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Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 11:51 AM EST

We recently introduced a new promo video for our Virtual Office service.

You can check it out on Youtube.

Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 1:43 PM EST

Today our Phone.com – Virtual Office service added new advanced call routing capabilities enabling virtually unlimited options on call forwarding to any phone, or menu, based on time of day or even a specific caller ID.

Callers can be directed based on their number (or time of day) they called to any phone.
These new call control capabilities also enable any Phone.com account owner to upload their address book and dial any contact straight from their personal online control panel.

By placing calls out of their control panel the recipient will see their virtual office phone number. No need to show your home or cell phone number.

We are very pleased with the progress we made since we launched in December 2007. We are growing our customer base and getting good reviews and feedback both on our robust feature set and our friendly customer support team. We continue to innovate and introduce new services and applications and with this new release already looking forward to our next product offerings coming out later in the year.

Here is a summary of the new features introduced today:

Personal Phone.com ADDRESS BOOK
You can now import your address book from Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL and other contact sources. You can also enter individual contacts directly into your Phone.com Address Book.

Your new Phone.com Address Book allows storage of all your contacts in one organized location. When your contacts are kept on file, you can assign rules to specific callers and route them to personalized menus, queues, voicemail, extensions, and much more. Each Extension is provided with their own Address Book.

Outbound Calls - Hide Your Private Caller ID
As a Phone.com Virtual Office subscriber you may now click to call a contact in your Phone.com Address Book from inside your own extension section in the control panel. You may also choose to click and call ANY random phone number from your private inbox. In both cases the phone number displayed for the call recipient will be the Virtual Office phone number and NOT your private home or mobile phone.

Caller ID Routing
With Caller ID Routing, you have the option to route incoming calls received from a contact stored in your Phone.com Address Book, based on their caller ID, to a specific destination such as your cell phone, a custom recording, a menu, or anything else you prefer! Route individual contacts or whole groups.

Click To Call Buttons
The Click to Call Button is a “web button” that can be “pasted” on your website, blog, auction or any online document and allow visitors to your site to click that button and place a call directly to you without having to dial your number.

Please visit the Phone.com website and learn more about our new and exciting features from our user guides or by contacting our support team. We are here to help you 24/7.

As always, we sincerely appreciate your comments and feedback — please let us know what you think by contacting support@phone.com

Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 11:14 PM EST

What makes a consumer brand a success? In the end, it really comes down to two things: name recognition and perceived value. With the growth of the internet in our warp-speed communications age, a new or re-branded company faces marketing challenges within the context of a globally shrinking attention span.

Executives of growth businesses must create alliances, leverage existing technology while pursuing research and development, and face the overwhelming surge of information—all the while making budget decisions about advertising and marketing spending. Demographics, projected ROI, and other statistical analyses can sometimes appear to be, well, bunk. Marketing and advertising without unlimited funds can feel like shooting in the dark. Sounds tough, right? Read on…

Today, I think that marketing strategy will be developed in a moment of phenomenal opportunity for creativity. Partnerships with many different kinds of companies and outlets will be critical to success.

Take the case of our own company, Phone.com. The simplicity of our name has helped clear our first hurdle: brand recognition. Brand=Phone. Product=Phone.
Think about names of products or companies launched or re-branded in the last several years. Which ones come to mind? How did you first hear of them? Do they represent the product well? Do you need an explanation? A few years ago, for example, Verizon spent $300 million on marketing—just to promote its new name! That certainly buys a whole lot of name recognition, but I will bet most new companies don’t have that kind of change lying around.

In the last ten years, domain names have morphed into brand names. Simple, easy to understand words, either real or imagined, have become associated with products merely by adding the dotcom at the end, and the plainer the better. The domain name marketplace reflects this incredible branding paradigm shift. Today, consumers will generally associate the most basic domain names with quality, as they have become a particularly valuable asset. In other words, if you have the money to buy a simple descriptive name, you must have the commodities to go along with it.

The backers of Phone.com invested in its name and its product, not in its explanation. To make Phone.com a success, we will leverage its association with a consortium of related companies, connected under the umbrella of WashingtonVC, to create reciprocal arrangements for marketing opportunities. WashingtonVC was actually created to use synergies between its portfolio companies to add value to each of its domain names as their respective independent businesses are launched.

It’s a neat idea. These kinds of new relationships, as well as traditional and non-traditional advertising, are worth investigating for any company. We are not just buying services from each of these companies; we are trading goods. This is wampum redefined, and whether it is on the web or in a store, this is a great trend.
These new multilateral marketing strategies will ultimately lead to what everyone wants for their business; to what name recognition and perceived value will bring: customers.