We love to hate conference calls. Dialing in at a precise time, fumbling for a cumbersome PIN, and then not being able to hear a word because of poor call quality. No wonder there is near constant bickering about the experience, and endless dreaming that some day, some smart company will finally get it right.
That day may be upon us. With the ubiquitous Polycom speakerphone dead in their sights, four startups are pushing a new wave of conference calling services that promise to make our conference-call nightmares, if not disappear, at least better, faster, and cheaper.
There's SocialDial, a company started by long-time entrepreneur Randy Adams. Adams was a director at Yahoo, he led the team that created Adobe's Acrobat Reader, and more recently co-founded the comedy website Funny or Die. Now he's dead serious about tackling conferencing calling.
SocialDial launched with a service that calls LinkedIn or Facebook contacts from your smartphone without needing their phone numbers. As long you and the other person both have the SocialDial app, you can complete the call. But the real star of the app is turning out to be a conference calling feature. Adams spun it out as a separate app, dubbed CrowdCall. CrowdCall uses old-school telephone lines to make international conference calls (for now, it's free and limited to 10 calls per day) from an iOS or Android app.
Why is that a big deal? Instead of voice over IP, the backbone of most new(ish) telephone conferencing services like Skype, CrowdCall uses regular old telephone lines, wholesale phone routing services, and overseas phone carriers to route calls internationally.
The problem with VoIP systems, Adams explains, is packet/data loss between wired and wireless networks. If your browser is fetching a packet for a webpage and there is a lag, the page might load slightly slower but eventually you'll get the full page. With VoIP, losing a packet can translate to dropped words and garbled phone conversations. Anyone who's had a choppy FaceTime or Skype call has experienced this first hand. By placing calls over phone lines and mobile carriers, not internet protocol, grainy voice calls are avoided Adams says.
Adams says his goal is to do away with phone numbers altogether and simply "dial up" people through their online personas, including e-mail addresses, LinkedIn profiles, and Twitter handles. Adams credits new technology like communication software FreeSWITCH and cheaper call routing as the main reasons startups finally have a shot at overtaking the big boy in conference calling Polycom. "There's been an emergence of wholesale routers that can cheaply route calls to phone networks around the world," Adams says. "We've never had access to that before."
Another would-be contender in conference calling, HipDial, is betting on the simple approach to storm the Polycom's walls with its conference call service. HipDial co-founder Jonas Huckestein believes that ditching what he describes as "ancient" hardware from Cisco and Polycom is the key to overcoming the worst problems people associate with conferencing calling. HipDial is built with voice and conferencing APIs from Twilio, a voice and text API provider. His web-based system creates one dedicated local or toll-free number per host that multiple people can call to start the conference call - no PINs required. Others simply dial in, and as long as the host is on the call, the conference starts. By logging into HipDial's website, the host can manage calls, mute people, and even assign hosting duties to another person. It's $10 a month for 500 minutes of calling.
While not offering complete solutions, other startups are trying to strip away some of the pain of older conference-calling services. That category includesMobileDay, and UberConference. MobileDay uses an Android or iOS app to dial into a conference call for you. You don't have to remember conference call information, the app saves it for you from your phone's calendar and enters the phone number, PINs, and proper pauses to get you into the conference quickly.
UberConference gives the host control over who can talk and hear parts of the conversation. The host adds phone numbers to the web-based system and dials into the call. Others call in and are added to the conference after UberConference verifies their phone number. The host can use UberConference's website to mute callers, keep track of who's talking, make recordings, and get a summary at the end of the call of who talked the most and who didn't say anything.
For all the startups eyeing its market, Polycom, the dominant company in the conferencing biz, isn't blinking. The 22-year-old company's triangular speaker phones are ubiquitous in conference rooms all over the world. Polycom execs believes it's partly because of that familiarity and reliability that the company's technology hasn't been displaced. "For 20-plus years, Polycom has had well over an 80 percent market share of conference phones," says Polycom VP of product marketing John Antanaitis. "The gray triangle speaker phone is iconic."
But even icons need to get with the technological trends. Antanaitis says Polycom is betting its latest efforts in video conferencing and telepresence services will keep it ahead of the competitive curve. Having grown up with YouTube, those graduating from college now or in the next few years are used to having video in their lives. "For the folks who are entering the workforce, referred to as the Millennials or the Digital Natives, video is a part of everything they do, whether its social, gaming, or what they do at work," says Antanaitis.
That said, he acknowledges that simple voice calls aren't going away any time soon, nor is the triangle. Antanaitis claims that many customers try a different flavor of conference calling before eventually returning to the bosom of Polycom.
That's certainly been the case in the past, but with smartphones getting more powerful and integral to everyone's lives there is a good chance that this newest crop of calling services could break that cycle. With so many tools and services succumbing to the pull of mobile, it seems inevitable that people will embrace simple apps and simply hang up on the iconic Polycom triangle.
