Conference Call

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Spam blogs ruin the web for everyone.

by alec on May 16, 2011

I keep an RSS search for terms like conference call, and conference calling.  It’s a simple way to keep tabs on competitors to Calliflower.  In recent years, though, it’s become a meaningless sludge pile of garbled English as SEO “consultants” create endless spam blogs by “respinning” content using a combination of thesaurus’ and reordering of sentences.

Take, for example, this gem from the spam blog called All Conference Calling.com, titled “Flat Rate Conference Calling”:

Flat rate conference calling is a service provided by a meeting phoning company which bills by toned prices. This particular rate usually includes a interferance per-minute charge, allowing companies the data of just how much they’ll spend per person per hour. How do we determine if flatrate conference calling suits your company?

To know flat rate meetings, you need to have a near take a look at how many associates you will use during a phone. In other words, the number of individuals will be logging onto these types of calls for each program? This can be hard if your company intends to hold a number of conference phone calls per month, each along with variable numbers of participants. For example, assume the first business call of the month will probably be using the panel associated with company directors. This might only be ten to twelve individuals. But, after this phone you may want to possess a session with your department mind there are gone 50 of these. Later that month, you want upon having a phone together with your entire employees, which is within the 1000′s! You can observe exactly where toned rate meeting phoning could be a issue.

What are “toned prices”?  “Interferance per-minute charges”?  The hyperlinks in this piece (all removed by me) simply link back to the main site.  The purpose of this “keyword rich” nonsense is to boost the search ranking for the main page, which consists of nothing but blog postings scraped from other people’s RSS feeds and advertising.  All Conference Calling.com is simply a way for it’s owner to make a few hundred dollars per month in advertising.  Multiple that by a thousand, and suddenly you have a business.

And how about this gem on “article” repository article2008.com.  Titled “Keep Away from Conference Calls that Waste Everybody’s Time”, it reads:

It’s slightly simple to have a conference call move awry. All it needs is a loss of ok planning. Positive, Convention calls are easy to make, contain much less bodily effort (via traveling), and save time. On the other hand, at the turn aspect, a conference name that may be badly controlled will certainly be a disaster. Just as in a regular meeting, everyone has to be informed, and everybody should come on time. Should you thought reaching a gathering late used to be unhealthy business etiquette, so is being late for a convention call. In any case, it’s merely a gathering in a different incarnation.

Grammatically mangled garbage spit out of a bot that uses a thesaurus to perform word substitutions to create new “original” content and game the search engine.  Just what is a “Convention call”?? To add insult to injury, the piece finishes with a hyperlink to a website on yeast infections.

What happened to the web of quality content?

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Riding out the storm

by alec on February 3, 2011

A couple of days ago one of our competitors sent out email to their customer base.  The pitch?  Stay home through the winter storm engulfing most of North America, and meet on a conference call instead.

Clever, no?  And indeed, we had a record breaking day yesterday ourselves, as we completed more conference calls on any day in our company history.

It got me thinking about what a great business opportunity natural disasters are for companies that bill by the minute for conferencing services.  After all, if our competitors’ bill rate is $0.10/min, and customers decide to hold, say, 5 extra four person meetings on conference calls because of a snow day, that could easily amount to $120 in windfall revenue.

As you know, Calliflower doesn’t bill that way.  The wholesale cost of telecom is so low, that we can afford to deliver flat rate local dial conferencing.  And so we do.  We pass our wholesale savings onto the customer.  Despite the heavy usage, yesterday we didn’t make any extra money.   Some people would argue that’s a lost a opportunity, but to me that’s vindication that we’ve got the right model.

So, how much could you save on a flat rate conferencing plan?

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Why we love Skype Connect for Calliflower Conference Calls

August 30, 2010
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In beta since March of last year, Skype Connect (formerly Skype for SIP) is now officially launched.  The purpose of Skype Connect is to allow companies to connect corporate phone systems to Skype, letting customers who use Skype contact the company via an IP call, and allowing the company to take advantage of Skype’s cheap [...]

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How web-based conferencing is impacting business

May 25, 2010

Tomorrow I’m kicking off a series of posts over on the Calliflower blog about how web-based conferencing solutions, like Calliflower, are impacting enterprise, especially the IT department.  The move to self service web models for providing traditional IT services is transforming the IT department and the costs associated.  So keep your eye open over the [...]

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$600 savings with Calliflower and Samsung Canada

March 10, 2010

This morning we announced a promotion with Samsung Canada.  Buy a Samsung Laptop or Netbook between now and April 30, and you can have a year of Calliflower service free.  If your business requires you to have the occasional online meeting or conference call, then Calliflower is the tool for you! So how does this [...]

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Calliflower expands: Flat Rate International Conference Calls now available from 30 Countries.

June 22, 2009

Late last week, we crossed another milestone with Calliflower.  As customers have discovered the tremendous savings Calliflower can deliver for international conference calls, plus the rich and engaging Calliflower feature set, they have driven demand for new points of presence. We’ve been only too happy to comply, adding local dial numbers wherever we can in [...]

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Do you really need $300K in telepresence gear to avoid swine flu?

April 29, 2009

In Virtually Flu-Free Meetings Forbes writers Andy Greenberg and Quentin Hardy look at the rise of telepresence systems.  Their angle?  Avoid swine flu by avoiding travel. With the specter of swine flu rising, companies have yet another reason to consider holding their meetings virtually rather than sending executives on planes. That’s good news for the [...]

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The environmental benefit of a conference call. Happy Earth Day!

April 22, 2009

There’s no denying that some meetings have to be had face to face.  Increasingly, however, people are becoming more willing to have those meetings virtually – via conference call, video conference or some other vehicle.  Because it’s Earth Day, I thought I’d work up a small calculation for what one of those face to face [...]

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Godin calls out Calliflower.

April 7, 2009

I’m pretty stoked.  I’ve been sitting here for the last hour watching our web site numbers climb because of a link from none other than Seth Godin this afternoon.  Yes, Mr. Purple Cow.  And I’ve also been racking my brains trying to think of a way to take advantage of this sudden attention, but more [...]

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Calliflower’s Free Conference Call service goes ad funded.

March 18, 2009

iotum today announced that the free conference calling version of the Calliflower service will add advertising. Calliflower Premium will remain advertising free, but Calliflower free conference calls will now be advertising funded.

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