Hard to believe, but there are two great conferencing apps at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. I just wrote about Oovoo and what they’ve done with video. There’s also Uberconference, which is disrupting audio conferencing. Thanks to the legacy vendors, audio bridges are still stuck in Bronze-age technology. Uberconference is about to change this.
Uberconference is a free conferencing app built by the folks over at Firespotter Labs. Chatting with Firespotter’s Josh Chiet, I learned his team was also behind the wildly successfully Grand Central Station. That’s the one number phone service that was sold to Google and is now at the core of Google Voice.
While swapping stories about all the bad conferencing services out there, Chiet demoed Uberconference for me. I really wanted to see their creative web interface up close after hearing CEO Yuval Baharav’s Battlefield pitch. Like a lot of other audio conferencing services, you get an email or SMS invite that lets you register for the call. So far, so good. But with Uber, the interface displays picture icons of all the folks in the conference and shows you who is currently speaking.
Let me repeat that. You will know who is currently speaking. Their interface will conveniently place the current speaker’s icon at the top of the page.
As a victim–I’m far from being alone, of course–of very large corporate conference calls, I applaud the Uberconference team. After about the fifth or so sign-in with all the antiquated services, my ability to connect a voice with a name seizes up. If you know the people and their voices, you’re fine. But that kind of defeats the purpose of a free-wheeling collaborative call.
According to Chiet, the Firespotter team has junked all the old ideas in their conferencing architecture, and instead based their system on softswitch technology and Google’s cool App Engine in the cloud.
By the way, Uberconference is a Battlefield Finalist. Well deserved.