You can check it out on Youtube.

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

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.

However, it is not enough to “tie” your toll free number to your cell phone or whatever designated phone you have.

Actually, even if you don’t use an 800 number or other toll free numbers you still don’t want to tie your business number to one phone.
Once you have a Phone.com – Virtual Office account (of any plan) you will automatically be able to assign your toll free or local phone number to accept calls based on time of day and day of week.

Call schedules allow you to set actions for each phone number in your system based on the day and time a call is received. A call received during business hours will hear the Main Greeting and a call after business hours will hear your After-Hours Greeting.
Call schedules can be set for specific extensions, or an entire call menu and more.

For example: creating a schedule for Monday- Friday, 8am – 5pm will give you the option to route calls to one destination during those hours and after those hours calls will be routed to a different destination such as ring cell phones of you and your partner only.

You can accompany each schedule with the appropriate professional recorded greeting to help your customers.

Confused how to set it up? Call our Phone.com – Customer Service team. We are at your service 24*7.

Now that you know what it is, what should you look for when choosing such a service?

Despite all the cool and valuable features, PRICE is still the main factor and we acknowledge this fact. Reliability of the service is the second issue and customer service would be the third (or perhaps the first?). After these come all the valued added features.

At Phone.com our goal is to provide this service based solely on these issues.

Our service is built on a solid platform with experienced engineers monitoring the network around the clock.

Second, we offer our service at the most competitive pricing in the industry; third, we offer 24*7 live customer support and we promise to not keep you waiting and to let you speak to someone who will really help you! If for some reason we don’t have the answer our representative will find out and call you back as soon as they get the issue resolved.

If you are still not satisfied with our service (and we don’t think this will happen) please let us know why, but in any case, unlike some other companies, we won’t make it hard for you to leave. We will also let you return your telephone adaptor to us and avoid cancellation fees. We don’t know of many companies who do that.

If you have any questions please call us or email us – we want to talk to you!

So we hope you got your attention but why get a VoIP home phone service in the first place? Think about these issues as well:

1) With the cable company packaged phone services (most are also voip based) you are limited to your real area code (as with the old phone companies) and cannot choose your own number (virtually any area code in the US)
2) You can take the Phone.com adaptor with you and use it with any phone at any place that has a home broadband connection (so basically you can take it with you when you go to grandma for the weekend – assuming grandma has broadband) and your home phone will ring there. You can even use it overseas.

Oh, and did we mention price? The price for unlimited monthly calling and much lower international rates can be half the price of our competition.

What is the challenge finding the right (and cheep) softphone? First let me clarify that at Phone.com we do not offer a softphone. We may do so in the future but took a decision to delay those efforts in favor of other applications. Stay tuned they are coming soon!

However, we decided to try and address Corey’s questions and Alon wrote an email response that was published in Corey’s blog. Below is that response. (more…)

We got this Emailed to us…
perhaps we can start a competition

The show is not exactly oriented for the business crowd (or is it?) but if you have college students or teenagers following new media they will love it and we can all learn something new. So check them out…