Small IS the New Big: PhoneValet Message Center Wins Macworld’s 2006 Eddy Award
Four year-old Canadian start-up, built from the ground up with Internet-driven operations and marketing, wins global honor for Mac technology innovation
OGDENSBURG NY and OTTAWA ON, 12 December 2006 – A two-time winner of Macworld Conference and Expo’s Best of Show award (2004 and 2005), Parliant Corp.’s PhoneValet Message Center 4.0 has just won the highest honor in Apple Computer Inc.’s Mac community with today’s announcement of the 2006 Editors’ Choice (Eddy) Awards from Macworld magazine.
“Parliant products service the needs of small office, home and home office users,” says Parliant’s Founder and CEO Kevin Ford. “This award proves that today’s small businesses can be as global as the imaginations of entrepreneurs. Before Parliant started building product, we started building systems that automated e-commerce, customer service, and support. Beyond that, Parliant outsources manufacturing, marketing, and order fulfillment. Today’s Eddy award proves that small is beautiful.”
Past Eddy award winners include the iPod nano, Flickr and Skype. The award for PhoneValet – a telephony tool popular with small businesses – signals the Mac’s growing market share with small businesses attracted to Apple’s “it just works” promise.
In his Eddy assessment on today’s edition of www.macworld.com, Macworld’s Jim Dalrymple declared that Parliant’s PhoneValet is “the premier telephone message-recording system for the Mac … The app now does a lot more than answer calls. It can also dial, record, log, and search through your calls; it’ll also automatically forward them to your cell phone when you’re on the road.”
While Parliant’s growing list of product awards is impressive for any global technology company, what’s more amazing is Parliant’s corporate structure, which Ford jokingly refers to as “four guys and a Web site”. In fact, Parliant was designed from its inception in 2002 to take advantage of global outsourcing, Web-based logistics, outsourced product fulfillment, pay-per-click marketing and the rapidly growing promotion role of the online technology press. All this so the Parliant team can stay focused on its core competency: making powerful telephony applications that are easy to install and use.
Parliant is privately financed by Ford – a serial high tech entrepreneur – and is a profitable company.
In addition to the multi-award-winning PhoneValet, last year Parliant released PhoneHerald Broadcast Dialer, an automated group dialing, message delivery and response collection system that is gaining loyal customers in high schools, medical practices, real estate offices and volunteer organizations across North America and around the world.
PhoneValet (now in version 5.0) retails at $169.95 per line for new users (including software and Parliant’s USB telephone adapter) and is available from Parliant’s Web site at www.parliant.com. PhoneHerald retails for $499.95 for one line, and $399.95 per line for two to five additional lines. Both PhoneHerald and PhoneValet come with a 30-day money-back customer satisfaction guarantee* and one year warrantees. (*Details at https://www.parliant.com )
We recently received a copy of PhoneValet to review, you can expect a full review of the product from Apple Gazette soon.
For more information about PhoneValet (and small business owners should really give this a look in my opinion) click here.
