No, we didn’t enter into US yet, but I got a call from Voyces professional Larry Lisser the other day.  With Larry’s track record and industry insight from the city of innovation, San Francisco, it was a pleasure talking to him and learn from what’s happening in the Bay area. Our strategy to offer ready to go Applications with API support, instead of a low end APIs without front ends, was confirmed as the winning strategy in US as well.

The best confirmation we can get is that our customer base is growing incredibly fast for the time being, Q2 has been fantastic. As late as yesterday we entered into a collaboration with another Schibsted company, the local search engine Hitta.se. This means that we have become the defacto standard in the Swedish media industry for call statistics and detailed traffic insight. 4 out of the 4 largest directory brands use Freespee Analytics.

…Can be quite fun. We are just preparing a spontaneous Monday evening party for our friends and families. Why?

One of the largest and most successful Classified media publishers, Blocket.se, went live with a Voice application driven by the Freespee Voice API the other day.

From now on, any Blocket customer can use the built in Voice application to set the rules for incoming calls for their Advert (press release). In addition, their privacy is protected.

Freespee makes Voice as simple and comfortable as email.

I am happy to announce that Freespee will bring our next generation Call Analytics solution to European directory publishers at the EADP conference in Palma de Mallorca.

We have successfully expanded our reach in Europe and we are currently working with four of the leading directory groups, in eight!! different countries.

Being at Palma de Mallorca (lovely conditions for Swedes…) enables us to meet with our European customers and introduce our next generation Call Analytics solution. Freespee Analytics 1.5 is the result of our experience in running large scale traffic visualization solutions for some of the biggest directory publishers for two years, with 0 minutes downtime.

We plan to launch in at least two additional European countries over the next two months, offering Call Analytics solutions to directory publishers, B2C classifieds and media agencies that all work with phone savvy business.

One of our customers thought we should attend the ICMA conference , this year in Berlin. So now Hanna and Juhani are there.

ICMA is a community for the classified media industry. We already have some classified media customers who have built their own Voice applications by using the Freespee API, which all have been very successful.

Hence, we very much look forward to this conference, and their voice casts at Talky.se.

After a 3 hours meeting with one of the most successful search engines for real estate in the UK, I realize that UK is the European answer to US in terms of performance based marketing.

The performance based business model is not just a word everyone is talking about, it is also implemented in daily business transactions. In addition, the UK market has already tried advertising setups with no phone numbers, hence 100% focus in driving traffic from the Advert to the advertiser web site or on online form for requesting a proposal. The reason behind this setup has been the inability to trace phone calls.

What happened?

Consumers didn’t appreciate it. Our statistics  show that up to 50% of the visitors of a vertical search engine service wants to contact the advertiser for a voice conversation. All efforts to make this complicated, drives down the value of the service.

Ironically, the average sales conversion rate for an inbound call is 60-70% in most industries. Average sales conversion rate for a click through is 1-2% in most industries. Hence, the value of the call is up to 30 times higher than the value of a click.

In UK, online business has understood this and are now looking for the best tech companies that can help them monetize on generated voice contact leads.

For this reason they contacted Freespee. With traditional display numbers, there is no business case in tracing traffic for an Advert with less than 5-10 calls per month. The Freespee number algorithms enable our customers to trace phone calls for all Adverts, even those with 1 call per year.

We wrote a couple of very large contracts the last 3 weeks. During this time, I had more contact with legal councils than with my family…

Both will use Freespee Apps as well as build their own Freespee API driven Voice App.

Yesterday, a genius in superfast processing large amounts of data joined our tech team. Per-Axel is a rock solid developer, that will help us bring call analytics solutions to a level we didn’t know exist.

I just came home from a great trip to Germany. We met with some really big media groups that like what we do.

These media groups are early adaptors, and Freespee objects, as a Number, a call, call analytics etc will mainly be API driven from external applications.

That’s voice 3.0 and it’s beautiful.

A week ago one of our customers, a nation wide car rental service, were looking at their call stats from their market spending in Yellow pages. They were very satisfied with the volume of received calls, but the number of missed calls was also too high.

We showed them how too drill down into detailed call analytics in Freespee Advertiser. Now they could see a pattern in the missed calls. It was an easy fix by better resource planning and now all calls are answered.

If a typical order is worth 250 EUR, I guess they are satisfied.

…as both consumers and businesses leave 40%-70% of all calls unanswered

Freespee Numbers are now used by several leading Online industries to offer voice like email. The Freespee usage is growing rapidly. The figures we see, like the one above, indicates that voice communication just have to adjust to the service capabilities that comes with text based messaging.

When you send someone an email, you do not expect immediate answer. When you call someone, if he/she do not answer, you often don’t even leave a voice message, because you are expecting a real time dialogue. This is a major limitation for regular voice services.

Many of us are simply not available for real time communication. At the same time, most of us prefer a voice conversation to a text conversation if we are about to buy anything. How can this be solved?

Freespee Numbers are addressing this and the result is tremendous!