Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Browse the web socially with Qwisk

2009-11-21T04:32:56-08:00

Qwisk is a new social browsing tool that launched yesterday at the TechCrunch Real-Time CrunchUp. Qwisk lets you quickly and easily share content with your social networks (Twitter and Facebook supported, plus the Qwisk network). It inserts a messaging pane on the left side of your screen to give you access to your social networks as you browse, and adds a sharing toolbar at the top of the screen to allow you to share content as you browse. To access content that others have shared, you simply click the individual messages in the messaging pane. To share content, press the appropriate button in the toolbar.

One can also start an IM-like conversation about a particular page with another Qwisk user by simply dragging that person’s image from the left pane onto the page.

It’s a clever implementation, although others have tried similar projects before (anyone remember me.dium?). The timing for a social sharing tool, however, is better than it has been previously as sites like Twitter and Facebook have rapidly become a constant firehose of links. Moreover, every link shared via Qwisk is actually a link embedded into Qwisk, making each user who clicks into a Qwisk user. Qwisk should propagate virally, and very very quickly.

In use Qwisk is reasonably unobtrusive, although it requires the user to remember to browser using the Qwisk URL bar rather than the standard browser bar. With large widescreen monitors, the extra real estate Qwisk consumes isn’t an issue. It might be irritating on a netbook. It is, however, far too easy to leave the Qwisk environment – the simple act of clicking on a link forwarded via email brings up the browser without the Qwisk add-ins. The Qwisk team needs to find a way to make their tool a permanent feature of my browsing environment, and not something I have to remember to browse to each time before beginning to browse.

Will people leave the tools they’ve become accustomed to for Qwisk? That part is unclear. Tweetdeck is a staple in my toolbox because of the other features – searches, filters, and so on – and not so much the fact that it makes it easy to share content. Qwisk, while promising, has more work to do before it’s a replacement for me.

SoundGadget: a Skype-certified speakerphone for road warriors

2009-11-18T06:02:17-08:00

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing with the Yamaha SoundGadget PSG-01S – a Skype-certified speakerphone provided to me for evaluation. This pint-sized device provides business travellers with a high quality portable alternative to the conference phones that can be found in boardrooms everywhere.

The SoundGadget packs an array of four microphones and two speakers into a tiny rectangular pillar standing less than 5 inches tall. The speakers support frequencies from 300 Hz to 20 KHz, making them an excellent alternative to the cheap units in most laptops, especially for casual music, video and podcast audio. The microphones are arranged in a 360 degree array at the top of the unit, with internal echo cancellation and noise reduction firmware. It’s intended to be used at a table for meetings, but it also worked incredibly well for me as I walked around my office. The extra microphones apparently made a huge difference.

Windows 7 recognizes the SoundGadget as a simple USB microphone and speaker combo. To the operating system, it’s little more than a USB headset. However, with the addition of the convenient utility packaged with the SoundGadget, the row of buttons on the side of the device are now activated. You can now answer and hang up calls with the touch of a button rather than searching the desktop for Skype. That’s a nice usability improvement, albeit not completely necessary.

If this were just a speakerphone it would be a handy gadget. However, recognizing that road warriors prefer to be economical about weight and baggage (see Jim Courtney’s comments about his recent experiences flying to Europe with the SoundGadget), Yamaha has added a couple of extra features to expand the SoundGadget’s appeal.

When turned on its side, the SoundGadget converts from a mono speakerphone into a tiny set of stereo speakers. In my use, it was a nice improvement over the speakers in my HP laptop.
Coupled with the software utility included, the SoundGadget can also function as a high quality microphone for recording podcasts or even music.

Until December 31, 2009 the SoundGadget is available at $199.90 at any Skype Store. In fact, the price is my only reservation about this device. To ameliorate that, it’s being offered with a full money back guarantee during this promotional period. If you don’t like it, just ship it back at their expense before January 31, 2010 for a full refund.

Nokia buy Palm? Not so fast…

2009-11-17T04:51:22-08:00

Last week rumours circulated (again) that Nokia might acquire Palm. Palm shares rallied, but seem to have settled back down this week. The “deal”, after all, is a Wall Street wet dream, and not much more.

It’s true that Nokia’s stock price is suffering and that Nokia’s share is slipping in the smart phone market. The mobile market is in transition, and Nokia was ill prepared. Nokia is fundamentally a hardware company trying to become a software company in a market which has lurched sharply toward software as the core differentiator. Wedded to Symbian while top competitors Apple and Google have bet on *NIX on the handset, Nokia knows it has to make some changes. The advantages of a modern OS architecture on the handset simply can’t be overstated.

And, in fact, Nokia is making changes. The N900 is a mobile Linux device, running Nokia’s home grown Maemo OS. The N900 has debuted to mixed reviews but Nokia isn’t asleep at the wheel.

And that’s why the billions required to buy Palm aren’t going to get spent.

Who might make a good dance partner for Palm? How about:

Yahoo – Apple and Google have both demonstrated the value of an integrated user experience connecting web based media and storefront properties to the handset. By all accounts, Palm’s WebOS is the best platform for creating mobile web experiences today. What better marriage than Yahoo’s deep web experience and Palm’s sexy new mobile platform?
RIM – BlackBerry OS is long in the tooth, and everyone knows it. The current king of the smartphone hill has a lot to lose, and the current crop of new competitors have better platforms to build their future businesses upon. Meld RIM’s deep understanding of the enterprise to Palm’s mobile web platform, and market it through RIM’s well entrenched carrier relationships and you’d have a winner.
In fact, RIM acquiring Palm might be so threatening to Microsoft that they’d conceivably enter the race just to make sure that RIM didn’t win the big prize. The shift to web technologies on the handset and within the enterprise would threaten Microsoft’s core franchise. However, given how poorly Microsoft has executed on mobile, a successful bid from Redmond would likely be the kiss of death for Palm.

My bet’s on RIM, even though a Yahoo / Palm marriage has the potential to create one of the most exciting and dynamic companies in the mobile world today. Palm needs a dance partner, but it’s not clear that Yahoo’s leadership has the stones to get the job done. The good news for Palm’s Rubenstein is that there are plenty of potential suitors in the market, if indeed the company is for sale.

Buying the BlackBerry Onyx: Telus and Bell vs Rogers

2009-11-13T05:53:59-08:00

My venerable BlackBerry Curve has just come out of contract with Rogers, so I’m in the market for a new BlackBerry and my pals at RIM tell me that the BlackBerry 9700 “Onyx” is the one to have. Not only that, but here in Canada Telus and Bell have both just launched new HSPA+ networks that compete directly with Rogers. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, there’s no way you could have missed the full page ads that Bell has been running in the papers.

Identical networks, identical phones… it seems like an ideal opportunity to compare service providers, no?

On the surface, it looks as if Bell and Telus are getting really aggressive. Bell’s price for the 9700 is $229, Telus’ $249, and Rogers $299. Winner, Bell!

And what about the plans?

My experience on iPhone has shown me that I’m not a super heavy mobile data user, and I’ve got a 3G stick so I don’t need to tether to my laptop. I’m looking for a modest number of minutes that can be used throughout North America, and a data plan that will give me between 500M and 1G of usage in any month.

For $40/month Rogers offers 450 local minutes. 1G of data is an additional $30, and North American long distance is $25, bringing the total to $95, plus taxes, fees and so on.
For $65/month Telus offers 450 local minutes plus 1G of data. Add a North American LD plan for another $35, and the total is $100, plus taxes, fees and so on.
For $60/month, Bell offers 600 local minutes, plus 1G of data. The North American LD plan adds another $30, and that brings the total to $90 per month, plus taxes, fees and the like.

Heavens! Bell offers more for less money than Telus or Rogers. Bell wins again!

Even taking into account the $35 activation fee that Telus and Rogers would charge me to switch, over the lifetime of the contract Telus is the most expensive at $3,884, and Bell the cheapest at $3,504.

Note that this doesn’t take into account the fact that Bell has given me an extra 150 minutes of usage per month as well. Since I rarely exceed 450 minutes per month on this device (my primary phone is the iPhone) it’s unlikely I would need that insurance policy, but it’s certainly nice to have.

When you net it out, I could save $215 over 3 years by switching from Rogers to Bell. That’s $5.97 per month.

Is it enough? For most people, probably not. I might switch this one phone away from Rogers just to see how good the Bell network is, but ordinarily even I wouldn’t consider the switch for $6 per month in savings.

I’m still waiting to see what happens when the real competition starts between these behemoths.

iPhone versus Blackberry: Horse race or Deathmatch?

2009-11-12T17:18:02-08:00

Infoworld’s product review format in the 1990’s was famous. It consisted of a detailed and hard hitting qualitative review, accompanied by a grid rating the reviewed product on a number of different critieria. Finally a weighted average of those criteria scores produced a single numeric score. Many a company was made or ruined by that single number.

It’s back.

In Ultimate mobile deathmatch: iPhone vs. BlackBerry vs. Droid vs. Pre Infoworld ranks 6 smartphones on 7 criteria, and then weights the scores for personal use, small business use, and “regulated business” a.k.a. enterprise use. Perhaps unsurprisingly, iPhone 3GS wins the top rating, and tied for second place are Palm Pre and BlackBerry Bold.

BlackBerry bold smokes iPhone in Enterprise, while iPhone kills Bold for personal and small business use. Weak points for iPhone? Security, business connectivity, and voice capabilities. Weak points for Bold? The browser, app support, usability, and personal technologies (the media player and so on). What would the world look like, though, if RIM fixed the browser and had more applications available? It would be a neck and neck race. Hence the reason RIM recently bought TorchMobile and launched the $150 million Blackberry Fund.

Can RIM do it? Or will Apple fix their Enterprise holes faster? What do you think?

Boingo’s sponsored hot spot program is clever marketing.

2009-11-12T08:23:36-08:00

Boingo’s sponsored Wi-Fi program caught my eye earlier this week. I’m a student of marketing programs, especially when quantitative measurement is involved. Boingo claims to have increased revenues by up to 35% at selected airports by allowing sponsors to subsidize internet access for travellers. The program requires the user to watch 30 seconds of advertising video in exchange for 15 to 20 minutes of complimentary internet access. Other opportunities exist to interact with the sponsor as well, including the welcome screen, a decision page and so on. At the end of the free period, the customer can then choose to continue by buying a Boingo day-pass, or finish up. Sponsors are reporting an astounding 39% click-through rate.

According to Boingo’s press release, the promotional campaigns “… have been sponsored by national hotel chains that wanted to communicate key amenities to a highly targeted audience, by leading search providers that wanted to fuel trials of their newly launched search tool, and by consumer electronics manufacturers whose products are targeted at early adopters.” In other words, if you’re a business traveller, stuck in an airport, and need Wi-Fi access for a few minutes, then Boingo’s sponsors might actually be delivering relevant products and services for you.

A long time Boingo subscriber myself, I checked into my own usage, and discovered that 28% of my Boingo sessions are under 20 minutes in length. It wouldn’t make sense for me to switch to their pay-as-you-go model because of the volume of my usage. However, if I was a casual user then watching a short video about a relevant product in order to gain access to a few minutes of internet usage might be very attractive. After all, in 20 minutes you could easily synch your email, download a few songs or television episodes to watch on the flight, or grab a specific piece of needed information from a web site.

And who can argue with a 39% click-through rate?

Blabellon, the net’s CB Radio.

2009-11-11T19:54:43-08:00

Last week a pretty interesting little web startup called Blabbelon debuted. Think of it as a CB radio for gamers. Using high quality audio, provided by Skype’s SILK codec, and a basic flash interface, it allows you to instantly invite pals to “blab” using a push-to-talk metaphor. Wanna talk? Push and hold the shift key and speak into your microphone. When done, release the key.

It’s fun, it’s funky, and it’s kind of retro. I kept expecting my friend Charlene, who was helping me to try Blabellon out, to yell “Breaker breaker, good buddy… what’s yer 20?”. The creators of Blabellon are hoping that it will catch on as the way for gamers to chat on the web – amongst teams, and also for trash talk with the competition.

More to the point, however, Blabellon is a clever example of how voice communication is changing. It mixes voice and web, and targets a niche “long tail” market of gamers who play games that aren’t already chat enabled. There are millions of these kids, and nobody is trying to reach them.

Perhaps it will catch on, the way twitter did. If nothing else, it’s a fun way for folks of a certain age to remember the golden age of Bert Reynolds, the CB radio, and Smokey and the Bandit.

For Rent: Cancun Holiday Villa

2009-11-08T15:17:00-08:00

Since the late 90’s, my family has owned spring timeshare weeks in Cancun. We’re heading to the west coast next summer for a family reunion and to see friends from our days living there. As a consequence, we won’t be spending our usual weeks in Mexico during March.

Today I’ve put our four spectacular time share villas at the Royal Sands Resort and Spa in Cancun up for rent. Cancun resort rentals are in high demand, and even more so if you’re planning to stay at the Royal Sands, which is one of the top rated time share resorts in the world. You can see the listing and some photographs here.

And to spice things up a little, here’s a photo of a banana blossom. It’s the size of a small coconut in real life.

eBay’s big mistake; Why the JoltID license was inevitable.

2009-11-07T07:30:49-08:00

Yesterday the end came to the Skype / JoltID lawsuit. Skype co-founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström have taken a 14% stake in the company, Index Ventures and Mike Volpi got the boot, and Skype users all across the world breathed a sigh of relief.

One thing that was never in doubt was that Skype would take a license from Friis and Zennström. Despite all of the breathless speculation that the company might buy Michael Robertson’s SipPhone and Gizmo5, it simply wasn’t going to happen. One doesn’t swap protocols for a half billion installed client applications at the drop of a hat. What was it worth to Skype to not have to do that? The deal values the JoltID license at $275 million, and the rumour mill pegged the price of the SipPhone deal at $50 million. Ergo, the cost of disrupting the Skype business by swapping out JoltID for SIP is at minimum $225 million. The disruptions to the business and to Skype’s enormous install base might have been far larger, however. A license was the only way to manage that risk. Skype knew it, Friis and Zennström knew it, and eBay knew it.

Exposed as rank neophytes in the world of software licensing, Meg Whitman’s acquisition team at eBay committed a costly error in buying Skype – not acquiring control of the entire asset. Even if the Skype founders had not wished to sell the Jolt-ID technology to eBay at the time of acquisition, a “paid-up royalty-free license in perpetuity” could have been made a condition of the deal. Licensing deals with these kinds of terms in them are common, and it’s unlikely that Friis and Zennström would have balked given the billions of dollars that eBay was already offering.

The lesson in all this? Deals involving technology licenses and acquisitions are common in business. When acquiring a technology asset, buyers must acquire the necessary control needed in order to protect the business. Either buy, or license in perpetuity, what you need to prosper. Unless your intent is to immediately begin work on a substitute technology, a license for core technology that needs renewal is a sure way to find yourself caught by the short-hairs in a future negotiation.

Om Malik said it best — “If my previous employer, Business 2.0, was still publishing the 101 Dumbest Things list, I would make eBay’s original Skype deal as the No. 1 dumbest thing…ever!”

Voxygen’s revolutionary “Caller ID” application

2009-10-30T10:17:10-07:00

Here at eComm, the last demo of the conference is one of the most impressive. Voxygen’s “next generation Caller ID” revolutionizes customer service by linking actions on a web site to a click to call button. The example they showed included a customer who browsed a camera shopping website, filled in a form for a call back, and then received a call from the customer service rep. At the call center, the representative received demographic and caller information, plus an entire history of what the customer had been browsing on the site, and up-sale tips. Result: A better and faster customer experience, with more revenue for the vendor, and lower costs.

The technology operates by assigning a unique temporary number to each support incident, and then attaching the information collected from the web site to the information popped onto the screen when the call center agent answers.

The commercial implications are obvious, but what about applications in support, learning, and coaching? The possibilities are endless. This is a winner for sure.

Links for 2009-04-22 [Digg]

2009-04-23T00:00:00-07:00

A Cyber-Attack on an American City
Just after midnight on Thursday, April 9, unidentified attackers climbed down four manholes in the Northern California city of Morgan Hill and cut eight fiber cables in what appears to have been an organized attack on the electronic infrastructure of an American city. Its implications, though startling, have gone almost un-reported.

Links for 2009-04-21 [Digg]

2009-04-22T00:00:00-07:00

Link building vs Link optimization
Valuable advice on how to optimize the links back to your site.

Links for 2009-04-15 [Digg]

2009-04-16T00:00:00-07:00

An Incidental Interview #17 - Robert Scoble and Sheryl Breuk
Proof positive that Robert Scoble brings value and has important things to say.
Three possible outcomes for Nortel after bankruptcy
Good analysis of what Nortel bankruptcy means, and who the suitors for the assets are.
Farting Permitted, Politics Prohibited?
HuffingtonPost covers the issue of Apple blocking and/or delaying games with political satire.

Links for 2009-04-14 [Digg]

2009-04-15T00:00:00-07:00

Use THIS & convince your IT department to give you an iPhone
New Forrester Report reverses their previous critique of iPhone and says "Hell yeah! iPhone is just fine for enterprise use."
Last day of 14 day free trial of Calliflower Premium
Today is the last day of iotum's special offer to trial Calliflower Premium for free -- unlimited document sharing and unlimited conference calling in 17 countries.
Skype to IPO in 2010
Huge news. Skype, with $550 million in revenue this year, expects to IPO in the new year.

Links for 2009-04-09 [Digg]

2009-04-10T00:00:00-07:00

Billy Bob Thornton's blown opportunity
How would you handle the situation if you were Billy Bob? Probably not the way he did.
Thinking about writing an iPhone App?
This is the first installment of a developer tell-all -- what went well, what could have gone better, and what was totally WTF!

Links for 2009-04-07 [Digg]

2009-04-08T00:00:00-07:00

Reinventing the conference call - Great improvement ideas
Great ideas for improving those painful teleconferences ... Even more in Sasha Dichter's reference, http://sashadichter.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/telephonitis/

Links for 2009-02-03 [Digg]

2009-02-04T00:00:00-08:00

Calliflower on iPhone Releases
remains faithful to the Calliflower experience on the web, while taking full advantage of the iPhone experience giving you the hands down BEST mobile conferencing experience ever.