Conference Calling

Conference calling is painful, particularly if you’re stuck in middle management hell, and you have to spend an hour of your day listening to bureacratic inanity. Nobody can make it fun. But it isn’t going away, not with corporations obsessed over their travel budgets, and an increasingly global workforce and client base.

What does need to go away is the pain of administering conference calls. It’s amazing that so many beautiful, lightweight business applications exist, for any business function you could possibly imagine, but conference calling has been sadly neglected. It’s been relegated to the status of a necessary evil.

What’s needed is a breath of fresh air. A touch of magic, and a blend of good, pragmatic business tools with the best of what the world of blogging, podcasting and social networking have created in the last decade. Using conference calling here, in an unexpected situation, is a start.

So, we’re… trying Gaboogie again – and opening up the phone lines to do a live, impromptu Tech Q&A call-in show. The program will be recorded for posterity and podcasting, in case you can’t tune in (or join us live). I’m only doing this for an hour tonight, otherwise I’ll be up for a whole day… which will have to wait until I find a real Helpathon sponsor. ;)

Call 1-877-422-6644 (pin 469) if you’d like to participate in asking and answering questions. After you’re connected, you can press “9″ on the phone to “raise your hand.” If you can’t get through to the conference call, and you wanna leave me a voice mail instead, call 1-888-PIRILLO (anytime, actually).

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