GigaOM » Collaboration

Search Transforms CalliFlower Sessions from Events to Social Media Elements

Jim Courtney — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 11:53:50 +0000

Last fall I wrote about the launch of CalliFlower as a fully-featured conference call service from the initial invitation through to the final archiving of a session. CalliFlower has two levels of service: a basic free service and a flat-rate premium service, launched earlier this month, that provides additional features such as document sharing and call access through about 50 local dial-in numbers in North America and Europe. During a call content is generated, ranging from the agenda and participants to a chat wall and shared documents. Calls may also be recorded. But most importantly, call sessions are archived for future recall. Last fall I hosted one-hour interactive calls featuring OnState Virtual PBX and InnerPass Share and Collaborate; click on the links and you can view the archived sessions, including a link to the recording. Later these call sessions were referenced in the SaundersLog SquawkBox blog (here and here) and Skype Journal (here and here).

This week, iotum, developer of the CalliFlower service, announced several new features. The major one migrates these one time events into an element of ongoing (public) conversations about the two featured companies. How? Simply by making all the content of public CalliFlower sessions searchable. The CalliFlower site is in the process of being indexed by Google over the next week. Through this additional feature CalliFlower sessions become another social media element in the ongoing “engagement and conversation” of a featured company or business with its customers or ecosystem.

Additional features launched today include upgrade of a session’s document sharing to support Office 2007 and Mac Office 2008 documents, simplification of the user signup process and support for the Google Chrome browser. (It is interesting to note that iotum is seeing more use of Google Chrome than Safari).

CalliFlower sessions can have several hundred participants; either service level permits an unlimited number of calls. Sessions can be set up from a web browser or, in the near future, via an Apple App Store iPhone application. Only public CalliFlower sessions are searchable.

If you are into social networking by engaging your customers through blogs, Twitter and/or Facebook, check out CalliFlower as one additional element for carrying on your ongoing public customer conversations.

Have you tried Calliflower?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Calliflower: A Complete Conference Calling Service

Jim Courtney — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:00:19 +0000

Six years ago, when I wanted to make a conference call involving five participants, Bell Canada wanted to charge me $0.55 per minute per participant, resulting in a $165 cost for a one hour call. All those participants had to be in North America and a conference call operator was involved. The moderator could try to “chair” the session but there were limited ways to actually manage who spoke. Any archiving of the session would rely on participants’ handwritten or typed notes.

Flash forward to today: iotum has analyzed the entire set of processes required for managing and moderating a voice conference call from scheduling and invitation to final archiving of the call for future reference. And they have researched today’s communications infrastructure, including web services and low cost voice connections.

They have executed on iotum CEO and co-founder Alec Saunders’ Voice 2.0 Manifesto. Today they are announcing the launch of their enhanced Calliflower Conference Call service – a fully interactive, complete voice conference call service that has been in beta for over a year.

From Alec’s launch post on SaundersLog:

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.

Originally developed as a Facebook application, they recently provided direct Calliflower portal access from the web. With today’s announcements CalliFlower is offering Premium services such as document sharing, enhanced worldwide “local” calling access and business administrator support. To top off their announcement, Calliflower goes mobile with an iPhone application that provides full access to these calls.

So what comprises the complete interactive conference call experience?

Prior to the call: Scheduling and invitations. Reminders via SMS or email. Low cost or free access for participants. Identification of participants calling in via either a PIN number or mobile number callerID.
During the call: A call-specific web page that displays an agenda, call participants, an interactive chat window, while allowing hand raising, muting, call recording and document sharing.
After the call: not only is the recording archived but also the entire call web page for recall of, say, URL’s given out in the chat window or the recording itself.

The cost to participants? Simply the cost of reaching an access point.

Previously the Calliflower calls could be reached by calling a number in Minnesota or France using the PSTN, SkypeOut or a couple of other softphone VoIP services. Going forward iotum will also be using Voxbone’s newly launched iNum service, initially providing free access to a +883 number from any of Voxbone’s iNum Service Provider Partners or via 55 iNum local access points worldwide.

The heart of the Calliflower service is its use of dynamic interactive web services as the backbone to the features described above.

During the call all participants can access the call’s web page “portal” for a fully interactive call experience as described above. The moderator can mute individual participants when the kids are crying or dogs are barking in the background. Having used the service many times during the beta period I found the combination of the web page’s feature set changes the overall dynamics of a conference call and significantly enhances the participants’ conference call experience.

Once completed the call recording and web page are available for recall by any of the participants or anyone else registered with Calliflower who may want to review the call. Recordings can be inserted into websites or weblogs, such as Alec does with his SquawkBox Conference Calls that periodically discuss technology industry developments.

The iPhone application (available shortly at the Apple App Store) provides full access to your calls, whether scheduled, during a call or in the past. Past call recordings and chat walls can be readily listened to or read. One “future” feature that that still requires development is the creation of calls from the iPhone.

Basic Calliflower Conference Calls will be free; while the Premium service is priced at the special introductory price of $50 per month, for two organizers, with a no-risk 30-day free trial period, until Jan. 1, 2009. Additional organizers cost $25 per month each.

We have seen the rise of many conference calling services over the past year, based on lower cost communications network architectures incorporating VoIP. However, typically they simply make the call connections or have a limited set of features. Having used the beta Calliflower service many times over the past 12 months I have been able to witness its evolution into this complete interactive voice and web service resulting in a unique conference call participant experience (and there are still a few nifty features to come).

My costs for accessing these many calls over the past few years: the $2.95 per month SkypeOut subscription charge (which lets me also make unlimited calls to within North America). And I never need a PIN code; Calliflower recognizes that my SkypeOut CallerID is also my registered mobile phone number CallerID. This allows me to also access Calliflower calls from my BlackBerry using iSkoot which cannot recognize touch tones required for PIN numbers.

Definitely worth giving it a try, not simply for the cost saving but especially for the value-add it brings to the entire conference call user experience.

Jim Courtney is an Associate Editor of Skype Journal.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Growing Your Conference Call Capabilities with Calliflower

Aliza Sherman — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:00:25 +0000

I’ve been finding more and more of a need for conference calls in my work and suddenly more and more conference calling solutions coming online. I also find that conference calls add something to my work that has been lacking since I’ve become so reliant on email: the warmth of human voices!

I recently reviewed Rondee, the easy-as-pie phone conferencing site, but just heard about a new conferencing site worth mentioning to expand your options for free conference calls.

Calliflower provides services to cover the entire process of conference calls – from setting them up to holding them to the followup and continued dialogue after the call is over. Calliflower is all about “building conversations” and sharing media, and they do it through a relatively clean dashboard so all of the elements of your call are on one screen.

Calliflower actually began as a FaceBook application adding free audio conferencing capabilities to people’s FaceBook accounts. As the app grew in popularity, the demand for the services apart from FaceBook became increasingly apparent to the company’s founders. They expanded their solution for not just conference calls but kept an eye toward being a solution for holding teleseminars and teleclasses as well.

To showcase their site’s capabilities, the company is offering their Calliflower Communiques, regular tele-conversations between a host (life enhancement speaker and writer Allan Hunkin) and authors and celebrities ranging from Alan Alda to William Shatner presented as teleseminars.

Here are some of the aspects of Calliflower worth noting:

1. Pin-free access to calls. After registering a call participant’s phone number becomes their personal pin. Easy to remember. Those who don’t want to register can access calls with a pin sent to them when the call is set up.

2. Controls at your fingertips. You can mute and unmute participants; acknowledge raised hands (a little hand icon that participants can use to signal they have something to say); lower hands; and other moderator functions. Everything is visible on a handy dashboard, a single Web -page view of your controls.

3. Multiple ways of accessing calls. Participants can opt to use VoiP (Truphone) or even a “call my phone” service (Sitofono) which is especially popular in Europe were mobile phone calls are free when received but incur a fee when made.

4. Enhancing call with a chat wall. You can carry out a simultaneous text chat as well as drop in links to MP3 files, flicker URLs to embed photos, share slides, and other multimedia resources to supplement the call and allow others to follow along.

5. “Seeing” the callers. You can see the names, pictures and caller status of everyone participating in the call – all on the dashboard. You can also see if their mike is open or closed or if their hand is raised.

6. Accessible call archives. You can archive the call agenda, any handouts, links and files to be accessed anytime after a call has been completed. This can also include an MP3 recording of the call.

Calliflower is looking to “reinvent business conversations” and provide new ways for people to interact within a conference call. Looks like they are on their way.

Some other conferencing call sites and services we’ve covered recently include FreeConference.com, SightSpeed (video conferencing), and Yugma.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.