Conference calls suck. Really.

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This evening I participated in a conference call with 6 people using a traditional conference calling bridge.  It was a horrible user experience.  HORRIBLE.  I had forgotten how bad conference calls can be because I’ve been using Calliflower for so long.

What was so bad?

1. Where was the agenda for the call?  Without an easy to tick through agenda on the screen, we just wandered.  With Calliflower, the agenda would have been mailed out with the invitation.
2. Who was on the call?  The call started with a bunch of disembodied voices, and no clue who was on the call or not.  Then, at one point somebody said goodbye and I thought the call was over. So I hung up.  But the call wasn’t over.  With Calliflower, I would have seen that everyone was still on the line.  With this other service, I had no idea.
3. Where was the chat window?  There were a couple of times that would have been really handy.
4. How about the hand raise?  We kept talking over each other.
5. Where was the mute?  One person came on the line and introduced a huge amount of echo to the call.  It would have been so handy to just hit the mute button and shut it down.

And you know what the worst part about it was?  The conference call originator was paying for this horrible experience, and happy to do so.

Calliflower is free, and it’s an amazing experience.  I didn’t realize how amazing until I had to go back to the stone age of conference calling tonight.

From now on, if anyone wants me to join a conference call, we’re doing it on Calliflower.  No exceptions.

Try Calliflower, and let me know what you think.

Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.