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“We launched a new service called PoketyPoke in early January…a personal conference manager,” announces James Siminoff (News - Alert), CSO of Ditech Network, founder and former CEO of PhoneTag, adding that “yesterday was the first time I was on a real conference call with a third party where every participant used PoketyPoke.”

 

There were five people on the call, Siminoff said, and “everyone came in at the same time. For those who do conference calls, you know that with five people this never happens.”

 

Most conference calls start about 5-7 minutes late, of course. Siminoff said he does about three conference calls per day “so that means I am wasting over 60 hours a year waiting for people on conference calls.”

 

Apostrophically, we find that to be a misleading statistic, this “how many hours a year I waste” on this or that. In fact, that 60 hours would never be available in reality anyway, and if you don’t have something with you to fill five minutes you should look into carrying around a magazine or rubber squeezing ball.

 

PoketyPoke is a Ditech product, of course. “All you do is forward the conference call e-mail invites with all of the dial-in and calendar information to PoketyPoke,” writes TechCrunch. “It will then automatically dial into the conference call at the right time and simultaneously place a call to your phone, bridging the two calls. So instead of you dialing in, it calls you.”

 

Evidently it also works for two-way calls.

 

You can “record and transcribe the calls as well,” TechCrunch says: “PoketyPoke uses the PhoneTag/Simulscribe voice-to-text transcription service “which Ditech Networks (News - Alert) licensed exclusively for $17 million. The service comes out of Ditech Networks Labs, which is run by Simulscribe founder Jamie Siminoff, and will be free during the private beta period.”

 

PoketyPoke is meant to showcase some of the Ditech Networks APIs, TechCrunch thinks, adding that it “could be used to build the feature directly into conference call services.”