If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Iotum, the canadian Voice 2.0 company headed by friends Alec Saunders and Howard Thaw, just launched an evolution of their popular FREE Conference Call for Facebook, Calliflower.

Calliflower is a completely new approach to “business conversation“, conference calls made easy both for Facebook users and for anyone who want to get the most easy and fully-featured web conference call service available in the market.

The number of features provided by Calliflower is impressive and user experience is brought at the highest levels. Here is brief overview:

• Caller visualization: See names, pictures and caller status in real time as everyone joins, participates and leaves the call.Callers are identified as they join the call, with their names and (if desired) pictures.The status of their lines (mike open, closed, hand raised to ask a question) is also visible to everyone.
• Intuitive conference controls: Participants can access conference controls, the live wall and more from a simple Web interface.
• Interactive chat: Participants can engage in a group chat before, after and during the call to share information without interrupting the flow of conversation. From sharing a link or an image to asking a relevant question, the multiparty IM opens a second channel for participants to have richer and more engaging calls.
• Call archives: Handouts, agendas and links to files can remain accessible to the right people, long after the call is over.
• Invitations and reminders: Receive call invitations and reminders by e-mail or SMS with all the information moderators and participants need.
• Easy calendar integration: Manage call invitations, updates and RSVPs with an attached iCal that integrates with any major calendar solution.
• PINless connectivity: The participating caller’s phone number becomes the personal PIN, which seamlessly connects callers to every call from anywhere.
• MP3 recordings: Moderators can record any call from the Web interface or from the phone. Recordings are available to every participant as MP3 files seconds after the conference is over or the recording is stopped.

If you want to try it out, I recommend to join the interesting call with the famous Captain Kirk of the 1st series of Star Trek, taking place on June 26th at 9PM EST. More interesting public conference calls are already scheduled, but you can create your own, for business meetings or just for bringing together your family and friends who live abroad in a call that everyone can easily join and, last but not least, completely for FREE if you use the Truphone call me button or my company’s Sitofono, integrated with Calliflower.

In conclusion, I would also like to point out that, to my knowledge, this is one of the best examples of usage of the Facebook platform inside and outside of Facebook. Another goal scored by Iotum.

Technorati Tags: calliflower, conference call, iotum, luca filigheddu, Voice 2.0

William Shatner has been my idol when I was younger. I loved the 1st series of Star Trek and he was definitely my favorite character (Captain Kirk) together with Mr Spock.

Now you have a huge opportunity: talk for FREE with him! Alec Saunders got him to join their next conference call on Facebook on Thursday June 26th at  6:30 PDT, 9:30 EDT or 3:30 AM CET (at night in Italy…). 90 minutes with him, any fan of William cannot miss this opportunity.

I’d also like to remind you that thanks to Sitofono, my company’s click to call service, you can join the conference call completely for FREE. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: conference call, iotum, luca filigheddu, william shatner

I found this article by  Ravi Shankar at LatestGeekNews very interesting and thoughtful. He made some interesting points about the actual usage of Voice and messaging apps on Facebook. As we realized some months ago already, Facebook is not really a platform for voice widgets.

The only exception is represented by Iotum’s Free Conference call which underwent a tremendous growth during the past weeks.  I can also confirm, in my perspective, that the traffic to their service coming from my company’s click to call Sitofono, integrated in the last version of the Iotum’s app, is definitely high, so I presume that the service is doing very well.

Why this lack of usage of voice apps on Facebook? Why, on the contrary, an incredible usage of applications that, at first sight, seem to be completely useless? Let’s take, for example, Superpoke. I consider it useless, but people use it continuously. Or other apps, like Friends for Sale, that is as useless as funny, so people like it and use it. 

From this analysis I read an important conclusion: people, on Facebook, look for fun and are not willing to use it as the nth voice communication tool. I find it very useful for messaging, for example, but I’m not using it for voice myself. 

If you are looking for the next successful app on Facebook, keep this in mind: the keyword for Facebook is not “USEFUL“, it’s “VIRAL“.

Technorati Tags: facebook, iotum, latestgeeknews, luca filigheddu, ravi shankar, VoIP