January 5th, 2007
You are currently browsing the articles from the VoIP Digest written on January 5th, 2007.
Start Your Own VoIP Service Provider in Under an Hour and For a Limited Time it is Free! Smith On VoIP reader and Chief Flattening Officer, Moshe Maeir directed my attention to his company, Flat Planet Phone Company , latest offering: the Flat Planet Phone System Beta Program . With the Flat Phone Phone System beta, qualified resellers will gain access to advanced phone services such as Hosted PBX, Mobile to VoIP connectivity, Disposable Numbers, Virtual IVR, billing and customer management system, and is the system is even integrated with the iotum relevance engine. Flat Planet partners also receive their own branded web site and all the tools to market the Flat Planet services under their own brand name. A You Need is a Dollar and A Dream The Flat Planet Phone System Beta is a Diamond in the Rough for a Savvy Entreprenuer. The Beta Program is open to resellers and Entrepreneurs all over the Flat Planet. Participants have applied from Australia, North America, Europe and the Middle East. Interested resellers should contact The Flat Planet Beta Program at beta@flatplanetphone.com. Resellers that are accepted to the program will have full access to the system for at least 6 months for free. After the beta period is over services will be offered at a special discounted rate.
Written by Smith On VoIP - Garrett Smith's Insights on VoIP P on January 5th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.
The most important market challenge for social networks in 2007 can be summarized in three words: monetization, monetization, and monetization.
Regardless of whether social networks will splinter into niches and verticals (e.g. sports, pets, moms, teenage girls, etc.), regardless of whether social networks adopt interoperability (e.g. OpenID), regardless of whether individual profile pages morph into widgetized and personalized start-pages, regardless of whether 2007 will be the year that social networking goes mobile… all such market development activities will prove secondary to a much more fundamental issue.
And that issue is whether social networks can innovate on the revenue generation side of its business model sufficiently to pull its average ad rates out of “junk” status into “premium” rate levels (e.g. from today’s $0.50 CPMs into something closer to $10 CPMs).
Towards such ends, there are four critical success factors that any innovation in monetization scheme for social networks must adhere to:
Social networks, and online communities in general, are terrible platforms for advertising formats designed for any type of call to action. As such, Google Adwords-type direct-response PPC ads have proven highly ineffective. On the contrary, the significant opportunity for social networks is to become highly-efficient branding vehicles. In fact, it is my prediction that social networks will prove themselves to be the most effective brand communication platforms on the Internet.
As we all know by now, social networks are a new media for self-expression and communications. And since the core revolves around people (not products), it is vital that any innovation in brand communication include the active and explicit participation of those people within the process itself. In other words, people themselves are the platforms, capable of message amplification and network effects, and they should be treated as brand re-communicators, not just end-receivers. So just don’t advertise at them, advertise with and through them.
Given the extreme pressure to monetize with low CPMs, many of today’s social networks are way too cluttered with ads. Virtually every pageview that is generated carries an ad. This is highly wasteful and counterproductive, for both users and advertisers. Instead, improved methods of monetization yielding higher CPMs, must correspond with a reduction in the volume of ads. To some extent, old-fashioned artificial scarcity must be imposed on available ad inventory in order to achieve improved performance and satisfaction for all parties involved.
Scalability is key; therefore, automation is critical. Google represents the best comp here. Every scale-enabling innovation that has been built into their Adwords & Adsense platform, from Do-It-Yourself purchasing to auction-based pricing to placement by performance, even the fact that they take credit cards, are all key reference points for anyone seeking to optimize monetization within social networks. The need for scalability also implies the capability to service the needs of smaller advertisers, alongside the big Madison Ave spenders.
The bottom line of all this for anyone running a social network already, or if you are in the process of building a new one… make sure that everything you do is designed to maximize monetization, as the difference between success and failure will rest on this metric. For instance, if you are creating a niche social network, do so in order to fetch high CPMs. If you are going to widgetize profiles, make sure it results in an enhanced path to monetization. 2005 and 2006 were years that proved that social networks were not a passing fad, but superior monetization is what will prove key for social networks in 2007. Consequently, it’s likely that M&A activity will also accrue towards those who are able to crack this nut.
Share/Send
Written by Robert Young on January 5th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Media and Featured.
TalQer version 1.0.0.1 is out of beta with a few surprises. It's a plug-in to GoogleTalk, and now to Skype, that lets you dial out on TalQer's network using your existing address book.
UPDATE: Let me explain the "minute-stealer" term since I didn't use it in the body of the article. I've heard it used for the last six months to refer to companies whose primary marketing strategy is getting customers to switch to their lower cost service. For example, Vonage is a minute-stealer relative to AT&T and TalQer is a minute-stealer relative to Skype. Skype is trying to have it both ways, of course, pricing services low enough to get people to switch but with features that get them to use Skype for more than cheap phone calls. Back to TalQer...
You won't see TalQer applying for Skype certification any time soon. TalQer inserts a big yellow dial button into the Skype UI, driving users to bypass SkypeOut in favor of their own prepaid service. Cash-flow-interruptus.
In and out is everything here. TalQer isn't about its own social network, it's about beating Skype's rate arbitrage, further cutting the cost of getting and making PSTN calls. When you're using Skype to save a buck on international calls, TalQer offers better rates: € 0.012 (1.5¢) per minute for some countries and matching Skype's 2 cent per minute global rate in many others.
Since TalQer isn't based in the EU (Fremont, California, apparently), no EU value added tax.
TalQer is also trying to outperform SkypeOut audio quality. They didn't go for termination partners (the companies who connect Skype or TalQer to the regular phone system) that move your bits over the Internet. TalQer's CEO, Charlie Paglee, says they signed up with services that move bits over leased lines, less affected by the latest YouTube downloads or peak net traffic. It costs them a little more, but Paglee says they don't have Skype's scale or overhead expenses.
I've been getting an earful from post-Christmas newbies frustrated to tears by SkypeOut call quality and Skype's not having someone they can call. TalQer may work for them.
Still waiting for SkypeIn to come to your country? SkypeIn is available in 14 countries, but TalQer phone numbers are available in 38. Neither offer numbers for China or India. The first TalqIn number is free, but you can rent more starting at €2.40 ($3.00) monthly, about the same as SkypeIn.
I can't say it works, or doesn't work. I wasn't prepared to buy the minimum $10 credit to try it. I can't imagine other reviewers paying for the privilege. If you do take the leap, let me know how this subversive little number works for you.
Technorati tags: skype, skyepjournal, voip, talqer, phones, charliepaglee, competitors, ebayinc, skypeltd, skypein, skypeout
Written by Skype Journal on January 5th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Competitors.
Anyone see Boise State’s amazing 43-42 victory over Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl, which saw Boise State complete an undefeated season by using a trick play to score a two-point convert? Well, I didn’t but the highlights of the game’s final moments were on YouTube. So, I head over there today only to discover this message:
“This video has been removed at the request of copyright owner Twentieth Century Fox because its content was used without permission”
Well, that sucks! Hey, I’m all for copyright protection but hasn’t Twentieth Century Fox learned any lessons from NBC, which went ape-shit when the SNL skit, Chronicles of Narnia, hit YouTube. Today, NBC is putting some of its skits on YouTube because it generates more interest in the show. There, I feel much better now.
Written by Mark Evans on January 5th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on video and Main Page.
What’s happened to Skype recently? When I call someone, they frequently can’t hear me or the call drops and then goes live again, or it drops completely. All the people who have experienced the same problems use a high-speed cable connection. Is that the problem or is there too much traffic on the network or does the latest version of Skype has a bug? It’s so frustrating that I’m double-guessing my recent decision to buy the North American all-you-can-eat long-distance plan.
Written by Mark Evans on January 5th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on VOIP Services, Competition.
Daylife, a stylized news aggregator that is the closest thing we’ve seen to a webified newspaper, beta-launched this morning. Daylife is a meatier version of aggregators such as Google News, Topix.net, and Techmeme, offering tools for pivoting around information by story, characters, time, popularity, photos, and quotes, in a wide range of news categories.
Funded by old media and new media alike — “roughly twice as many investors as it has employees,” says paidContent — the company is perhaps best known for the involvement of media guru Jeff Jarvis and media bogeyman Craig Newmark.
While Daylife is engagingly pretty, it’s hard to comprehend as a whole, and it’ll take some learning to figure out how to use it. The company seems to understand this and has sent its data elsewhere to power the Huffington Post’s News Ranker and Treehugger’s grndx. This seems like a good direction, but the indexes have inadequate explanation of what makes something more newsworthy or more green, so they’re pretty much useless.
Daylife’s goals overpower what it’s doing, at least with the beta. It aims to “Make the news ecosystem more transparent and self-correcting, for the benefit of all involved,” “Develop new models for funding journalism,” and “Enable a civil discourse that is pragmatic, solutions-oriented, and doesn’t exaggerate divisions in favor of celebrating what unites us,” among other things.
Sounds great, but we don’t see any progress on these fronts so far. There’s not even any way for readers to comment on stories!
Update: Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, an investor in Daylife, pans it in a review on his site. He writes,
What makes Daylife stand out is not so much what it does well, but what’s been left out. There are no RSS feeds, even for your bookmarked stuff. Even worse, there’s no ability for users to leave comments on articles, a feature that has been wildly successful at NewsVine and Topix. And the fact that the news is gathered by humans, instead of the algorithmically determined news at Digg, means the company will always have a higher cost of doing business.
Share/Send
Written by Liz Gannes on January 5th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Software 2.0 and Startups.
Earthlink's visionary CEO Gary Betty has died. He was only 49.
While I did not know Gary, I knew much of the fruits of his labors.
I've always admired Atlanta-based Earthlink as a resourceful, honest and successful company who managed to battle the cable and telco Internet Service Provider giants deftfully but never without forgetting the [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 5th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Earthlink.
Paramount Pictures and Crisp Wireless say they are launching a mobile portal for movie promotions and mobile content. Admit it, you want to get Nacho Libre ring tones on the go.
Share/Send
Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on January 5th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.
The ink on FCC Commish Kevin Martin’s Valentine card to AT&T is not even dry, and already we are beginning to see the purging of the BellSouth executives. Just like when SBC Communications bought the real AT&T and then became Ma Bell 2.0. We got hold of an internal memo, but this should be public anytime soon.
Here is what is happening:
Mark Feidler, BellSouth President and Chief Operating Officer, will leave the company to pursue other opportunities. He is not alone. (The company list of departing BLS people is below the fold… enjoy) Some other old skool AT&T guys are also leaving the company. I am going to do an map of who is doing what and where they came from a little later, when there is a little downtime. (Any tools you can recommend for this?)
Herschel Abbott, Jr., Vice President - Governmental Affairs
Valencia Adams, Vice President - Chief Diversity Officer
Barry Boniface, Chief Strategy & Development Officer
Keith Cowan, Chief Field Operations Officer
Francis Dramis, CIO, E-Commerce & Security Officer
Mark Droege, Vice President and Treasurer
Rebecca Dunn, Senior Vice President - Corporate Compliance and Corporate Secretary
Ron Frieson, State President - Georgia
Margaret Greene, President - Regulatory & External Affairs
Don Hallacy, CIO - Communications Group
Donna Lee, Chief Marketing Officer - Business Markets
John McCullouch, State President - Mississippi
William Pate, Chief Marketing Officer - Retail Markets
Eddy Roberts, Jr., State President - Kentucky
Patrick Shannon, Chief Financial Officer
Krista Tillman, State President - North Carolina
Lynn Wentworth, Vice President and CFO - Communications Group
Share/Send
Written by Om Malik on January 5th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband.
Virgin Mobile USA is saying it has 4.6 million customers, which makes it the most popular MVNO in the U.S. Last I heard Boost Mobile had 3.6 million customers. It took both companies years to bring in that many users, so it’s going to be a long road for Amp’d, Helio and the rest.
Share/Send
Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on January 5th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.
So it is not FOX, but an exit is an exit, even if it is a puny one. A Canadian company, Kaboose has bought them for about $2.25 million. More @ Techcrunch
Share/Send
Written by Om Malik on January 5th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.
As if there weren’t enough mobile TV standards waiting in the wings, Samsung is planning to announce another mobile TV broadcast technology at CES called Advanced-Vestigial Side-Band, that will use digital signals from local TV broadcasters. The Wall Street Journal has some details, and Samsung PR tells us it will offer more info at the Samsung press conference on Sunday at CES:
For the technology to work, broadcasters will need to transmit separate beams to portable devices equipped with a Samsung chipset. . . The channel lineup could either be the same as local broadcasters are transmitting or special-tailored programming. — WSJ
We pointed out these other four ways that are being cooked up to offer mobile TV, and pointed out Modeo’s beta launch yesterday, which it will also announce at CES. Qualcomm is also supposed to get its MediaFLO mobile TV service up and running any day now. So many options and so much money put into a largely unproven technology.
Samsung already has phones for the mobile TV standards DVB-H, DMB and MediaFLO. With Samsung deciding to offer yet another way to get mobile TV, it seems like a good sign that the mobile TV broadcast standards battle is still largely up for grabs.
Share/Send
Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on January 5th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Mobile.
At the request of model and ex-wife of Ronaldo Daniela Cicarelli — who was in a sex tape with her new boyfriend that kept cropping up on YouTube despite her requests to keep it off — a Brazilian court has ordered YouTube shut down. While that’s clearly not going to happen, newly deep-pocketed YouTube continues to gather more enemies by the day. Check out the full story on NewTeeVee.
Share/Send
Written by Liz Gannes on January 5th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.
So what if most U.S. carriers won’t touch Google, the king-maker is doing a mobile search deal with the world’s largest wireless carrier, China Mobile. Google will provide its search engine technology for China Mobile’s WAP portal. The partnership has been rumored for weeks, but was officially announced today, and the companies’ say it will be widely available in early 2007.
Google has been signing up deals across Asia for mobile search, and has teamed up South Korean SK Telecom, and Japanese carriers NTT DoCoMo, and KDDI. In Europe Google has partnered with Telefonica, Vodafone and T-Mobile EU. In the U.S. Leap Wireless has been one of the first to warm up to Google’s mobile search. A lot of the carrier deals have been with smaller, early-adopters, but China Mobile’s hundreds of millions of subscribers is a significant win.
Lack of U.S. carriers deals isn’t doing too much damage to Google’s mobile search in the U.S., with about half of U.S. users turning to Google. M:Metrics says out of the 10 million plus subscribers who tried out mobile search in the U.S, Google was used by 5.25 million users. Yahoo had around 4 million users. Our readers experienced the same. Over half of our readers said they use Google for mobile search in our recent poll.
In Korea and Japan, typically hard markets to break into, the carrier deals are key — It’s the same with China. The China Mobile deal is also important because mobile subscribers in China seem to be more accepting of mobile advertisement, or so says the Wall Street Journal this morning, and the mobile is often a better way to reach audiences than PCs. Thanks to China Mobile Google’s mobile search just got in front of a lot more eyeballs.
Share/Send
Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on January 5th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Mobile.
Cisco has started off 2007 with a bang: buying Ironport Systems for a whopping $830 million in stock and cash. Ironport makes appliances for enterprises and helps them tackle the spyware problems and email spam amongst other things. The deal is an effort by Cisco to beef up Cisco Security Technology Group. Is this deal a sign that Cisco has its big “check book” out again?
As a backstory, the company raised over $100 million in venture funding. The buyout today is still more cash in the pockets of Peter Thiel and Max Levchin and ex Hotmail-ers Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith who were amongst the individual investors who participated in the initial round of funding.
Share/Send
Written by Om Malik on January 5th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Startups.
I'm not pulling this one out of the ether. Or the Ethernet.
The idea is actually hinted at by Matt Wasserlauf, who is CEO of online video ad network Broadband Enterprises. Matt tells Mediaweek's Mike Shields that "such inventory (referring to ad availabilities) is ideal for less content-phobic direct-marketing brands 'that are used to late-night TV, [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on January 5th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Vonage and General and trends and YouTube.
Well, it turns out the buyer of Bubbleshare isn’t News Corp. Instead, it’s Toronto-based Kaboose Inc., which is buying the photo-sharing service for $2.25-million to strengthen it’s position as “the biggest independent, family-focused online media company in North America”. (That’s a real mouthful, eh!).
Anyway, the deal will see Bubbleshare CEO Albert Lai and his team join Kaboose, which is looking to develop its community and social networking activities. It’s a small transaction but can only be seen as a successful for Lai, who made its first entrepreneurial splash when he and his partners sold MyDesktop to JupiterMedia in 1999. Hopefully, it will also provide Canada’s Web 2.0 community with some inspiration/encouragement that there are rewards if you take the plunge. I’ve got a lot of respect for Lai but the reality was Bubbleshare was more a feature than a business so it’s future hinged on a buy-out. At the end of the day, he and Bubbleshare did well.
The question you have to ask is whether News Corp.’s apparent $5-million offer for Bubbleshare was pulled off the table when details of the deal were leaked.
Under the terms of the transaction, Kaboose will buy BubbleLabs Inc. for $2.25 million with another $750,000 on the table based on an earn-out.
Update: Much to my surprise, Kaboose offered up its CEO, Jason DeZwirek, for an interview (and you thought only the mainstream media got to interview CEOs). I’ll provide a Q&A later in the post (see “continue reading” at the bottom) but wanted to highlight a couple of things from our discussion. Kaboose attracts 10 million unique visitors a month during its peak season (October to December) - 80% to 85% from the U.S. When asked whether the Bubbleshare purchase could inspire Canadian Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, here’s what DeZwirek had to say: “I hope that’s the case. If it is a by-product of it, that would be great. I think it’s a real shame that Canadians aren’t as active in the new media environment as we could be. Part of the reason is we are too Canadian-focused. People who are working on things are focused on the Canadian audience only, and that is not what the Internet is about. Although Kaboose and Bubbleshare are Canadian companies, we are both developing tools and applications that have universal appeal.”
Technorati Tags: M&A, Web 2.0
Can you talk about when discussions with Bubbleshare started?
We have been aware of bubbleshare since early summer and have been talking to them on an off over that time. Things accelerated over the last 30 days or so. But our belief has always been and is today they have a great set of tools with respect to sharing photos that are extremely easy to use. From our perspective, our audience of 10 million users a month is largely families and from that largely moms, and photos are a big part of preserving and sharing family memories. We have needs across the board for all our properties, not only photo sharing tools but other tools and applications, and the development team at bubble has a great skill set.
There are dozens of photo-sharing services out there. Did it help that Bubbleshare was in your backyard?
Yes, it was [helpful]. We weren’t specifically shopping for a photo sharing company. We were doing ‘buy, build partner’ scenarios for social networking tools and applications, which we view photos as an integral part of. From that angle, [Bubbleshare] is a great company and a great team where we have a photo application pretty much baked and ready to go and the team and technology can server as basis for a number of other social networking tools we plan to introduce this year.
Are you looking for more acquisitions?
We are very acquisitive company. This is our ninth acquisition. Our company has been built on acquisitions. This is the first time we have really bought tools and applications or technology. We have bought larger operating companies and larger Web companies. Ultimately, we see the Bubbleshare tools as generating traffic, retaining user and generating more pageviews. We are still focused on buying properties but our mission is helping parents plan and share family life.
Written by Mark Evans on January 5th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Web 2.0 and Main Page and M&A.
With no more opportunities left to build another YouTube, pre-launch startup Twistage wants to take advantage of everyone’s fascination with YouTube to build its functionality into other sites. Get the scoop on NewTeeVee.
Share/Send
Written by Liz Gannes on January 5th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.
