Dreamforce!

I spent most of the week at Dreamforce, the Salesforce.com user show where we exhibited SimpleSignal's cloud based, unified business communication solutions to more than 9000 attendees. As people walked by our booth they were greeted with our napkin sketch we had printed on actual napkins. The photo above is what it looked like.

Briefly we explained that in spite of the cool features that are available in a hosted IP PBX solution it wasn't enough. True unified communications would need to incorporate the users cell phone and software. For instance, using a feature called "call swap" we can allow a user to initiate a call on their cell on the way to work. When they get close to their desk they can without interruption move the call from the cell to their desk phone. Conversely, if they are stuck on a call and have to go they just press *11 on their desk phone. This transfers the call to their cell and they are off and running without interrupting their call by having to say something like "hold on I have to transfer the call to my cell". The transfer is so smooth the other party would never notice. You can watch how this works by viewing our youtube video.

search "simplesignal" (one word).http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVh5hhRcrvw

The other cool thing we showed on our napkin sketch was how we build our voice service directly into the app's. Salesforce.com is a great example. If you adopt the salesforce mantra of "if it's not in salesforce it doesn't exist" you are spending a good deal of your day working out of the application. We provide the user with the ability to click on the contact and automatically call out to the contact without dialing the phone. If a contact calls inbound,  a screen pop of the contact's information appears while they pick up the call. Our voice integration into the app and the way we include the cell phone is revolutionary. Now their cell phones and the app's they work out of all day actually work together to create a unified communications solution. Behold, a new day dawns!

I was pleased to see the reaction of the 300+ people we had actual conversations with about the difference we could make in their work day. Our sales staff will be busy in the coming days with the follow on conversations. It's exciting to be involved with a breakthrough technology like unified communications.