The Flat Planet and a Phone !

Today was an exciting day for conference calls! Lypp announced Lypp 2.0 - Next Generation Conference Calling. A few hours later Alec Saunders followed up with Free Conference Calls… now with recording

The Lypp gang seems to have put together a great product that competes with the traditional call conferencing services. Call Conferencing is a big big market. There are 2 kinds of services, the “for pay” and the “free”. Though free services have become popular, Corporate America still spends much moola for their conference calls. This expense is scheduled to grow as more companies cut down on travel for budgetary and ecological reasons. From the what I read in the Lypp blog, it seems that their product will compete with a “more for less” marketing message. Using Open Source products, Lypp is a step ahead of the traditional providers in both cost and features.

The “Free Conference Calls” application from iotum, takes a different direction. Unlike Lypp , the FCC app is based on facebook and free. Similar to Lypp, FCC is big on features. There is a great facebook application where you can actually see who is on the call (with their pictures) and even raise your hand to talk (see screenshot below). Today Alec announced their newest feature, call recording. This is really cool, since you can do an audiocast with a live audience, record it and then load it onto your blog as a podcast. All you need is a POTS phone and your computer. Thats all!

While in slightly different markets, both of these products show us the power of integrated IP applications, and how far and fast you can go with standards based development platforms.