Free Conference Calling Blog

You are making Rondee one of the most talked about conference calling companies in America. Thanks to all of you who give us your feedback, ideas and suggestions to help us grow.

Our first issue focused on the new features that we built to help make Rondee the best free conference calling service available. If you do not currently receive Rondee News, simply register for an account and you’ll be included on our issue next month.

We’ve decided to make available to the public some code snippets for use with Asterisk, the free PBX which powers the Rondee free conferencing service. The first code in the set allows live streaming of audio from conferences using only a PHP script and a web server. Other solutions out there require much more complex configurations.

Along the same lines, we will soon be launching live web-based streaming for your Rondees.

Rondee provides organizers with a special PIN that can be distributed to others who would like to listen-in on an ongoing conference call. On your invitation page, you will now see a “Listen-only PIN”. This PIN is unique to your free conference call, and it remains private unless you distribute it to others.

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Yes, you can record your Rondee conference calls! When you set up your Rondee you’ll see several boxes with options you can select. Just check the box to record the call. Your invitees will be notified that the call is being recorded. After the call is over, just go back to Rondee.com (you can get to your call through “My Rondees” link at the top of the page once logged into your account; you’ll see a new link for the recording which will have appeared on the particular page corresponding to that Rondee.)

Your call will record in the GSM format. If you’re interested in how to convert that to another format, please see the blog post by one of our users: converting your Rondee to another format

Schedule a free conference call with Rondee

One of our missions at Rondee is to let our users know about innovative telephony services as they become available. PhoneSpamFilter.com is one such service. It’s a user-supported clearinghouse of phone solicitor phone numbers, and more importantly, it allows telephony providers to automatically block telemarketers using a free Asterisk-based PHP script. What could be better?

Take a look at the service, and next time you get an annoying sales call, make sure and post a comment.

Some of you may have noticed that Rondee was not accessible for a period of time this past weekend. We apologize for this unplanned outage. It was due to a catastrophic failure at our primary hosting facility, theplanet.com. Here is an article about the outage, which affected 9,000 companies.

We have restored full service as of today. There was no loss of data, and most of those affected were able to use our backup conferencing system to hold successful Rondees.

Thank you for sticking with us through this outage. We are currently investigating ways to increase redundancy in our systems to ensure this does not happen again.

A few folks have written to us asking what could have happened.  Invariably the answer is this: After inputting the PIN, you must press pound.  Otherwise, Rondee will not know that you have finished inputting your PIN and will wait for you to continue.  In a few cases, users report that they entered their PIN and pressed pound only to be told that “This Rondee is not in use”.  Assuming you have dialed in at the correct time, this error message is generally caused if the PIN is entered too quickly or if the reception on your phone is poor and the tone transmission is affected.  The solution is to re-enter your PIN a bit more slowly.

If you start a bit late, no problem.  As long as someone joins the Rondee within 30 minutes of the scheduled start, the space will be ‘held open’ for the group. If the call goes later than anticipated, its still not a problem. You can keep talking as long as you like.

Only Rondee gives you a convenient way to schedule calls on the web, a universal access number 619-2-RONDEE (619-276-6333) you can put in your speed-dial, and your very own virtual meeting space where registered users don’t need to remember random codes.

And, besides being free, Rondee also includes convenient web-based scheduling.

A few folks have asked about whether or not you to register to use the Rondee free conference calling service.

In short, you do not need to register for Rondee unless you want to schedule your own Rondees using the Rondee website. However, there are benefits to registration for everyone: