Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Slick conference calling app UberConference has integrated its service with hot startups Evernote and Box, a sign it’s dedicated to making conference calling smarter and more useful.

UberConference’s goal is to make conference calls not as painful as they usually are with cloud-based software. It recently launched an enterprise-class version of its offering and new iPhone and Android apps. Now it is lining up partners to make the experience better.

“The direction we’re going is to be more collaborative,” Craig Walker, CEO of UberConference-parent Firespotter Labs, told me while demoing the new features. “We’re always asking ‘How can we make this more powerful?’ We’re excited to be partnered with these two great companies.”

With Box or Evernote integrated into the software, workers can collaboratively edit documents while on a conference call and then share the results with team members. At the end of a call, links to the notes and files used during the meeting are included in the call summary. Notably, UberConference is one of the first partners to integrate with Evernote Business. Walker said he will likely add Box and Evernote support to its mobile apps eventually.

On top of adding handy Box and Evernote Business integration, the UberConference team has also added international calling support for more than 40 countries across Europe, South America, and Asia. Basically, the company has made it so if you are located another country besides the U.S., you don’t have to pay for often-expensive rates for international calling to the U.S. Instead, you’re able to dial an in-country local number to get into a conference. International support only works for UberConference paid accounts.

Walker said the company’s next big additions will likely be a full-fledged iPad app and a native app for Android tablets.

UberConference-parent Firespotter Labs, based in Pleasanton, Calif., has raised $18 million to date from top tier investors Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures. The company is also the brains behind the apps NoshList, Nosh, and Jotly.

Photo via UberConference

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Inventive conference call service UberConference, from the inventor of Google Voice, has launched new apps for iOS and Android, a move that will make conference call experiences better even if you’re a highly mobile worker.

UberConference won the top prize at TechCrunch Disrupt New York last May because its premise of “reinventing the conference call” is attractive for workers who hate traditional conference calling. Recently, UberConference introduced a new enterprise-class version of its software that increases conference size to 40 people, outboard dialing to join a call, call recording, and more.

Just like their web app counterpart, the new UberConference apps on iOS and Android allow you to add additional people to a call, mute the line, put “earmuffs” on other people on the line, and turn call recording on and off.

“With the modern worker being mobile much of the time and dependent on their devices to conduct traditional business functions, we knew that it was important to give them all the tools and functionality of UberConference in a slick app for their smart phones,” Firespotter Labs CEO Craig Walker told VentureBeat via email. “Now a user can be anywhere and quickly start an UberConference by clicking a few names from their address book. UberConference will dial out to each of the parties and bring them into an instant conference call.”

UberConference-parent Firespotter Labs, based in Pleasanton, Calif., has raised $18 million to date from heavy hitting investors Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures. The company is also the brains behind NoshList, Nosh, and Jotly.

Check out a few more photos of UberConference on iOS in the photos below:

Photos via Firespotter Labs

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Conference calls are sort of the bane of my existence. I agree that they’re useful, and I’m content to just listen in on weekly meetings. But when I actually have to participate, it can be … frustrating.

Voxeet’s conferencing service aims to change that, as VentureBeat previously explained during the startup’s debut at the 2012 spring DEMO event, (where it was later named DEMO God winner). Voxeet offers crystal-clear voice conversations that you can manage and translate using a visual interface on Windows PCs, Android devices, and, as of today, iPhones.

Basically, when you start a conference call, Voxeet will enable you to switch from your PC to your iPhone without any disruptive beeping, background noise, or having to announce what you’re doing. You can simply switch devices without interrupting the overall call. There’s no need to redial into the call or entering in a string of pass code authorizations, either.

You can download the new Voxeet iPhone app today for free in the App Store, or download its existing Android app on Google Play.

Founded in 2009, the San Francisco-based startup has previously received $300,000 worth of incubation from Innovantic and about $235,000 in loans/grants from French governmental entities. Voxeet was also recently awarded $600,000 in IP communication services from iNetwork after winning the Voice App Igniter Challenge.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cinchcast lets you create your own massive webcasts and conference calls for events such as quarterly conference calls. The number of participants on the calls can scale from a handful to millions of people. Without the cloud, this wouldn’t be possible.

Aleksandr Yampolskiy (pictured right), chief technology officer at New York-based Cinchcast described the key lessons from scaling up Cinchcast using cloud services at VentureBeat’s CloudBeat 2012 conference in a fireside chat with Vanessa Alvarez (pictured left), director of product marketing at Gridstore. Cinchcast disrupted the conference call business by creating self-serve, reservation-less web-based conferences.

“We scale from hundreds to tens of millions,” Yampolskiy said. “With the influx of traffic, you can easily provision extra instances” of server hardware.

Yampolskiy said he relies on three rules to help scale up the company’s business. The first rule is to automate as much as possible. When a process requires an engineer to work until 2 am in the middle of the night, it clearly isn’t scalable or automated. Rule No. 2 is simplicity. He says you have to make complicated things simpler in order to scale a service to the millions. Rule No. 3 is to use metrics to measure every aspect of performance, security, uptime, and latency.

Those rules were put to the test on June 29, when usage of the site began to plummet. Over the course of a few weeks, traffic fell from 4.8 million page views a day to 4.2 million. Executives were camped outside Yampolskiy’s door seeking an explanation. His company used New Relic‘s performance management app as an X-ray for the business. The team used it to identify a problem known as “donut caching” that wasn’t working properly, resulting in a slowdown in performance for users. The company attacked the problem and improved the service.

Since Yampolskiy joined 15 months ago, the load time for the site has gone from 14 seconds to 4.9 seconds.

“We saw a huge corresponding increase in revenues,” he said.

As for a public or private cloud, Yampolskiy said, “I like to be in control of my destiny. If it goes down, it is my responsibility. But I have a mix of public and private clouds.”

Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Firespotter Labs has introduced a new enterprise-class version of its UberConference software, a visual reinvention of conference calling from the creator of Google Voice.

UberConference won the top prize at TechCrunch Disrupt New York in May because the premise of “reinventing the conference call” is attractive and the software is polished and smart. UberConference calls show who is talking at the moment, mutes lines of people who aren’t speaking, and generally tries to fix any of the weird quirks that plague every conference call.

“With companies spending over $3 billion annually in the U.S. on audio conferencing, users deserve a better experience than what they’ve put up with for the past 30 years,” Craig Walker, CEO of Firespotter Labs and creator of Google Voice, in a statement. “UberConference Business offers entire organizations an experience far superior to any other conference calling service available today.”

UberConference Business also promises the following features that make it stand out from its regular product:

• Increased Conference Size: Have up to 40 people on a single conference call.
• Outbound Dialing to Join: Check the outbound calling box when you schedule your conference call and ÜberConference Business will automatically dial you and the other participants when it’s time for your call.
• Call Recording: Record any or all of your ÜberConferences. MP3s are available for each recording and saved as part of the call summary.
• Start Without Me: Set up a conference call without having to be on it.
• Removal of Branding: Remove the “this free conference call is provided by…” messaging at the start of every call.
• Dedicated Support: Chat or email with us if you have questions.

UberConference Business incorporates the full set of features from UberConference’s regular products, including the visual interface, Evernote integration, “social caller ID” with LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+m and Twitter info, and “earmuffs” that let people create breakout conversations. Additionally, the business version of UberConference can be downloaded from the Google Apps Marketplace, which makes it possible to access an UberConference account from the Google Apps menu bar.

UberConference-parent Firespotter Labs, based in Pleasanton, Calif., has raised $18 million to date from Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures.

More on UberConference can be viewed in the video below:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Firespotter Labs, the creator of services including UberConference and Jotly, has raised $15 million in its second round of funding, the company announced today.

The company’s UberConference service promises to reinvent the conference call and it won the top award at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012. While Firespotter has other services, the new funds will mostly be targeted at UberConference, which is spearheaded by Google Voice creator Craig Walker.

“Craig is an accomplished serial entrepreneur in the communications industry, and he and his team are uniquely positioned to build the next generation of communications services,” said just-named Firespotter board member (and former CEO of Sling Media) Blake Krikorian, in a statement. “The communications space is changing dramatically and we’re excited to be working with Firespotter to usher in those changes.”

The new round of funding was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from prior investor Google Ventures. In total, the company has raised $18 million.

Check out videos for UberConference below:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

If you’re anything like me, conference calls are one of the more annoying aspects of your workday. Thankfully, enterprise-focused startup MobileDay wants to make at least one aspect of conference calls less unpleasant — the dial-in.

MobileDay, which is competing in today’s MobileBeat 2012 Innovation Competition, has developed a free app for iPhone and Android phones that can scan digits from your phone’s calendar and ring you into a conference call with one tap. The app also shows you a list of your upcoming conference calls and lets you create such events that are synced with your phone’s calendar. You can also send SMS or email messages to meeting attendees if you need to give them more details or let them know you’re running late.

While the app’s purpose is slightly simplistic, MobileDay does plan to expand its scope of services soon. MobileDay CEO Jim Haid told VentureBeat that the company will make a move into one-touch access to VoIP calls, with services including Skype, Cisco’s WebEx, or Twilio. Eventually, the company might look into its own conference call service, but for now it wants to work across all services to make people’s lives easier.

The company is still figuring out its business model as well, but it will most likely offer a freemium model.

“Right now, we’re getting our app out there,” Haid said. “We want to understand our customers first. We plan to start charging down the road.”

Based in Boulder, Colorado, MobileDay was founded in 2011 and has raised about $1.5 million from Foundry Group, Google Ventures, SoftBank Capital, SoftTech VC, Bullet Time Ventures, Box Group, and DH Capital.

Photo credit: MobileDay

Conference calls tend to suck the life and soul out of an otherwise productive workday, and it’s not just the content. In fact, sometimes, we all have struggled to simply hear the content over a constant hiss of snaps, crackles, and pops.

“You’re straining to follow the conversation, background noise interrupts, and if two people talk at the same time, the sound cuts out,” said Voxeet founder Stephane Giraudie in a recent chat with VentureBeat. “It can be hard to tell who’s speaking, and that lack of context can make it hard to follow the conversation.”

Voxeet is a startup attempting to bring radical transformation to the infuriating space of conference calling. The company focuses first on crystal-clear conversations, where you always understand perfectly who is talking and what’s being said. It accomplishes this through an app — for Windows PCs and Android phones, for now, but later for iOS devices and Mac PCs. The app provides greater clarity through sophisticated audio processing, and also lets you manage your call and the people in it through an attractive visual interface.

The startup also wants you to be free to roam — yes, you don’t have to stay chained to your desk just because a call is running late. Voxeet allows you to transfer the call from your PC to your cell phone mid-conference with a single click and without sending any beeps or notifications to your colleagues.

And it offers audio that is fully duplex, meaning more than one person can talk at the same time without making the other people’s audio cut out. It’s even in stereo, so as you rearrange speakers’ avatars in the app to move them from left to right, their audio shifts from left to right, too.

Giraudie has had to deal with his share of bad conference calls. Originally from France, he found more and more of his professional life tied up in calls between colleagues in the U.S. and Europe. “Conference calls aren’t going away anytime soon,” he said, noting the cost-effectiveness and popularity of partially or fully remote workforces. But, he continued, “The quality and functionality of conference calls aren’t much different than they were ten years ago; we’re planning on changing that.”

First, Voxeet identified the three main problems with conference calls: Horrible sound quality, no easy way to identify speakers, and no mobility. Solving these problems, said Giraudie, “is not a simple technical task. We spent three years in stealth mode, with a team of top sound engineers designing and building a disruptive solution for each one of these, so that conference calls can finally be experienced as naturally as if you were around a table. We call this Natural Conferencing. This is a such a radical improvement to conference calls it’s hard to imagine going back.”

“It is a big market and companies spend a lot of money and it’s a terrible experience,” said Chuck Ganapathi, an entrepreneur in residence at Accel Capital. Ganapathi made his comments onstage at DEMO Spring 2012, in a panel discussion after Voxeet’s demonstration. “The technology sounds great, but I wonder how they perform on WiFi and 3G. But if they solve those problems the market is huge.”

Since its inception in 2009, Voxeet has received $300,000 worth of incubation from Innovantic and around $235,000 in loans and grants from French governmental entities. Currently, the Voxet app is available for Windows PCs and Android mobile devices; iOS and Mac support is coming soon.

For the startup’s roadmap, Giraudie revealed, “We’ll be producing an API to support our integration efforts with future development partners who will use Voxeet as an embedded technology in their own product. Also, we plan on developing Voxeet technology that will extend the same 3D Audio quality to conference room settings.”

Voxeet is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Image courtesy of Hadrian, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

I hate being on hold on the phone. I always feel obligated to keep my hand on my phone, and I have a chronic fear that I’ll finally make it off hold the second I put my phone down.

Well, it looks like there’s an online service that will finally assuage those fears called Fastcustomer. It’s ridiculously simple — a user just visits the website, types in a company and types in their phone number. After a few minutes, which they would otherwise spend on hold listening to bad elevator music, the user will get a call that will put them on-line with the customer service representative immediately.

The company also has an iPhone application that does about the same thing with a different interface. The application has a list of companies that the user can select. They tap the company and can then close the application and wait for the call to come. The application landed on the Apple App Store late last month. An Android application is on the way as soon as the company finds an Android developer, according to a post on Y Combinator’s news aggregator Hacker News.

The service on the website is free to use. The company said it has been on hold for more than 15,000 minutes, “because WE LOVES HOLDING,” according to its website. It uses Twilio, a telephony application programming interface (API) that gives developers a way to interact with dial tones and phone functions through programs.

The average person is typically on hold for more than 50 hours each year trying to resolve any number of problems, according to the company. That number seems a bit high, but I know I’ve felt at least a touch of rage listening to that infuriating elevator music.

The service is similar to Knockknock, a company funded by Dave McClure’s Twilio Startup Fund. But Knockknock users have to call into the service and record the name of the company and the department they want to get in touch with, rather than using an online form or an application. Knockknock is still in private beta, as well.

It does seem like a service like this is ripe for abuse — such as some bored kid on the Internet getting companies to call random people. So far, the company doesn’t have any plans to counteract that abuse — the team wants to see how the problem evolves and how to handle it in the future, they said in a post on Hacker News. But Fastcustomer is definitely something I plan on using the next time I have to get in touch with a customer service rep. Even if it is just to play a few extra minutes of Minecraft or a game on my Nintendo DS.

A recent Stanford Graduate School of Business study analyzed 30,000 conference calls held to discuss public companies’ earnings. The results could turn the art of detecting executive deception into a science. One telltale sign: The frequent use of swear words.

The discovery is timely. Remember how Enron CEO Jeff Skilling famously called an investor who questioned his claims an “asshole“? We know how that turned out. Now Kara Swisher of AllThingsD is all but openly calling Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz a liar in her coverage of the company’s recent executive departures. And Bartz, whose leadership of the fading Internet giant is looking ever rockier, famously swears like a sailor.

Then there’s Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, who publicly called one New York Times writer a “douchebag,” and uses saltier language in private to deride journalists who don’t print verbatim the electric-car investor’s carefully edited version of reality. (No wonder he hired prim and proper VentureBeat wordsmith Camille Ricketts to help clean up his act.)

There are other “tells” indicated in the paper, such as using enthusiastic words like “great” or “fantastic” rather than merely “good” to describe financial results. Once again, Enron’s Skilling was an exemplar of this. So was Bartz in the company’s most recent conference call:

… display growth is very strong … we are making great progress on growing profits and margins … General Motors was the first to use the new format and the results were simply fantastic … So these are great numbers and a big reason why the ads did so well is they just looked great.

Great! Fantastic! So great and fantastic that the stock hasn’t budged in Bartz’s tenure.

And Tesla’s Musk has never failed to express his boundless optimism for Tesla’s prospects in emphatically certain terms. An absence of words expressing uncertainty is another indicator of deception, according to the Stanford study.

There’s no reason to believe Yahoo and Tesla are Enrons in the making just because their leaders have made a few intemperate remarks. But based on the findings of this study, perhaps Silicon Valley CEOs should watch their language. Certainly their shareholders should.