Monday, November 24, 2008

Calliflower Premium Launched

Regular readers will know that I've followed Ottawa-based Iotum for a long time, and have some news to pass on for their latest incarnation, Calliflower. This is a Web 2.0-style platform that's trying to bring more intelligence and value to audio conferencing.

At the recent Under the Radar event, Calliflower had two announcements of note. First is their integration with the iPhone. This is good news for two reasons. First, it exposes Calliflower to a huge market of tech-savvy consumers, some of whom will no doubt find this service of great value. Second, since Calliflower is mainly a business application, it makes the iPhone more relevant to the enterprise market - SMBs as well - and that's a big market that Apple very much wants to crack.

Secondly, Calliflower launched its Premium service, which comes with a modest monthly fee that will be attractive to power users, especially those doing international conference calls. I believe that companies like Calliflower/Iotum need fee-based offerings to survive long term, and it's great to them do this. The introductory pricing is $50 per month for two organizers, and with this you get file sharing, and local inbound dialing for North America and 4 other countries, plus the use of Voxbone's iNum global area code (883). You can read more about it in the press release here.

There's a lot of Web 2.0 here, and you can imagine how much more engaging these calls can be, layering file sharing and IM on top of the audio service. Plus, with the flat monthly fee, the per minute dialing charges are eliminated, making conferencing much more affordable for regular users - as well as attractive to everyone else who thinks that conference calling is expensive.

Oh - if you're keen, and are among the first 400 to sign up before November 30, Calliflower will add a 3rd organizer at no extra cost.

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