D.C. startup Speek is taking the next step to its goal of changing the often disdained world of conference calling with its new "Speek for Business" launch on Thursday. It's the first major product launch since the company closed it $5.8 million Series A round of funding from investors including Edward Norton back in March. It's a solid expansion of the Speek for Teams business offering that the company soft-launched a while ago. This the next generation of what the Speek team has been hyping as the future of business calls.
There are a lot of new features in Speek for Business that will catch the eye of people used to dealing with the hassles of arranging conference calls. There's no dial-in and PIN numbers to forget or get wrong (which also means no easy excuse for getting out of the meeting, but that's another story). The video conferencing has also been improved, with the added bonus of being able to share the screen that you're looking at with people on the call. You can share the data between employees or simplify it by showing it on the screen, especially if its sensitive and not something you want to pass around.
"Conference calls suck. That’s a universal fact," said Speek president Danny Boice in a statement. "What also sucks is downloading a 50MB file to do an online meeting and share your screen, or only being able to join a conference call AFTER you’ve shared your screen. With our launch of Speek for Business we fix all of the above for business users all over the World once and for all!"
Speek seems to be on top of the attraction to corporate clients of being a platform too, offering its services branded specifically for the corporate client. It also means that the freemium model used by Speek so far can shift into contracts for complete services with larger companies. The custom website addresses for conference calls also make the system easier to use.
"This is easily the best thing we have done at Speek," said company CTO Matt Turner. "Bringing teams together over a medium that has for too long been stuck in the 20th century was a natural progression on top of the conference call. We are beyond excited about the opportunity we have to help teams stay on the same page when it comes to their calls."
Speek isn't giving up on the personal links for its conference call services, but the business focus will be ever more important. The data compiled by Speek will also be useful to managers, something that Boice has had a focus on since before the funding round.
"[E]nhancing what we do with that data for companies is going to be important," Boice said at the time. "Letting management go in and look at their staff an that data so that if they're a sales organization, they can draw correlations between whether their best sales people talk more or talk less or how many conference calls people are doing every day or even listening to a recording of the call."
Speek has signed up customers in legal, financial, management and nonprofit arenas since its Speek for Business soft launch a month ago, and is expecting plenty more. Clients have even been lured away from other services like Join.me, GoToMeeting and UberConference according to the company. Though conference calling isn't inherently a sexy industry, Speek may be on the road to at least turning it into a very profitable one.
"We are ecstatic about the opportunity to shepherd in the new generation of businesses collaboration technology," Turner said.
