TellFi (YC W11) Is Google Voice For Companies (opens in new tab)

In what way is this better than any of the other hosted PBX solutions out there? I don't see the novelty here. Even the "advanced" stuff, like voice mail transcription, have been standard features at virtual PBXs for years now.

I chatted with their support, and out of the box(*) they don't allow you to call out from the company phone number. So if you make an outgoing call and the callee decides to return it, it will be returned to your personal cell phone during lunch time with the family, not to your business phone with voceimail etc. In detail, they said it's case by case, and that it might be illegal if not done right(!?), so they have to "handle it with care". Obviously, I wouldn't have the patience for it.

I actually do not mind the pricing that much, but they have to deliver on convenience 100%, and exposing a private phone numbers is an inconvenience.

Also, the additional external line pricing is not posted on the site - support said it will be about $8 in most cases.

Other than instant startup, how does this differ from Phonebooth.com?

We've been very happy with them, at $20/month unlimited calling.

We (Convore Inc) were an early beta user of TellFi. In about 5 minutes we were able to get a phone number and have that phone number go straight to voicemail and email us the voicemail. Perfect!

My company got a sneak peak using TellFi, and I'm pretty excited about it. We don't yet have a physical location, but using their service we were able to get a business number and setup menu systems ("for such-and-such, press 2") with appropriate forwarding to our cell phones. This gives us a legitimacy we otherwise wouldn't have.

Just as I personally don't see the point for a land line now that I've got a cell phone, I likewise don't see why I would want to worry about getting a real phone system when we have TellFi.

I did a review for RingCentral [1] which offers similar features to TellFi, and honestly so far i have not been impressed by the features offered by these hosted PBX services.

I have found that many have clunky interfaces that were not easy to set up and configure AND once configured it was hard to go back and change something.

It certainly is nice to have a service that allows ringing multiple phones, and has better support for multiple lines unlike Google Voice, but for now I will stick with Google Voice for my business for the one or two calls I get, as it is simple to use and free.

RingCentral was nice in that it provided an iPhone application and made it extremely simple to dial-out using your 1-800 number from that application, but the iPhone app did not provide access to contacts that were already on the phone [2] and required setting them up through their system with no easy way to sync them (all of my business contacts are stored on my business'es Google Mail account, I don't want to duplicate that).

[1]: http://www.osnn.net/submitted-news/99624-ringcentral-virtual... (A site I am an administrator on) [2]: I reviewed their services in March of 2010.

How does this improve, or differ from, Toktumi (http://toktumi.com/Whytoktumi.aspx)? At first glance, they appear quite similar, with perhaps Toktumi edging ahead on features.

that is the saddest looking screenshot.

Are they using twilio/ tropo on their back end? Just curious

That's kind of steep pricing IMO as far as the minutes are concerned. I can get an OOMA for $200 + $100 / year with 2 lines, 5000 minutes and lots of other features.

As I posted on the other thread (saw that one first, but this has more comments): How is this different from Phone.com's virtual office, which has been out for at least a couple years now? http://www.phone.com/products/virtual-office/

We had an early beta of this. It literally takes 2 minutes to set up a phone for your business and take call routing, voice mail,etc.

Congrats on the launch Jason + Conor!

Oh! Look what I found: http://inumbr.com/features

$6.99/mo, 120 minutes, control outgoing caller id. Cool!

any services like this available for the uk?