At SimpleSignal, we believe that our business can make the world we live in a better place.  Building partnerships between SimpleSignal and ministries and other non-profit charities produces a more meaningful work-life balance.

We’ve adopted a model of giving that is designed to grow with our company. The 1+1+1 model shares a portion of our financial and intellectual wealth with the world.

• 1 percent equity: using 1 percent of our profit to offer monetary assistance to those in need.
• 1 percent time: finding meaningful activities for SimpleSignal employees during their six paid days off a year devoted to volunteerism and promoting a culture of caring.
• 1 percent product: facilitating the donation of communication services to non-profits, helping them increase their operational effectiveness and focus more of their resources on their core mission.

I believe my job as CEO of SimpleSignal is to not only deal with the day to day tactical issues that we encounter but to make sure we are focused on what our customers will need in six months.

While the need of the day is to save businesses money there is a limit as to how far down a price can be compressed before the quality of that service is degraded. The magic of VoIP is not that we can deliver voice services cheaper than the incumbent phone “Baby Bell” companies but that we can deliver it better and cheaper. By using the internet as our primary backbone and not having to rely on a connection that is based on wires that are hung on telephone poles we can deliver voice communications more efficiently. Not only can we deliver the service cheaper we can now add features to the voice that make it better.

We’ve invested the last four years and millions of dollars into our voice network to make sure we can deliver outstanding voice quality to businesses of any size and who are located anywhere in the world. That’s our foundation. A business needs to be able to trust that they can pick up their phone 24/7 and make a clear call.

However, that’s not all business wants to do with their communications.  It’s surprising to some that our voice quality is superior to traditional land lines and made even better sounding by adding HD voice. We can make voice communication even more engaging by adding video. In business face time counts. Now you don’t have to waste time traveling to have the impact of being face to face.

We believe that businesses are going to find efficiencies in building the voice right into the software apps the live and work out of everyday. As business learns the value of better connecting their workers no matter where they are VoIP will need to be integrated into everything a business does. Their CRM, their email, their IM, their text all should be voice enabled.

For example, Yesterday I was talking to a potential vendor when he said, “Hmmm, nice pictures, Do you live near the beach?” I said, “how’d you guess that?” He said he used an application called XOBNI (in box spelled backward) that managed his Outlook so when he pulled my contact information it did an Internet search and found my Facebook page where he noticed my photos.

By Q3, SimpleSignal will have the ability to use the caller ID  to know who’s calling and learn what they’re doing, what they’re blogging, and other living online information while you talk to them. Since the SimpleSignal system is connected to the Internet, when a call comes in, our system knows how to identify the caller and go out to the internet to find recent information about the caller, such as local and company news, latest blog, twitter, flickrs, birthday, and other information you might be interested in. SimpleSignal users can, in an instant, gather customizable “rich, living, current information” that contributes to your relationship with the caller.

That’s life in a Voice 2.0 world. Kind of cool eh?

Ok, it’s a tough business climate out there. Our business has been impacted not only because businesses are spending less but many are shutting their doors and quitting altogether. It’s survival of the fittest and in this marketplace the weak will not survive.

But companies should look beyond only surviving the current crisis and see it an opportunity for innovation. One analyst I read said “While one trend is for companies to cut costs, reduce investments, monitor consumption through pricing and reign in cash flows to survive the crisis in the short term, another more important trend is to look at disruptive business models as an effective way to attract consumers.”

The term disruptive business model refers to those models that combine “existing technologies with new business models to create low cost products and services

Disruptive? SimpleSignal is about as disruptive as a leaf blower in a feather factory!

First we created a way to bring the world voice services over the internet cheaper and better. Now we are changing the very business models that we have come to accept as normal for the way we pay for telecommunication services.

How disruptive would it be if SimpleSignal could connect millions of VoIP users for free through peering with other IP networks like Skype to bypass the traditional land line networks. (Could it happen this year? Stay tuned)

What if Minutes were free and you just paid for the features and software apps you used and benefited from?

Developments like these could completely disrupt the 100 year old Telco business model.  What will the FCC do if it couldn’t tax telco’s any easier than the government could charge you for email? How will the Verizon’s and ATT’s survive without being able to charge you for each minute you are on the phone?

Yikes!

Maybe by promoting innovation we might stimulate economic growth and invent entirely new business models. This is America. Aren’t we supposed to love disrupting things?

What would the telecom world look like if all our communication was over the Internet and was totally free? What if a voice call was treated like an email or an instant message?

Does this mean telco as we know it is soon to be dead?

Yes, That is what I’m predicting.

Let’s look at how people communicate today. It’s not just voice anymore. As a matter of fact, traditional voice is the most inefficient of all the ways we communicate. It’s real time and usually involves just one other person. Email, IM, text messaging, and now Twitter and Facebook have become viable means of efficient communication. There are many times I instant message or text someone before I call to see if now is a convenient time to have a phone conversation.

In addition, the traditional telco system of area codes is no longer relevant. The geographical location of a voice user is no longer a concern. Most people have cellular plans where they are billed by the minute rather than distance. Landline plans are quickly following suit, and in many cases the minute charges are unlimited in favor of a flat rate. In fact,the latest research shows that if you are under 20 years of age you may never even own a landline.

Voice will be just another form of communication that comes alongside other forms of communication we use every day and the cost of voice communication will essentially be free. It’s already here. Skype now has 405 million users that can connect to each other and have video and voice conversations for free. Yesterday I was on a Skype call and could see that 16 million other calls were in use at that moment over the Skype network. Each of these were going on for free!

The way people communicate is changing and the business models must change with it.

The telco company that will win in the brave new world in which we live will be the one that can continue to create unique ways that allow you to talk like you’ve never “talked” before. It will not be limited by the boundries and paradigms developed for the “Public Switched Telephone Network”. We don’t need a phone anymore. We just need to communicate.  Watch my future posts for some of the groundbreaking new ways SimpleSignal and our partners are changing voice communication…as we speak.

That’s why we need to talk. Contact me on my “one number for life” that can reach me anywhere 949-429-5929 or email, facebook, or IM me at dave@simplesignal.com

Along with the economy, the traditional Telco service provider is in a market transition. SimpleSignal is a company that was built to navigate through the turbulence of economic contraction. This downturn is our opportunity to increase market share.

Traditional phone companies have been delivering their “voice as a service” for more than 100 years. This model, however, is changing. As mainstream business adopts VoIP this revenue stream will disappear. It’s been disappearing since the advent of VoIP in 1997.

Over the last ten years hundreds of independent VoIP service providers have sprung up and begun to take customers away from traditional Telco providers. The problem is that they are non-differentiated from the giants like Verizon and Quest. These upstarts all promised to bring something disruptive to telco but as its played out many of them are just trying to emulate telco…only cheaper. Since their services look basically the same and because they are non-differentiated their value proposition is limited to bringing service to the consumer cheaper. This is a rough game to play. How much cheaper can you be and still be profitable?

Delivering cheaper voice is not and has never been SimpleSignal’s sole purpose. Our vision is to seize the opportunity to change traditional voice services forever. We’re doing that by building a company that delivers and distributes voice not just as a service but as an application with limitless potential.

Why is it important to deliver voice as an app? Voice has a better value proposition as a feature rather than a stand alone service. That statement is disruptive. Delivering voice as an app or as a feature embedded in a software program changes the game for telco service providers. We’ve been talking about creating these mash ups for a couple of years now but no one has been able to successfully build a working business around it…yet. So, we continue to slog it out trying to win market share by adding value to SMB’s by being cheaper and more feature rich than traditional telco. Yet the concept of selling voice as an app has captured the thinking of visionary telcos. Most notably British Telecom when they purchased Ribbit for a stunning $105 million earlier this year. Why did they do that? Primarily because they realize that soon it’s not going to be about VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) as much as it is EoIP (Everything over Internet Protocol). The world is changing the way we receive video, voice and data. It’s not going to be a world where voice stands alone as a service or you subscribe to one network and not the other. All these services are being delivered over the net…everything is now converged to the net. This convergence changes the way people live, work, play and learn. What many people don’t realize is that we are not connected to one proprietary network (ie. AT&T). We can actually seamlessly roll from one network to another. For example, now through a new feature we have called “call swap” a business can begin a call on their Cell carriers network and seemlessly move that call to the SimpleSignal Wi-Fi network where they can access the internet. The advent of the app store at Apple has unlocked some amazing technology that will change the way we live. It already has. You want further evidence?

•Today a new google app will launch in the iphone app store that let’s us launch Google searches by voice command
•Loopt let’s me know where my kids and friends are by mapping them on google earth in real time. This is the ultimate in “Presence”
•Facebook and other social networking sites allow us to stay connected with friends and family in real time.
•Improvements in video conferencing keeps me in personal touch without having to travel. Now the image is so clear you can interpret body language and even eye movement as if the person were sitting across the desk.
•We now have the option to connect to our video, voice or data wirelessly or wired.
•We want the option to work from anywhere. Some are still saying “oh that’s terrible. Now I’m always available to my work.” I’m of the opinion that “anywhere connectivity” is convenient. It affords freedom. We just have to learn new ways to manage it.
•When I buy the ticket for a sporting event online I’m asked to give up information about what team I want to win, my favorite players and what snack I want when I’m there so the stadium knows what to stock up on. They know what the consumer needs are so they can generate more revenue.

We live in an “intelligent, network centric” world. New business opportunities exist because the net knows us.

Ten years ago VoIP was thought to be a “disruptive” technology that would change telco. Disruption is what happens to an industry when somebody introduces a game changing innovation. Voip has the opportunity to “disrupt” but has largely missed the opportunity it has to “innovate”.

In 2009 SimpleSignal will differentiate itself as an innovator by delivering voice as an app, as a feature not just a service, to business. We will concentrate on selling suites of business services and not just voice alone. An example of this is our SimplyMobile product. This is where we took Microsoft’s Office Suite and “mashed in” our voice services to create an easy to use, hosted, no maintenance, feature rich service for one price per user. We are actively working with web and software developers to tie other apps together to create killer offerings that will create “mash ups” that will create interesting and easy to use voice enabled software for small business.

Our understanding and competency of this opportunity is perfectly timed. The giants of software are just now considering how they might include voice as a differentiating feature in their product. Salesforce.com, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are all delivering their services as “hosted”. What each of them need is a voice. This year we “mashed in with Microsoft and Salesforce and won recognition and awards for it. In 2009 we can add revenue and scale by offering the world our feature rich voice services in collaboration with the software giants by using our voice as a feature in their software.

We are already executing our 2009 strategy. Since October we have made significant inroads with the Microsoft and Salesforce.com companies and their user communities. Our traction grows and our customer user base gets bigger each month. In January we will be cooperating with Google to “mash in” our voice and feature set with Google docs.