By Haley Steinhauser, Director of Public Relations and Social Media
It’s October 2001. Jennifer Lopez and Ja Rule are signing “I’m Real” all the way to the top of the Billboard Top 100. NBC introduces us to Zach Braff with its television premiere of “Scrubs.” President George W. Bush establishes the Office of Homeland Security one month post-9/11. Apple presents the world with the iPod. The 13th College Football Holy War is played where Boston College beats Notre Dame in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. And, the day before this game, FreeConferenceCall.com was born.
October 26, 2018, marks our 17th birthday. If FreeConferenceCall.com were human — we’d be one year into driving on our own and one year shy of being able to vote.
Seventeen years after David Erickson founded the company, the world has changed and so has the way we connect with people. We are no longer chained to our desks for conference calls. Hello, cellphones! If you don’t care for our world-famous hold music, you can upload your own. Just hearing someone's voice not cutting it? Enter video conferencing. Missed your flight to your BIG presentation. Don’t stress. You can screen share it all right from your laptop.
FreeConferenceCall.com has changed too. Our free audio conferencing offering has grown into free screen sharing, free video conferencing and free recording. Out of our free service came StartMeeting®, our solution for enterprise customers. In the early days, our customer base was small but flashforward to 2018 and where we were named the second largest audio conferencing provider in the world based on minute volume. And, we’ve gone from Dave’s one-bedroom apartment to having nearly 200 employees sprawled across the world from Long Beach, California to Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.
What hasn’t changed is our mission: to provide a borderless platform that bridges countries and collaborators, creating a space where we can all freely connect, share and innovate — without cost and without barriers. Talk to any minister, small business owner or nonprofit employee and you’ll find out they use FreeConferenceCall.com to connect and build their community. We are still pushing the boundaries of what conferencing can do. And, we’re still dedicated first and foremost to the user.
As we mark our 17th birthday this month, we just wanted to say thank you because, without you, there would be no FreeConferenceCall.com.