Tag Archive for 'Grand Central'

RingBranch Climbs The Telecom Tree

Published on February 27, 2008 in Startups. 1 Comment

I’ve been meaning to write about RingBranch for some time. But now that they’ve opened up some beat invites, it’s probably time to talk about them.

RingBranch is a relatively new Atlanta based startup. Basically the idea is a service that allows cell phone users to break free of their free minute circles and make more free calls. So if you have one of these cell phone plans that allows you to pick a phone number or numbers that you can make/receive calls from, using RingBranch you can effectively grow the number of phone numbers you can call to or receive calls from for free - free cell phone minutes that is.

How is that? RingBranch allows you to store up to 100 numbers that you can call from any phone by calling your RingBranch number. The beauty of this is that if your cell phone dies, gets stolen, etc. then you can still call your most important contacts. In fact, this is the impetus of RingBranch when co-founder and CEO Allen Graber was in New Orleans and he needed to call people but his cell phone was dead.

Even more important, I think, is the recent news that the U.S. Customs Service is seizing cell phones and downloading everything on them.  Yeah, that’s pretty scary but if you save all of your stuff on the network, then maybe you’ll be safe from this physical copying of your data. Of course that doesn’t stop these agencies from getting subpoenas on providers and downloading your information en masse.  But I digress…

I haven’t dug too deeply into this but the company says their technology is based on Microsoft technologies like .Net and SQL server. They’re also using some other telecom hardware and software but I’m not totally sure what that encompasses at this point.

Like I said, the company has opened up beta slots.  There is no cost, currently, for using the service although that may change as the service matures and moves beyond beta.  One can expect that this service will necessarily be priced less than “normal” per minute charges per carriers and is basically an arbitrage opportunity for RingBranch.

Also note that similar, but not identical, services may be obtained by using Grand Central (which is now owned by Google) or Mobivox.  Grand Central is free but Mobivox costs money to use.

The company has been self funded to date.  I suspect that will change at some point but the company has not shared any fund raising plans with me as of yet.

Disclosure: Allen Graber was an angel investor in my previous company but, as usual, that doesn’t mean I won’t abuse him. ;-)

What To Say About Evoca?

Published on January 29, 2008 in Startups and Technology. 1 Comment

I had an interesting call with the CEO of Evoca, Murem Sharpe (that’s her in the photo to the left holding the phone), about what they’re doing a few weeks ago. If you recall I previously wrote about ATDC companies that didn’t drive their own public awareness. One of the companies that does seem to own their public persona is Evoca. They have a nice looking site as well as an updated blog (although the last entry right now is dated December 28, 2007).

The reason it has taken me so long to write about Evoca is first, there has been a lot of good stories to write about but second, I needed to figure out what I thought of their business. In a nutshell, Evoca lets clients convert audio into an embeddable online audio clip. Nothing spectacular, right? Well, their hook is that you use a regular phone to do it. So the idea is that usage is vastly simplified since most everyone knows how to use their phone or cellphone to make a phone call.

Evoca has some interesting client wins including the Discovery Channel and has even been used by President Bill Clinton. But I’m really struggling to see how I could use this service myself. Maybe it’s because I’m not a Skype user (Evoca provides free call recording on Skype). Or maybe it’s because I would often rather chat on IM, email, or in person rather than on my cell phone (I was recently called a Luddite by a friend because I don’t do mobile email - I just like to say that I rock it old school). Judging by the list of recent Evoca recordings it seems like a lot of folks use Evoca in other countries. Maybe we just don’t get “it” in the U.S.

The competition in this space is pretty fierce. There are a lot of companies doing telecommunication related stuff including Grand Central (acquired by Google), Jangl, Jott, Yap, and Jajah. Not to say that any of these companies is directly competitive but it wouldn’t take much for one company to bleed over to another. For example, Grand Central already allows users to embed voice mail messages they receive onto a web page.

Evoca has built their system to be highly scalable and I noticed that they were serving content off of the Amazon S3 service which I talked about before in relation to JungleDisk. Murem also told me that they are using the open source Asterisk project as their platform through which phone calls get convert into audio files.

Evoca is a virtual company with people spread in multiple states. Murem told me that there are about twelve active employees and the company was founded in July 2005. The company has been completely bootstrapped over this time with no outside funding.

I’ll keep an eye on this one to see how it evolves and if I can figure out a way I can use the technology. I still haven’t figured that part out yet. Maybe I need to get a technologically current cell phone first. Nah…

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