In today’s world of home-based businesses, geographically dispersed business operations, outsourced services and worldwide marketing activities, scheduling meetings can become a bit of a nightmare. It’s also a world of many calendar programs (Outlook, MS Exchange, Google Calendar, LotusLive (Notes), iCal and Entourage) and diverse platforms (Windows, Mac, smartphones). Scheduling a meeting by email exchange can be a tedious and lengthy process at the best of times. Launching today, Tungle aims to make meeting scheduling a much simpler process for all parties.
Initially released two years ago as an Outlook plug-in, the Tungle team used the alpha and beta versions of the platform as a market research tool, as much as a test of the platform itself. Key findings included:
- it takes too many emails/phone calls to coordinate one meeting
- participants are dispersed around the globe and across different time zones
- 60% of meetings are with participants from outside the meeting coordinator’s company
- 75% of meetings are one-to-one
- 95% of meetings have four or fewer participants
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Since its first launch in early 1996 I have been a follower of SlingMedia’s SlingBox hardware and companion SlingPlayer software. At that time it allowed me to take advantage of Canadian networks’ extensive coverage of the Turin Winter Olympics while working on a project in southern California. For instance, I was able to watch the Women’s Hockey gold medal game on CBC at a Starbucks in Palm Springs.
Their initial SlingPlayer only worked on Windows-based PC’s. With today’s public beta launch of SlingPlayer Mobile for BlackBerry, I can now access my cable TV subscription on a BlackBerry from any location worldwide where it has high speed Internet access. Read the rest of this entry »
For many years users had to be satisfied with using either a computer screen or data projector to display Microsoft PowerPoint presentations. A few years ago making a PDF file for a slide presentation become an Adobe Acrobat option. For Power Point 2007, Adobe developed a PowerPoint ribbon bar to simplify the process. But all these output modes were tied to the local PC desktop environment, not only for the application but also the output.
Bloggers and web marketing personnel have been looking for ways to host PowerPoint slide presentations in “the Cloud” and embed them within weblog posts. SlideShare’s service had become one of the most popular of these services due to its relative ease-of-use. However, my first experience last spring found me switching between my PowerPoint desktop application to review and edit a third party’s PowerPoint presentation, and my browser to set up a SlideShare account through which I could upload the resulting presentation for embedding into a post.
Two days ago I had to upload another Power Point presentation to a weblog host. It just so happens I came across a press release from SlideShare along with an invitation to try out their new SlideShare Ribbon Bar for PowerPoint. So I gave it a workout.
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Three weeks ago I provided a detailed description of Fonolo, the “Deep Dialing” service that takes you directly to where you want to go within an enterprise IVR menu.
At that time Fonolo was looking for 100 new beta accounts as the final stage of a private beta program. It’s provided good feedback but they need to hear from a broader audience of consumer users. Today Fonolo, with an expanded directory of over 300 enterprises, will launch a fully open public beta available to anyone wishing to try out the service. They want feedback from “real users”.
For those with a deeper interest, check out this Skype Journal post for more background on what Fonolo is learning from their beta programs.
You’ve got a problem with your Internet service but every time you call your Service Provider’s support line you have to branch out through their phone tree to get through to technical support via a series of voice menus that get repetitive quickly.
- What service are you calling about? 1 for Wireless, 2 for Home Phone, 3 for Cable TV, 4 for High Speed Internet
- What assistance are you seeking? 1 for Billing, 2 for Customer Service, 4 for Technical Support, etc.
Last week, to reach a technical support service I had to enter “9″ four times to reach the particular service I required. And there was also the “anxiety” time spent listening to the introduction to each step.
What if you could just “call” the basic number but jump right to the level of response you are seeking?
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Have you ever called into a business’s directory from a BlackBerry and been asked to enter the person’s last name? But BlackBerry has a QWERTY keyboard and the Automated Attendant is looking to see 2 for “A, B or C”, 3 for “D, E or F”, etc.
Have you tried to “dial” a phone number represented by a vanity name from a BlackBerry, such as 1-800-BLK-BRRY or 416-TAXICAB (a service available in the Greater Toronto Area to automatically call a taxi). But RIM doesn’t expect users whose mobile smartphone has a QWERTY keyboard to remember that 416-TAXICAB really means to dial 416-829-4222.
In investigating the use of a service that spiders a business’s automated attendant as the subject of a future post, I learned that there is a simple way to address the problem on any BlackBerry with a full QWERTY keyboard: Simply hold down either the “Alt” key or the “right-Shift” key and type the letter.
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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.
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Last fall I wrote about 
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
