Don't Miss THE CALL OF THE YEAR!!

The folks at client iotum and a former VH1 producer, Fred Graver, have cooked up one ingenious concept for using the power of social media, the web and VoIP to ring in the New Year. It's the New Year's Eve Conference Call application which Alec Saunders unveiled last night.

It's pure genius and works on two levels. First by using the Facebook application combined with iotum's TalkNow the company gains immediate sign ups for two services. What's more it shows the power of relevance to a T, that was debuted at DEMO 2006 in Phoenix where iotum captured a DEMO God Award. But the killer is the Great North American New Years Call, which shows just how powerful the iotum platform is and how far it will scale. This is called load testing. But while other conference call services may go about doing good deeds, this goes a lot farther because Alec Saunders and his team have figured out how to do a lot more from the basis of a night of revelry.

1. Generate sign ups for one if not two iotum services-Talk Now and Free Conference Calling

2. Grow virally - friends will tell friends

3. Demonstrate the value of the services

4. Generate press attention

Under what I have labeled the "Rule of Disruption" in order for a technology to accomplish that, you have to use existing behavior and modify that in such a way that all people do is switch services and and add more functionality, without having to do much more differently. Skype is a perfect example of that. Saunders and team have with this app started the ball rolling in that direction with how people hook up on the phone.

iotum has been quietly load testing the system, with a series of traffic building promotions and already have over 50,000 users signed up and using the Free Conference Calling platform which keeps improving with each and every update. With this New Year's Eve promotion the company will give a new meaning to ringing in the New Year.