(FREE) Internet Telephony Tools for Educators (and anybody else)

Last month, I had the opportunity to introduce 17 Top Internet Telephony Services at the FETC 2009 conference in Orlando, FL. I started with the evolutionary history of Internet Telephony and, sort of chronologically, overviewed and showed some demos of PC-to-PC/PC-to-Phone services, IP Phones, UMS, Voice Broadcasting sites and Video Broadcasting tools.

The talk was, I thought, rather well received. I had to stay afterwards, for a while, discussing the many resources I presented with some of the educators who remained interested in the topic. Jeff May wrote a good outline of my presentation, along with others he attended (Thanks, Jeff, for taking notes and the good review). For those of you that might want to check the material that was covered, here are the slides (Thanks to our good friends at Docstoc for hosting the doc).

FETC - (FREE) Internet Telephony Tools for Educators

/ John

Blog postings we enjoy

We certainly appreciate being mentioned in leading media outlets like BusinessWeek, US News, Discovery Educator Network & TechCrunch, but the posts we most enjoy are the ones from our users who demonstrate how Phonevite can be used in everyday life, to improve communications with our social networks.   Here’s 2 recent examples of these:

Glenn Moses, an Assistant Principal and Teacher, through his own live example, describes how Phonevite is helping many teachers in their classroom.

Nathan Chase, a recent proud father, shows how Phonevite is perfect for announcing a new baby.

In addition, we receive many testimonials by email, including how Phonevite was instrumental in emergency evacuations, rescue missions and family updates during the horrible hurricanes last month.     These stories definitely give us some additional adrenaline to keep going in these tough times for all.

Phonevite wins Best Consumer Offering at the ITEXPO

With the demise of the VON Show, the Internet Telephony Conference & Expo (aka ITEXPO) is now regarded as the biggest and most eminent show in the VoIP industry.    We planned to attend the EXPO this year because we thought that it was time for us to show our true colors, as they say, and let the industry know what we were doing with VoIP on the one-to-many calling front.   Sure, there’s been a lot of innovation since VoIP made it mainstream in the late 90’s, and Kalvin (Co-Founder) and I (John, the other Co-Founder) were part of that early history with Dialpad (the most popular VoIP web service which was eventually acquired by Yahoo!), but we felt that most of the R&D has been going into one-to-one communications (e.g. Skype) and related value-added services, such as VoIP-PBX (e.g. RingCentral) solutions and Unified Messaging Platforms (e.g. GrandCentral, which, by the way, was created by our former colleagues from Dialpad, Craig and Vincent, which then was acquired by Google).      By attending the ITEXPO, our intent was to make a statement to the industry;  That VoIP could be exploited and leveraged for communications to groups, i.e. for one-to-many communications, an area that has not received much attention, both in the public arena or the development community.     

Phonevite Booth at ITEXPO

From the opening day of the exhibit floor, we were pleasantly taken aback to find our bootstrapped booth (we literally only had 2 tables, a few chairs, and a slide projector, all of which we borrowed from a church in LA, and we bought 2×10 yards of white linen, at wholesale price in the LA Garment District, to use as (i) a table cloth and (ii) a projector screen – see first picture above) be overwhelmed with constant traffic (we were exhausted after 2 days of the non-stop Phonevite pitch).     The highlight surprise was when the TMCNet (Organizers of the ITEXPO) Editorial Team came to our booth to present us the Best of Show Award as the Best Consumer Offering (we were the sole winners in this category), which to us was a sign that the Industry was validating our claim that it was high time for VoIP to be taken to other non-traditional frontiers, like one-to-many calling, henceforth called “VoIP Broadcasting”.

We’re back

I admit it. I’ve been horrible at blogging for months. Today, Vincent, one of our star engineers, brought to my attention the fact that we have some significant number of visitors to our blog page, and that they have been probably been disappointed by the lack of postings. For that, I apologize.

A lot has happened since we last posted. Some of the latest updates are that we successfully completed a Seed Round of funding. In fact, we were oversubscribed and, regretfully,we had to turn down some good investors. We also moved our headquarters to San Jose, CA, in the heart of Silicon Valley, in order to attract a good talent pool and to be closer to the money in Sand Hill Road. We now have, in our team, a few star developers from some of the top web properties in the world, so we are pumping new products/features at a much faster speed.

In terms of products, we launched our Premium Service in February and released a better algorithm for voice mail/answering machine detection recently. We have cool applications planned for Facebook and OpenSocial, as well as some mobile applications.

Please let us know you are out there in the blogosphere. Drop us a line. Give us some suggestions. We welcome feedback, good or bad.

Will keep you posted.

John / Co-Founder

Testimonials from our Users

It has been a little over a month since our beta launch and we are glad to hear how Phonevite is being used as a great tool for communicating with others.   We have selected a few testimonials from our users (permission granted) that illustrate how Phonevite is being used by everyday people in their everyday lives.

NEW BABY ANNOUNCEMENT
“Just wanted to let you know that I like your service. I am having a baby on Friday and my wife and I will be using your service for notification.”  Lee Moore, Celebration, FL

HEALTH / RECOVERY UPDATES
“This service is excellent.  My mom was injured in a horse riding accident and was in the hospital over 4 hrs away.  Phonevite was instrumental in communicating with our family back in Lufkin.  There was nothing but praise from my family members who received updates via the phonevite service.  Thanks again for providing this service.”  Danny Butler, Lufkin, TX

SCHOOLS
“Thank you Phonevite!   We can now make sure all our students, parents and staff are informed of school news in a timely manner.   How can you offer this service for free?”  Chiae Byun-Kitayama, Principal, Topeka Drive Elementary School, Los Angeles Unified School District

CHURCH/YOUTH GROUPS
“This is amazing! I’m a youth director who is constantly calling to remind students and their parents about activities and trips. This program has made life so much easier.  Instead of taking the time to make 60 different calls, I can now use this program to save me an hour of my time and ensure all my kids are still on track.  Thank you guys for making something so useful.”  Travis Hairston, Trinity Baptist Church, Lufkin, TX

YOUTH/COMMUNITY SPORTS
“…Went very well, thanks.   It saved me having to make [many] separate calls, and I’ve already heard back from [several] people, which is great.   Thanks again, and I will definitely pass this on to the schedulers.”   Nick Morgan, Regional Referee Administrator (for a national youth soccer organization), Los Angeles, CA

CUSTOMER REMINDERS
“Holy crap you guys rock. My boss wanted me to call over 200 established customers to just tell them that a discount on their christmas light installation was ending on the 31st… we were going to have to bring in other people to help, etc… But then I found you guys. It took less than 30 minutes to call everyone! You saved me tens-of-hours-of-work and saved the day.”  Adam Brown, Austin, TX

WOW!

First things first, thank you to all our visitors and all the users who are signing up.   We hope you enjoy the experience.    Also, please excuse the barebones appearance of this blog.   We kind of just created one in a rush and, with so many users coming to our site and so many tasks to take care of, we are not able to put enough time making it look nice.   However, we thought it was important to at least get it started and have this essential medium of communication with our users out there.   So pls. bear with our appearance for now… 

Well, now the juice;  so many developments this week…

First, Matt Marshall, VentureBeat, featured us on Tuesday 7/24/07.    That kind of triggered it all – Thanks Matt, you are the finest journalist in the Valley.   Then, the blogosphere picked up and it hasn’t stopped since then.    One of the cool postings we liked was the one by Philippe Lagane @ AccesoWeb2.0, who wishes that the service was also available in France (Philipe and France, hang in there… we are working hard to get there sooner rather than later).    Then, yesterday, we were featured on Webware/CNET and Lifehacker, among others, and the thing just took off.

We’ve been getting great feedback (Thanks to all the fans!!!) and suggestions (Thanks to all the free advisors!!!).   Among them, I wanted to address the prominent ones:

 – Mozilla users – we are finding that the majority of our site visitors use Mozilla (a whoopping 61% vs. general population stat of 34%).   While for now you have to use the Phone-based recorder, or use IE for the web recorder, we are working on a more universal solution other than ActiveX for the recorder/player (maybe flash?  any suggestions?).

– Business/Premium users – got lot of inquiries from people who want to use Phonevite for business purposes.   While we are currently focusing on the consumer market, we are weighing how to offer this service for small businesses and organizations to use.   However, we will always be careful that our service does not get perceived as a telemarketing tool (We don’t like getting calls in the middle of our dinner either).  One of the initial tools we have put in place is an automated Do-Not-Call registry, where anybody can opt-out from receiving any calls from a specific caller ID or from phonevite altogether (we’d rather lose potential users than our reputation).

– VoIP Fans – We are unabashedly VoIP based.   While VoIP has been losing a lot of steam and getting a bad rep lately with the stock performance of Vonage and  the flameout of Sunrocket, we are all-in believers of VoIP.    Our origins are in VoIP and we plan to stay in this space for quite a while – we believe that Data and Voice will converge totally one day.   Our company name, Ifonoclast, is a twist of the word Iconoclast, which means somebody who breaks tradition, and we are here to destroy the tradition of the regular phone and the internet, to allow people to call in ways never done before.  Thanks for supporting our cause! (sorry for the initial long rambling, it has been a long week with lots of developments)