Deep dialing service Fonolo is now open to everyone. Previously in private beta, the tool lets you browse company phone trees and dial straight to that section, skipping having to sit through tedious voice menus or remember specific buttons to press. Better yet, it does it all without you having to actually dial the number on your phone.
Since we last wrote about the service it's increased its list of companies from 50 to over 300. Still missing, however, is the option to record calls, which should let people easily document horrific or wonderful customer service experiences to share with others.
For a holiday angle on this, tools like Fonolo can be helpful if you're trying to save time calling hotels, car rental places, airlines, and retailers about return and exchange policies. In the case of Alaska Airlines I was able to go in and save about a minute and a half by using Fonolo to get to the right department.
The service will apparently remain free throughout its beta period. Possible monetization routes include pre-call advertisements, and a premium service that tacks on more features. There's also an iPhone app in development that will let you browse through and call companies, which is due in early 2009.
Fonolo's system lets you dial to a particular part in a company's phone tree. The service is now open to everyone.
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Getting stuck listening to automated phone menus can be downright dreadful. Some systems require half a dozen or more menus to get you to an actual human being. A service called Fonolo is trying to make this experience a lot easier by listing the entire phone tree on one page and giving you little call buttons to skip right to that part of the menu. The best part is that it actually calls you when it's time to talk to someone and you don't even have to do any dialing!
Fonolo is officially launching to the public in early September, but I got a sneak peek Monday. There are just 50 company numbers in the listing, but there should be several hundred by launch. One of the best uses for this technology is for calling department stores and banks--both of which can have five or more sub-menus that you must suffer though to reach a human. Digging around in Circuit City's listing I was able to find the department I wanted to call in just a few seconds, whereas it probably would have taken me about five minutes if I had called in.
As part of the sign-up process, you give Fonolo various numbers it can call--be it your office, home, or mobile line. Next to each option there's a call button that will let you pick which number you want the call sent to. You can track how long the call is and actually hang up from your browser; Fonolo is simply the routing the call.
Eventually the service plans to let you record these calls (potentially for sending to the Better Business Bureau or other such organizations), although the feature is currently disabled. You can sign up to use Fonolo before its September launch on this page.
Fonolo shows you how to skip some of the annoying automated phone menus you run into when calling many large businesses (click to see entire tree).
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One of Apple's biggest blunders in creating its own directory of iPhone Web apps was to make the site suited for desktop users instead of people on the portable handset.
While the company has since made it easy for people to bookmark Web apps onto their home screens by adding a quick link from inside of Safari Mobile, the "official" directory of Web apps continues to be unapproachable for iPhone users unless they're on a speedy Wi-Fi connection. Widget directory Widgetbox has come up with its own solution and launched a directory of iPhone-friendly widgets that can be installed on the home screen as mini widgetized Web apps.
The directory interface is completely iPhone-friendly, and to go alongside it there's a simple how-to guide to turning bits of Web content into widgets that can be added to the directory just by tagging your work with "iPhone." Users without any sort of Web development experience will be able to make their own iPhone widget apps using Widgetbox's widget-building wizard, which I'm assuming will get iPhone-centric size presets.
The one thing I found underwhelming with most of the example iPhone widgets is that they look just like they do in the directory instead of taking up the entire screen. They also come with Widgetbox branding and links back to the directory--two things which are bound to take crucial seconds to load while on an EDGE connection. However, it's still a lot better than having to load the entire Web page, which in the case of BART's QuickPlanner tool (which serves up travel times for local Bay Area trains) means a nearly three-fold load time decrease from loading BART's home page.
You can navigate to iPhone.Widgetbox.com on your iPhone or iPod Touch to go to the directory. You can also check out the developer specs to make iPhone/iPod touch-friendly Widgetbox widgets here.
The new iPhone widgets directory (left) gives you a listing of tiny Web apps to run on your iPhone. When it comes time to 'install' them, you simply add them as a bookmark on your iPhone's home screen.
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