Unified communications has long been touted as the future, but being able to provide access to all of one’s calls and messages on multiple devices is an idea that has just barely come to fruition. Now, the folks at Firespotter Labs think they’ve built a solution — a cloud-based platform for enterprise communications called Switch.
Firespotter Labs was probably best known for building UberConference, a cloud-based phone conferencing system that won TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield a couple of years ago. (It also built a few lesser-known apps, which included Nosh and Jotly, but has been mostly focused on solving this communications problem.)
Over the years, Uberconference continued to add features like Screen Sharing, integration with Google Hangouts, Box and Evernote. But in the background, the team has been working on a whole new communications platform for enterprise users.
This isn’t the first time it’s worked to solve this type of problem: Much of the team has been working with Switch co-founder and CEO Craig Walker during his various other efforts at building communications tools. Prior to Firespotter, Walker founded GrandCentral, which was acquired by Google and became the backbone of Google Voice. And before that, Walker led voice-over-IP company Dialpad, which was acquired by Yahoo and became the basis for Yahoo Voice.
Now he and team are once again building a telephony solution that will allow users to make or receive calls from any number of devices — from the desktop to their mobile phones to even the phones placed on their desks at work. The new company, called Switch Communications, provides a cloud-based platform designed to give users access to their voice communications wherever they are or on whichever device they prefer or have handy.
Things have changed since Google Voice, and the folks at Switch hope that means they are getting better. In addition to having a single number that rings on all their devices, Switch users also get features like call transfer, company directory, visual voicemail, and switching between devices. It’s able to provide many of those features thanks to a series of mobile apps that it’s built out for Android and iPhone devices, as well as desktop apps.
For companies that use Google Apps, Switch is positioned to take the cloud-based productivity suite that Google provides and offer voice communications on top of it. On the back end, Switch integrates with Google Apps to give enterprise users access to company directories, contacts, and calendaring.
It also integrates with Hangouts to enable video conferencing, and, since it knows the people in your organization, can show the presence of your coworkers — you know, whether they are online or off.
Being built on top of Google’s infrastructure also means it’s ultra-easy for businesses to get signed up. Switch needs only connect with a company’s Google Apps admin to get set up. Once that’s done, admins can provision accounts and numbers to employees, as well as set up a virtual receptionist system, dial-by-name directory, custom greetings, and office hours.
Google Apps is huge, and Switch is hoping to grab some customers who are looking for improved telephony services. The company is charging $15 per employee per month, which includes a free number and unlimited text messages from within its platform.
Switch has raised a total of $18 million since being founded, with investors that include Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures. The company now has about 60 employees and is headquartered in San Francisco.
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Apple will be accepting donations for the City of Hope charity during the month of October, which is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the company revealed today. The organization is a research and treatment center created to combat not only breast cancer, but also diabetes and other life-threatening diseases including lymphoma and brain cancer.
Traansmission – The trucking industry is a multi-hundred billion dollar marketplace, and independent truckers represent roughly $45 billion of that. Cahill’s app, Traansmission is a logistics marketplace that connects shippers and truckers so that no truck ever has to make a long haul empty. The company’s in a pre-release beta and has already signed up 188 truckers in 25 states. Cahill says that he’ll have 1,000 truckers on the app before the end of the year and sign up $1 billion worth of shippers.
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Selling a subscription service for new perfumes (and eventually colognes), ScentBird is looking to give women a new way to buy fragrances. Roughly 63 million women in the U.S. use at least 5 different perfumes at different times, says ScentBird chief executive and co-founder Mariya Nurislamova, and they can spend up to $1,000 for ten bottles. So a service that charges $15 per month for women to have their pick from name brands and small boutiques is transformational for the roughly $14 billion fragrance market, Nurislamova says. “ScentBird is an experience company,” she says. It seems to be a successful one, with its first pilot run sold out and 90% of its subscribers filling their perfume queues for the next 12 months.
For busy professionals looking for a healthier option than delivery (or DiGiorno) and who want to select their own meals rather than have them curated, there’s Chicory. Founded by Yuni Sameshima, Chicory is a service publishers can add to recipe pages online that allows a reader to buy all of the items needed to make the meal in the recipe. “There are up to 5 million recipes viewed online every single hour, but it’s still just content,” says Sameshima. “Chicory places a get ingredients button natively on recipes to make recipes interactive and transactional.” The company has partnered with Peapod for deliveries and is developing a feature to make particular brands the default option for certain purchases. “We automatically recognize the ingredients in recipes and match them to products sold by the online grocer,” Sameshima says. “We re-imagine the way recipes are used online. “We allow food brands to be the default product for any ingredient [and] this is changing the way food brands spend their $33 billion.” The company has partnered with the Daily Meal and has inked a new deal with Time Inc. “Chicory is the future of how food, media, and commerce interact on the web,” says Sameshima.
Komal Raj and Arti Anand were two consultants who had an eye for fashion and wanted to be able to wear well-made clothes that wouldn’t cost them a fortune — thus Numari was born. Calling it a fashion brand for the professional woman, Numari’s tailored looks have solved a problem which has bedeviled the online retail industry for years: the dreaded return. According to Raj, 40% of apparel bought online is returned because the clothes don’t fit. Numari’s return rate is 7%. Users take their own measurements and then order a customized article of clothing made to their exact measurements. The company’s dresses start at $160 and the Raj says the company’s margins are roughly 54% on the items it sells. “It’s going to take my co-founder and I a few years to be the next Sheryl Sandberg or Arianna Huffington,” says Raj. “But in the meantime, we can look just as good.”
Helping the Ned Ryersons of the world close the deal, AdvisorCONNECT has developed a social customer relationship management tool tailored to financial advisors and insurance agents. The company tracks financial advisors’ and insurers’ networks to look for key life events, like promotions or a new job, or a new addition to the family. The company launched a pilot with Northwestern Mutual and will launch at Mass Mutual later this year. Guardian Life Insurance has also come on board as a customer. “We monitor advisors’ networks looking for life events that would correlate with an actionable need,” says
At Bubbl, the goal is to make the best media social and shareable. The company has developed a technology to enable users to grab the exact part of a video they want to share and distribute it across social media networks. As content becomes more “snackable” according to chief executive Mauhan Zonoozy, video sizes continue to shrink and Bubbl provides an ideal tool for sharing clips and other content. “We integrate seamlessly on top of video players,” he says. So far, Bubbl has partnered with Warner Bros. Studios and The Hobbit to embed its technology into their promotional sites.
