How FUZE Was Born.
Next week at CTIA in Vegas, we’ll demonstrate a new service we’re really excited about called FUZE. FUZE is an easy-to-use, personalized communication service that lets today’s knowledge worker and mobile professional communicate and collaborate in any way, from anywhere, from a computer or mobile phone.
Here’s a story about how FUZE was born…
I spend many hours each week on airplanes, in airports, on shuttle buses, in conference rooms and on conference calls, from my cell phone and my computer. As I travel, I often ask people that I meet to describe their daily work life. I sincerely enjoy the conversations, as this is my attempt at grass roots market analysis. I am a sponge for all of the different user experience stories. Many diverse people in various functions often speak of the same common problems which they experience each day, which centers around the challenges with communication, conferencing and collaboration experiences.
I speak to hundreds of people, from sales professionals, project managers, executives, HR specialists, executive recruiters, engineers, advertising and finance people, you name it, and I have met them all. And honestly, I have yet to hear anyone tell me that they want to be more connected or, as I would define as “hyper-connected”.
I have yet to hear anyone say that they wish to be always connected and available for more IM’s and SMS communication or that they need to attend more calls and more meetings.
People do tell me that they want their business communications to be more productive and less intrusive. And what I hear, over and over again, is that people want more choice and greater control.
They want control of their communications with their peers, constituents, customers and partners; and they want things to get simpler. Isn’t technology in fact, when properly designed and delivered, supposed to make our lives simpler? In many instances this is not the case. Why do all of these advancements in technology demand more of my time? With every improvement, there is a new interface to learn, a new device to come up to speed on. I also hear that too often technology is built without the right input from the user base. Who are these companies building these products and applications for anyway? (Perhaps Steve Jobs is the exception here).
They tell me that they are busy and getting busier and they need to communicate, collaborate and conference quickly, efficiently and with something more than just a PowerPoint presentation. These conversations often revolve around what has become a Power Point sharing generation; that tool for communicating ideas, proposals, concepts and plans.
I ask the people that I meet, “what troubles you most about your daily work life?” Other than the complaints about work-life balance and the new pains of air travel, it is often “I do five or six meetings a day and I thrash around with getting the conference started and I cannot stand running these painful and unfriendly power point collaboration software programs.” I wonder, why should that be so hard and don’t you want to do more than push a power point? Why are conference calls so hard to even get started in the first place? Why has there been so little innovation in this field?
Conferencing is the most often used tool in business next to email and it requires both a phone and a computer, yet it’s almost universally a frustrating experience for everyone involved. Look, we are going to have more meetings, not less and we are going to have to communicate with more people and quicker than ever before. Why can’t there be a better, more agile way to do this?
I ask my new comrades on these airplanes a few more questions. It starts something like this…
• “What if you could have a conference call number for life, so that you don’t always have to go through that last minute panic of finding the conference number?”
• And, “what if you could have a conference room for life with visual controls that enable you to manage your meeting”.
• And “what if you could just “fetch” people into the conference so that you don’t have to tie up precious time waiting for your participants to arrive. In fact, what if your conference could do that for you, automatically, just fetch in the attendees?”
• And “what if you could control your participant’s cell phones during the conference? What if you could make the conference so affordable that anyone in the world could join from any protocol – Skype, VOIP, mobile and landline, and it cost only pennies. And let’s add, what if you could have the conference produced in high definition audio?”
I get lots of nods of the head.
But then I go further. I ask…
• “What if in your conference you could share any content that you wanted - power points, documents, spreadsheets, architectural design images, structural models, high resolution images, Visio drawings, even video and film…. all delivered in High Definition?” Even high definition film and video and yes, power points, what if they could be converted nearly instantly, into high definition and you could synchronize these across everyone’s browser so that as you conduct the meeting, everyone is in complete sync and you are now in more control than ever before, from anywhere in the world, in real time?”
The response is always “yeah right, like that exists”. High definition film and high definition documents in a browser? No way! Can’t be done without some huge amount of bandwidth and a big piece of software that I have to download onto my computer, and my company won’t allow downloaded software anymore and I can’t see how this is done, etc, etc.
I respond,
• “But what if I said this required nothing more than a standard browser with no software to download and all you need is a broadband connection and that there is no prep time to set up the content. It happens in real time and at a cost that is pennies per minute and that you could have more than 1,000 participants attending your meeting from anywhere in the world and it costs them nothing?
Then I ask,
• “what if all of this can be done at a mobile phone as well as at the desktop and the mobile phone and desktop are in complete sync with one another?”
The responses are incredulous as if I am describing some HoloDeck sci-fi fantasy technology that does not exist.
I finish with explaining all of the other personal business tools available to the user in the same interface such as virtual fax software, contact management, address book convergence, voice to text speech transcriptions, etc.
Why keep killing tress and polluting offices with fax machines? Add to that, your voicemails will never run out of storage and they will be convert into text so that you can read them at your mobile handset or at your computer and search on them for life. And you can have chat, IM, SMS and you can have all of these features available at your mobile phone? High definition imagery, film, audio and collaboration at the mobile phone?
The next response is “how fast could I get such a product?”
This is why we built FUZE.
The engineers and technology behind FUZE are the same engineers and technologies building advanced products for NASA, Disney, Sony and Callwave’s millions of customers of the world’s first highly successful Internet telephony application – Internet Voicemail. Our video collaboration design came from the vision of Mike Buday, a luminary in the television industry and long time creative artist and software architect, who believed that people of all professions, desire to collaborate with rich media and high quality content beyond the power point presentation and that they want to do this in real time and in a synchronized way.
I believe that from my on-the-ground experiences, business people, mobile professionals and knowledge workers want more choice. They also want better quality, low price, speed and ease of use unified communications tools. They also want personalization. So, we decided to give them one place for all of their business and personal communication in the form of FUZE.
We developed FUZE because end customers tell us what they want. They ask for unified communication tools but they want them where they are in control and where they can be more productive, not where they are controlled by a hyper-connected and tethered world that can break in and consume their diminishing cycles.
Because in the end, a distributed work load and better life balance enables us to work more and be more productive but at the same time, to make it to those soccer games, recitals and other life activities that are so important.
Unified Communications should be “simplified communications” and that’s what we are striving to achieve with FUZE. I hope that everyone is able to enjoy and use the products that we’re building and it will remain our commitment, to always hear the customer and provide more choice for our customers.
- Jeff
PS – if you happen to be at CTIA in Las Vegas April 1-3, be sure to stop by the CallWave booth # 808 to see FUZE in action.
