Call-the-Cloud

Great News! Fonolo is now available as a free application for the iPhone and iPod Touch! [iTunes link].

Tired of all the "Press 1 for this and 2 for that" nonsense you normally get when calling a company? With Fonolo, you can actually preview all of the options in a company’s phone menu before placing the call.  Just tap the option you need and Fonolo will do the rest.

If you already have a Fonolo account, your call history, bookmarks and recordings will automatically be synchronized to the iPhone application. If you’re new to Fonolo, you can create an account right on the phone.  Best of all, the Fonolo service remains free for consumers.

Home Screen

Here you can see recent calls made through Fonolo. How does this differ from a regular call history? Each entry remembers the point inside the company’s phone menu that you called. Just tap to repeat the call.

Company Screen

From here you have one-tap access to the three most common points called in the company’s phone menu. We call them “Common Calls”. You can also dial the company’s “front door” (top left button) or view its entire phone menu to initiate a Deep Dial (top right button).

Navigating a Phone Menu

To navigate through a phone menu, we invented this “split screen” approach. The top half shows you the words that you would hear at this point in the menu. The bottom half lets you navigate to any of the options available from this point.

Dialing

When you trigger a call, the Fonolo service will call the company and navigate through their phone menu. Your phone will ring shortly afterwards and, when you answer, you will be connected directly to the point you selected.

Most people know Fonolo for our award winning consumer service which makes it less frustrating to call large companies. With that service, we pioneered the technology of “Deep Dialing” — connecting directly to any point in the phone menu, without the annoying navigation.

About a year ago, we started working on an enterprise product that would allow companies to use this same technology to improve the calling experience for their own customers.  Last summer, we demonstrated the “widgetized” version of Fonolo which allows the Deep Dialing interface to be embedded on any web page. It got people pretty excited. (Illustrated below. Or, try it here or here.)

Over the last few months, we have built supporting technology around this widget version of Fonolo: web-based admin tools, advanced tracking, etc.  As well, we have done a number of field trials getting the product tuned to the needs of the market.  As a result, I’m happy to say that we now have a solid offering. It’s still a “v1″, to be sure, and there will be a lot of tweaking ahead, but today our product is: easy to deploy, scalable, reliable, flexible, compatible with all major browsers and — most impressively — compatible with any company’s phone system.

We’ve done all this work somewhat quietly; the consumer service has been getting most of the attention. Well, now it’s time to shine the spotlight on the enterprise product. First step: we’ve given it a separate web site. As of today, when you go to fonolo.com, you will see a “fork in the road”:

If your company has an phone menu and a call center, then take a look at business.fonolo.com. We’ve boiled it down to the clearest and quickest way to explain our value to you. I guarantee you will “get it” in 30 seconds.

You can add Fonolo to your site with only a few lines of HTML. Instantly, your customers will have a better calling experience, your call center will be more efficient, and you will get feedback that you’ve never seen before. (Your customers can also use Fonolo from the smart phone too  — more on that later.)

If you think there’s a fit, sign up for our free trial and we’d love to talk to you!

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of presenting about Fonolo to a standing-room-only crowd at Startup Camp Telephony. The event was organized by Embrase and hosted at TMC’s ITExpo event in Miami.

ITExpo was a great show as always: Good sessions on  HD Voice, 4G wireless, the future of call centers, etc. I was on a panel titled Voice Application from the Developer Perspective with Conversif and TruPhone. (I’ll post the slides later.) A boisterous blogger dinner organized by Andy Abramson capped it off (where the menu included celery sorbet — two words I never thought I would see together).

But the StartupCamp was certainly the highlight for me.

From an article on TMC.net …

Startup Camp Telephony was born from the desire to grow the exposure – and ultimately commercial successes – of the many dynamic young businesses being created today in mobile, voice, video, network and other emerging forms of telephony. … Fonolo’s Shai Berger… explained that the call center industry still has the room and need for a service that will help clear the so-called “logjam” that has contributed to an inefficient calling process.

Thanks to Twilio for sponsoring. If you are interested in building a voice application you should take a look at their platform.

The other presenting companies were:

• pebb.ly — A platform to set up interactive SMS-based marketing in 2 minutes. (Quick! Can you name what country has the TLD “ly”?)
• CloseHaul — A freestanding gsm femtocell with game-changing potential.
• SayHired  — Accelerate the hiring process with automated phone-based interviews.

Check out their sites - a lot of promising ideas there.

Some video from the event here. I hope TMC and Embrase make this a new tradition.

Skype announced last week that they were discontinuing their "Extras" program, which is a storefront that allows 3rd party developers to to extend on the Skype platform (i.e. Skype’s App Store). An immediate and very negative reaction from Skypohiles around the world lead the company to clarify that this was just a transition to a new and better developer program.

Developers: "Give it to us naked"

Naturally, the debate now moves to what that new program should look like. A long standing request from developers has been the ability to use Skype’s communication services without actually running the Skype desktop client. This is the so-called "naked Skype" approach. (Alec Saunders credits a post from 2006 as the origin of the term.)

TechCrunch says of the naked option:

Eventually, we suspect, Skype will release a SDK that allows developers to integrate deep into Skype and make calls over the Skype service without opening the Skype client. In other words, people may start to think of Skype (voice, video, chat) as a service rather than a client that must be installed and used to communicate.

Telephony Online said Skype should:

move the API to more of a service-layer rather than client layer access… let a developer embed call controls for accessing Skype into their own applications, with Skype benefiting from network usage, particularly usage that uses Skype In/Out minutes.

The risk: becoming the "dumbest pipe of all".

The problem there is that Skype is not the cheapest option for PSTN access (aka "In/Out minutes"). If I were a developer, and Skype offered this kind of API, I would use Skype’s IM, file-transfer and Skype-to-Skype calling features (for which Skype earns no money) and I would use a cheaper 3rd party provider for PSTN interconnect.

Markus Goebel put it well a recent post: "If Skype opens too much, they can become the dumbest pipe of all. Other companies and services would channel their calls for free over Skype’s gratis P2P network."

(For more on "smart vs dumb pipes" see here.)

Skype is able to charge premium rates for their In/Out minutes precisely because that service is tightly bound to the client experience. The fees for those PSTN minutes (3 billion of them last quarter) account for nearly all of Skype’s revenue (which was $170m last quarter). (Data from Skype Journal.)

If they make their API too open — go too naked — they risk leaving their cash cow out to freeze.

I attended the Internet Telephony Expo last week in Los Angeles. It was a terrific show as usual: I got to speak on a few panels, met some great people and got up to speed on industry trends.

Operators and Developers

I participated in a panel called "The Ecosystem of Application Developers". Alan Quayle moderated and he opened with a question that sparked some excellent discussion:

If you could have one wish to make working with a operator easier, what would that wish be?

My answer was: "Nothing." After the chuckles subsided, I explained that when it comes to the interface between mobile users and developers, the operators have been replaced by the device makers. I’m talking about Apple’s AppStore, of course, followed very distantly by Android’s and RIM’s offerings. Also on the panel was Francisco Kattan, Sr. Director Developer Ecosystem at Alcatel-Lucent. He has a similar take and describes this as a "developer exodus away from operator communities to the handset and OS communities"(more here). Alan’s summary is here.

Mobile development

I also participated in a panel called "Creating Mobile Voice & Video Applications". The moderator was Doug Green, publisher of Telecom Reseller. We had a lively debate on the two alternate approaches that have emerged for building mobile apps: Using the mobile browser and "wraping" it up like and app, vs. building a proper native app. I was very bullish on the former. Arjun Roychowdhury, from Hughes Systique (which is a 3rd party mobile app developer) was less enthusiastic. This is a topic I’ve been immersed in for last few months because of our work on Fonolo’s new iPhone app. (coming soon).

Where is Voice 2.0?

Finally, I was on a panel called “When Voice Meets Web 2.0”, moderated by industry analyst Jon Arnold. This was more of a general discussion of what’s happening in this space, from both an enterprise and consumer perspective. By the way, Jon was just quoted in Maclean’s talking about Google Voice.

Props

Thanks to Rich Tehrani for organizing an excellent event. And special thanks to Andy Abramson for hosting a terrific wine dinner. Andy has an audio recap of the conference posted here.