Last year was a huge year for all of us here at FreeConference.com - we expanded our team, redesigned our entire product and launched a completely overhauled website, and on top of it iotum Inc (our parent company) was honored with inclusion on the Inc 500, Profit 500, and the Deloitte Fast 50 and 500. Here’s a look back at some of our biggest changes and a little bit of insight into our process.
First, the biggest and most obvious change: our .... well, everything! We completely overhauled the whole product - we introduced download-free video and screen sharing, international numbers, PINless-entry and more. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though; let’s start where we all do, the website.
Some of you may remember our old website - needless to say, if we were going to make changes, this would be the place to start. The whole project took us the better part of a year - from the earliest designs, to copy and through pretty intensive analytics efforts, this was one BIG project.
Old vs. New FreeConference.com home pages - what a difference!
But it didn’t just stop at the surface of the website, there was a lot of internal user interface design happening in tandem. This wasn’t just a facelift, after all, this was a complete product overhaul, and one we were determined to do right.
In the summer we began a private beta test of the new product. Over the span of 3 months we engaged with a core group of long-time users to help us build the new FreeConference; we wanted to know what worked and what didn’t, what they wanted that we didn’t have, and how we could make our service easier to use. Ultimately, we ended up with a conference dashboard that looks something like this:
As we neared the end of our beta tests, we were finally ready to launch some two of our biggest new features, ones we’d been excitedly testing in our offices for months: download-free video and screen sharing.
When we created FreeConference 15 years ago we were the only independent, free, web-based conferencing product (and not just all together, we were the only one in each of those categories) and, at the time, it was a revolution. But times have changed, and so have we. Phone conferencing will always be the core of our product, and we will always strive to make our phone-conferencing systems as high quality and easy to use as possible, but it was time to adapt - and since we’ve never been in the business of simply borrowing someone else’s technology, that meant it was time to innovate (you don’t get to be the first conference calling company to support a call of over 250 people by waiting for someone else to do it first).
And so we developed an HD, in-browser, no-download, completely integrated, totally free platform for screen sharing, and web and video conferencing.
Like I said, it was a big year.
Since we launched video and screen sharing we’ve been hard at work developing even more amazing, free features - including PIN-less call entry, text-message notifications, and mobile apps - and affordable paid bundles for our premium add-ons, because every business should be able to afford truly great conference calling.
We’re so proud of our entire team for pulling off such a huge amount of work in such a short time - and we can’t WAIT to show you what we have in the pipes for 2016.
Happy New Year to you and yours!
The FreeConference Team
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