Now the Conference Calls You

Created during Startup Weekend New York City, "an intense 54 hour event which focuses on building a web or mobile application which could form the basis of a credible business over the course of a weekend," Bridg.me is a very simple idea -- it's one you could come up with, well, over the course of a weekend. Using Bridg.me, you add a conference call to your Google Calendar and then, at the appointed hour, the conference will call you. Don't underestimate the value of a simple idea, though.

How many times have you had to scramble at the last minute to find the three separate codes required to join a call with your coworkers? In addition to a phone number, there's usually an extension for your party and then an access password. And then, once you've fumbled your way onto the call you've either missed something important or you have to sit there and wait for everything else to join. The elevator music provided by various conference call companies is awful and if there isn't any, you're still wasting your time. Sometimes it's even worse. You could be the second person to call in and then you have to make small talk with your least favorite office buddy as the others shuffle through their emails to find the phone number.

Bridg.me solves all of these problems. And all for only five cents a minute (after the trial period ends; the company hopes to grow and, when it does, they say, basic services will be provided for free). To get started, you just need to register on the site and, when creating a Google Calendar event, add the number of each participant as well as the #bridg hashtag. Bridg.me will take care of the rest.

"We want to make it an even more seemless experience," Justin Isaf, who pitched the product at NYC Startup Weekend, told TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsis. "We hate conference calling as it stands. We want to make it as easy to conference call as it is to tweet."