CallFire

CallFire Inc. is a cloud telephony services provider (SaaS) headquartered in Santa Monica, California, known locally as Silicon Beach. CallFire designs, develops, and offers web-based VoIP products and services as a business-to-business (B2B) service for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB's) and bills customers based on usage.

As of 2012, CallFire had over 50,000 clients[1] and billed over 185 million minutes.[2] CallFire hosts approximately 1.4 billion calls and text messages, 6 million campaigns, 80 million sound files, and 14 TB in storage (Network File Storage).[3]

History

The company was incorporated in 2004 by Dinesh Ravishanker, Vijesh Mehta, and Komnieve Singh.[4] Punit Shah & TJ Thinakaran came on board in 2006 and 2007 respectively to round out the founding team. Dan Retzlaff, James Nguyen, Shane Neman were hired during the initial years, and Ronald Burr was hired in spring 2012.[5]

Reception

In 2010, CallFire was ranked no. 285 on Inc. Magazine’s 29th annual List of America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies[6] According to Inc. in 2012, CallFire was nominated for the 2012 Small Business Influencer Award by smallbiztrends.com.[4]

CallFire was ranked #15 within the Telecommunications industry in the Los Angeles metropolitan region.[6] Much of CallFire’s annual growth is attributed to “the growth in calls and use of its service in U.S. elections as well as Hurricane Sandy”[2]

Political campaigns have started to use services in the cloud telephony industry. Services like CallFire are used by local and state candidates and issue-oriented political campaigns to reach potential voters.[7] Various campaigns have conducted voter identification and persuasion, grassroots fundraising, rally crowd building, volunteer recruitment, get out the vote (GOTV), and other activities.[8]

Services like CallFire are used by municipal officials, private businesses, and insurance agents to send emergency notification messages and calls about electrical outages, storm shelter locations and other urgent information along the path of Hurricane Sandy.[9] Additional uses are for advertising, e-commerce, human resources, and payment processing (see Cloud telephony).[10]

On May 20, 2013, CallFire's CEO Dinesh Ravishanker was named a finalist in the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year 2013 program in the Greater Los Angeles area. The award recognizes entrepreneurs who demonstrate success in innovation, financial performance, and commitment to their businesses.[11]

References

  1. ↑ Anderson, Steve. "CallFire Clears 50000 Users" , TMCNet July 18, 2012.
  2. 1 2 "CallFire Claims Record Growth.", SoCalTech January 7, 2013
  3. ↑ "CallFire CTO Discusses How Company Solved its Data Challenge",YahooNews November 20, 2012
  4. 1 2 "CallFire: Nominated for the 2012 Small Business Influencer Awards in Corporations", SmallBizTrends
  5. ↑ [Toscano, Efren. http://techzulu.com/callfire-bootstraps-50000-signups-and-hires-former-netzero-ceo/ "CallFire Bootstraps 50,000 Signups and Hires Former NetZero CEO"], TechZulu July 16, 2012.
  6. 1 2 "CallFire: Company Profile", Inc.
  7. ↑ "Following Second Debate, Obama and Romney in Dead Heat Among Registered Voters in Virginia." October `9, 2012.
  8. ↑ "Following Second Debate, Obama and Romney in Dead Heat Among Registered Voters in Virginia." October `9, 2012
  9. ↑ "For More than 2.5 Millions Affected by Hurricane Sandy, CallFire Cloud Telephony Urgent Messages" November 2, 2012
  10. ↑ "Six Questions Every Telecommunications Senior Executive Should Ask About Cloud Computing" http://www.accenture.com/us-en/Pages/insight-telecommunications-cloud-computing.aspx February 15, 2011
  11. ↑ "CallFire CEO Dinesh Ravishanker Named an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2013 Finalist in Greater Los Angeles" May 20,2013


External links

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