If Virtual Office Solo had been worked out by a few moonlighting developers, and the founder lined up some angel investors and delivered a cool presentation at say New York Tech Meetup, it would be getting a lot more attention from all the usual tech sites.
Solo was instead launched by 8×8, a NASDAQ-traded company that has a long history as a VoIP service provider. Remembered by some (including me) for their residential VoIP service, called Packet8, they’ve since refocused their efforts on the business market.
With Virtual Office Solo, 8×8 now has a simple, ready-to-go browser-based softphone coupled with a virtual phone number that’s designed to appeal to teeny businesses.
I received a demo account from the 8×8 crew yesterday, and have been playing around with this inexpensive ($7.99/ month) service in my spare moments.
Solo’s Flash-based interface is clean, fluid, and effortless. Think of it as as an “attendant console” where one person—you, the solo entrepreneur, or perhaps your partner, the marketing executive—becomes the outside voice of the company.
From a laptop, Solo subscribers can put callers on hold (to the sounds of Edvar Grieg’s classic “Morning Mood”), transfer them to other team members, or set up a quick 3-party conference call.
There’s no auto-attendant or extension dialing. But just-starting-out entrepreneurs are used to doing everything, so they can add receptionist to the task list. Solo makes good sense for laptop-centric business types and developers, who can juggle calls while still keeping their eyes on code, spreadsheets, and PowerPoints.
However, Solo doesn’t leave you completely on your own.
You can add call forwarding rules to route calls to others on your team based on caller ID and time-of-day. There’s also a do-not-disturb that will land calls directly into voice mail.
By now a standard feature in most hosted telephony, email notification of voice messages along with a .wav attachment is also part of the Solo package.
I was hoping to use their Android app on my Archos tablet.
Unfortunately, 8×8 hasn’t set up a version to work in the tablet realm. (Drat!)
In any case, the idea is that you can also receive calls on your smartphone— they have an iPhone version as well. SIP is the underlying connection protocol so it can easily signal both the smartphone app and the browser apps to ring simultaneously. In other words, you won’t miss any calls
And when you make calls using their app, the caller ID that appears to others is the separate number that’s been assigned to you by 8×8.
Virtual Office Solo is a great piece of work. My only marketing quibble is that perhaps 8×8 can offer a free trial period, just as the cool NYC and San Francisco startups tend to do.
Just a suggestion.
Update: There’s also a conferencing bridge, which I somehow overlooked on my first pass. You can schedule meetings by sending out email invites for up to 15 participants.
Related articles
- $7.99/month for Cloud Telephony. Interested? (technoverseblog.com)
