ROK Talk on the bus

Now and again I take the bus in London.

Sometimes it’s the most effective way of getting across the city without having to arse about with the tube system. I do like getting taxis around the place but the traffic in London is getting worse and worse. Everywhere I want to go seems to cost a minimum of a tenner and take upwards of 20 minutes. This, despite living in central, CENTRAL London.

Yesterday afternoon between meetings I hopped on a bus and got a call from a colleague.

‘Will you setup that conference thing for us and the lawyer?’ he asked.

‘Sure!’ I replied, already coming out in excitement spots.

ROK Talk is one of the best mobile applications on the planet. It’s phenomenally easy to use and solves a real, real connectivity problem.

I fished out my N95 and setup the call. Bish, bash, bosh — setup in 10 seconds.

When I’ve been talking to the ROK Talk team, they’ve been a little alarmed, I think, at what I’ve been doing with it. I’ve definitely been ‘using it in anger’ – that is, deploying it as a critical business application despite it’s beta status. It’s been ROK solid!

So there I am standing on the bus going up Park Lane. My colleague Martin joins the call instantly — he knows the drill. But we get an announcement that Alex, the lawyer, has hung up.

Martin had to call Alex to explain that when the phone rings and an electronic voice says ‘Youaaaaan MaaaaKLEOOD has invited-you-into-a-conference-call’, that it’s not a devious ploy. Obviously if you get an unannounced call like that, you work in the legal industry and you’ve never experienced ROK Talk, that’s a fair point. I re-started the call and Alex joined in fine, if a little bemused by the simplicity. I think he’s used to the total arse of setting up conference calls. In fact Alex, Martin and I have spent about an hour in silence over the past week while we waited for other people to join calls using our old conference system.

I got off the bus and set my phone on mute so the guys didn’t have the sounds-of-London reverberating through the call unnecessarily. I decided to take the Hyde Park underpass to get on to Oxford Street.

You’ll never guess what happened.

Total arse.

I got cut off.

From my own conference call.

Such is the power of the T-Mobile signal, I only had to disappear under ground for 5 seconds and woosh, I was cut off.

No biggie.

The call continued without me. A minute later, when my signal reappeared, I just called the ROK Talk number and was put straight back into the call.

Pure 100% genius.

Buy shares in this. Given the opportunity, I definitely will.

Oh, now, do try and get in on the beta — the sign up form is on their site — however they’ve been totally over subscribed so far. As you can imagine, they’re giving the service away for free whilst in beta, so that could get quite expensive if they open it to tens of thousands. I believe they’re working on opening up more and more accounts each day so do try.