I get a small thrill out of finding voice-oriented apps in these normally data centric startup events. That was the doubly the case with Parlor.fm, which launched its smartphone software earlier today at TechCrunch Disrupt.
After years of having been traumatized by partially cooked “unified communication” software from the legacy PBX makers, it’s reassuring for me to see a well-designed, perfectly intuitive app that uses voice as the foundation.
I shared my thoughts with Parlor’s COO, Michael Thulen. I’m pretty sure Thulen is young enough to have missed the worst of the bronze-age computer telephony apps, the distant ancestors of what I was being shown at the Parlor booth.
What was most exciting to me was that the conferencing part of their software is absolutely free!
Thulen demoed some of Parlor’s functions on an Android gadget, where it behaved quite nicely. An IOS version is in the works.
So how do they manage to pull off this free service? A brief ad that’s played at the beginning of the conference—up to 20 attendees supported on the bridge—helps pay the bills for Parlor. And from what I could gather this is a VoIP-based, perhaps SIP-ified, connection, so no cell-phone minutes are eaten up while you’re in the call.
Parlor, by the way, handles the conference invitation by sending out PIN-free access numbers.
This part of their service make great sense for smallish businesses: they gain fancy conferencing capabilities, which have in the recent past required an investment in on-premise telecom hardware or else recurring payments to a provider. And smaller players, I think, will not have as much of an issue with an ad-based app as their larger peers.
Parlor also supports anonymous chat rooms, which are organized by subject area. Chatters can engage in point-to-point calls for which, again, there’s no charge. As with conferencing, Parlor picks up a revenue stream from voice ads (related to the subject area).
As we say in New York City, bupkes is a cool business model.
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