Here's a great new post on FastCall411:
"...But wouldn’t it be cool if you needed to find a plumber in your area (any plumber) and instead of getting 10 numbers and then calling each one separately and possibly having to leave messages, etc, if you could just be connected to the plumber that actually picks up the phone? "
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Monday, October 29, 2007
Screenwerk: FastCall 'Widgetizes'
Greg Sterling
As part of a syndication move, FastCall411 is now offering an API and widgets that can reside on partner/affiliate sites. The model, whether in mobile or on the desktop is intended to remedy the problem of local merchants not answering their phones — or calls being connected only 20% to 25% of the time.
What I’m wondering about the service is whether it works as well if you take the urgency out of the scenario (e.g., locksmith, plumber). CEO Richard Rosen spoke to me prelaunch about the most responsive and service oriented businesses rising to the top because they will typically be the ones that answer calls. Accordingly, the FastCall411 algorithm rewards those businesses by featuring them over time.
In the recent WebVisible-Nielsen local search/user survey, “friendly customer service” was ranked number one as the factor that had the “largest impact on your decision to purchase a product or service from a local business?”
As part of a syndication move, FastCall411 is now offering an API and widgets that can reside on partner/affiliate sites. The model, whether in mobile or on the desktop is intended to remedy the problem of local merchants not answering their phones — or calls being connected only 20% to 25% of the time.
What I’m wondering about the service is whether it works as well if you take the urgency out of the scenario (e.g., locksmith, plumber). CEO Richard Rosen spoke to me prelaunch about the most responsive and service oriented businesses rising to the top because they will typically be the ones that answer calls. Accordingly, the FastCall411 algorithm rewards those businesses by featuring them over time.
In the recent WebVisible-Nielsen local search/user survey, “friendly customer service” was ranked number one as the factor that had the “largest impact on your decision to purchase a product or service from a local business?”
Friday, October 19, 2007
Kelsey Group Blog: FastCall411 Grows Legs, Widgetizes For Local Search
FastCall411 streamlines the process of looking for a local service provider by letting you call a handful of them at once. The first one to pick up gets your business, which the company hopes will resonate as a good consumer experience that sidesteps issues of disconnected numbers or unanswered calls.
CEO Richard Rosen told me his data show about two-thirds of calls to local merchants go unanswered, while inaccurate or outdated local business data is a well known issue. Rosen, a former exec at Jambo and CallSource, launched FastCall last March and my colleague Peter Krasilovsky wrote about it here (also see the company’s presentation at DEMO).
What’s new is the prospect of portability in its offering. Following the same logic as many other companies such as Agendize, FastCall411 will widgetize the technology in order to gain distribution and traction around the product when it is planted on well-traveled local search sites and IYPs. Rosen is currently in talks with a handful of undisclosed local search providers and will announce a few distribution agreements soon.
“We do want to build distribution, and we have a widget that essentially lives in a listing,” says Rosen. “This [includes] a phone number and the click-to-talk widget that can dial that one merchant or more than one merchant.”
The buttons or widgets themselves will carry FastCall411’s branding, but there is still an opportunity to brand the distribution partner during the call, according to Rosen. This would involve a voiceover that tells a merchant the IYP from which the call originated, much like other call tracking services do.
In addition to proving value to the advertiser in this way, Rosen is angling the product as a good user retention tool for IYPs and local search sites that could save users from the hassle of unanswered calls and having to go down a list of providers until someone picks up. The reality of this problem would come down to lots of variables and vary across service categories, but his point is taken.
“Our pitch [to IYPs] is that ‘hey, the consumer just did a search; they called the merchant, the phone was disconnected and there is a way to create a better experience,’ ” says Rosen. But unlike other valuable click-to-call functionality from the likes of Ingenio, Voicestar and eStara, wouldn’t the option to call many providers conflict with paid listings?
The answer is yes, but for that reason (and others) Rosen is angling the product to reside within non-paid listings in IYPs. His proposition is that FastCall411 will pay distribution partners for any calls that are generated through the widget, which it then hopes to monetize.
“Our primary strategy is to extend the widget but unlike a call measurement play, we’re looking to pay our distribution partner for the calls we generate,” says Rosen. “We’re going to give you the API and the widget and as long as you generate calls — which we think we can monetize — then we’ll pay you a couple pennies a call.”
This is an interesting extension of FastCall411’s value proposition, and we’ll have to wait and see how it works in this distributed way. This will come down to the company’s ability to monetize it and how well its consumer-centric angle really resonates with IYP and local search users. The potential is certainly there.
FastCall411 Grows Legs, Widgetizes For Local Search
CEO Richard Rosen told me his data show about two-thirds of calls to local merchants go unanswered, while inaccurate or outdated local business data is a well known issue. Rosen, a former exec at Jambo and CallSource, launched FastCall last March and my colleague Peter Krasilovsky wrote about it here (also see the company’s presentation at DEMO).
What’s new is the prospect of portability in its offering. Following the same logic as many other companies such as Agendize, FastCall411 will widgetize the technology in order to gain distribution and traction around the product when it is planted on well-traveled local search sites and IYPs. Rosen is currently in talks with a handful of undisclosed local search providers and will announce a few distribution agreements soon.
“We do want to build distribution, and we have a widget that essentially lives in a listing,” says Rosen. “This [includes] a phone number and the click-to-talk widget that can dial that one merchant or more than one merchant.”
The buttons or widgets themselves will carry FastCall411’s branding, but there is still an opportunity to brand the distribution partner during the call, according to Rosen. This would involve a voiceover that tells a merchant the IYP from which the call originated, much like other call tracking services do.
In addition to proving value to the advertiser in this way, Rosen is angling the product as a good user retention tool for IYPs and local search sites that could save users from the hassle of unanswered calls and having to go down a list of providers until someone picks up. The reality of this problem would come down to lots of variables and vary across service categories, but his point is taken.
“Our pitch [to IYPs] is that ‘hey, the consumer just did a search; they called the merchant, the phone was disconnected and there is a way to create a better experience,’ ” says Rosen. But unlike other valuable click-to-call functionality from the likes of Ingenio, Voicestar and eStara, wouldn’t the option to call many providers conflict with paid listings?
The answer is yes, but for that reason (and others) Rosen is angling the product to reside within non-paid listings in IYPs. His proposition is that FastCall411 will pay distribution partners for any calls that are generated through the widget, which it then hopes to monetize.
“Our primary strategy is to extend the widget but unlike a call measurement play, we’re looking to pay our distribution partner for the calls we generate,” says Rosen. “We’re going to give you the API and the widget and as long as you generate calls — which we think we can monetize — then we’ll pay you a couple pennies a call.”
This is an interesting extension of FastCall411’s value proposition, and we’ll have to wait and see how it works in this distributed way. This will come down to the company’s ability to monetize it and how well its consumer-centric angle really resonates with IYP and local search users. The potential is certainly there.
FastCall411 Grows Legs, Widgetizes For Local Search
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Jim Forbes - the founding producer of DemoMobile - wrote a great review of FastCall411
Jim was the founding producer of DemoMobile and the editor of the award-winning Demo and DemoWeek newsletters, as well as a Sr. Editor with InfoWorld, PCWeek and other publications. He has a strong following as he writes on mobile technology and internet marketing.
More Disruptive and Category Expanding Technologies from Demofall07
ForbesOnTech -
FastCall 411, Localized Commerce and Great Consumer and Vendor Facing Features
For the last couple of years I’ve harped on the need for localized ads as a key component to any mobile search product. Localization has the potential to become a significant disruptive force in search, driving a hard wedge between those companies that skim cream off the market, and search providers who grow their businesseds from local rootstock.
One of several companies at Demofall07 that made me sit up and take notice was Fastcall411, a Los Angeles area startup that’s focusing on local search by focusing on local businesses with high availability responsiveness quotients and the consumer facing experience.
What I liked about FastCall411 most is its consumer experience. The search engine is fast enough to deliver a solid experience over a cell phone connection to the web. But that’s not even half of what sets this company apart when it comes to the consumer experience. Once a consumer locks on a local vendor, the query turns into a VOIP phone call connecting the caller to a local vendor via FastCall’s server. The vendor is committed to providing a phone number that’s available and this startup gives consumers the ability to connect to more than one number to local vendors ( important when dealing with tradesmen who list their cell phones in addition to office numbers).
What made this Demo really hit home was that immediately prior to its Demo I was also in phone mail hell, trying frantically to find an electrician in Escondido who could restore electrical power to my mountaintop redoubt. Damn the carpenters who cut a line into my home office!
Fastcall411 isn’t electronic Yellowpages for the web. It’s a service that actively partners with local merchants, ranking them by their availability to respond to consumers. And there is no charge to the consumer for the service.
But it gets better, much better. Fastcall serves local businesses, a segment that Google currently overlooks unless they happen to be the local component of a national brand.
Moreover, FastCall provides an actionable service with a straight path to a transaction.
I believe it can compete against Goog411 because FastCall is a bottom-up proposition whereas Google is a top down service that overlooks whether or not a vendor can actually service the needs of a caller. Focus on the consumer and you win.
It’s services like FastCall that most likely will provide a seasoned crop of future ad and service sales reps for Google, Microsoft and Yahoo when they realize that localized Internet ads have the potential to be a mother lode.
More Disruptive and Category Expanding Technologies from Demofall07
ForbesOnTech -
FastCall 411, Localized Commerce and Great Consumer and Vendor Facing Features
For the last couple of years I’ve harped on the need for localized ads as a key component to any mobile search product. Localization has the potential to become a significant disruptive force in search, driving a hard wedge between those companies that skim cream off the market, and search providers who grow their businesseds from local rootstock.
One of several companies at Demofall07 that made me sit up and take notice was Fastcall411, a Los Angeles area startup that’s focusing on local search by focusing on local businesses with high availability responsiveness quotients and the consumer facing experience.
What I liked about FastCall411 most is its consumer experience. The search engine is fast enough to deliver a solid experience over a cell phone connection to the web. But that’s not even half of what sets this company apart when it comes to the consumer experience. Once a consumer locks on a local vendor, the query turns into a VOIP phone call connecting the caller to a local vendor via FastCall’s server. The vendor is committed to providing a phone number that’s available and this startup gives consumers the ability to connect to more than one number to local vendors ( important when dealing with tradesmen who list their cell phones in addition to office numbers).
What made this Demo really hit home was that immediately prior to its Demo I was also in phone mail hell, trying frantically to find an electrician in Escondido who could restore electrical power to my mountaintop redoubt. Damn the carpenters who cut a line into my home office!
Fastcall411 isn’t electronic Yellowpages for the web. It’s a service that actively partners with local merchants, ranking them by their availability to respond to consumers. And there is no charge to the consumer for the service.
But it gets better, much better. Fastcall serves local businesses, a segment that Google currently overlooks unless they happen to be the local component of a national brand.
Moreover, FastCall provides an actionable service with a straight path to a transaction.
I believe it can compete against Goog411 because FastCall is a bottom-up proposition whereas Google is a top down service that overlooks whether or not a vendor can actually service the needs of a caller. Focus on the consumer and you win.
It’s services like FastCall that most likely will provide a seasoned crop of future ad and service sales reps for Google, Microsoft and Yahoo when they realize that localized Internet ads have the potential to be a mother lode.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Back from DEMOFall'07
We are back from DEMO in San Diego. First. A huge thanks to my development team. Punit (far left) and Dinesh (far right) were on board for 4 days and were a huge help. Rashmi, her husband Vic and baby were staffing booth duty. Now that's dedication! Amy (2nd from left) should easily have won "most congenial." Attn DEMO: you need to add THAT award. I added links to the blogs posting on FastCall411 to the right.
DEMO was a great experience and a great way to launch a company. We pulled together as a team (yes coding minutes before our demo). Press and VCs were top notch. Words can't describe the professionalism of the DEMO production team. I have a huge stack of VC business cards, and a full inbox of VCs asking for info. The buzz and excitement continues.
Here's our DEMO page and video of our DEMO.
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