Calling in to a conference call has been easy enough from a mobile phone – and nothing beats soaking in the rays on a roof garden while listening to a long boring call (just don’t tell my editors). But now foonzMobile from RPM Communications will let mobile users take part in a conference call that will cost nothing other than the minutes sued for a regular call. Users simply send a short text message (“START”) to FOONZ (36669) to get the ball rolling. foonzMobile then replies with a text message with the instructions, allowing you to initiate the call. Additional text messages are sent to the other parties with a number to call, and participants simply the dial that number and foonz does the connecting.
“Conference calling isn’t just for business anymore,” said Michael Bayer, CEO and co-founder of RPM Communications, Inc., the parent company of foonz. “People who want to share news, get a group of friends together, or let team mates know that practice is cancelled can forget about phone trees or calling people one-by-one. foonzMobile makes group voice communication as immediate and easy as text and IM, and it’s available to every one of the 230 million people with cell phones in the US. And of course, it’s available to businesses too.”
Additional features are available to registered foonzMobile users, but anyone can try out the service by text messaging. We’ll give the service a spin soon and let you know what we thought.
This is definitely an interesting capability. I tried out the service this morning and found that it is a fairly complex user interaction. Two separate SMS messages to get started and once you get the call set up you have to type in a phone number and call it. Recipients in the call have to do the same, receive a text message and then call a phone number in Iowa.
FoneMine had implemented this capability a while back (called FoneTalk) and it’s done more directly by sending a SMS with the numbers and everyone receiving a call immediately. You can try it out by getting a FoneMine account at http://www.fonemine.com. FoneMine is targeting businesses with the group calling capability but it’s offering the same capability to consumers for free.
Try it out :)
Comment by Steven Cox — July 31, 2007 @ 12:48 pm