Frucall Blog - Web 2.0 and m-commerce

Count down to public beta

It's amazing how many big and little tasks should be taken care of when you want to launch a service. Wearing my program manager's hat, creating and maintaining the master launch checklist has been my number one priority, and it's a long list. A lot of efforts should be coordinated within engineering, marketing, PR, etc., involving many different people.

Probably at some point I should post the list somewhere on the Internet for others, since 80% of it are general things that anybody launching a software service has no choice but to follow, and Frucall is no exception.

It's pretty late, but I'm looking forward to starting the new week... We are getting dangerously close!

Ring Up My Bill, Please

Interesting story in New York Times about payment services using mobile phones:
Ring Up My Bill, Please

Public beta release date fixed

One of the good things about having a blog is that it will later serve as a diary and history of the related events... I'm glad to announce that the management has decided to make 4/3/2006 the official release date of the service to the public. A public launch deadline always brings a lot of stress, and I already feel the stress for this one. But that's part of what makes it exciting :-)

I'll probably be less active here since there's a lot to do to make sure that everything goes smoothly. Let's hope for a great launch...

Toll free phone number: 1.888.FRU.SHOP

Ok... Our toll free phone number is fully functional. As some of you have noticed in the emails we had to go back and force between the toll free and regular numbers due to technical difficulties with phone number routing, but that is all fixed and the toll free number 1-888-FRU-SHOP (1-888-378-7467) is now fully functional. It's less straight forward than what you would imagine to find and get a phone number (as they call it, a "vanity" number) that matches a business or service. But that's a different story...

Launching the public service

Here's the good news... As the result of the beta test has been pretty positive and also the engineering team is about to wrap up the latest features and freeze the development, we are getting ready to launch the site in in public beta. This will happen around first of April. Stay tuned for more information.

Frucall Logo

Doing creative work is always amazing, fun, and extremely hard... Everybody has an opinion. It took us some time to agree on the green/orange color scheme, but fortunately that's done now (and as you see, the color scheme of the blog is also changed!)

Next thing was the logo. We had different suggestion, but we seem to be all agreeing on Mandy's design:

We are all very excited about it, and the logo is already incorporated into the web portal. This will cause some changes to the rest of the creative to make them all consistent, but we're almost there. Thanks Mandy for a great job!

A very interesting prediction

I had read this some time ago. It was on my list of things to do to find it and post it here - The vision is great, and I think it will become reality very soon:

http://battellemedia.com/archives/001023.php

Currently Frucall does the price comparison, but there is no local information involved. Once we add the local information to our mashup, then we will be very close to this John Battelle episode!

--Nasser

Some background - part 2

During the second half of 2005 we started a number of different projects within Millenigence CBU. We wanted to leverage what we were doing on the other side of the house (EBU - Enterprise Business Unit) on VoiceXML and what we call the Device Abstraction Engine (DAE) - which is a core component of our DashPhone technology. I remember that a couple of these projects never really took off due to lack of APIs from other consumer services we wanted to connect to, namely Skype, which was very disappointing. While the messaging APIs and device APIs of Skype were well developed, they had virtually nothing on the voice side.

But what we were calling "a VoiceXML/DAE interface to RSS and Web Services APIs" went pretty well. We could get news feeds as well as item specific information from Amazon and deliver them to converged communication devices. So we started thinking in terms of making it a service, initially focused around shopping, which is one area that is - by nature - highly mobile.

The reaction within the engineering team and also the marketing team was very good. We had built an early "working" prototype, which we showed to different people within friends and family circles. Everybody liked it, which is partly due to its simple concept - it does not take a genius to understand how to use it.

People who saw it asked for it and were asking if they could keep using it. We took the results to the Board of Directors. They liked it too (the reaction from BoD was very positive in fact - we were not expecting such a warm reception).

So that's how Frucall became an official Millenigence CBU project - and the rest is, as they say, history...

Some background

I have owed you a background for some time now... Here it goes.

Millenigence is a software company, and is a leader in delivering information to different types of communication devices. Our applications deliver data from various online sources to devices such as IP phones, blackberry devices, cell phones, Palm/PocketPC handheld devices, and basically anything that can somehow connect to a network.

Our Enterprise Business Unit (EBU) works closely with companies such as Alcatel, Avaya, Polycom and others that make such devices. We support SIP and non-SIP IP phones from these vendors such as the Alcatel IP Touch, Avaya 46xx series, and Polycom IP600. We have the technology to make our applications device agnostic, so any application built using our technology - DashPhone - can deliver enterprise data from the corporate intranet to any of these devices as well as cell phones and PDAs.

The Consumer Business Unit (CBU) of Millenigence leverages the same technology for consumer applications. In the case of consumer applications, the data source is usually the Internet rather than a corporate network, and the target devices is usually cell phones (yeah, you see the flashy Cisco IP phones in the movies, and we do support them too, but I can tell you that not many consumers have seen or used them!) So anyway, CBU is the home of Frucall. When I get a chance I'll tell you more on the specifics of the project...