Calliflower Press Kit, June 24 2008

iotum talks business with Calliflower™ conference calling

• Press Release 2008-06-24
Open Beta Introduces a Fresh New Approach to Business Conversations
• Screenshots

How it grew

We at iotum planted the seeds for Calliflower in the rich growing medium of social networking. That was back in Sept 2007, when we launched the first conference calling service on the Facebook® platform. Winning critical acclaim, we quickly raised a user base of 200,000 -- users who were delighted to graft the interactivity and multimodality of Facebook onto an audioconferencing platform.

Conference attendees found that calls created within Facebook were playful but productive - a stark contrast to the usual dull, stale, attention-scattering conference calls they'd come to know and hate.

Calliflower is an outgrowth of that positive experience in the Facebook environment. It has the shared pictures, walls, links and interactivity of Facebook, but stands by itself. It extends beyond any particular social network to reach a new and larger business audience. At the same time, it contains the tools social networkers have come to know, and those tools take care of the entire lifecycle of a business meeting - from invitation to moderation, participation and follow-up. The beta we're delivering is the first step in our quest to reinvent the virtual business meeting. It's a fresh new way of looking at "talking business" - exchanging a largely passive, boring, audio-only experience for show and tell, give and take, and wide awake.

QUotes And testiomnials

"NewsGang Live wouldn't exist without iotum's Calliflower service. With Calliflower, we recruit participants to the daily NewsGang Live show by simply broadcasting the URL for the show on Twitter. Creating and managing calls with their interactive dashboard couldn't be easier."
Steve Gillmor, creator of the Gillmor Gang and NewsGang Live Internet shows.

"We use Calliflower for our public reading of an Ancient Aramaic Text, the Zohar. Our virtual classroom accommodates people from all over the world in a fun and interactive environment with live chat for questions, participants' pictures and status and recordings available to every participant."
Paloma, creator of Scan for Peace.