James Siminoff

Today we launched PoketyPoke

Early in the PhoneTag years I had a conference call scheduled with a major carrier.  I had the reminder set up in Outlook and it popped up 15 minutes before the call.  After the reminder came up I closed it and started to work on some other things, when I looked back down it was 10 minutes after the start of the call.

So I frantically called into the bridge and as soon as I got on, stated how sorry I was that I was late.  I will never forget the response from the very high level guy, “Don’t worry it shows how important you value this relationship that you had three executives waiting for you for over 10 minutes.”  In some ways he was sort of joking but he was also a bit pissed off by this.  In the end we never got the deal and I never forgot that experience.

Since then I have been late to many conference calls for the same reason, lets just say I have a pretty bad case of ADD, I try to remember but inevitably the same thing keeps happening.  So rather than using medication to solve my attention problem I figured we would use technology.  When PhoneTag did the Ditech deal a few months ago it gave us the additional needed technology pieces to roll out PoketyPoke.

PoketyPoke is like Tripit for conference calls.  Once you sign up you just forward any free form email or calendar invite to calls@poketypoke.com.  At the time of the conference call PoketyPoke calls you (on the number of your choosing) and bridges you into the conference call.  PoketyPoke does all of the deep dialing so that you do not have to remember all of the bridge pins, etc.

The service was announced today in this post on TechCrunch.  So far I can not believe the response.  I have been fortunate to have a few posts on TechCrunch and other big blogs/media.  This one killed us, it crashed our servers (we put more up and now are running smooth again).  So overall pretty exciting.

Oh… and about that name, PoketyPoke.  So one of the many conference calls I was late to was with Jay Phillips, founder of AdHearsion.  He shot me a note saying, “Pokety poke we are on the call.”  As soon as I got on the call I told him he had just named my new product and as promised, here it is.