
I think the company I work for has only 15 or so lines out for over 40 employees...I can imagine what would have if our CEO tied up 10 or so of them.
Or are you suggesting setting up a call center that takes a bunch of numbers and dial them? I think you would need to have this since most companies have limited dial out lines. This involves some serious logistics to handle multiple numbers, extensions, live voice operators etc.
Posted by: Billy | August 12, 2008 at 12:56
Send a meeting request to all people for the conference
Open Skype - conference in up to 10 people.
Total cost: $0
Keep the conference call down to less than 5 people. More than that is total confusion anyway and the meeting will run over.
Posted by: Peter Cranstone | August 12, 2008 at 13:23
Hi Peter,
The point of the note was really getting the technology to do way way more than it does today. Way more. Skype is still keystrokes.
Thanks for stopping by
Posted by: Rick Segal | August 12, 2008 at 16:55
Rick,
In the time it takes you and I to connect to that conference call,
Our kids (OK - I don't know if you have kids!) have already reached level 5 of whichever game they are playing On Microsoft X-Box live, with a shared visual environment to boot. Can we say “collaboration”?
Posted by: Elliot Ross | August 13, 2008 at 09:16
Rick,
Thinking about your mention earlier of the BackCheck.net folks, it seems there is an easier "social" aspect of it (similar to Tungle mentioned above).
A simple availability/presence tag with preferred method of contact, that you flip on and as soon as everybody is "on" then it calls. You could even have simple 5-minute alarms ("We'll call in 5 minutes") via secondary systems (SMS, email, voice).
As someone who rarely uses phones, I can't appreciate the problem but I'm surprised in this land of easy VoIP access (asterisk is cake, SIP providers are a dime a dozen) I'm amazed this is still an issue.
But then again, I find myself amazed more often than not.
Posted by: J. Shirley | August 14, 2008 at 11:57
@Peter Cranstone:
I've tried to use Skype for conference calls. Can't rely on the quality. Maybe if it's just an internal discussion, ok. But for anything sensitive, you just can't rely on "best-efforts" voip.
Last thing you want to do, when you finally got key people from your customers/investors together on a call, is spend the first few minutes going "can you hear me?" and fiddling with headsets, etc.
Posted by: Shai Berger | August 16, 2008 at 21:59
I have apparently done a piss-poor job of marketing or service.
The service you have described already exists, it's called Lypp: http://lypp.com.
We have 350+ business customers in Canada that feel the same way you do. They seem to be quite happy with the service considering we have had zero churn, not one cancellation since we opened the doors in February.
If you want an account simply download the Outlook add-in here:
http://lypp.com/conferencing/outlook
or, sign-up on the web: http://lypp.com/conferencing
Posted by: Erik | August 19, 2008 at 11:29