It’s been a few weeks since we launched Touchring at TechCrunch50. During that time we have been busy talking with our users and bouncing ideas off of them, so today we are pleased to announce some of the fruits of that labor with two upgrades to our service.
The first is a new embeddable Touchring button for your website. Where previously if you wanted to embed your Touchring into your website, you had to embed a full flash widget, that is no longer the case. Now you have the option to choose from embedding the larger fully functional flash widget or embedding a smaller, lightweight but still beautifully designed image that links back to your Touchring profile (pictured below)
Why did we do this? Because we think freedom of choice is beautiful. And because on many blogs, it is a lot more convenient. As a flash-widget, an embedded Touchring needed to use up a fair amount of your precious screen real estate and it resulted in longer load times, so for those blogs that have precious little real estate to spare and/or those who want to keep their page load times down, the new button was made just for you.
You can use this new feature by heading to your Touchring Sharepage. If you are making your Touchring, the Share page is the final step in the creation process. But to get to the Share page from a Touchring that you have already created, you need first go to your Touchring profile page, select the Touchring that you would like to share as a button, then click on the Share button found on your Touchring (as highlighted in the picture below).
Once you have arrived on the Share page, you will notice that on the top-menu bar you now have the option to select ‘Button’ (as shown in the picture below). From here embedding that button into your Facebook page, blog, or website is dead simple. Just copy the html code that is provided and paste it onto the page you want it to appear.
The second update generally improves the user experience when sending text messages. Where previously, when somebody sent a text message to you from the web using your Touchring, the message was marked as coming from a generic Touchring number (i.e. 512-111-1111) rather than the sender’s number, which made it kinda of difficult for the you (the recipient of the text message) to respond. But our new CallerID feature (pictured below) allows the sender to tie his/her cellphone number to the text message so that this issue is eliminated.
That is all we have to say about that. Stay tuned for more updates to come. This is only the beginning of our pursuit to provide you with the best social voice experience possible.
If you have any questions about the features mentioned above, or if you have any suggestions about additional updates that you would like to see applied to Touchring feel free to leave a suggestion below. We would love to hear from you.
Today marks the first working day back in Korea after the whirlwind trip that was Techcrunch50 (TC50). How was it you ask? Simply put it was an incredible learning experience both for the company and for myself personally.
First, background. We didn’t have a chance to present on stage. But we did own the TC50 DemoPit. And we were close… real close to getting chosen to present on stage. Close enough in fact that the big daddy Arrington himself came to speak with us, but in the end we were beat out by SocialWok, an interesting Google mashup application (see we are gracious losers).
That is all water under the bridge though. The important thing here is what we learned at TC50 as a company.
Prepare for Murphy’s Law – You have heard of Murphy’s Law. It is the saying that goes, “If something can go wrong it will.” And at a high profile, high energy (read high stress) event like Techcrunch50, you can bet that Murphy’s Law will come into play. Maybe it will be the WiFi, or maybe it will be something else. So be prepared for it. Don’t let it destroy your demeanor and ruin your experience. A flawless demo / pitch is great, but if something goes wrong you have to roll with it. Laugh it off and everything will be fine. Whoever you are talking to will leave with a good taste in their mouth. But make a big deal out of it and believe me… beyond just having a bad demo you will have just turned that person off completely to your product.
Have a 30 second teaser and a 5 minute version of your pitch, but more importantly LISTEN – The teaser often goes by another name, the elevator pitch… but regardless of what you call it, you need to have one. When you first approach people, many of them will tell you they are in a hurry, so you need the teaser to get those people interested enough to stick around for the longer demo. The five minute pitch on the other hand is your baby. That is your chance to knock’em dead. And if you didn’t have a solid pitch before the conference, you can bet that by the time you leave you will know your sh*t inside and out. To be honest this may very well be the most valuable thing that you get out of this conference. Here you have the opportunity to pitch your idea to people who aren’t your friends and who aren’t your family. You will receive unfiltered feedback from people who know what they are talking about. LISTEN to this feedback. It is golden. If they aren’t impressed with what you are doing, find out why. If they are impressed, don’t let it get to your head… rather find out what they don’t like and what they would like to see implemented in your product.
Bring Swag – This point ties in very closely with the one above. Believe it or not, most of the people there are not there to talk with you, so be ready to woo them in with some sweet swag. And by swag, I mean something cool. Something that people will continue to want to have and use after the conference. Fliers, pamphlets, and things of that nature are a waste of trees and resources. They just end up in the trash. What we ended up doing was making some really kick-ass T-shirts (pictured above) designed by punodostres and using those to lure people to our booth. Worked like a charm.
Work the crowd – In general people will not come to you unprompted, you need to go get them. Everyone there is browsing for something interesting. But despite that fact, people are surprisingly reluctant to initiate the conversation. That is your job. Something as simple as “Hi, do you have 30 seconds?” will do. Once you and your team have grabbed the attention of a few people, the process is self-perpetuating. More people will linger around your booth if it looks like something interesting is happening there, making your job a hell of a lot easier.We kept our booth manned with two or three people at all times, which is something I would definitely recommend. One person may be able to generate sustained interest throughout the day, but it’ll be a whole lot easier with two or three.
Everyone at your booth should be doing something – This one is common sense. Don’t have someone just standing around twiddling their thumbs. You don’t have enough space around the booth to be wasting like that. If you aren’t engaged in a conversation or demonstrating your product, you need to be walking around introducing yourself, and sending people back to the booth.
Be prepared to be exhausted – Hours of sustained talking by itself is hard work. But if your experience is going to be anything like ours was, you will be making last minute tweaks to your product that will keep you up until the wee hours of the morning. So my advice is this. Get pumped. Like National-Championship-Gameday pumped. This is your time to shine. And sustain that initial adrenaline rush for as long as possible. Only after that initial rush has started to fade. would I recommend caffeinating yourself. Another thing to keep in mind is that the tokens you need to earn for the last presentation spot on stage are collected at 2pm-ish. For us, it was full steam ahead, afterburners lit up, until then. We were so busy trying to talk to people that every one of us skipped lunch. But once the tokens were collected, things relaxed significantly.
Have a unique business card – To be honest, I fought this one tooth-and-nail. But I lost. And I am glad I did. Our CEO decided that something unique was the way to go, and so we had a TC50 special edition business card created. It was basically a little flier. The cover was our company name, and if you opened it up you would see my contact info and a picture of a iPhone like device. A lot of people commented on the design, saying they liked it. Now maybe they were just being polite, but whether or not they really liked it, we had a memorable design and that is the point I think.
Be friendly – I can’t stress this one enough. Yes, so maybe it is true that on the day you are in the DemoPit, you are competing against everyone else in the DemoPit for those tokens. But a little competition is no excuse to be rude. Be nice to your neighbor. Some of them don’t even care about the tokens, and they will end up sending people your way if they like you. And remember this event should really be about getting feedback and building your network and being nice helps immensely, so keep focused on what is important.
Have marketing / press release material prepared – I know what you are thinking. You are thinking “Hey, but you said no paper swag earlier.” And you’re right I did. And I meant it. What I mean by having marketing / press release material prepared is have something saved to your computer and all zipped up and ready to send off at a moment notice. There are a number of bloggers looking to cover a product just like yours, and if a Techcrunch blogger walks up to you and asks for you to send over a summary of what you are doing, be ready. You can’t ask for better publicity than that, so when it happens you want to be prepared.
Was TC50 a better choice than DEMO? – This final point is a really more of a question that I have been wrestling with myself. And the honest answer is I don’t really know. In regards to the price difference alone, TC50 is definitely a better deal (free vs. 30k). But in terms of the weight of the event DEMO may be better.I was actually having this conversation with a friend of mine (@tomserres) whose company (Piryx) will be presenting at DEMO in two days time. And he made a great point in that DEMO has been around for 20+ years and the event takes place on a resort outside the city, so everyone there is basically stuck with everyone else for three whole days. You eat together, you drink together, and you sleep together. While at TC50 the people that you really want to meet don’t usually even hang around for the whole day. They show up, do their thing, and leave. Is the increased opportunity to brush shoulders with the movers-and-shakers in the industry worth 30k? I don’t know but it was a great point.
That brings my reflections on TC50 to a close. If you would like to hear more, or want to share a similar experience please feel free to contact me personally (@drebabels) or leave a comment below.
Today is a big day for Touchring. Today we are at the 2009 Techcrunch50 conference, and we will officially open up Touchring to the public. For us this is a very big deal, and so we would like to share some of our enthusiasm and hopes with you.
So let me begin by making bold statement. A year from now the world will look back on this day and say today is the day that a voice over the internet was freed from the desktop. Today a voice enabled web was made available to everyone.
Now you are probably thinking, “Well that sounds good and all, but what does Touchring actually do?”
I could tell you, but if I do I would have to kill you.
No, but seriously I can’t tell you. Telling you would take more time than you would be happy about. So I will do something better. I will show you.
You know what they say… a picture is a worth a thousand words. Well if that is true then the video I have for you must be worth 2000 times that… because that is about how many frames it took to make. So without further adieu, the world meet Touchring… and Touchring meet the world.
To summarize:
The Touchring micro-application is built to be easily shared by offering an embedding function similar to Youtube’s or by using a unique shortened URL. Each Touchring is linked back to a complete user profile stored on our servers.
No matter how far your Touchring spreads across the web, that you maintains full control over it through your profile, so that you can quickly adjust privacy settings, presence, status, etc, of every instance of that Touchring from one location.
Currently Touchring can send calls to landline and mobile phones, as well as send out SMS. By the end of 2009, Touchring will also be able to connect pure VoIP calls between their different user’s Touchring applications, as well as support interoperability with other voice protocols like SIP and Google Talk’s XMPP.
Touchring is also closely integrated with Facebook and Twitter so that users can use Touchring to send and receive their updates from these social networks.
Touchring works right out of your browser, so there is no need to download a client.
So now that you a bit of an idea about what Touchring is… why did we build Touchring?
We built Touchring for one simple reason. We saw you connecting and creating communities with each other using video, using music, and using text. But no where in that mix did we see you talking (in the literal sense) with each other. And we thought that this was a shame, because the human voice has that special ability to bring people together and express things that text cannot. So we set about to change that.
In the coming weeks and months we will be working on perfecting the Touchring experience and slowly inviting more and more people to play with us.
If you are interested in picking up an invite, shot us a request and we will see what we can do about getting you in.
What we ended up doing was making some really kick-ass T-shirts (pictured above) designed by 
