By Ddorsey on August 31, 2010
Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Aug. 31 – babyTEL, Canada’s leading independent VoIP telephone company, announced today that it has been certified as a Cisco Select Partner by Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) www.cisco.com. babyTEL now addresses the high-level skills required to design and deploy Cisco Small/Medium Business (SMB) solutions.
“We are very excited to receive the Cisco Select Partner certification,” said Nicolas Rossignol, Vice President, Sales. “This is validation from a major networking equipment provider that we understand and support IP Telephony solutions for SMB customers. Customers can now rely on babyTEL to provide and support high quality SIP trunking solutions that work reliably across the Cisco SMB product line.”
babyTEL provides high quality Enterprise VoIP Telephony services which offer greater flexibility, more features and significant cost savings over traditional corporate telephony installations. Enterprise customers can use their existing Internet connection to connect to IP-PBX’s, thus reducing the requirement for traditional costly “land lines”.
“Being recognized by Cisco is a welcomed endorsement,” said Steve Dorsey, President & CEO of babyTEL. “Cisco and babyTEL both share a commitment to high standards and this certification is a natural evolution derived from our reputation for excellence in the enterprise market.”
About babyTEL
babyTEL (www.babytel.net) provides residential, enterprise and social network telephony solutions in the U.S., Canada and international locations. Headquartered in Montreal, babyTEL is a developer and provider of VoIP and Unified Communications solutions which includes offering ‘Telephone’ the first Social Voice telephone application for Facebook (http://apps.facebook.com/babytel).
For further information: Dan Dorsey, (514) 879-8585 X246, www.babytel.net
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Cisco VoIP Certification Partner
By Michael Citrome on May 4, 2010
When we first started developing our Telephone app for Facebook, our vision was to bring voice to Social Networks. Social Networks like Facebook are great for sharing photos and exchanging messages, but you had to go offline to your mobile phone to actually talk to anyone.
Telephone changed that – with Telephone, anyone could talk and voice message with their Facebook friends, all from within Facebook.
But bringing voice to Facebook itself is not our ultimate goal at babyTEL. We want to bring the uniqueness and warmth of voice to the hundreds of thousand of applications on Facebook and other social networks.
The babyTEL team is on its way to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco to debut our latest innovation – the Telephone API, which will turn any social application into a real telephone network for its users.
When a developer implements the Telephone API, all of his users can instantly launch the babyTEL phone, right from the app. The phone comes pre-loaded with all of the user’s friends on that app, configured the way the developer wants.
The Telephone API is also designed to work well with Facebook. We’ve used all of our experience developing for Facebook to create an API that takes the Facebook Platform’s quirks and idiosyncrasies into account, and all of its functionality complies with Facebook’s Terms of Service, so your app will play by the rules, even as it changes the game.
Want to learn more about the Telephone API? If you’re at Web 2.0, come see us at Booth 415 or check out the Telephone API page here (http://developers.babytel.net).
Posted in Uncategorized
By Stephen Dorsey on February 9, 2010
Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired Magazine, is well known for having popularized the idea of the Long Tail and the Zero Dollar Economy. But there are complexities inherent to giving things away for free that Anderson did not exactly address in his Wired article from 2008 and the subsequent book.
Anderson’s theory goes like this – create a free service that becomes wildly popular. Then, introduce a premium version of your service that 5% of your users are willing to pay for. The cost of providing free service to the other 95% of your users has to be so low that the 5% who pay cover the cost of providing the free and premium services combined, and allow you to make a profit in the processs.
In order for this plan to succeed, the premium, paid-for service needs to have the greatest reliability, highest quality and best human interface because the users are paying hard cash. The free service can be built to a lower standard because it’s free – and if it were just as good, why would people pay for it?
If only this were so.
The reality is somewhat counter-intuitive. It is the free service, not the paid service that needs to be designed to perfection. Sure, the paid service should also be perfect as well, but ironically, paying users demand less. How is this possible?
The answer is that paying users have “bought in” and now they are in it for the long haul. It is because paying users have made an investment with their time and with their money, and therefore are committed to “making it work.” They will spend the time experimenting, getting tech support by phone, email or chat. They have the incentive to stay with the service because they paid for it.
On the flipside, with a free service, every aspect and every details needs to be intuitive and attractive to the user. The user has no commitment, so any lack of clarity, any temporary frustration and –click- they just move on. For us at babyTEL, we have found that our free Telephone service for Facebook has to be tested over and over again with a broad cross-section of users at varying levels of computer skills. Only once nearly all the users have an easy time using Telephone is a new feature ready to be released.
So “free” cannot just be a synonym for half-baked. A free service has to be just as good as a paid offering, or even better, to keep users on board so it will grow virally. Getting users to buy in when a service is free can be as big a challenge as getting them to buy a service that is not free.
Posted in Insights | Tagged babyTEL, CEO, Chris Anderson, Facebook, Free, Long Tail, Phone Service, Telephone, Viral, VoIP, Wired Magazine, Zero Dollar Economy
