CallFire

Inc. Magazine Unveils 29th Annual List of America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies—the Inc. 500, 2010.

Inc. magazine yesterday ranked CallFire NO. 285 on its 29th annual Inc. 500, an exclusive ranking of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. The list represents the most comprehensive look at the most important segment of the economy—America’s independent-minded entrepreneurs. Companies such as Microsoft, Zappos, Intuit, GoDaddy, Zipcar, Clif Bar, American Apparel, Oracle, and many other well-known names gained early exposure as members of the Inc. 500.

CallFire came in as the #2 cloud computing service and #18 overall company in the Los Angeles region. Within the telecommunications industry, CallFire ranked #15 among companies like ClearAccess and Xirrus. Dinesh Ravishanker, CEO of CallFire, attributes the strong growth to “economic circumstances requiring SMBs to leverage cost & time saving technologies like CallFire.” He adds that “CallFire also released our Phone Tree product (a powerful inbound and oubound IVR utility) which has been adopted by thousands of businesses which drove 20-30% of our revenue growth in less than a year.”

The 2010 Inc. 500, unveiled in the September issue of Inc. magazine, is a group of companies that are smaller but much faster-growing than last year’s crop. Aggregate revenue is $11.3 billion—down from last year’s $18.4 billion—but median three-year growth is 1,231 percent, substantially up from last year’s 880.5 percent. The companies on this year’s list employ more than 45,000 people.

The Hottest Regions for Fast-Growing Companies

California continues to rule the roost by number of companies on the Inc. 500, with 92, up from 84 last year and 78 in 2008. The Golden State is followed by Texas (52), Virginia (46), New York (36), and Florida (29). These five states place in the same order as last year, and each of them has more companies on the 500 than last year. They now account for more than half of the companies on the list.

Ranking Methodology

The 2010 Inc. 500 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2006 to 2009. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by June 30, 2006. Additionally, they had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2009. The minimum revenue required for 2006 is $80,000; the minimum for 2009 is $2 million.

Meet our executives at the Inc. 500 Award Ceremony and Conference

TJ Thinakaran, COO of CallFire, will be joined by Ravishanker when they visit Washington, DC. September 30th – October 2 for the Inc. 500 Award Ceremony and Conference. The event will bring together current Inc. 500|5000 honorees and alumni to recognize the achievements of fellow entrepreneurs and their contributions to the global economy.

This post was written by Matthew Lasar and originally featured on ArsTechnica.

Not long ago I was out of town, sitting in an unfamiliar neighborhood cafe and talking with a buddy on my mobile phone. Quick as a text message, the proprietor rushed in and pointed to a sign over the door forbidding such activities in her establishment. I obediently nodded, said my goodbyes, and shut the device down.

I then spent the next fifteen minutes listening to a couple at the adjacent table have a loud argument, about which the owner said nothing. Still, I try to be accommodating in these situations. It makes no sense to argue with folks about this stuff. Once people get it in their heads that checking tomorrow’s weather on your iPhone or Android device at the table is rude, it just is—until the day that it isn’t any more. But since everybody’s debating the appropriateness of cell phones and laptops in restaurants and cafes, it’s worth remembering that our attitudes towards communications gadgets change constantly. One way to get a sense of that is to read Claude S. Fischer’s wonderful tome, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940.

The Telephone Pledge

From the late-19th through the early 20th-century, the telephone was the communications tool of the well-off and the middle class, Fischer notes. “Besides those with business reasons, it was the social elite who subscribed in 1900,” his survey of three northern California towns concluded. Doctors, lawyers, local storekeepers—these represented the Bell System’s core market. They were often the only people who could afford to lease the service. When blue collar households had to decide between a phone or a Model-T Ford, they often chose the latter. Although innovations like party lines and rural co-ops gradually expanded telephony to rural and urban working class consumers, by the early 1930s much of this progress was undone by the Depression. Between 1930 and 1933, over 2.5 million Americans dropped telephone service. The nationwide subscription rate fell by ten percent, to less than a third of the total  household market. Within this context, AT&T publicists took pains to portray the telephone as a respectable, middle class gadget, to be used politely and responsibly. Bell Telephone franchise ads constantly railed against rude or argumentative behavior over the receiver, as in a 1910 notice with the headline “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the Telephone.” “The marvelous growth of the Bell System has made use of the telephone universal and misuse a matter of public concern,” the ad warned. Some local phone companies even pushed for, and won, city laws making profanity in phone conversation a finable or jailable offense.

AT&T went so far as to send out a card titled “The Telephone Pledge.” “I believe in the Golden Rule and will try to be as Courteous and Considerate over the Telephone as if Face to Face,” it required consumers to declare.

Continue to read the full post from ArsTechnica here.

1. News/Updates – Important and time sensitive customer updates can be sent directly to your opt-in client or customer using SMS! Plus, people like knowing stuff first. Send your customers updates about product launches, product updates or events. Consider a news text like a micro-newsletter with bite-size updates.

2. Emergency Notification – SMS is a great way to notify your group or team during an emergency. Send critical updates during natural disasters, last minute event location changes or just before your company’s all-hands meeting.

3. Promotions – Travel agents are using texts to their customer databases to highlight special offers and promotions, which can be tailored to individual preferences. Send a message with a unique discount code for customers to redeem. The exclusive code creates incentive to stay on the list for future promotions.

4. Contests – Launch a text messaging contest to your database with a text-to-win campaign. Try sending out a follow up text about the winner of the contest so customers will continue to enter for upcoming contests.

5. SMS Coupons - Use SMS coupons to give out specific coupons or coupon codes for a customer loyalty program. Also when coupled with in-store promotions, texting becomes a strong vehicle for small businesses with newer clientele.

6. Customer Service - Many offer customer support and problem resolution via text. Customers are also able to check order status, track their packages and receive back order notification alerts.

7. Events – Implement a text messaging marketing strategy to promote weekly meetups or networking events. Send out key logistic information like changes of venue or detailed parking instructions.

8. Non-profits & Causes - In Spain on the eve of Election Day in 2004, demonstrations were banned 24 hours prior to an election. Instead, protested rallied via text messaging, utilizing the country’s 94% mobile phone penetration rate in Spain.  Start to rally volunteers who are mobile warriors supporting your next cause.

9. Lead Generation - Gyms worldwide are using mobile marketing to generate leads through stronger databases, send out new membership promotions and offer updates on new classes and class cancellations.

This post originally appeared on ReadWriteWeb.

The interactive voice response (IVR) app was notably absent from the agenda at ReadWriteWeb’s Mobile Summit in Mountain View, California. This is part of a larger trend: In the race toward capitalizing on the smartphone boom, application developers are focused on creating apps for smartphones, but very little attention is being given to creating apps for the voice network.

The phone call is no longer considered sexy. However, just like the human need for conversation, the phone call is never going to go away. People will always talk, and that conversation will continue to be a perennial part of any communication strategy. Building apps for the smartphone may be cool, but building apps for the voice network is essential.

Personalization to Stay Relevant

The nature of the phone call is rapidly evolving, especially as it relates to commerce. As businesses fight to stay relevant in the conversation – no pun intended – they see the value of using new data streams to access customers and utilizing existing streams effectively. They do this by using the telephone to send out a message that attracts customers.

There is a need to personalize the phone call. It’s a direct response to the fact that people have little patience for the generic phone message, especially in this microblogging age. Unless it’s apparent early on in the message that it was meant specifically for them, it’s going to take a lot more to get the customer’s attention. Not only does the phone call need to be personalized for each customer, but this personalization has to be able to scale with the business.

There are two aspects to personalization. The first is to unlock the information in disparate data sources, and the second is to interject this data into the conversation at the right time and in the right format. This has and always will be the dominion of the app developer with deep smarts in the business domain. These apps need to discern data quality, employ complex business rules and interject the data in real time into the conversation, all in an effort to make the conversation relevant.

This relevance can be in the form of traditional messaging, like personalized appointment reminders that give clients details of the appointment along with the ability to automatically reschedule, or it can be in newer methods, like in student education where key presses on the phone can be tied in real time to an online seminar.

No Longer a “Tool of the Big Boys”

Unlike the mobile device, these apps are hosted on the network, meaning it’s up to the telecom provider to build the platform to support these apps. This is where the cloud-based IVR comes in, providing the full set of features and scale with very little up-front costs.

It’s important to note that the technologies that make up the IVR developers palette have been around for decades; what’s changing is the access to these technologies. For example, open standards like Voice XML, CCXML and technologies like text-to-speech (TTS) and speech-to-text have been available for a while, but until a couple of years ago, building an IVR that could customize a phone call was the dominion of large enterprise applications.

Building IVRs was a complex, multi-person endeavor, partly because of bloated protocols and high learning curves, and partly because of licensing and related costs. Not only was the barrier for entry high for developers, but the pricing of the technologies involved made the business case for a small development shop even harder to make.

To compound this problem even further, providing quality “copper-to-copper” termination at scale has always been an expensive proposition. It was the case that the only way to guarantee that 10 simultaneous calls would have the same call quality as 10,000 was to buy 10,000 phone lines worth of hardware, manage direct carrier relationships and keep dozens of servers idling, just in case the big flood came. Understandably, this made small- and medium-sized businesses even more wary of doing too much with their IVR other than what was available from cookie-cutter software. IVRs remained the tool of the big boys.

Cloud telephony is disrupting this old way of business. It has abstracted the complexity of telephony and the associated costs and provided an on-demand platform where anyone can create apps that are relevant to the conversation. Platforms provided by the likes of CloudVox, Adhearsion and CallFire are disrupting this status quo by creating an environment where the IVR resides in the cloud and can be invoked either by calling out to phones, or by consumers calling in to a hosted number.

“The Illusion of Simplicity”

The cloud solves the problem by creating the illusion of simplicity. The tasks of setting up trunk groups, interacting with carriers, and so on are taken care of by the service provider, who in turn provides open, on-demand APIs to connect, create and execute calls. In fact, many providers are ignoring VoiceXML and CCXML and are creating simplified standards that are more appealing to developers.

CloudVox, for example, provides a JSON-like representation of a call that can then be executed via the Web on its cloud. CallFireXML , on the other hand, provides a reductionist XML spec that allows for great expressiveness by providing a simplified XML tag set. Simplification in cloud telephony means not having to worry about how the phone call is made; you simply tag your data, and the service provider takes care of the rest.

This trend has not gone unnoticed by the big boys. In fact, there’s a mini-consolidation wave happening in the industry. The big players – the AT&Ts, Verizons, and the Level 3s of the world – are now on the prowl to dominate this space, either by innovation or by acquisition. Of course, their deep pockets make it easier to buy rather than build. BT’s acquisition of Ribbit and Microsoft’s acquisition of TellMe are perfect examples.

This is also a validation of the fact that the telephone call is not going away. As long as people want to talk, there will be a need for building apps that allow for person-to-person calls, and that’s a great business to be in. What kind of hosted IVR apps would you like to build today?

TJ Thinakaran
COO, CallFire

Our company mascots, Lucky & Ronak, are learning how to share… but sometimes it doesn’t go so well! Ronak is a 4 month old English Chocolate Lab pup and Lucky is a 3 year old Jack Russell Terrier.

Meeting notes:

• Patience sometimes pays greater dividends than opportunism.

• Lack of communication can lead to inadequate goal alignment between business partners.

• A show of force (followed by tail-wagging) is sometimes more effective than an actual bite.

Happy Friday from the CallFire Team!

We are happy to announce the launch of our new SMS text messaging product!

Features include:

• Simple uploads using Excel or CSV lists
• Delivery reports and analytics
• Send one or thousands of text messages
• Only 3 cents per text message
• Enterprise grade reliability

Complementing our core Voice Broadcast and Cloud IVR products, SMS allows you to easily send a text message to a list of opt-in phone numbers with pay-as-you-go pricing of three cents per message.

Coming soon are more advanced features such as auto-reply, visual survey results (think American Idol voting), and SMS APIs for developers. If your company (or team) needs to communicate with customers or employees, try CallFire’s group text messaging! Like our voice services, SMS is scalable and reliable to meet everybody’s needs.

In the spirit of election season, we’re releasing 8 tips for developing an online Political marketing strategy or GOTV campaign in the Cloud. We’re not experts in Political Marketing but we manage our share of virtual phone banks and polling around this time of the year. These tips are based on research and conversations we have with our valuable political clientele. This is not an attempt at defining an all-encompassing online political marketing campaign – instead we hope you find a strategy or two for your political campaign that you haven’t yet executed. We left out the more obvious suggestions like, “make decisions using data and analytics,” “design a great website” and “respond to email.” Instead we attempt to highlight trends in online political warfare specifically in the 2010 election cycle. We’d love to hear your feedback!

#1 Market your candidate in search results on Google and Bing

Around election time people will be searching these and other search engines by candidate name. (ex: “Barbara Boxer”, “barbara boxer ca”, “barbara boxer vs”, “barbara vote california”). Your search result should appear for similar queries and any relevant permutations. If your budget permits, consider showing your candidates ad whenever someone searches for the names of political opponents. This isn’t considered poor form – we see it as a public service to voters. Consider using multi-variate testing to determine Ads that drive the highest clickthrough from the cloud. http://adwords.google.com

• Pros: National reach, highly targeted
• Cons: Expensive, $1-5/click

#2 Place site-targeted ads for your candidate on Political websites

Content match advertising allows you to place video or text ads for your candidate across various websites and mobile devices. Consider targeting geographically relevant local news websites and the political news sections of nationally read publications like HuffingtonPost.com, Politico.com, NYTimes.com and WSJ.com.

• Pros: Less expensive than search advertising, target the long tail.
• Cons: Untargeted.

#3 Accept campaign contributions online, via telephone and snail mail

Make it blatantly obvious how supporters can donate to your campaign. Services like Google Checkout, CampaignPay.com and PayPal.com allow you to build web-forms to accept online donations. Use variant testing to measure the efficacy of different email designs, landing pages and call-to-actions for each donation push. Just a few days of A/B testing can reveal small percentage differences in donation levels and clickthrough rates. Seemingly simple variances in ad-copy and your call-to-action text can result in considerable (in some cases double-digit) percentage changes in your collections efforts. (Fast forward to minute 18:00 to watch Dan Siroker discuss how small changes in user interface design can change donation outcomes. )

• Pros: Inexpensive to set up, collect more donations than ever.
• Cons: More money, more problems. Just kidding, none that we can think of!

#4 Enable volunteers to make voter-outreach calls from home

Lets face it, some volunteers (like some employees) prefer to work from home. In 2008 and 2010 we saw an increase in on-demand Virtual Call Centers usage by political folk. Solutions like CallFire’s own Cloud Call Center and Five9’s Virtual Call Center software allow groups to enable the long-tail of their volunteer base who may live in geographically distributed areas of the United States. Cloud power dialing solutions like these allow volunteers to work from home, the beach or phone banking location with just a cell phone and laptop – and allow real-time telephone targeting in the areas your campaign needs it most. Because it’s web-based, you can change the script for your volunteers and collect statistical data in real time that can change the outcome of an election.

• Pros: Low cost because volunteers use a cell phone & their own laptop (no hardware or software), harness more volunteer hours, allow volunteers to work from home.
• Cons: Volunteer training is required.

#5 Survey your population via telephone and social media

Make calculated efforts to collect data on your voting population with online & telephone surveys. For example Facebook and Twitter support applications like RealPolls which provide easy tool to survey Facebook users. Short, fun surveys provide an interactive way for voters to find friends with a similar political lens while providing your campaign team invaluable data on voter preferences. Toll Free feedback hotlines can easily be set up using a Cloud ivr system like CallFire or Angel. Advertising an anonymous feedback hotline allows voters to freely voice their opinions, giving them the opportunity to be heard.

• Pros: Analytics galore, survey dozens or millions instantly, low cost, send automated outbound surveys or inbound toll free hotlines.
• Cons: Tough egg to crack, multiple survey types and iterations may be required.

#6 Tailor communication by age, location & political affiliation

If you’re mobilizing volunteers for phone banking, ensure voter-lists are paired with volunteers of similar backgrounds. Similar backgrounds creates an ethos of trust with the recipient and increases the chances they will discuss issues of mutual importance. For email campaigns, be sure to address issues important to that specific voter. We’re not suggesting you create 100 different variations of your email blasts – but splitting them up by major 2-3 age groups and 3-5 political affiliations may allow your team to leverage key issues that are more important to one demographic than another. For example, you might want to target a 25 year old male voter with an email describing your candidate’s Gov2.0 transparency initiative – but on that same day a 70 year old female voter might receive an email regarding women’s rights issues. Electronic communication affords you relevance and micro-targeting like never before – take advantage of it!

• Pros: Connect with voters on a personal level, make outreach relevant.
• Cons: Time consuming and resource intensive.

#7 Try the “Google Surge” (no, it’s not a dance move)

• Pros: Network surges are highly effective at getting last-minute eyeballs on your candidate.
• Cons: Extremely expensive

#8 Partner with an experienced Political Technology company

Experience trumps all, so if you’re late to the game and don’t want to architect your Cloud campaigning solutions in-house, we suggest you find a great technology partner. We recommend a company like ActionKit.com or an experienced creative political consultancy like CraftDC.com. If you can’t afford one – a good start to your cloud campaigning efforts should include the implementation of a hosted CRM platform to manage your outreach efforts. Consider Salesforce.com or Leadmaster.com. For those of you with in-house techies – consider an open source option like SugarCRM, VTiger.com and OpenCRX. Remember, to accurately measure your outreach efficacy you must first define quantifiable success metrics!

The modern political campaign seeks not only brand awareness, but also requires interaction and voter education for a big win. Always question your assumptions, rely on real-time data feeds and create innovative ways to connect with potential voters.

Good luck from the CallFire team! 877.897.FIRE

For your reference

Patrick Michael Kane – Technology driven political advocacy expert, CTO & founder. Former lead technology consultant for MoveOn.org, One.org, OFA and ActionKit.com clients.
Website: http://www.actionkit.com

Brian Donahue – Political Consultant & Founder of Craftdc.com Mr. Donahue has managed 4 Federal election campaigns and served on 2 presidential campaign staffs and Headed national 72-hour Task Force for RNC. Mr. Donahue also served as the Executive Director for Bush-Cheney ‘04.
Video: http://www.gspm.org/brian-donahue-video
Website: http://www.CraftDC.com

Dan Siroker Video: “How We Used Data to Win the Presidential Election” Stanford University & Dan Siroker – the former Data Analytics Manager for the Obama campaign.
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71bH8z6iqSc

Election Assistance Commission – Data from 2008 http://www.eac.gov/News/press/eac-releases-data-from-2008-presidential-election Download the full report as zip.

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View was packed last week with computer relics and hundreds of RWW Mobile Summit attendees to adore them. The unconference itself began with CallFire CEO Dinesh Ravishanker introducing the keynote speaker Richard MacManus, the Founder and CEO of ReadWriteWeb. Just before he handed things off to Richard, Dinesh had all attendees reach under their seats for the CallFire giveaway – a toll free number with 1000 IVR minutes. Attendees were told “creativity is your only limit” with the ability to create surveys, a feedback line or track advertising analytics.

Because of the unconference format, attendees at the RWW Mobile Summit were able to create their own path. Not only did attendees choose the panel and topics, but they also helped lead them. This type of format is rare yet welcome in the hardcore tech community, which loves to cut out the fat of big budget conferences. CallFire team members attended panels such as Mobile Video Content, Lessons Learned from Location based Apps, and Cross-Platform App Development. TJ Thinakaran, COO at CallFire, discovered that “you can’t get away from developing native apps and yet HTML5 will simplify deployment.” Other notable trends were SMS being a prominent way of developing apps in the future as well as the sudden rise in augmented reality applications.

In between panels, the event sponsors had the opportunity to participate in “speed geeking”, the unconference equivalent to speed dating. Essentially, companies had five minutes to demo their product – including Q&A. It gave a chance for the demoing companies to reach more eyeballs in a short amount of time. The CallFire team was able to quickly demo how to use Cloud IVR to develop inbound & outbound phone systems and create complex surveys and automate meeting reminders with text-to-speech. In the meantime, other attendees were asked to participate in a contest, deployed on CallFire’s IVR platform, which tested knowledge on basic telephone trivia. The caller answering the quiz in the shortest time won an iPad.

Overall, the RWW Mobile Summit was filled with solid discussion, networking, and a myriad of application demos. To read more about geo-location, mobile commerce, cloud computing and privacy trends visit the RWW Mobile Summit Keynote Recap here.

Co-Founder and CTO, Vijesh Mehta speaks about his experience as an Entrepreneur at an APEX panel featuring professionals in various stages of their ventures.

Vijesh answers the following questions:

1. Startups are risky.  Why do you do it?
2. How do you feel about funding? Does it mean selling your soul to the devil?
3. What was the hardest thing during the first year and how did you overcome it?
4. How do you recruit a great team when you have limited funds?
5. How many hours do you work a week?

Hear his answers: Listen to the recording here!

Do you use a hosted-CRM utility?  Do you use CallFire’s Cloud Call Center?  If your answer is ‘Yes’ to both of these questions, your CCC agents might benefit from a link to your CRM platform, directly within the CallFire Agent Popup screen.

1. Export the necessary data from your web-based CRM. If you are unsure how to do this, search for “Exporting leads to Excel” in your web-based CRM’s FAQ or Help section.
2. Be sure to include the unique ID for each customer as one of the items
3. Once you have exported the list to excel, you must turn the leads into unique urls
   • To do this, first copy-paste the piece of the URL that precedes the customer’s unique ID (in most cases, this should be the same URL each time) in a blank field in excel
   • In the blank row to the right run the following command script: =(X2&Y2), where column “X” is the column where the URL appears and column “Y” is the column where the unique ID appears. This will combine the items in each of those columns so that the resulting piece will now appear as the unique URL with a link to that customer’s profile in theCallFire agent interface.

4. Upload the list to an existing Cloud Call Center campaign or create a campaign for this list of contacts.Before making phonecalls, make sure that you have already logged into your web-based CRM account. This will prevent the link1 tab from taking over the CallFire agent interface when you click on it.

https://na7.salesforce.com/help/doc/user_ed.jspsection=help&target=exporting_from_salesforce.htm&loc=help&hash=topic-title