CallFire

CNN has this article about companies that hire home-based workers. With quality of life becoming an increasingly paramount factor in people’s lives more companies more companies allowing for employees to work from home. The story states that:

CallFire’s Virtual Call Center allows organizations provide a better quality of life and increase productivity of their members. Think about it, your support, sales, or volunteer staff only need to have access to the Internet and a phone, and you can have all the features and controls that a brick-and-mortar call center would have. Here’s the kicker, it costs you no more than $2.10 per hour per agent. That’s it! No up front fees, no monthly minimums. I’ve had customers who’ve told me that makes a great case for keeping their support desks on US shores.

Try it out!

Quote of the day:

Mr. Watson - Come here - I want to see you.

                                                   — Alexander Graham Bell

Some of our customers may have experienced intermittent issues with their campaigns today (specifically between the hours of 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM PST). Rest assured that the issue was not with CallFire’s own servers. Our long distance carriers were having problems completing calls and our servers detected this issue and put the affected campaigns on stand-by mode. This is a designed feature to make sure that all campaigns are running at optimal levels. So what may appear like a bug is actually a feature. Such is the complicated, dense, and interconnected nature of middleware, we have to be prepared for even the most outlandish of scenarios and do everything we can to keep the system stable and secure.

Quote of the day:

Try not. Do, or do not, there is no try. — Master Yoda

Press-1 campaigns have been around for a while. Why would our Press-1 campaigns be any different? Because we add a Voice 2.0 twist, of course.

Earlier this year, CallFire released its Voice Broadcast user interface for small to medium enterprises. CallFire is the fastest, easiest way to price-effectively create Press 1 outbound campaigns. CallFire empowers small businesses (previously unable to deploy telephony applications due to expense constraints) to now easily connect warm leads to a sales force, LIVE.

Use CallFire.com today to easily create Press 1 campaigns using our Press 1 API, please visit: http://www.callfire.com/dialer/cm/info/voice_broadcast_api.html. To try out a Press-1 campaign for your business, sign up here.

Cheers, DR

My colleague Adrian and I were lamenting about how the startup life can impede one’s workout schedule. Unlike me, he’s a workout fanatic. Working out in the morning would be a good way to ‘get it done and get it out of your way’. One challenge is consistently getting up in the morning, and that’s when Adrian came up with an idea: Why not use CallFire as a wake-up service?

Think about it, if you scheduled a campaign to give you a call every day of the month at 4:00 AM, it would cost you $1.05. That’s one dollar for the entire month! It’s way cheaper than the $4.99/per month or 7cents/min that dedicated wake-up services charge you. You could even schedule three additional snooze style wake-up calls and still not break the $5 mark!

CallFire: the personal productivity tool. Whowudathunkit!

Quote of the Day:

I have to exercise in the morning before my brain figures out what I’m doing.

                                                                                                          -Marsha Doble

CallFire affords developers a powerful Voice Messaging API that enables businesses to intertwine voice messaging into your web presence, proprietary software, CRM, or internal software!

Analogous terms for Voice Messaging, include: Voice Broadcast, Voicemail Broadcast, Voice Blast, and so on. The bottom line: CallFire provides Voice Messaging with Voice 2.0 interoperability. Learn more by checking out CallFire’s various APIs here: http://www.callfire.com/dialer/cm/info/voice_broadcast_api.html

Cheers, DR

The Direct Marketing Association conference held in Chicago was quite a learning experience for the CallFire attendees. To our amazement, many marketing executives had not used (nor were familiar with) Voice 2.0 Teleservices, Voice Broadcast or Virtual Call Center functionality!

To our delight, no Voice 2.0 Teleservices companies attended DMA. In addition, very few Virtual Call Center & Voice Broadcast competitors emerged as strongly we did. Our salespeople took time to understand the business of the attendees and offered expert advice on how to most effectively utilize our services. *Patting ourselves on the back*

CallFire is revolutionizing the way Teleservices work – and very few C-level executives understand how this can affect your bottom line. With a little creativity and business acumen, businesses can add value to their internal processes & client relationships - with minimal investment. While at DMA I met a very interesting individual by the name of David Dalka from Chicago – a well known blogger. We struck up a great conversation about the future of telephony and how the world of advertising & user application design will change dramatically – due to companies like CallFire. He gets it. Check out David’s blog here: http://www.daviddalka.com/createvalue/

Thanks to everyone that helped make CallFire’s venture to DMA a success! On a side note, here are a few photos I took from the CallFire booth @ DMA in Chicago, 2007:

CallFire.com @ DMA, Chicago 2007:

DMA Chicago welcome booth (Left). CallFire volunteers & employees (Right).

Finished CallFire booth (Left). Intern, Reena Mohan & DMA IPod winner! (Right).

Cheers, DR

We just released the hosted call center api! For everyone who wants to use the call center connect with agent popup with your own backend, we provide everything you need to integrate straight into Callpeer platform.

You can login your agents and the system will start dialing and connecting calls to the agent. Every time a connection occurs, you get information about it and you can display a popup and peripheral information from your own backend. Collect the data and just let the Callpeer platform know that the agent is ready for the next call and we will handle the rest!

Features

• Run multiple campaigns simultaneously
• Add hundreds of agents per campaign - enormous scalability (Already tested with over 400 agents per campaign)
• Full connection details - so you can display popups and collect information on your own system
• Easy call center api and full documentation.
• Full campaign and agent statistics

CallFire now supports internal list management. You can create and maintain a list of phone numbers easily within your dashboard. This feature also provides an internal do-not-call list support for your campaigns.To use the feature, click on the phonebook link.

Create a new list and start adding numbers to it. The internal do-not-call list will be created automatically for you when you make your first campaign. You can add and remove numbers from all of your lists.

The MasterDNC list can be scrubbed against when you create a new campaign. Once the campaign is created, the system will dial all the numbers that were not scrubbed. Updates to your Master DNC list do not update old campaigns.

CallFire is pleased to announce CallPeer, their application development platform. CallPeer will allow developers to create nifty VoIP applications via hooks into the CallFire infrastructure. Currently, we support such hooks via our API which allows clients to integrate their back end systems with our Voice Broadcast infrastructure. In the future we’ll be rolling out new features and releasing new versions of the CallPeer plaform.

CallPeer is what we would call a true Web 2.0 play for CallFire. There is this misconception that Web 2.0 is all about pay-per-click or eyeball capture. In fact concepts like pay-per-click advertising, high degree of user acquisition and retention are the result of true Web2.0 not the root cause. The whole phenomenon of Web 2.0 is about creating new innovation out of existing inventions. It is about creating new value out of existing technology. If you look at the ‘famous’ Web 2.0 companies, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace etc, the technology they are using is not new at all. In fact, in some cases their technology is at least a decade old (MySpace was built using ColdFusion–remember that anyone?). What they bring to the table is finding new ways for integrating existing technologies.

CallFire’s play is integrating two existing technologies-the web and the telephone and marrying them to an amazingly intuitive interface to create new value for our customers. Through CallPeer we aim to extend that value proposition to developers as well, giving them the freedom to create their own applications using our infrastructure. As the CallFire team huddles around the drawing board dreaming up new features, do drop us a line if there are cool features you would like to see.

Quote of the Day:

Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible–Alan Kay

Our many users have since gotten used to the famed ‘My Campaigns’ page. The page was designed with simplicity in mind. For example, in theory there could be infinite campaigns and a finite number of actions for each, it was deemed best to have all campaigns listed and then to have all the actions for the campaign as part of a single drop down menu.

In effect, for every action, you would first have to select the campaign, and then go up to the drop down menu, and select the action. Well, it turns out some times simplicity creates complexity. We found that 80% of our customers were 20% of the functionality 80% of the time. So we figured, why not make those tasks easily accessible.

Ladies & Gentlemen! We Present the new ‘My Campaigns’ Page!

Alongside each campaign, you’ll see easy access buttons to start, stop, schedule, and delete a campaign. Sure, it will add more clutter–I mean color–to the page, but hey it’s convenient, and hence simple! We expect that this small enhancement will go a long way towards the usability of the site. As for those who just love our drop-down menu, rest assured, you can still do things the old way.

Quote of the Day:

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.–Leonardo Da Vinci