For more information click here.

On Friday, September 13 at 1pm Eastern, Jenny Dempsey (@jennysuedempsey) and Jeremy Watkin (@jtwatkin) will be hosting a Coffee And Customer Service Hangout with a couple of our awesome customer service representatives to discuss this topic from the perspective of a customer service professional.  You can tune into the hangout live on YouTube or go to CommunicateBetterBlog.com to see it in its entirety.  They will tweet a link to the hangout from @commbetterblog prior to the event.  We hope you can join us!

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… and if you missed it live… here is the video: 

Younger workers may be fluent in technologies that their older counterparts may have never heard of.  On the other hand according to Mary Jane Copps a phone-use consultant: “For many people, it’s a lack of confidence that they’ll be able to say the right words in the right order in the right amount of time,”.  Those “older” employees are typically more comfortable on the phone. They may be faster on their “feet” in terms of answering questions because they didn’t grow up taking their time to respond to a text message, when someone called they had to talk to them at that moment.

Some small business owners have seen a decline in sales due to their younger Millennial employees sending sales pitches to potential customers instead of making a call.  It’s much harder to build a relationship and rapport with a client via email then it is by phone.  In a Wall Street Journal article last week “Jason Nazar, a 34-year-old Santa Monica, Calif.-based technology entrepreneur, says his company has missed out on potential hires because his 20-something employees schedule interviews by email, rather than phoning applicants” Jason was quoted saying “If you can do something more quickly and more efficiently by using older technology, then do it,”

Dana Brownlee a Corporate trainer explained in the WSJ article that one of her clients “recently had to teach his young employee what a dial tone was and explain that desktop phones don’t require you to press “Send.”  So pick up a phone next time it is beneficial to talk to the recipient.

The event will be sold out and will take place at the Howe Center – Stevens Institute of Technology. For More information click here.

With over 360 attendees TEDxNavesink will host dozens of talks by industry experts in addition to hosting several live cast performances from the TEDxCity2.0 conference taking place at the Times Center in NYC.

Talk highlights include presentations by Bagriella Levine, COO of the robotics company Protei – Cindy Zipf, Executive Director at Clean Ocean Action – Erika Casriel, an investigative jounallist having worked for publications such as Rolling Stone & Vanity Fair – Tereza Nemessanyi who leads Microsoft’s presence with Startups in the East – Avi Karnani CEO and co-founder of Thrive which was acquired by Lending Tree.

For more invormation about TEDxNavesink, schedule, and tickets visit: http://www.tedxnavesink.com/

About TEDx – In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, live speakers combine with TEDTalks video to spark deep discussion and connection. These local events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event.

Startupcamp brings together 4 startups in the communications field that under strict time rules present their company to an audience of hundreds and address some tough (and not so tough) questions from an experienced panel of judges.

Phone.com was also the provider of the polling app that allowed the audience to text and vote for their choice of best of the 4 in real-time and projected onto the big screen.  It’s always nice to see that in action and proud of our team for doing it well.

At Phone.com we work with startups and with entrepreneurs of all kind all the time. We our-self are still a young and energetic company and to feel the spirit and excitement of innovation (in any industry and not only our own) is refreshing and that is what we all felt it in the room at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center.

Plus, when an event has a lot of good wine, beer and hot hors d’oeuvres and also a keynote by an industry leader (this time Yahoo’s senior VP Jeff Bonforte sharing some of Yahoo’s new vision and especially management style do’s and dont’s) StartupCamp  is certainly a cool place to be.

A few words on the startups presenting:

Perch- an “always on” video conferencing screen for offices and mobile workers positioned as the tool for improving culture in organizations. Perch is optimized for user experience,   auto correct outages etc.  It is always two way and has unique IP enabling mic optimization when a person is near it and speaking. In beta now but expected to be in the app store next week – free for teams and value add fee is the biz model.

TextGen- the claim: anything you can do with an IVR you can do with text.  Creating text between you and your customer. TextGen allows any number to receive texts. Will sell as an add-on to voice service.

Perzo – the question Prezo answers is: what is your personal (family and close friends) network? If LinkedIn is for business and Facebook for friends/social;  Where do you feel comfortable to share family private information?? Prezo brought together email, Facebook , presence and voice chat and other existing platforms and built a secure communications network for privacy can best be describes as a client that aggregate existing communication tools with a new slick UI.

Alice receptionist – subsidiary of winTech LLC – great virtual receptionist solution using two way video communications between the lobby of an office and the employees anywhere and in any office.  Uses motion detection or Identification etc. Also offer info like maps etc to the visitor. Market is enterprises and government etc and looking to channel partners.  Already have 60 paying customers worldwide. Price ranges from $5.5k to $8k or $12k much based on the hardware used.

I recommend you check out all of these solutions.

And the winner was… Well, all were winners (but Alice got the most votes)

We look forward to be at Startupcamp#9 in South Beach this coming winter.

StartupCamp highlights the innovations of early-stage entrepreneurs building young companies in the communications and collaboration arena. The event offers these companies the chance to pitch to the large audience of industry experts, media, investors and prospects attending ITEXPO West in Las Vegas.

Last winter in Miami, StartupCamp7 featured an extraordinary interview with John Sculley, with New York’s VerbalizeIt declared the winner of the pitch competition. The startup has since gone on to be featured on ABC’s SharkTank.

StartupCamp8 may introduce the next amazing technology and Phone.com is proud to once again co-sponsor this incredible event.

StartupCamp8 is collocated with ITEXPO Las Vegas
Dates: August 27-29, 2013
Time: 4:00 PST
Location: Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, NV

Many pundits have commented about what this means to both Google’s ambitions to become an ISP or to the competitive environment in the major markets it enters as a broadband provider. The competition will be the likes of Verizon FiOS or AT&T U-Verse or a major cable company like Time Warner in Austin and major cable-system operators Comcast, Cablevision and Charter elsewhere. 

One thing is certain: Our nation as a whole needs superfast gigabit broadband and will benefit economically from Google’s entry as a service provider that drives competition versus other providers.  Competition brings consumers and businesses more choices, spawns new businesses and causes productivity to rise. Washington knows that the value of bringing high-speed Internet to all corners of the U.S. will boost the economy and more broadband capacity will mean services providers of all stripe, especially those in the cloud, will see opportunities to offer businesses and consumers innovative alternatives to the major carriers.

Indeed, it will be interesting to see  what a new, uber-fast broadband ISP might mean to providers  that supply dial-tone and a host of value-added services.  Some might call these services “Over The Top” (OTT), but I prefer to think of these innovative offerings as value-added services, which is why the Google move to deploy broadband in many markets could have a positive impact on the growth and trajectory of OTT services and on the value-added providers that deploy and market them.

In the past, there were several debates, some of which reached the FCC or state regulators, addressing “fair play” when bandwidth owners – including Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and the like — could control and perhaps did control the quality of broadband for services that competed with their own. Most notably, these included voice over IP services, such as Vonage or even Skype.  The issue of “net neutrality” has also been discussed for many years and has been addressed to some extent, but I am not certain that the problem is really solved or over.  It all depends on whether Google decides to play the same game as the big traditional carriers, or if it forgoes the old monopoly mindset and truly competes against the old guard carriers and encourages new services to ride on its broadband fiber network.

So what does Google’s broadband mean to VoIP?  It certainly does not seem as though Google is going to supply its superfast broadband as a standalone service without TV and other services. The company is already offering Google TV in Kansas City.  Will it also become a phone service provider? Will it remain with its current voice, chat and video offering?

If Google will honor “net neutrality,” its network’s faster speeds and more bandwidth will spur greater demand and increased IP use and better quality IP.  For the OTT and value-added service providers, that means their services will work better and be “closer” to more households and primarily small businesses.  OTT / value added services bring a tremendous boost to small business. Different cloud-based solutions improve productivity and connectivity. Superfast broadband will just fuel the growth of such services even more than today.

The danger is if Google builds out this network and then starts acting like an AT&T or a Comcast – for example, if it offers full TV service as we know it today, or if it offers a commercial phone service and then makes network-design decisions to give higher-quality / more-accessible IP to its own service and hurts the competition, or if it attempts to charge OTT service providers as well as end-user customers for use of its broadband — then we are taking two steps back.

Like any technology for communication and commerce since before the turn of the last century, bigger is better: new roads, better ships, shorter trips, aviation and telecom etc. ; now bigger data pipes will contribute to the economy of the city. A faster and greener economy outlook will cause more businesses to open and OTT services can become more of the norm.

So if Google keeps everything neutral, those customers will have a chance to enjoy OTT services as one of the best and more cost-effective business phone services, at a fraction of what they used to pay.

On the other hand, if Google’s service ends up being just a faster version of the incumbents’ broadband, then eventually it and the incumbents will end up competing with one another.  Personally, I would like to see companies like Google enter the market for faster broadband not to offer their own “everything” but rather to serve as a super utility and allow startups and other new offerings to flourish without the threat of the incumbents changing the playing field.  Google should stand to benefit from such an open market.

Yes, Google can offer its own video conferencing and its own chat and its own many other apps and services, but if it  focuses on doing everything just like the current broadband  incumbents, then I don’t see the greater good.  Google will fall into that same trap of being no different than the big telcos and cable companies.

Also, what is still missing from this new Google service is the mobile aspect. Google is already offering free Wi-Fi in some citie,s but that is not the big picture. I would anticipate that the focus on Gigabit fiber could impact the efforts on the mobile front, but mobile uses spectrum, a resource that is limited, while adding more fiber strands brings more capacity to where wireless can’t always. Another reason to stay away from the “offer everything” approach.

Overall, I welcome superfast Gigabit broadband. America needs it. It is not cheap and whoever provides it needs to get paid for offering it. I believe the model has to be different from the ones the current incumbents offer. That will bring more openness and many great value-added services that are both business changing and life changing.

Well, fast forward to now; all one needs to do is visit ERAs news section on their website to learn about their on-going success and the success of their alumni company.

Phone.com has had the good fortune of working with many of these companies and follow their success. Companies like Public Stuff, Buzztable, ParkingPanda, Appycouple, Tapfame, Bizodo and many others.

On Thursday we visited ERAs new offices in mid-town Manhattan and met with several companies that are part of the current program (ERA4).  We were once again impressed by all of the teams we met and also loved the new ERA facility. Just the way a start-up environment should look like! Frankly, just like how every tech company should look like. This post is hardly the only one that talks about the energy and atmosphere in a technology start-up or on one of the several accelerators around but not all accelerators are created equal. ERA has something really special going, Follow them! We certainly will.