Staples made a name for itself on the strength of its "easy button," referring to how it could simplify many common office problems. Speek--a startup conferencing company that officially opened up today after being in beta since March of 2012--is out to make its own "easy button," but this time for conference calling.
Speek is walking into a market with some very high stakes. Current reports suggest that, in 2012, in just North America alone, there were nearly 45 billion minutes of audio-only conference calls taking place. That breaks down into thousands of years' worth of calls, and a significant opportunity for potential competitors like Speek to come into play, as long as those competitors can offer an advantage over the current way of doing business, and Speek's weapon of choice in the market is ease of use.
With the Speek app, all a user need do is set up an account, and then set up a conference call, using a username to secure the call. The username then becomes part of a link for future calling, which can then be sent to other users, via pretty much any method normally used to disseminate a link up to and including pen and paper. The users then follow that link to the conference call in question--and no, none of the other users need an account, just the one setting up the call. Those who arrive on that link get access to the virtual conference call itself. Once a user reaches the conference call room, that user then inputs his or her own phone number--even a Skype number for the mobile users without smartphones--and after clicking on the "join this call" button in the virtual conference call room, the system actually calls the number entered, and the user is on the conference call.
Sound good? There's only one real downside to Speek, and that's that--for now, anyway--it only works with United States phone numbers. But reports indicate that before summer is over, that will expand to international numbers too. As for pricing, this may be the best part. Speek costs nothing for conference calls up to five users deep, and shelling out just $10 a month steps users up to unlimited participants and file sharing while on the call itself, as well as call recording and audio transcription logs.
What's more, Speek is also taking advantage of the rising tide of Web-based real time communications (WebRTC) to offer users a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) feature that allows users to get on conference calls from a device running the Chrome browser. That too will likely expand the farther out WebRTC extends--Firefox only recently enabled WebRTC in the Firefox 22 beta--so those who don't use Chrome should be able to get in on this too in fairly rapid fashion.
Naturally, Speek is still new to the market, and will likely be adding on new features and tweaking the current set accordingly over the next few months as many new companies do. But it's also clearly setting up a conference call system that's so spectacularly easy that most anyone can do it, especially given that the conference call system in question actually calls the users, instead of relying on the users to call into the call.
There may be a lot of competition in this market--including from WebRTC itself--but Speek has some clear advantages working for it, and that may be enough to keep it ahead of the game.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
