Ifbyphone Blog

In a new post, mobile advertising guru Andrew Grill highlights U.K.-based Yell.com’s new mobile map-based “yellow pages” services.  The free-to-use (ad supported) service takes advantage of both browser and phone capabilities to offer a true Web 2.0/Voice 2.0 experience — for example, every number is click-to-call, and you can add contact info automatically to address books and send it to someone else as a text message.  Unfortunately for North Americans, Yell Group’s U.S. service — Yellowbook.com — doesn’t yet offer the service. 

There is a great deal of value in allowing your users the ability to contact the right people, at the right time with the right information.  One of the great benefits of social media is that it allows you to get in contact with people who you are interested in.  I can go to Facebook and keep up with the lives of former classmates, current friends and even business associates.  I can go to Twitter and participate in conversations as disparate as SEO, fatherhood or the stunning sweep of the Cubs by the first place White Sox this past weekend.  There are a great deal of other social media sites that have found niches in keeping people connected.

Generally speaking, most of the communication that these sites facilitate is electronic.  Email, posting on message boards or walls, instant messaging.  For many types of conversations, those forms of communications work really well.  But there are certain conversations that do not lend themselves to email or IM or board posts.  There are certain conversations that really require a direct human-to-human call.

One of our partners is JumpForward, a social media site that specializes (among other things) in assisting athletes to get in contact with colleges that may be interested in recruiting them. Last week we announced the partnership, check out this video:

JumpForward is using our technology to allow athletes and coaches work together more effectively.  If you are involved in organized athletics of any kind, I’d highly recommend you spend a few minutes on thier site.

Without getting *too* philosophical, I think JumpForward is really at the cutting edge of communications.  It’s nice that I can go to my Facebook page and see that a friend loves WallE or hates the new ColdPlay album.  But I think there is untapped potential in hooking up people who need to talk to each other at the right time, in the right way.  I think that it’s a direction we’re headed, albeit slowly.

In the mean time, we’re happy to be at the forefront with JumpForward.

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Interested?  Click here and I’ll give you an immediate call back.

Venture Beat reports that American Express customers can now take Reardon Commerce’s personal concierge with them when they leave home. It illustrates the converging of several trends: context-centric application mash-ups, multiple ways of interacting — voice, SMS, email, Web. This could be taken to the next level with a smart interactive voice application at the end of the click-to-call to increase the efficiency at the other end — think about changing travel plans — and to eliminate typing on tiny keyboards.

With virtualization - and its fellow travelers: on-demand functionality and free form mashups — as the belles of the tech ball these days, it’s surprising how little buzz there is about these subjects in the telephony space. There the prevailing model remains a fixed suite of functionality from a single vendor. 

So I was initially excited to find, tucked away on TMCnet.com, a contributed article whimsically titled, “Improvise Your Own Voice Over IP Services.” Clicking over, I hoped to find some Voice 2.0 thinking about the possibilities of Communications as a Service. Alas, the piece – written in a style most generously described as not that of an native English-speaker — was about managed telecom switch partitioning, not cool end-user mashups.

However, it started me imagining some very possible voice mash-ups. 

For example, you can deploy a VoIP trunk to deliver dial tone, connect that to an existing PBX via a VoIP gateway, and use IfByPhone as a “virtual” IP-PBX and for building specialized IVR applications. Later on, you can replace the PBX but still use IfByPhone for IVR and click-to-call. You can add on-demand contact center functionality to the mix and a Skype gateway for overseas calls. 

The point is that each of these elements is independent of the other and doesn’t constrain your ability to freely build — and quickly adopt — tailored business systems incorporating voice. In other words, improvising your own voice services. 

Our vision, stated here time and again, is that the phone is the best technology that small and medium businesses have at their disposal. Normally it is in the context of using our technology to drive more conversations (using Click-to-call, IVR applications, Virtual Receptionist, Voice Broadcast, etc).

But today we’re taking another angle. Today we’re showing off a demo of a time entry application. There are a number of businesses that have workforces that are primarily in the field. The fact that the main office is in a physically different location than the workforce presents any number of challenges.

The main office wants information from the field (status of jobs, time spent), and they may want to send updates to the field (a change in priorities, a new job, etc). But how do they enable that kind of communication?

You could just have everyone calling each other day, but then no actual work would get done. You could use tablet PCs or SmartPhones with custom built applications. But think of the associated costs. The development cost for this type of application is going to be significant. The developers are going to have to learn a particular mobile phone OS and the associated SDK. Plus, you are going to have to purchase and support the hardware. Then you are going to have to train the users on the device AND the application.

Once you get done with all those costs, it’s clear that the return on investment is going to be negative.

Wouldn’t it be easier if you could do all those things just using the phones all your workers already have? Using IfByPhone’s API, you can do just that. We have developed a bare-bones Time Entry application. This application allows you to input an Employee ID, a JobID and start and end time. Here is how the demo works.

An employee would call a phone number, and it will ask them for their employee ID. After validating the Employee ID, it will ask them for the Job number, the starting time, and the ending time. Once the call is complete, IfByPhone posts the results to a webpage run by the company recording the time. Then the data can be thrown into any internal database they want.

This is a pretty bare bones application. But with some customization, you can imagine some pretty powerful possibilities. For construction companies, you could allow a foreman to authenticate himself, and then enter in not only hours worked for his crew, but potentially request new equipment, enter in amount of product used for a given job, etc. If you have technicians in the field, you can use your existing database to direct them to the next job (potentially including step-by-step directions).

So please, try this out. Click the phone to enter some data (look below for valid Employees and Jobs).

Then go see the results pop up in real time here.

The app will ask you for an Employee ID (11111, 22222, 53581, and 49525) and a JobID (11 and 22). I feel the need to emphasize: I am not a graphic designer, and this is simply a demo. So the data page ain’t pretty. And we’re not doing things you want to make sure to do in any real application (user validation, validating the job #, etc). This is simply a demo meant to show how our voice applications can extend to external systems and databases. I’ll be posting the files to the download section of PhoneMashup in a couple days.

Click here to talk to Khyle.

Click-to-Call isn’t just for business. With the ubiquitous mobile handset morphing into an on-the-go media center, click-to-call offers a simple and elegant user-interface for any mobile Web application.

National Public Radio apparently sees it that way.

The recently debuted NPR Mobile Web is a partnership with ten local stations that delivers specially formatted text, pictures and audio - including streaming audio — to Web-enabled mobile phones.

To listen to news stories, or play the interactive version of NPR’s popular quiz game, “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me,” simply click on the “call’ icon and start listening. The free service is carrier- and device-independent.

Think of how useful this could be for GPS navigation or any other service people look for when they’re on the move. We keep saying this: keyboards are for typing - phones are for talking.

Like Cracker Jack and baseball, peanut butter and jelly, or the proverbial horse and carriage, some things just go together. Like the mobile Web and click-to-call.

When people are searching on the mobile Web, it’s a good bet they’re looking for something they want right now. So it’s just plain smart to make it easy for them to get in touch - especially for businesses like restaurants where reservations are important.

Jessica Dolcourt at Download.com has highlighted three mobile applications that incorporate click-to-call: Golf.com, Find It! For Blackberry and Zagat To Go (which has added click-to-call since Dolcourt’s post). Expect to see more smartphone and PDA applications incorporating click-to-call as the mobile Web extends its reach.

Only a handful of e-marketers include customer satisfaction in their Web marketing metrics, according to Antone Gonsalves at Intelligent Enterprise. This data, from a recent eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit survey, shows just how far Web marketing can detour around the reality-based world.

It doesn’t take a rocket to understand that customer satisfaction drives that all-important metric, conversion rate – or that without it, conversion rates nose-dive.

While online surveys are useful for gauging customer satisfaction, they force answers into predetermined boxes – they’re black and white. Adding voice to the online marketing mix adds the Technicolor of inflection, phrasing and context to build a full color picture of customer satisfaction.

For example, “I’m working on my car and I need to remove a bolt from the carburetor. I had to look all over for the right wrench and then when I finally found the automotive wrenches, there was hardly any information,” supplies insight about how customers expect to navigate your store or site — and why they might abandon before buying. Plus, it delivers context information for keyword optimization and ad buys.

The familiar click-to-call supplies the mechanism for smoothly incorporating voice into the online mix. Here’s how:

Ask customers to participate in a brief survey by simply clicking on a phone icon on the page or in an email. This connects them directly to a voice-directed survey that includes multiple choice as well as open-ended questions. While you have them on the phone, you can even immediately route unhappy customers to a service representative, pre-briefed from the survey results.

You can also reuse the results to add customer comments to your website for a more compelling testimonial. Let’s face it, hearing and talking is our natural communication medium, not reading and writing.

More than a year ago PhoneGnome CEO David Beckmeyer posed the question Where are the Voice 2.0 developers? We’re still waiting for the answer, says FierceVoIP editor Doug Mohney in his post, Pulver’s Purple Prophesies–And Fallout Thereof, charting VoIP’s journey from industry-disrupting new technology to plain vanilla status quo. 

If you’ve been around the VoIP space any length of time you’ve heard plenty about the uber-cool applications that digital voice was going to bring us. Well, we have mobile personal ads from Jangl – wait, didn’t Jangl go under a few weeks ago? 

Let’s face it, whether you call it rich voice or Voice 2.0, the pickings are slim. Talk about the impossible dream. Searching Google News on “rich voice VoIP” yields three hits. One is about fax-over-VoIP and the other two are about the same services for public safety agencies. Not exactly paradigm-shifting.

A decade later the VoIP industry has barely scratched the surface on the opportunity presented by turning phone calls into data. The last VON show in San Jose was all about new variations on the century-old theme of making and delivering phone calls. Like one more Baskin Robbins flavor – it’s still just ice cream. A new Skype handset is still…a handset.

Instead of making more ice cream maybe we should think about making something new — using the flexibility that VoIP opens up for making business operations smarter, more efficient, and more effective.

For example, add a short IVR to capture information like address or account number to route calls to the nearest office, look up account information or schedule a service call. Or think outside the phone call envelope altogether, as PEAK Technologies has done in its voice-based supply chain applications.

Just as we no longer write separate applications to update customer name in the accounts receivable and customer order systems, it’s time to stop silo-ing voice in something called the “phone system.” But that’s not going to come from the VoIP industry – it’s still too busy making cheap phone calls.

In the last couple days, there has been bad news for a couple Voice 2.0 startups, Jangl and TalkPlus.  There are people commenting on what this means for Voice 2.0: has the bubble burst?  What does the future hold for Voice 2.0 companies?

I feel bad for the people at Jangl and TalkPlus.  More or less, I’ve been in their shoes before.  I know how it feels, and it’s not pleasant.

But second, Voice 2.0 is poorly defined.  I consider IfByPhone to be a Voice 2.0 company in at least some ways.  But we are vastly different than both of these companies above and many other companies under the Voice 2.0 umbrella.  IfByPhone is sitting in the middle of a convergence of several different marketplaces, Click-to-call, Call routing, call tracking, voice broadcast, and IVR being just a few of them.

So, I for one, am going to suggest that we stop calling every new telephony feature or company or widget Voice 2.0.   Just becuase AT&T doesn’t offer it to their residential customers doesn’t make it part of the next wave.

For IfByPhone, I think the most appropriate term is Telephony Application Provider or TAP (I didn’t come up with the term, but I think it fits).  I think it’s pretty clear that there will be a huge marketplace for companies large and small to integrate voice into business processes and existing business applications.  And IfByPhone will be there at the forefront of that marketplace.