Well, it has not been because the Mobivox team lacks for creativity that this space has been quiet since late last year. We've been busy.

We've gotten two of latest partners to market, extended the functionality of |PL and dealt with the holiday season downtime.

Last time I wrote here, it was about CRM. We have been busy here as well, adding real-time dynamic CRM extensions to the Mobivox|PL platform. Next week at eComm 2009 in San Francisco and at Voice Search 2009 in San Diego, I'll be unveiling our partner offers and talking more about this important area. The foundations and concepts were laid out in the previous post and, now, the capabilities are ready for prime time.

I did counsel readers of this blog to stay tuned for how CRM can be used for customer conversion. The URL below will give you an idea of the art of the possible:

Play CRM over Voice Demo

As you can hear, with a services platform voice user interface that intelligently engages its users in dynamic, real-time voice interactions, the need for extensive outbound calling infrastructures and email, paper-based or otherwise "old world" campaigns is greatly reduced. For marketing purists, they could even be totally eliminated.

Our view, and experience in our direct to consumer "living lab", is that this kind of capability not only drives strong partner ROI, but also enhanced revenue growth through ARPU increases and new customer acquisition in innovative and cost effective ways. Not to mention the loyalty impact of reduced churn.

Many more CRM applications innovations are likely to come from our growing portfolio platform partners. Our goal is to give them the complete toolset to acquire users, develop market leading offers, and manage their customer relationships right, right from the beginning.

Get your copy of the CRM over Voice white paper.

November 2008. The month that mobile VoIP went from a cheap way to call the world to a unique (and cost efficient) way to be reached - anywhere in the world.

When VoIP first touched down in the mid-market and enterprise segments years back, we were drawn primarily to the cost savings opportunity. Reducing branch-to-branch or other long distance voice dialing was worth the less-than-stellar voice quality. We talked of 'applications but little, if any, real-world ones were deployed. Fast forward to today and most are now investing in IP telephony to converge their voice and data networks in such a way that they can exploit a variety customer facing and productivity solutions.

Last week, we announced our MOBIVOX|PL offering and as you can see from our press section, it attracted a lot of coverage and attention. Also, we noted that Alec Saunders and Jon Arnold, among others, have picked up and expanded on the concept of moving beyond minutes into value added services in their recent posts. There is more to come on MOBIVOX|PL from us in the coming days and weeks.

A few months ago, when I had just joined as CEO of Mobivox, we had communicated with the customer base of our consumer mobile VOIP business that they should stay tuned for new pricing and packaging in the early Fall. In about 2 weeks time, those packages will be introduced, although we’ve been making some small changes along the way. We’ve added Auto Top Up Payment to make payment easier and eliminated free service in some geographies altogether due to abusive behaviour that was costing us real money for little if anything in return. We’ve even quietly added new features customers have asked for and improved call quality to allow customers to access the Mobivox service more easily and reliably across the world.