This patch contained small bug fixes from the “Sunny” release v1.5, posted on 8/5/10

Most important changes:

• Fixed many sources of crashes for Ringio Mobile for Android – big thanks to all the users who sent their bug reports!
• Dramatically improved Ringio Mobile’s connection management (for when your cell phone switches between 3G and Wifi)
• Improved the usability and robustness of call whisper / audio pop (when you get a call and you hear Ringio whisper the caller’s name to you)
• Further simplified the process of signing up for Ringio

Head on over to the Ringio Support Community for the full release notes.

If you were logged into the Ringio software during the upgrade, the system may have logged you out, and upon trying to log in you may be asked to upgrade your client software… sorry for the inconvenience, but this helps us ensure that you’re getting the best possible experience with the service.

Lets us know what you think!

photo credit - flickr user storm crypt

We also put out a press release last week in which we announced some of the highlights of the new functionality, but since you’re paying by the word on PR Newswire and most journalists have a notoriously short attention span, we could only scratch the surface of all the good stuff we packed into our latest product release.

Before we dig into the details, in the name of the entire Ringio team I would like to say a heartfelt thank you to the more than 300 businesses who signed up for our service in the last few months and who provided the feedback, ideas and focus for this release. We could not have done this without you (obviously) and hopefully you were excited to see some of your requested features appear  ‘magically’ in your account last week.

To shamelessly rip off the Microsoft commercial: Ringio 2 Was Your Idea!

So let me give you a quick run down of what we added and how you – as our current or future customers – can benefit from it.

Streamlined Sign-up Process

OK, we admit it. The process and the experience we put our initial beta customers through when first signing up was clunky at best. (We also heard ‘confusing’, ‘unusable’ and ‘Microsoft-like’. Ouch!). So while still not perfect, I think the new step-by-step wizard is a major step in the right direction. Please, try it yourself. (And yes, I did just try to trick you into signing up for a free trial ) Our stated design goal is that the setup for a 10-person company should take 10 minutes or less. So get out your stopwatch, and tell us how fast you can get it done!

Management Dashboard

The next thing we heard is that our users wanted a central dashboard from which they could get a quick overview of their entire Ringio setup, from which they could make changes with one-click access to all major feature groups. So here we go. I think the new design (see below) is pretty nice and clean. If you don’t think so, we don’t want to hear about it (just kidding).

Custom Greetings

Quite honestly, we really thought that every customer would instantly and inevitably fall in love with our ‘one-size fits all’ auto-attendant. It was clean, well organized, efficient and moderately smart … Oh, boy … did that work out well – NOT! Clearly another one we can safely put into the ‘feature prioritization brainfart’ category. By my rough estimate, more than 40% of our customers actually wanted their sparkling new Ringio phone system to sound exactly how their old system sounded (at least the main greeting) or finally get that professional recording by William Shatner or Liz Hurley. So go ahead, my friends, just ask Susan in Accounting, Auntie Helen or whatever voice ‘talent’ rocks your boat to record for you, then upload the file through the Ringio Admin Portal and you’re off to the races. You can obviously always revert back to the Voice of Ringio with a click of a button!

Personalized Greeting & Welcome Back

One of the reasons why the Ringio system might be (well, actually it certainly is) superior to any boring PBX you might have bought in the past is the option to let the Ringio system greet your known callers by name when they call your business. This alone makes Ringio the most polite and customer friendly small business phone solution out there. And while you might not find ‘polite’ or ‘customer friendly’ on many feature comparison charts yet, it’s key to our product philosophy of helping you create  ‘better business with every call’ – so we’re sticking with it! And to put some ‘Smart’ icing on the ‘Polite and Customer-friendly’ cake we also added the simply awesome ‘Welcome Back Routing’, which checks for every caller, who they have spoken with last in the company and if that employee is available right now connect them in an instant so both sides can continue their conversation. This one’s a winner for sure.

Route to Departments / All Users

Another feature we didn’t expect to bubble up to the top of our feature request list so quickly was the option for businesses to skip the auto-attendant part altogether and simply let the Ringio system find the next available employee. Another way of improving customer service by increasing the efficiency of getting a caller to a live person as quickly as possible, so we obviously loved the idea.

‘Silent Ringio’ – Put Ringio Behind Your Enterprise PBX or IVR

Take my word for it … this is one of the  ‘hidden gems’ of this release. By combining the ‘Custom Greeting’ with the ‘Route to All Users’ option, any company can now take advantage of Ringio’s Screen Pop and built-in CRM functionality without requiring major changes to whatever it uses as their big and expensive corporate phone or IVR system. All you have to do is upload a blank audio file, select the  ’Route to All Users’ option and then forward whatever option in your Corporate IVR your team is responsible for (Sales, Support or Accounting) to the Ringio number you selected. From now on you can control the schedule, the ‘smarts’, the tracking and everything that matters from your Ringio account. What makes this doubly interesting for many folks running Sales, Support or other teams at larger organizations is that at $25 per user / month, Ringio is about 20% of the cost of Virtual Call Center solutions with all the functionality you really need.

Most importantly all of these Routing options can now be conveniently configured from a single tab:

Bring Your Own PBX / Virtual Extensions

The folks at Ringio are all big fans of  ‘Going Green’. While we obviously believe that physical PBX ‘boxes’ are quickly following the path of rotary phones, cassette players and floppy disks, we also don’t want any of our customers to simply throw away their perfectly fine and dust-collecting PBXs in a manic frenzy … some of them might turn into collectors’ items eventually LOL. However, what we heard loud and clear from many beta participants, was that they actually want both (Shocker ). Keep their existing PBX until death (or the upcoming maintenance renewal bill) do them part, but start taking advantage of the killer Ringio features right away. Wish granted! Not only does Ringio now support the ability to use your existing PBX Extensions as default endpoints for your employees, it also now sports one of the most elegant and user friendly interfaces in the industry to define ‘Virtual Extensions’ for any number of employees in your company.

So to make this a little clearer:

• You can now set up a Ringio system in 10 minutes or less with all the bells and whistles that allows existing callers to dial the extensions they have gotten used to, then routing the calls through Ringio to the actual phone of the employee hanging off your 1970s PBX.
• If and when you decide to move any of your existing or new employees to the 21st century, you can do this with a single click of a button.
• No matter where your employees take the call (PBX or Mobile) they all can take advantage of all of Ringio’s Rich Calling features. Pretty good, huh!?

Caller Picture ID

Now this one, while definitely ranking towards the top of the ‘cool feature list’, is quite frankly still at a somewhat ‘betaish’ stage. What Picture ID does is that it actually displays a contact’s picture in both the Ringio Contact Manager as well as the Ringio Screen Pop, as long as such a picture can be found on any of the main social networks – at least that’s the plan. In full disclosure, we simply ran out of engineering time and didn’t want to hold up the entire release for a feature that most folks might classify as ‘nice to have’. So in order for it to work in its current stage, your contact actually must have a ‘Gravatar’ account (www.gravatar.com) tied to the email on file, which basically means that he or she is either a Super-Geek or a hardcore Super-Geek. If you’re desperate to get a glance of how Caller Picture ID works, just add me to your contact list in Ringio (Michael Zirngibl, work: 202-470 6515 email: michael@ringio.com) and my mugshot will appear. No offense taken if you delete the contact 3 seconds later. Give us a few weeks and we’ll fix the whole thing to include access to profile pics on Facebook and LinkedIn, which will be our first foray into Social CRM functionality. More on what’s coming in that area  in a later post …

Voicemail Caller Receipt

Have you ever left an important voicemail for somebody at a business wondering if they actually received it, just to ‘panic’ and then write a lengthy email basically repeating and paraphrasing exactly what you just told them 5 minutes ago? No? Well than this feature is simply not for you and you should just skip the following 15 sentences … If yes, read on and learn that we now give our customers the option to turn on Voicemail Receipt notifications for their account. Trust me, your customers will love this one … Turned on, any registered contact in Ringio leaving a message for you / your employees will instantly get an email with a link to the message they just left, giving them a) the peace of mind that their important message will show up at the top of your Ringio NEW voicemail list next time you log in and b) also giving them the option to simply forward the email back to you with a ‘little nudge’, just in case they feel your time to respond could use a little improvement. This one’s maybe a little out there, but we would love to hear how your customers react!

Plus: Other Stuff

Well, there’s a whole bunch more usability improvements like improved Contact Search, Endpoint Management, Auto-Attendant Configuration etc. etc. but they probably don’t warrant a full-blown benefit appraisal in this post, so let’s just cut it for now

I hope you can see that everyone here at Ringio is fully committed to making this the best small business phone solution on the planet. No seriously, that is the plan … no wink wink or smiley faces.  And while we’re certainly not there yet, I think you’ll be quite pleased with both the quality and speed of the functionality improvements we are putting out there for our customers.

So if you’re serious about treating your customers better with every phone call, sign up today and give Ringio a shot … If you feel like we’re still missing something, make sure to let us know.

That way, you could be part of our upcoming viral marketing campaign and claim that ‘Ringio 3 Was Your Idea!’ Cheers!

Michael

The Ringio team is thrilled to announce today the completion of our public beta phase, and the introduction of some usability enhancements and new features that make the Ringio product even more attractive for small businesses.  Ringio launched in April 2010 – just a few short months ago – and since then we’ve taken the feedback from over 300 small business users to improve multiple facets of the Ringio experience.

The press release we issued today contains the details, but here is a quick summary of the new features and enhancements:

“Bring Your Own PBX”

Preexisting PBXs now work with Ringio. Calls and their CRM displays can be routed straight to those on PBX extensions as well as those on direct-inward-dial numbers, with no need to change recorded greetings, prompts, etc. Ringio can also make “virtual extensions” out of phones at home and mobile phones, either forming an entire hosted PBX or adding them to an installed PBX. This makes remote or dispersed employees reachable through the company’s main number and system.

Caller-Centric Call Routing

Personalizing the customer experience for every call, Ringio can automatically greet callers by name. It can also automatically route them to the person they spoke with last. The service can also reach employees on the fixed or mobile phones they desire. Calls can also be routed to a predefined list of employees — for a particular skill set, language or marketing campaign, for example — or evenly distributed to all employees to handle particularly heavy call volumes. Companies can also record, install and change custom greetings as often as they wish.

Streamlined Sign-up and Account Administration

Ringio makes self-service, web-based setup and administration of their office-communications systems practical and easy for busy SMBs, with friendly phone technical support for backup. With its new online administration dashboard, 10 employees can be set up and running in 10 minutes or less.

Read the full press release

Some would say I’ve been waxing lyrical about Android in the last few weeks as I compared iphone vs android.  I am a fan, no doubt, but –lest you think that I’ve lost my sense of objectivity– here are some worrisome trends that have recently emerged about Android phones:

* Some new Android models arrive with so-called JunkWare: gratuitous apps that are shoved into the standard distribution of the OS whether the user likes them or not. Mark Milian highlights some of the abuse in a recent LA Times article.
* There are unconfirmed reports that the new Motorola Droid X (a very cool phone by technical standards), contains hardware preventing users from installing their own homebrew version of the Android Operating System. While most users won’t be doing this type of hacking, it’s just bad form on the part of a manufacturer.

So just because the Android platform has been making a lot of progress in competing with iPhones, it doesn’t mean that the platform is devoid of its own dubious practices… remember, use your best judgment when picking a phone for your business.

image credit – scifi cool

At Ringio, we’re big fans of Google Voice.  I remember standing in the audience watching Vincent Paquet and Craig Walker relaunching in 2007 at the ETel conference and saying, “Wow, this is really useful!”

We’ve built Ringio based on the same philosophy as Google:

• Communication tools can be better, but have to be centered around the users.
• We can help people be more productive and stay more organized as it relates to phone calls.
• We have to build a web product, not a telecom product.

Just as Google Voice has improved personal communication, Ringio is designed to improve business communication.

For instance, here are a couple of useful Google Voice features:

• Find me on whatever phone I’m at
• Transcribe my voicemails

And a couple of the more useful Ringio features:

• Get a screen pop with information about who’s calling me
• Easily transfer calls to my business colleagues

Google Voice is for individuals. Ringio is for groups.

Here’s where the real power lies – if you combine Google Voice with Ringio you get a super solution for small businesses.

Use Google Voice for:

• Calls that are directed at you
• As the solution for call-blasting your different phones
• To make cheap phone calls

Use Ringio for:

• Calls that are directed at your company (calls for Sales, Technical Support, or Ordering)
• As the solution for distributing calls between employees
• As the mini-CRM that allows you to write notes and keep a history of your conversations with customers

Ringio and Google Voice work together beautifully. Here are a few tips to make this combination work for you:

• Set up your Google Voice number as the number where Ringio should find you
• Turn Google Voice’s call screening off
• In Ringio, set your Outgoing Caller ID to be your Google Voice number — that way if you call people from Ringio they will call you back at your Google Voice number

It’s great to see what the community of Google Voice users is figuring out -  the tips, the tricks, and the hacks. Hopefully we’ll see more of these emerge as more people use GV and Ringio together!

The one thing that defines my life is the constant and overwhelming assault of demands on my time. So for me, productivity is not a nice thing to have, it’s an essential skill to master.

Add to that the fact that I have a naturally curious personality prone to distractions (INTJ in Myers Briggs) and what you have is a recipe for disaster.

So to stay on top of things and be effective I use a suite of software programs that help me be hyper-productive: very focused on the most important tasks for me, on top of the information that I need to get my work done and with a list of things that my colleagues owe me.

I have honed this system over time so that it stays with me, whether I’m working in the office, working at Starbucks, travelling, or even when I’m hanging out and all I have access to is my iPhone or my Android.

Here’s what my productivity software list is made of:

• OmniFocus
• + Basecamp
• + Dropbox
• + Evernote
• + Socialtext
• + Ringio
• = stay productive.

My personal organizer application: OmniFocus.

I mentioned this app in my previous blog post. In a nutshell, OmniFocus helps me implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. It is a sophisticated app for managing to-do lists. What’s special about it is that it has many criteria to help you bubble up to the top whatever is important to you.

OmniFocus has desktop software client and a mobile client. I sync between them using a service called Spootnik, which has the added benefit of syncing between my organizer system and the rest of the company’s system, which resides in Basecamp.

Other alternatives to Omnifocus are: Things and TaskPaper (which I really like for its simplicity). Remember the Milk does similar things but is web-based.

My company’s organizer application: Basecamp

It’s not enough for me to keep track of my tasks, I need to be able to keep track of other people’s tasks, and as a group we need to stay organized and seamlessly communicate about each other’s projects. Since Ringio collaborates with a lot of vendors and people outside the organization, we use 37 Signal’s excellent, lightweight project management tool called Basecamp.

If you’re using Basecamp right you will have increased the awareness about the status of projects, and the chances that something will catch you by surprise will be drastically reduced.

If you don’t like Basecamp, or the price, there are many worthy alternatives

My files: always with me with Dropbox

It’s amazing how complicated it was to share files two years ago… if you had a Windows network and had a file server you could set up local file sharing… but it turns out that most of the files you want to share is with people outside of your network The alternative is FTP, but many people don’t know how to use it, and it’s insecure anyways. What you really need is a way to create shared network folders without the network or without the file server… enter Dropbox.

Dropbox is an elegant service that integrates right into your desktop (Finder, Windows Explorer, etc) and mobile, and allows you to share folders with other people. When you update a file on your computer, it updates on theirs, and vice versa. Even when you’re not at your computer, you can log in to the Dropbox website and it gives you access to your files, and shows you recent activity. It even helps you recover accidentally deleted files.

One edgier alternative to Dropbox is Drop.io

My personal note taking system: Evernote

Evernote is a lightweight note taking system that helps you keep all your text, screenshot and video notes organized. I use it to jot down ideas, meeting notes, feedback from customers, transcripts of phone calls, reference how-to-do-this things….. anything that is for my eyes only.

Evernote does a great job of staying out of the way until you need to recall something, then it’s super search and tagging system come to the rescue.

With their iPhone and Android clients, Evernote helps me capture notes (even voice dictation or pics I take with my camera) while I’m on the road.

My company’s document sharing system: Socialtext wikis

A wiki is collaboration software that helps you keep documents organized and hyperlinked, much like a website that anybody in your team can edit. The ultimate example of a wiki is Wikipedia. We use wikis at Ringio to create things such as product specifications, software release plans, to create customer proposals, to keep track of our competitors, and to store instructions for different kinds of activities that our teams do.

A wiki is a system that acts as “company memory”. If you’re using it right you will be avoiding duplication in the long term, because you will be able to more easily recall when somebody had been working on an idea that you’re revisiting.

There are alternatives to Socialtext, such as Clearspace, or Google Sites.

My company’s virtual PBX system: Ringio

I spend a good chunk of my time on the phone, making calls to prospective customers, bloggers and the press, investors and partners.

It’s essential for me to spend as little time as possible looking up contacts and dialing, and I need the flexibility to call from any old phone and know that the receiving person is seeing always the same caller ID.

The Ringio software does exactly that for me.

There are alternatives to Ringio, such as Google Voice, Toktumi or Ring Central. I’m biased, of course, but I encourage you to try the different solutions.

Other productivity boosters:

• Searchable email: I heavily rely on Gmail’s search capabilities and labels
• Delicious bookmarking, Chrome’s bookmark sync
• 1Password or LastPass for password management and form-filling
• Tungle for meeting schedule management

What software do you use to increase employee productivity?

High Availability In the Cloud

(Editors Note: At Ringio we have learned a good deal over the last 12 months about cloud computing and we thought it would be a useful topic to discuss in the Ringio blog, as so many of Ringio’s customers are in the high-tech field.)

The typical factors considered when evaluating the ROI of the cloud compared with traditional data centers are:

• Machine Utilization, Elastic Demand and Auto Scaling. Most services do not need all servers all the time.  The cloud allows you to scale up and down and reduce cost at low demand times.  This is especially well described in Joe Weinman’s cloudonomics blog where he states that “even if cloud services cost, say, twice as much, a pure cloud solution makes sense for those demand curves where the peak-to-average ratio is two-to-one or higher.”  In a traditional setting you would have to be provisioned for peak demand all the time.
• Power. In physical data centers the cumulative power cost outweighs the machine cost somewhere in year 2 or 3 onward.  In the cloud, the unit machine cost includes the power cost.
• Human Resources to run the data center. Due to no physical work such as cabling, the expected personnel count required to support data center operations is less in the cloud.

However, in addition to the above mentioned factors, one also needs to look at the out of the box high availability tool set that is provided by the cloud in order to provide a more thorough analysis.

The cloud provides the following benefits in the High Availability arena at a fraction of the costs of a traditional data center setting.

• Geographic Redundancy and Diversity
  • The Cloud Way: The cloud – out of the box – gives you the power to instantiate your services in geographically diverse regions.
  • The Traditional Data Center: To do the same with your own data centers is very costly / time consuming / resource intensive.  In addition you need to pay for inter site connections and point to point links.  This can cost in the hundreds of thousands dollars extra.  Now you need to instantiate 2x the peak demand in any one data center assuming that any one data center can take over all of your traffic.
• Point In Time Data Snapshots
  • The Cloud Way: The cloud gives you block storage that allows for snapshotting which allows for data protection and point in time recovery.
  • The Traditional Data Center: The same capabilities can cost tens of thousand of dollars or more when being implemented at local data centers by the way of SAN’s and NAS’s.
• Shared Data across Multiple Geographic Regions
  • The Cloud Way: With a highly available Network Attached Like Storage your data is available in multiple regions.  In additions block data can also be snapshotted and made available across multiple regions
  • The Traditional Data Center: You need to work with ISPs regarding bandwidth and Point  To Point(P2P) connections and then worry about the availability of these P2P connections.  You need to purchase SANs and NAS’s at each site for the data to be replicated.
• Load Balancing & Basic Monitoring
  • The Cloud Way: The cloud provides this at a basic level and gets you off the ground quickly.
  • The Traditional Data Center: You don’t need to implement your own solution unless you really need to do some advanced loadbalancing for example.

One of the key disruptions of cloud computing has been the commoditization of High Availability offerings, some of which are mentioned above.  This is a boon for all startups like Ringio and for any existing enterprise that is looking at the cloud as well as high availability.

In my view when comparing the two approaches it’s not just the cost to run a service but the cost to run a service in a highly available manner – that’s where the cloud truly shines.

photo credit – calle vieja blog.