Tag: mobileday
I participate in multiple conference every day. While I can’t change much about the general tediousness associated with 15 different people all joining a call within a five minute window, I can do something about the misery of pressing 18 different numbers on a phone to join the call.
MobileDay solved this problem for smart phones several years ago when it launched. If you want to join a conference call (or any phone call) on your iOS or Android phone, just use MobileDay. Press one button – join whatever call is next on your calendar – automagically.
But it gets even better. MobileDay just released a feature which lets you push the call from your smartphone to any conference room phone. Until now, while I can do one touch dialing into a conference call from my iPhone, I still have to dial 18 (or 19, or was it 20, or does it need a 9 at the beginning, damnit) numbers on the ubiquitous Polycom phones in conference rooms. And, amazingly, sometimes I give up and just use the speaker on my iPhone, which is truly sad and pretty awful compared to the dormant Polycom it is sitting next to.
The new Push feature available for MobileDay Business subscribers can be pre-programmed to connect with any device: Polycom or desk phone. Meetings can still be initiated with MobileDay’s revolutionary one tap and then pushed to another device. Push is keyword sensitive: once I have pre-programmed a device and named it after the meeting room it lives in, whenever I am in a scheduled meeting in that room, MobileDay gives me the option to connect with that device. As with all MobileDay calls there are no numbers to remember – all you have to do is press the green button that pops up on your smartphone and you are in your call.
My favorite products are ones that just work like magic. MobileDay has created several of them, and Push is one of those things that suddenly makes my life a lot better. If you are nostalgic for the days when you had to get up, walk across the room, and manually change the channel on your TV, you probably won’t be into Push. But if you like things that just work and you make a lot of conference calls, go try it and let me know what you think.
Little Colorado Company MobileDay Finds Big Hole In Enterprise Bucket
I’m a seed investor in MobileDay, a Boulder-based company that has helped its users make over two million mobile-based conference calls in the past few months. Its popularity comes from One-Touch Dialing where users press a big green button that shows up on their phone just before a conference call and they’re in. I use it every day – for every call – and am no longer in conference call hell on my iPhone as I go from my calendar to my dialer back to my calendar back to my dialer as I try to remember what the next number in the conference call sequence is. But – this is a show vs. tell type app – just go try it on MobileDay iPhone or MobileDay Android.
When MobileDay wanted to figure out how to make money, they went on the road to talk to big companies. They already knew who has lots of users of MobileDay, so they visited them and said, “You already have hundreds of employees using our product – how can we work together?”
MobileDay quickly found out that mobile had disrupted the control that companies used to have over the cost of conference calls. People moved away from land lines and toward mobile, but conference calling hadn’t caught up.
MobileDay knew that they could save time. One-Touch Dialing proved that. But here was a chance to save money also. If MobileDay could make their big green button also dial the cheapest number automatically, companies could save an enormous amount of money.
Enter Least Cost Dialing (LCD). With LCD enabled, the MobileDay app automatically inserts the company’s lowest-cost conference phone numbers. Every dialing sequence is based on the employee’s location, and LCD can reroute calls through the company’s internal voice or data network. MobileDay will provide the same capability for international calls which will create awesome savings opportunities.
While LCD is in the background saving money, One-Touch is up front making conference calls simple. It’s a great victory for both users (ease of use) and the CFO (massive cost savings for a small monthly fee.)
As MobileDay tackles this huge opportunity, they are hunting for senior mobile developers (iOS and Android), enterprise sales experts, and a great product/support person. If you want to be part a pioneer in the mobile enterprise game, email me and I’ll pass on your resume.
I’m super impressed with the progress MobileDay has made in the past six months. We are a seed investor in the company whose goal is to fix conferencing calling. Their approach is “one touch into any conference call from any conference call provider.”
The current MobileDay iPhone app is excellent – I use it multiple times a day. If you make any conference calls, give it a try and tell me what you think and what we can do better.
Also, take a look at their new one minute overview of the product and give me feedback on whether it makes sense and what they can do better.
MobileDay – Never Dial Into Conference Calls Again. from MobileDay on Vimeo.
Each day I do at least two, and sometimes as many as a half dozen, audio conference calls. I make almost all of them from my iPhone when I’m walking somewhere or driving in my car. I find the process of dialing into a conference totally insane, maddening, and archaic. Here’s how it usually goes when I’m in the car.
- I go to my calendar on my iPhone at the appointed conference time.
- I try to memorize the conference call id. If I’m lucky, the phone number is underlined so I don’t have to remember that.
- I dial the number (or it dials automatically). Once the conference bridge answers, I press the keypad (#) icon on the phone.
- As I’m driving, I try not to crash into something as I type the conference code.
- By this point, I’ve often forgotten the code, press the home button on my iPhone, go back to my calendar, read the code again, press the home button, go back to the phone icon, and try to finish entering the number before it times out. If it times out I get a second chance (usually) and go back to step #4.
- Usually I’ll get into the conference. But if I don’t, I go back to step #1, but only after screaming “fuck” at the top of my lungs at my phone.
- Once I’m in the conference, I once again go back to concentrating on driving. I usually realize that I’ve paid no attention to the road for the last 30 seconds.
- If I’m driving to the Denver airport, I can guarantee that at least one time during the call I will drop and have to start over at step #1.
All I really want is a notification to pop up on my phone when it’s time for a conference call that allows me to have one touch access into any conference call automagically.
This is what MobileDay does. And it’s available now on iPhone and Android. Go try it and give me feedback.
It’s an early release so there will be plenty of rough spots, conference call numbers that don’t have the right sequence in their database, and funny iPhone glitches (since Apple locks down a lot of the phone dialing stuff), but I’ve been using it for all scheduled phone calls for the last 30 days and it’s rapidly improving with each release, especially based on user feedback as we learn all the different cases we need to solve for.
The MobileDay team has been quickly adding features like being able to – within the app – send email and SMS messages to meeting participants (for example to tell people I’m running five minutes late) and automatically map locations of meetings from the address block.
I was involved in the creation of reservationless audioconferencing, which was pioneered by Raindance (I was a seed investor) in 1997. Today, reservationless audioconferencing is ubiquitous (and I view it as a platform for communication), but the UX has been relatively unchanged and is still optimized for phones with keypads that don’t have integrated calendars and scraps of papers with numbers scribbled on them. It’s time for a completely new way to interact with this platform and MobileDay is obsessively focused on this. Play around and help us focus on the key things that are needed to make this a completely flawless experience.