Blogs
Save $600 on Calliflower with a new Samsung Notebook or Netbook
This morning we announced a promotion with Samsung Canada. Until the end of April, you can get a year of free Calliflower usage when you buy a Samsung Canada Netbook or Notebook. To find out more, visit this web page. Sorry folks -- it only applies to Canadian customers, but if this goes well we might be able to extend it to other Samsung customers in the future.
And if you're a reseller who sells Samsung Canada products, visit our affiliates page -- http://affiliates.calliflower.com -- and create an affiliate account. Once you've done that, you can earn a commission on all sales of Calliflower through this promotion, simply by referring your customers to the Calliflower sign-up page with your referral link.
Update on Calliflower Service issues
You may remember several weeks ago that Calliflower experienced two service outages. At the time we diverted all the resources that we had to fixing those outages. Today I'm writing to let you know the progress we've made.
Firstly, we discovered some remarkable things about the code we've written. It's resilient, tough, and very hard to bring down. The downside is that inefficiencies we had introduced into Calliflower through a couple of recent updates had resulted in very long response times for some classes of activities. For example, during debug we discovered one scenario where Calliflower might take several minutes to respond to certain kinds of user requests. At no time did it actually cease functioning, it simply got slower and slower!
The team has been hard at work over the last few weeks optimizing that code, and the optimizations were deployed last week. I'm happy to report that no request should take longer than one second now, and that we've made great strides in improving the overall responsiveness of Calliflower. Most importantly, we won't see a repeat of what happened three weeks ago.
As one person remarked to me, these growing pains are signs that the word is getting out, and that we're succeeding as a business. True! Nevertheless, everyone here has had a renewed focus on customers as a result of these incidents.
Thank you to all of our customers for the patience you've shown. We're grateful for your continued patronage.
Alec Saunders, CEO
A rough couple of days for Calliflower
We've had a rough couple of days here at Calliflower. On Monday night, and again on Tuesday at lunch, we had outages. The cause, in both cases, was resource consumption on our servers created by users organizing very large conference calls (one had over 400 registered attendees). We discovered a couple of serious bugs that we hadn't previously seen, which led to the entire service being unavailable.
Importantly, I wanted to let our customers know that we are taking a number of steps to resolve these problems.
- Every development resource in the company has been pulled off existing projects, and is now devoted to fixing the issues.
- We are monitoring the service very closely, watching for large calls, and asking those callers to wait to have their calls until we are finished the fixes. Ordinary calls of even up to 40 to 50 people shouldn't be a problem.
- We are implementing ways for our customers to be informed when there are issues with the service, rather than having to find out by simply not being able to make a call.
We estimate that these will take 2 to 4 weeks to finish. In the meantime, we're asking for your patience as we work through these issues.
Alec Saunders, CEO
Calliflower Updated - New Features for Teleseminars, Coaches, and Distance Learning Users
Since launching Calliflower last year, we've attracted a pretty solid base of customers who hold events online -- multi-person podcasts, distance learning sessions, teleseminars, coaching calls, and more. They come to Calliflower because it's simply a better way to organize and manage these types of calls. Calliflower is easier and more cost effective than a traditional webinar, more interactive and intimate than a conference call, and more accessible (we're now in 31 countries!) than most other kinds of solutions.
Yesterday we announced three new capabilities for those customers -- a simple sign-on for their participants, a co-moderation system allowing multiple people to lead and manage a session, and a recurring call feature to allow our coaching customers to be able to easily schedule a series of calls. Early reactions to the announcement have been super-positive. Here's a sampling:
Calliflower "Cool Tool of the Week"
Check out Susan Ward's Small Business Blog at About.COM. This week she names Calliflower the "Cool Tool of the Week", saying:
"If you have an iPhone and a need to make conference calls, what could be cooler than managing your teleconference through your iPhone? "
Thanks for the recognition, Susan!
New Calliflower Features, Ways to Pay
Over the last month, the Calliflower team has been working hard on some enhancements to Calliflower that are going to make it easier than ever to sign up and use. We rolled those enhancements out last night.
First, we’ve made it easier than ever for customers to participate in a Calliflower call. Participants (as opposed to organizers) will be able to join the call without signing up to use Calliflower, and still have access to all the great Calliflower features. Organizers simply send invitees a link to to the call in regular email. So if you’ve got a huge mailing list of people that you want to invite, or you want to post an invitation to your event on a website or a blog, it's now very easy to do. This is a feature targeted directly at our customers who do teleseminars, and webinars.
Second, we’ve increased the payment options for Calliflower Premium. Now you can choose PayPal or American Express (via PayPal). Personally, I always prefer to pay by PayPal and I think this is a great step.
And lastly, we have a dramatically simplified new sign up process. From now on, when you sign up for Calliflower, you get 14 days free usage of Calliflower Premium, without having to put in a credit card. Just give us your name and email address, and you’ll be running Calliflower Premium. At the end of 14 days, if you decide you don’t need the Premium features, then they just turn off. So if you know anyone who needs a great collaboration and conference calling solution for webinars, or teleseminars, please encourage them to test drive Calliflower!Read more
What are the real costs of Free Conference Call services?
Every so often I get a call from a customer who has misunderstood how Free Conference Call services work. These people are usually upset about a higher-than-expected telephone bill which they’ve received. That’s because when you make a free conference call, you still have to pay your telephone company a long distance charge to reach the conference calling service. And usually that calling service is located in an out-of-the-way location, resulting in higher charges.
The difference between a free conference call service, a Calliflower Premium call and a traditional toll-free service is simply who pays and how much.
| Free Service | Calliflower Premium Service | Toll-Free or 800# Service |
| Each participant makes a long distance call to participate in the conference call. | Each participant makes a local call to participate in the conference call. | The call organizer pays for each participant to join the call. |
| Cost: Whatever your carrier charges you for long distance. | Cost: A flat $50/month for two organizers. $25/month for every additional organizer. | Cost: your toll free rate (7 to 10 cents/minute usually) multiplied by the number of participants. |
So when does it make sense to use each of these options? Let’s look at a few scenarios and see!Read more
Socializing the Calliflower website
We've taken a big step in the last couple of days in turning on various social media features on www.calliflower.com. When the site was first built, the social media features were omitted, and we've just now begun the process of retrofitting them.
So what does that mean?
- More input from our users. We now have a few blogs up and running, and more will be coming. More to the point, other parts of the site will be social media enabled as well. For example, FAQs now have open comment streams. It simply made sense that if you had a question about Frequently Asked Question you should be able to ask for answer there.
- More content extended into other networks. We're beginning with Twitter, but our intent is that this website should be able to post updates to a variety of social media engines.
- Options to bookmark and comment. At the bottom of this entry and all through the site, you'll find an "Add to Any" widget which lets you post anything you find here that interests you to your favorite social network, bookmarking service, feed aggregator or blog.
Enjoy!
Alec.
Using Google Ad Manager to Manage Affiliate Ads
There are a number of reasons to rotate advertisements on your website, including
- avoiding "ad blindness", which is the phenomenon of visitors ignoring ads.
- rotating ad "inventory" in order to place other paying ads on your pages.
Google Ad Manager is a free tool which can be used to effectively manage ad inventory on your site. It allows you to track and manage ad inventory on your web site, sell advertisements to advertisers, and will backfill unused inventory with Google Adsense. Ad Manager is the solution we recommend to Calliflower Affiliates to manage inventory on their web sites.
Setting up ad manager is a straight forward process. Read more
The Calliflower Communiques...
Over three months Calliflower is bringing you conversations with some of the most interesting people of our time. We are featuring some of the most well-known and thought-provoking people from the world of entertainment, business, politics and the Internet. You get to interact and ask your questions to our guests. Click on the JOIN button to assure yourself a front row seat at our Calliflower Communiques. If you do not have a calliflower account, you will be prompted with a form to create one in seconds flat. 
Our Host (and you're going to love him as much as our guests) is Allan Hunkin. Allan Hunkin is a life enhancement speaker and writer with over 30 years of experience in self help and personal empowerment. He holds train the trainer status in five different models of psychology. He has been an online broadcaster since 1997, conducting over 700 interviews with authors and thought leaders, in the areas of personal and social transformation.
Our format (and you're going to love this too) is 45 minutes of one-on-one interview and 45 minutes where you get to ask your questions of our guest.Read more
An evening with Al Turtle - The Map to Successful Relationships
Committed relationships, another name for marriages, are a confusing topic for almost everyone. While most people will say these are the building blocks of any culture, understanding the how, the why, and the what of making a good one seems to elude us. The statistics of divorce, the costs of broken families, the tragedy of Domestic Violence appalls us. No cultural institution faces conflict more often or more directly than a committed relationship.
However, do we know what to do about it! Al Turtle is the lucky kind of person to penetrate the mysteries and to find a satisfying Map of Relationships. "With a good map, you know which way to turn next," he says. Al, as a marriage therapist, has been using his Map to understand and guide thousands of lost couples over the past 9 years. Many more have stumbled on his Map and are using it to find their own ways.
In our time together Al will share his Map, how he found it, what he does with it. He will explain how it works and answer your questions. You might just survive it yet.
Al Turtle M.Ed. was originally trained as a counselor in the 1970s. In 1992, he and his wife Sandra set up a private counseling practice in Coeur d'Alene Idaho. One of their specialties is relationship work and the development of the practical skills of living together peacefully. Al has been an active member of Imago Relationships International since the early 90s. This large group of Marriage Therapists, founded by Harville Hendrix, has been extending their coverage across the world. He teaches and guides peace-making efforts in the U.S. and overseas.
Al is an original thinker who approaches conflict and coexistence issues from a unique and practical perspective. He uses his experiences with over 2400 couples in Idaho in continuing to develop his understandings of, and resolutions to, the dynamics of conflict in dyads, families, groups, communities, with extensions into politics and beyond. His approach to sharing his ideas is both humorous and penetrating.Read more
An evening with Josh Waitzkin - Perfecting Your Art of Learning
You don't get to be an eight-time national chess champion and a world martial arts champion without learning how to learn. Josh Waitzkin tell us all about how to learn what you need to learn faster and with more ease.
Josh Waitzkin, an eight-time National Chess Champion in his youth, was the subject of the book and movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. At eighteen, he published his first book, Josh Waitzkin's Attacking Chess.
Since the age of twenty, he has developed and been spokesperson for Chessmaster, the largest computer chess program in the world, currently in its eleventh edition. Now a martial arts champion, he holds a combined twenty-one National Championship titles in addition to several World Champion titles. He is the president of the JW Foundation, which helps struggling youths with the learning process, and regularly gives seminars and keynote presentations.Read more
An evening with Alan Alda - Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself
Our beloved Alan Alda is with us for a one on one conversation with you his fans. Alan has recently had the distinction of being nominated for an Oscar, a Tony, and an EMMY -- as well as publishing a bestselling book -- all in the same year. His memoir, entitled Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, and Other Things I've Learned, became a New York Times bestseller. Whether you loved him as Hawkeye Pierce in MASH, Arnold Vinick in The West Wing or any one of the hundreds of other character his has played you simply love him. An evening to remember.Read more
An evening with Ken Blanchard - Being a One Minute Entrepreneur
Mega-bestselling author (The One Minute Manager ) Ken Blanchard is with us presenting inspiring stories that reveal the secrets to becoming a successful entrepreneur including how to build a firm foundation, how to ensure a steady cash flow, and how to create legendary service. Join us and learn how to think, act, and succeed in creating and sustaining a business, no matter what your industry.Read more
An Evening with Ariane de Bonvoisin - Taking Charge of Change
Change happens, usually when you have other plans. Ariane de Bonvoisin and her team are change experts. In this teleseminar we discuss the key aspects of change and how to not only survive change but thrive as a result.
Ariane de Bonvoisin is the CEO and founder of first30days.com, a website to help people transition through any change, whether it's a health diagnosis, going green, moving to a new city, or getting married. With a degree in economics and international relations from the London School of Economics, she joined The Boston Consulting Group and worked in over a dozen countries in a few years. After an MBA at Stanford, she moved back to New York, working with media giants BMG and Sony Music.
In 2000, Ariane was tapped by Time Warner to become the Managing Director of a new digital media venture fund. First30days.com became her life's work in 2004. Ariane is based in New York City where the company is also headquartered.Read more
An evening with Gabor Mate - In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addition
If addiction has touched your life at all you will not want to miss this detailed examination and explanation of addiction. In this teleseminar as in his new book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts bestselling writer and physician Gabor Mate looks at the epidemic of addictions in our society. He explains why we are so prone to them and what is needed to liberate ourselves from their hold on our emotions and behaviors.
Gabor Mate, M.D. is the author of four bestselling books including Scattered Minds and When the Body Says No-published in ten languages on five continents-and co-author, with Gordon Neufeld, of Hold On To Your Kids.
A Former medical columnist for the Globe and Mail, where his byline continues to be seen on issues of health and parenting, Dr. Mate has had a family practice, worked as a palliative care physician and, most recently, with the addicted men and women in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.Read more
An evening with Peter Senge - The Necessary Revolution
A revolution is underway in today's organizations and Peter Senge is leading the charge. As Peter Senge and his co-authors reveal in The Necessary Revolution, companies around the world are boldly leading the change from dead-end "business as usual" tactics to transformative strategies that are essential for creating a flourishing, sustainable world. There is a long way to go, but the era of denial has ended. Today's most innovative leaders are recognizing that for the sake of our companies and our world, we must implement revolutionary - not just incremental changes in the way we live and work.
Peter will be talking about a wealth of strategies that individuals and organizations can use - specific tools and ways of thinking - to help us build the confidence and competence to respond effectively to the greatest challenge of our time.
Dr. Peter M. Senge is the founding chairperson of SoL and a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Senge is the author of The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. He has lectured extensively throughout the world, translating the abstract ideas of systems theory into tools for better understanding of economic and organizational change. He has worked with leaders in business, education, health care and government. The Journal of Business Strategy (September/October 1999) named Dr. Senge as one of the 24 people who had the greatest influence on business strategy over the last 100 years.Read more
An evening with William Shatner - Up Till Now
After almost sixty years as an actor, William Shatner has become one of the most beloved entertainers in the world. And it seems as if Shatner is everywhere. Winning an Emmy for his role on Boston Legal. Doing commercials for Priceline.com. In the movie theaters. Singing with Ben Folds. He's sitting next to Jay Leno and Jimmy Kimmel, and he's practically a regular on Howard Stern's show. He was recently honored with election to the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. He was a target on a Comedy Central's Celebrity Roast entitled "The Shat Hits the Fan."
In Up Till Now, his autobiography Shatner sits down with readers and offers the remarkable, full story of his life and explains how he got to be, well, everywhere. Bill Shatner reveals the man behind these unforgettable moments, and how he's become.Read more
