Ifbyphone Blog

Announced on August 29, the Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) was enacted in order to give consumers more control over which parties have permission to contact them via outbound telemarketing. At that time, the Federal Trade Commission gave telemarketing companies and telephony solutions companies until December 1 to develop and deploy a solution.

Today we announced that we have begun to deploy enhanced interactive voice broadcasting tools to make compliance with the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule even easier. Ifbyphone is the first to announce full conformity with the Telemarketing Sales Rule and looks forward to setting the standard for TSR compliance.

Ifbyphone’s enhancements offer voice broadcasting customers a default recording of the required opt-out message, the ability to customize that recording and a pre-packaged solution for accepting opt-out telephone calls, thus insuring compliance with the new rule.

To learn more about how to keep your company TSR compliant using Ifbyphone technology, call us at 877-295-5100.

MidwestBusiness.com featured an interview today with Ifbyphone CEO Irv Shapiro. You can read the full interview here.

You can also check out two other interviews from earlier this year:

TelephonyOnline.com Interview

Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Ifbyphone has received a good deal of press surrounding our funding announcement.

GoMoNews.com

One if by land, 4.6 million Ifbyphone. Internet start-up gets multi-million dollar VC investment

Chicago Tribune

Ifbyphone, which provides Web-enabled phone services for small and midsize businesses, on Tuesday will announce $4.6 million in new funding from five venture firms.

Crain’s Business Chicago

The money is coming from Chicago-based Apex Venture Partners and Blue Crest Capital Finance L.P., as well as Origin Ventures LLC in Northbrook, Spring Mill Venture Partners of Carmel, Ind., and i2A Illinois Innovation Accelerator Fund. Apex Venture and Origin Ventures provided money for Ifbyphone’s first round of funding last year.

Chicago Sun-Times

The 21-employee company, which sells Web and telephony applications to small businesses, plans to invest in expanded capacity for its 7,000 and growing subscribers.

TMCnet

“We view this new round of funding as a strong endorsement of our growth and expansion strategy,” said Ifbyphone founder and CEO Irv Shapiro. “It positions us extremely well to continue our expansion during these complex economic times.”

FierceVoip

“We want to improve our ability to handle the needs of the middle market,” Shapiro said. “Ifbyphone technology can automate the answering of routine call center calls, like delivery dates and hours of operation, which can be up to 25 percent of total call volume.”

Shapiro said the expanded marketing operations would help to reach potential customers who might find Ifbyphone’s services very attractive in a recessionary environment. He said customer support remained a top priority for the company, and he claimed that the company doesn’t have customers, it just has raving fans.

One such fan is Wayne Boulais, general partner of Apex Ventures, which led both fundraising rounds.

“Ifbyphone was an attractive investment because it’s successfully capitalizing on two trends,” Boulais said. “It’s providing low-cost VoIP services very reliably, and its compatibility with Asterisk is changing the possibilities in exciting and flexible ways. Shapiro is an experienced entrepreneur, and we’ve been pleasantly surprised with the company’s performance.”

Boulais said Ifbyphone’s customer retention and conversion rates were high, and the company was well suited in challenging economic times, because of good testing methods and low barriers of adoption by customers due to an aggressive pricing scheme.

Profy.com

Another interesting thing to note is that IfByPhone is based in Chicago so this amount of $4.6 million of funding will do more for this company than in could do for a Silicon Valley based startup - in fact, experts evaluate this amount as equal to $6.5-$7 million raised in the Valley due to a considerable difference between rent, salaries and other costs that are often higher in California

For more coverage, visit StartupMeme.com, PEhub.com, TheDeal.com & DavidDalka.com.

Another piece of exciting Ifbyphone news rolled in today, as we officially announced a $4.6 Million round of financing. Apex Venture Partners,  Origin Ventures, Spring Mill Venture Partners, i2A & Blue Crest Capital Finance LP all invested in the round.

“We view this new round of funding as a strong endorsement of our growth and expansion strategy,” said Ifbyphone founder and CEO Irv Shapiro. “It positions us extremely well to continue our expansion during these complex economic times.”

Ken Green, co-founder and managing partner at Spring Mill Venture Partners, said, “We believe that Ifbyphone represents the next great wave of Internet-enabled business services, allowing small and medium-sized businesses access to capabilities previously only available to their larger competitors. This kind of service offers an opportunity to level the competitive playing field.”

You can read more details in today’s Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times & Crain’s Chicago Business News.

Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) stock price jumped 4.06% Monday morning after Ifbyphone announced the release of a second iPhone app, Conference Call, and publicly shared the success of its first iPhone app, Voice Broadcast.

Ifbyphone Releases Second Apple iPhone Application was the lead story on finance.google.com Monday Morning as Apple’s stock saw a higher open.

Officials at Ifbyphone commented, “While correlation does not imply causation, we’re glad to see that Apple investors were as happy Monday morning as those who downloaded the new Conference Call iPhone app.”

With the help of the iPhone, Ifbyphone is giving a whole new meaning to the phrase, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you”. Today we announced the release of our iPhone Conference Call app, which joins our Voice Broadcast app on the iTunes app store. Here is a video demo of the app:

The idea behind the Conference Call app is simple. When you schedule a conference call you shouldn’t have to start late waiting for everyone to call in. Using Ifbyphone’s iPhone Conference Call app, you can schedule a conference call for as many contacts in your iPhone as you’d like. Instantly, or at the scheduled time in the future, all of those contacts will receive a phone call and upon answering they will be connected to the conference. This way there is no waiting for them dial in. You schedule a call at 10 am on Monday, and everyone who is supposed to be on the conference gets a call at 10 am on Monday. They don’t need to call in, because Ifbyphone calls them. Of course, if they miss the call there is a dial in number to access the conference call in a traditional manner.

We include 100 free minutes a month, so please go ahead and try it out. You can download the app on iTunes. If you don’t already have an Ifbyphone account, sign up for a free Ifbyphone iPhone account.

Additionally, you can read more about Voice Broadcast, our 1st app, here, and you can download the Voice Broadcast app here.

If the video wasn’t enough, here are a couple of screen shots of the iPhone Conference Call app:

Main Menu

Schedule A Conference Call

FierceVoip has announced this year’s top VoIP companies — The 2008 FierceVoIP Fierce 15 — and Ifbyphone is on the list. FierceVoIP editors evaluated hundreds of organizations, and found us to be amongst the “fiercest,” proven by creativity and innovations in the marketplace.

Past winners have included companies like Vonage, Skype, & GrandCentral. In a description of how this year’s winners were chosen, FierceVoip noted the following important characteristics of the leading VoIP companies in 2008:

• Voice Mashups - Check out PhoneMashup.com, and try our New Yelp! Mashup to get restaurant ratings over the phone.
• Rich & Unique Applications - Learn about our features, solutions, and plugins.
• Building Relationships - Take a look at our partner programs for Resellers, Developers, OEMs, & Affiliates, and visit our press page for a list of partnerships we have announced this year.
  
• Building a Base of Paying Customers - Review our customer testimonials, and see our Pricing & Packages.
• Open Source Telephony - Sign up for a Developer account, and read about how we were declared the “Single Coolest Thing Done With Open Source Technology at the Web 2.0 Show” by Information Week.

We also want to offer a big congratulations to our friends at Fonolo & TruPhone, also 2008 Fierce 15 winners.

Here is our full press release.

Ifbyphone just received an honorable mention in AdRANTs.com’s ad:tech Booth Schwag Award for 2008, for giving away cool Ifbyphone branded red light-up yo-yos.

As AdRants.com said,

In terms of booth schwag at New York’s ad:tech, there wasn’t much that stood out. There were pens and pens and pens and more pens. There were matchbooks. There were hats, cups and mints. There were stress balls, pins and badges. A few, however, rose above the toss-in-the-nearest-trash-can category. Ifbyphone had yo-yos. [ Full Story ]

Speaking of “cool” and “giveaways”, Ifbyphone was recently called the “Coolest Thing Done With Open Source at the Web 2.0 show” by Information Week, and we’re giving away accounts with 100 free minutes per month for our iPhone apps.