Stop everything and get ROK Talk now

It’s rare that you come across an application that, within 10 seconds you find yourself saying ‘SOLD’, ‘YES’, ‘I want it’.

There’s a tremendous amount of innovation going on across the industry — but it is still rare to find yourself demanding to get it on your phone right-away. ROK Talk is one such service.

Crafted by a team of uber, uber geniuses, ROK Talk is teleconferencing, fixed.

When I met them the other week, I seriously petitioned them to use that as a strapline: ‘Teleconferences, fixed’.

Let’s face it, teleconferences are shit. Absolute shit. The technology has always worked well. It’s the people and the disorganisation that never, ever works as it should.

Teleconferences are, however, a critical, critical element in business.

Pain in the damn neck though.

Why?

1. No one turns up on time
2. At least one person is guaranteed ‘not to have seen the email’ and forgets to turn up
3. Two people out of the five attendees have to phone you to get reminded of the PIN number
4. You have to hang-up or do the uber-embarrassing ‘are you coming on the call’ phone call from your mobile
5. You’re screwed if you got the timezone wrong
6. A critical attendee can’t remember the login details so takes another call instead and you thus missed your big chance…

The number of times I’ve been sat in a Venture Capitalist’s office whilst BIG people, high-powered PROPER people sit staring at the wall whilst the executive assistant in Atlanta frantically dials round 12 people trying to get them on the call. Depressing.

Most recently I’ve been doing some work with one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies. Same trouble. People are late. Some folk can’t remember the login code. Just when everyone’s memorised the phone number and login code, it changes. The whole teleconference industry WORKS fine — it’s the USERS that cause the process to screw up so regularly.

Out of 15 teleconferences I had last week, not a single one happened on schedule and as intended. It’s such an intensely frustrating experience, it really is. Two weeks ago I took part in a conference call that was arranged by a human. A human. Seriously, this company employs a service where a nice American lady phones you up and tries to cajole and organise everyone into a conference… then, she pops in every 10 minutes to ask if everything is ok. Hardly private. Really annoying. I felt like a two year old.

Finally, last week, I was saved: I was sent the link to download ROK Talk on to my Nokia handsets.

PRAISE THE HANDSET GODS!

Why is ROK Talk such a revelation? Simply, it allows you to select people from your handset’s address book and start a conference call.

That’s it.

No arsing around. No pin numbers, none of that rubbish. You just select the people (or enter the telephone numbers) and press ‘start’ on your device. Instructions are sent via your handset’s data connection to the ROK Talk service and within a second, your handset is ringing.

The automated voice tells you that the conference is about to start and asks you to press ‘1’ to confirm. That’s just in case you made a mistake. You don’t want the system going away and calling 25 other participants if you made a mistake.

So press ‘1’. Right, you’re in. Simultaneously, the ROK Talk system is away calling everyone else. [Party trick: Try doing this with everyone in the room at the same time, it’s very weird when *EVERY* handset rings at the same time, even better if you don’t warn anyone beforehand].

Each participant answers their phone and receives an automated message immediately saying that ‘Ewan MacLeod’ (me) ‘has invited you to a
teleconference, press ‘1’ to join’. If you can’t answer the call when it comes in, the ROK Talk system identifies your voicemail and will send you a text instead. If you then dial in, the ROK Talk system is clever enough to recognise your MSIDSN (‘phone number’) and assign you into the correct on-going call.

All of a sudden within seconds, folk are piling into your call. Genius.

Absolutely unmitigated GENIUS.

No pin numbers. No screwing about, it just works.

Now… let’s say I’ve started this call and — well, remember I am the ‘leader’ (to use traditional conference call parlance). So If I’m on the train and my handset conks out due to loss of signal… that’s me screwed. I need to find the sodding pin number and dial in. In some cases, I won’t be let in again. In other cases the conference ends immediately. Either way it’s an arse. Not with ROK Talk. I simply dial the ROK Talk 0207 number.

Guess what? I’m connected straight back into the call. Nice.

Do I need a recording of the call? No bother. It’s a standard setting – I can have the call recorded and sent to me afterwards.. or I can even instruct ROK Talk to send *every* participant a text message with the link to retrieve the recording. Pure genius.

If I’m calling a group of people regularly, say five team members, I can save them as a ROK Talk Group. That means they appear at the top of my ROK Talk address book, so getting your team on a conference call is a piece of simplicity.

Love it.

Billing? For simplicity, ROK calls everyone. Your attendees don’t need to screw about dialing in and there are no 0870 numbers. There’s a cost of course. Calling out is expensive. However ROK Talk have done deals with the leading providers here in the UK and internationally to assure their users that, yes, there is a per-minute cost per conference call attendee, but you’ll pay the absolute market minimum cost for this. Expect a small slither on top for ROK Talk, otherwise you’ll be paying more or less wholesale rates. But for the next 30 days, there are no costs if you’d like to try out (and get hooked) on the service.

Compatibility? Any decent Nokia running on Symbian 60 (version 3) can be used to initiate calls. Attendees can use whatever handset or landline number they wish.

Cover me in honey and call me Sharon: The amount of companies and handset manufacturers salivating over this is quite rightly phenomenal. ROK have a total WINNER on their hands here.

Back to the subject of this post. Stop everything. Go and get yourself a beta copy of ROK Talk and play with it:

a) to see how good it is
and
b) to validate my gushing

It’s all at www.roktalk.com