Wirelessnorth.ca

One of the unexpectedly cooler demos at eComm08 was the launch of a Canadian company (based in Toronto) led by experienced entrepreneur Shai Berger fonolo. What fonolo does is help you, as a consumer, kick the butt of any dial-in customer service system. The fonolo service tracks and publishes the dialling tree and IVR scripts for popular customer service numbers. So you can skim over long scripts and at a glance see what option, however many layers deep it is that you are looking for.

From there, you then click on that option, and fonolo dials in for you, listens to using voice recognition and punches all the buttons then connects you only once it gets right to the spot you wanted. Super cool. No word yet on whether it also helps you skip the pain of keying in your 10-digit mobile phone number to the IVR then re-telling it again to a human agent 2 seconds later.

Better still though, you can use fonolo to log and track all your calls to customer service and record them too, and rate call center agents. You could even then play back a previous conversation while on the phone. If it works, this could be powerful stuff for consumers.

The other thing learned? Turns out there’s a lot of room left for innovation left in the telecom industry even for dusty old applications like “voice” as developers create new value by mashing-up voice with web interfaces and external data sets. (For another great example see Ribbit also demoed at eComm.)

Fonolo is in closed beta for now but look for the official launch soon. We’ll keep you posted on WirelessNorth.ca with a full review once it becomes available to the public.