Paid Search vs Email
Ever wonder what the cost of advertising on the net is, vs other media? Check out this post from John Batelle. It makes a compelling case for why Google is such an attractive buy.
Archive for August 17th, 2004
BlogMatrix
I tried the last version of David Janes’ BlogMatrix Jäger and sent him some suggestions in email. David mailed me yesterday to tell me that the new version was up, and that he had implemented many of my suggestions. Hurrah! That’s what’s called listening to your customers!
I downloaded it last night. Installation was dead simple, including importing my Radio subscriptions list. Some of the new things that I especially like include:
- You can now resize the fonts in the recently updated list. My eyes couldn’t read the lawyer font David used the first time.
- You can specify how often it rereads the blog list. This is a big improvement over Radio, which is locked into every 60 minutes. I don’t want to read blogs every hour, and with the size of my subscription list, if you don’t read when it gets new headings, it gets out of control.
- Offline mode — you can read blog entries offline if you want! Great for travel time blogging.
- Blog summaries. This is a slick feature. Clicking on a blog name produces a summary of recent entries for that blog. It makes powering through a large subscription list easy.
- Search. Another slick feature that allows you to search the list of blogs in your subscription list for specific terms.
- Watch lists. Just like search but in real time.
Nice work.
Pingtel to be the RedHat of the IP PBX World
Pingtel has completed its transition from being a hardware company to being a software only company. This news story from TMCNet tells all.
It looks like a gutsy move, designed to give incumbents like Nortel, Mitel, Cisco, and Avaya heartburn. Instead of buying a PBX, use PingTel’s open source on a subscription basis.
But is it that gutsy? At the end of the day, many enterprises buy monthly services from their carriers for $30 to $50 per seat. The cost of the PBX is incidental to the services costs. Most of the large equipment manufacturers have programs that build the cost of the PBX right into the monthly charge.
What’s the difference between that model and the model of open source subscriptions? Not much. Pingtel’s move looks like a pricing play wrapped in open source marketing hype to me.
