Mobilize posted the video for the whole launchpad: http://events.g...artup-Launchpad
The Fonolo part begins at 54:00.

There are several things that differentiate Fonolo from the other services mentioned here.

First, only Fonolo shows you an actual transcript of the full phone menu. Most of the other services tell you how to get to an agent quickly (e.g. “press zero 3 times”). That’s a flawed approach because not all agents are equal. If you have a technical question, hitting zero might get you a billing agent, and you haven’t really helped yourself. With the full phone menu available, you can navigate properly to where you’re going.

The reason we can display the full text of the phone menu is that we are actually spidering the menus. We regularly call every company and explore all the paths, processing the audio and comparing to our database. That’s the “heavy lifting” here and the technology to do this is one of our core assets. To my knowledge, no one has ever done this.

A second innovation is our approach to “Deep Dialing”. When you initiate a call through Fonolo, we call the company and navigate their phone tree. But we aren’t blindly sending the touch tones down the line. We are actually processing the audio along the way, and comparing with our database. This way, we know if the menu has changed since we last spidered it. Every call through Fonolo re-validates a path through the tree. A nice consequence of this is that the more people use our service, the more accurate our map becomes. To my knowledge, nobody else is doing this.

Finally, our service goes beyond phone menu navigation. Fonolo is a way to organize all your calls to companies. Our Intelligent Call History keeps a log of all your calls to given company, across all your phones, and makes it easy to make and review call notes and recordings. This is all part of our mission statement: “Make it easier to deal with companies over the phone”.

P.S. Better video quality is coming later this week. I’ll post the link here when it is available. Or check my blog at http://www.shaiberger.com.

P.P.S If you’re a blogger and want a beta account email me with a link to your blog and I’ll set you up. (shai AT fonolo).

Have you ever called a large company and been given the IBR system, “Press 1 for Sales, 2 for support, 3 for billing, or 5 to cancel your subscription” ???

These guys aren’t exactly innovating here, but no clear leader has emerged.

Thx
sganguly@yahoo.com

If you’re interested in the beta, please sign up at our site. We’re ramping up our calling capacity this week so we’ll be able to send out a bunch more invites.

- Shai Berger (Fonolo CEO)

Congrats on the win and the great coverage!

Jaafer