I was at the NYC one this weekend. Bridg.me stood out as one of the best of the weekend, for sure. I was surprised that Playmob won, though they seem like they have a solid business model. Disappointed at coviewer.tv, to be honest.
You have to love it when a service comes in and completely changes the way you think about the problem it is solving. This falls into the "What in the world didn't anyone think about this before?"
IfByPhone's conferencing does this, they call it "Smart Conference". Love it, nobody joins the call late. Freaks people out. Some even tell the group, "Hi, this is Joe, sorry I can't talk right now, I need to jump on call." "Um, Joe, you're on it."
I tried registering, and the responded with a verify email that had my password in clear text. I'd wait for a few days before you try using the service, for anything.
Eesh. Sorry about that. The password was only emailed for debugging during development, since we weren't storing it (plaintext) in the database. It has been fixed :)
The concept is great. Kudos to that. Just a minor quirk - there is no timezone information in the create new call page. Even if timezones are not supported, indicating the current timezone would have helped.
I agree. Although, I'm not a huge fan of the common phrasing such as "impossibly simple", or "stupidly simple". Something about having the word impossible or stupid in big bold letters on my landing page just makes me feel like I could choose a word that satisfies the same message without those negative words on there like that. But, I see it used all the time like this and always end up thinking the same thing that I just explained here. So, I'm probably a minority here. heh
Was at the NYC startup weekend and saw their pitch and it was by far the best one. Really great example of using straightforward technology to solve a huge pain point and customer problem.
Nice app and good design, however I have a problem with this and other startup projects I have seen in startup weekends that there is just not enough information before asking me to signup, where is the 'about' page?.
Also, call me ignorant but how does someone trademark a slogan over a weekend (footer) - "The Conference Calls You™ "
Based on experience this past weekend at the Baltimore Start-Up Weekend event putting up an about page is tough. We banged out/refined the concept within 4 hours, then did wireframes/logos, set up server, create/modify PSD for both our launchrock page & site, then did front-end coding(other team member did back-end coding at same time) and then finished 1st iteration and tweaked it twice to get the two pages we created looking presentable. We slept some in between.
We definitely(2 biz ppl, 1 designer & 2 techies) would like to have put more info on our homepage (http://www.adsgrader.com) and create an about page but not able to due to time constraints.
For anyone who has not been to a Start-Up Weekend Event I just want to say the $100 to attend is well worth it! SO much fun and the way I think tech incubators should select/choose start-ups(See who can in 48 hours assemble team to create a viable product that can scale & select candidates into incubator to further products that matter along).
I agree there isn't enough info. Very annoying. I just signed up with a mailinator.com address to see what was in there. It seems they charge 5 cents per minute. It's not clear if that is per phone connection or per meeting. They also provide an option to link your Google calendar to the account.
Cool idea! Agreed that the name/URL needs to change, as demonstrated in the title of this original post. I love the simple, clean design/branding, very well done, especially for a weekend's worth of work.
Does this utilise Twilio? Would love to see a pricing structure and what countries it's available in before registering. Is it tied to a single phone or can you set different numbers on a per meeting basis?
In their end-of Weekend pitch, they said that they were Twilio-based (in the interests of getting this done over the weekend). Over the longer term, they plan to move to Asterisk/trunks if/when call volumes picked up (since Twilio pricing is not very aggressive for long multi-way calls : but the service/pricing is excellent for knocking something together).
Availability and pricing of things like Twilio is pretty variable outside of the US. Last I checked Twilio wasn't going to work for most SMS down here in NZ for example. Not sure about voice.
Exactly right. We're based out of Australia so it's horribly annoying to see so many cool startups that don't provide service to us down here. The majority of voice/sms startups these days use either Twilio or Tropo (including us) so that severely limits the cost or even use of a service for Australians.
One of my favorites from Startup Weekend NYC. It's something we call think about if you have ever been on a conference, and fits my needs pretty well. Congrats!
You should also checkout CallMeMeeting. Same weekend, same problem, same solution -- two different startups, two different cities. They won 2nd place winner at KC Startup Weekend. Mentioned in preso ... already selling service to large beta customers. Nice job to both teams. Love the concept!
Since you are making outbound calls, I'm curious how you will handle verification of phone numbers? It looks like I can enter whatever phone number(s) I want, which seems like it could be abused by spammers.
