Good news; we won the Red Herring 100 award which recognizes the top 100 private technology companies in North America.
The timing is highly appropriate as we officially came out of our beta phase last week with the launch of ooVoo 1.6. What a great way to cap off the first year!
We’ve received plenty of feedback on our new version and the ooVoo Options packages through our support center, the ooVoo forums and directly to us via ooVoo, which we love. Look out for a cool new web feature we’re launching that will bring you face-to-face with some of ooVoo’s employees for direct, real, face-to-face conversations about how you feel about the product, how you’re using it, etc.!
Jamie Watson from ZDnet and Mitch Cantor from Studio Nashvegas blog and others are giving us valuable input and we are encouraged by the initial reactions. Almost everyone appreciates that we have kept ooVoo’s most often-used features free: high quality video chats between up to three people on PC or Mac, video messages, instant message text chat and file transfer. Let’s be honest, there are some customers who aren’t too happy with the change and while we NEVER want an unhappy customer, we are working hard to build a business for the long-term and sometimes that includes unpopular decisions. Call us crazy, but we still believe it’s unbelievable and AMAZING that you can have a video conversation with anyone, anywhere in the world – for as long as you want to – for free.
For those people that are new to the ooVoo experience (where HAVE you been?!) we include a month free trial of ooVoo Super + Phone option that includes video conversation recording, hosting and streaming, adding people to a video chat by phone, advanced video effects and enhanced customer service. ooVoo Mac users, while not yet enjoying all of the features available on the PC version, will continue to have free six person video chat (in addition to unlimited video messaging, text chat and file transfer) until the full-featured Mac version is ready – we are aiming for Q4 of this year.
Come back soon!
Philippe
Hi everyone – Philippe here again. As most of our ooVoo customers know, we’ve been running a trial offer since February to promote the launch of ooVoo 1.5. This promotion gives our customers FREE telephony (up to 500 minutes/month) so they can call any landline or mobile phone in the U.S. or Canada (from within or from outside the U.S.) It’s a great feature because it allows you to add friends, family and co-workers into your video conversations even if those people aren’t at a computer.
We’ve received a lot of positive feedback from this promotion and we’re learning a lot in the process. Unfortunately, one of the things we’re learning is that some people are using it to make harassing or prank calls to individuals, a behavior not uncommon in VoIP or regular telephone services, but obviously very concerning to us (and not permissible per the terms of the ooVoo end user license agreement).
We’ve taken immediate steps to answer the complaints we’ve received from the affected individuals and to block the users making these calls. We want to be able to continue to offer this great feature (and trial offer) to our valuable customers who are using it in the way it was designed: to communicate and connect with each other - whether it’s face-to-face or on the phone – from anywhere in the world. Please send an email to reportmisconduct@ooVoo.com if you need any assistance in this regard.
Thanks,
Philippe