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.