TechZulu and the Entrepreneurship Association at UCLA's Anderson School of Business have partnered up to create a quarterly series of events that will showcase new technology entrepreneurs in the LA area; the premiere event is this upcoming Thursday and CallFire will be there!

We're happy to announce a few team additions here at CallFire headquarters. Ryan Koven joined the Solutions team in September as a Solutions Specialist and Natalia Klishina joined our Marketing team in November as an Online Marketing Analyst.

A few days ago, we got an interesting email from Thomas Kennedy, the newly elected Citrus County (FL) School Board  Member for District 1.  It read "CallFire got me elected!" It turns out that Kennedy's use of voice broadcasts helped his campaign  win by a landslide, in 60 out of 61 precincts in his county.

Why Voice Broadcast?

The CallFire Development Team is working hard at HQ on CallFire 3.0 - our most feature rich product to date. These photos were taken last Friday, when the CallFire team held its' weekly developer "Show and Tell". Our team utilizes an agile dev process called "Scrum" methodology and we release features & deliverables in a time-span we call a "Sprint." (SCRUM on Wikipedia).

1) Starting your IVR: All phone calls start with a HELLO

Make sure your outbound or inbound IVR always starts with a "Hello".  It's helpful to begin with a play tag that is just a greeting before you move into a menu tags before you start prompting your customer with the next action.

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

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

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.