I'm working at 1-800-Free-411, a company that's moving
through it's post-startup, not yet a midsized company
phase.
The company is actually a lot of fun to work at. The product is useful to a lot of people (Advertisement supported 411 Directory Assistance), and it's a great place to work, learn, and play.
What I like best about the company is that it has a very high engineer to manager ratio ;) That's always one of my metrics when looking at new companies.
Before that, I worked at Irrational Games (now 2k Games), as the IT manager of the US and AUS offices, working on Bioshock and other games.
How is your company doing now that 1-800-GOOG-411 is out? A lot of Google's side businesses are just for the data but some are out to compete for real. It'd be interesting to hear from the inside.
It's great to see Google coming in and validating the market that we're in. The company's doing well financially, and continue to grow callers. It's an exciting place to work, and I'm glad to be here.
When Goog-411 first came out, I was impressed: They do Call-Completion (auto-dialing the number you called), which we don't, and I'll admit it's a nice feature.. It's just expensive to do. (They eat those minutes)
On the other hand, we have live operators, and were Google prefers automation, so there are always tradeoffs. .Our Automation is pretty great, but we know that some people won't get recognized, so we give a Liveop backup, and Google doesn't.
I'm afraid I can't really go into details more than that without breaking agreements.
That's enough for me, I'm glad to hear things are going well. While it's hard to compete with Google's pocketbook funding the minutes, I think for a lot of Google services, they have a hard time competing with any competitor that has a human available in loop. People really, really value that and I'm sure you guys are reaping rewards from doing it.
The company is actually a lot of fun to work at. The product is useful to a lot of people (Advertisement supported 411 Directory Assistance), and it's a great place to work, learn, and play.
What I like best about the company is that it has a very high engineer to manager ratio ;) That's always one of my metrics when looking at new companies.
Before that, I worked at Irrational Games (now 2k Games), as the IT manager of the US and AUS offices, working on Bioshock and other games.