Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Closer to home, yesterday iotum partner Versature announced their relationship with Communigate.   The highly stable and scalable nature of the Communigate platform was a key factor in their decision, according to folks at Communigate.  Frankly, I think that underplays what Communigate has.  Having seen the Communigate platform in action many times over at the Versature offices, its functionality is superb, and its extensibility allows the Versature team to add new capabilities as they need.

Congrats to both!

For the last few days, courtesy of Toronto-based word of mouth marketers Matchstick, I’ve been one of 45 bloggers in Ottawa playing with a Nokia 6682 cell phone, with Rogers service.  This phone is the baby brother of the Nokia N70, which I’ve written about before, but which has never been available in Canada. In fact, none of the N series phones have been available here! A pity.  The 6682, however, is, and it’s a nice piece of gear.

From an industrial design perspective, the N70 and the 6682 are almost identical.  The 6682 is clad in an appealing pearl plastic, while the N70’s shell is plastic and brushed chrome.  Functionally, both have a sliding plastic rear panels which uncover a high quality camera.  Slide the panel open, revealing the camera, and the phone will automatically switch to camera mode, allowing you to shoot either still photos or videos.  The 6682’s camera is a 1.3 megapixel unit, capable of shooting a 1280×960 still photo.  The N70 shoots better pictures and video because of its 2 megapixel camera.  Both, however, suffer in low light settings, like bars and restaurants. The 1.5 meter range on the flash is good enough for snapping a few photos of friends while having a beer, but its effectiveness is limited beyond that.

Still, if you want to snap some photos, send them to your friends, or post them to a photo blog, this is just the ticket.  The bundled in Nokia Lifeblog software makes it a snap to do just that.

Another of the nice features of the 6682 is the music player.  It comes with a pair of high quality stereo headphones, and music playback software.  Nokia also provides an adaptor for the Nokia “pop-port” to allow any stereo headphones to be used, in case you don’t like theirs.  To get your favorite tunes onto the phone, just connect to your PC with bluetooth, or the included USB cable, and download away.  With the 512M MMC card (a $60 optional extra), your phone will have the same capacity as an iPod shuffle. 

Getting information to and from your phone is a snap with the Nokia PC Suite software.  You can synch contacts, calendar items, to do lists, music, photos and videos.  It works with either bluetooth, or a USB connection.  I found the bluetooth very convenient, and more than quick enough.

My unit came with the Nokia HS-26W bluetooth headset.  This is a very welcome improvement over the Motorola HS-820 I’ve been using for the last two years.  It has a much better design for the earpiece, and most people I’ve spoken to say that it sounds much better as well.  It’s a keeper!

Oh, and by the way, it’s also a capable cellular phone. The 6682 is a tri-band GSM/GPRS phone with EDGE for fast uploading and downloading.  They claim up to six hours of talk time on a single battery charge.  Rogers has also tricked it out with the usual assortment of links to sites to download games, ringtones, videos and more.

For my money, the Nokia 6682 is likely the best cellular phone / camera on the market in Canada right now.  Of course, I am disappointed that Nokia and Rogers haven’t chosen to market the N series phones here, but the 6682 is the next best thing.  It’s a great little unit. 

Jeneane Sessum is taking shots at the latest marketing buzzword — “attention”.  Whether you agree or disagree with her viewpoint, please go and read what she has to say. She takes the mundane, and makes it poetry.  Revel in the words.  Jeneane is one of those rare talents who can turn a phrase. 

For instance, arguing against the concept of “gestures” she writes:

More and more, my gestures reflect not what I am paying attention to, but instead are sideways related to what I’ve dropped my illusions about. In surrender of control, then, not in clinging to it, we wander here. We value most those instances of delight so fleeting that they are the opposite of thought and reason; they are out of time; they scatter us to the wind rather than draw us in.

They repel us outward, until we are untraceable, exiled, free, and only in knowing me severed will I tell you how you can find me whole.

Wow!

This morning I found this piece of email in my inbox. Alec Saunders .LOG is sooo popular that I’ve broken one of the stats packages provided by my hoster. See below.

Thank you to all of you who think that what I write is valuable or entertaining enough to keep coming back. And thank you especially to Bluehost for providing such a great service at such a low price.

—-

From: support@bluehost.com
Sent: August-28-06 6:30 AM
To: alecs@exmsft.com
Subject: Analog stats analyzer disabled for saunderslog.com.

This is a automated message from bluehost.com to let you know that your site saunderslog.com has outgrown the Analog stats analyzer that you have enabled.

Due to the way that Analog processes stats it uses a excessive amount of memory if you have a lot of traffic, so much in fact that it can actually crash your server.  Because of this we have been forced to disable Analog on your site.   You are welcome to use the other log analyzers we offer, Awstats and Webalizer, as they do not suffer from the same limitation.

If you have any questions or concerns about this please respond to this email and it will be directed to our support department.
 
Thank you,
Bluehost.com Support Services 

Google and EBay have just announced a Click to Call advertising partnership, and Andy Abramson thinks that Google got the better it.  I think he’s probably right.

I’ve built a quick model based on my own experience with Google Adsense, and some assumptions about terminations.

Let’s assume:

1. Click through rate: 2.3%.  That’s my actual today.
2. Average revenue per click: $0.25.  My actual is just under $.24. Let’s assume that Google earns at least as much as I do after they pay me.

If Google wants to build a $100 million / year business from selling advertising to EBay, then they need about 400 million clicks in a year, or 1,096,000 clicks per day.  Assuming a click through rate of 2.3%, and a paltry 2 impressions per day, gives a requirement of roughly 24 million users to earn that $100 million.

Clearly, as Russell Shaw pointed out in his piece, if Google is serious about Click-to-Call, GTalk is not going to cut it.  GTalk doesn’t have users.  Hence the reason for the deal with EBay. The writing is on the wall, especially since Skype is going to be integrated with the Google Toolbar. 

But what about on EBay’s side?  Let’s assume that the average call duration is 10 minutes, and that their costs are a very aggressive 0.5 cents per minute, and they’re able to monetize their terminations at 4 cents per minute (that’s what I currently pay for my personal toll-free 800 number, and that’s the market that EBay is going to try to displace).  At 400 million calls per year, EBay can expect to earn $160 million dollars, with costs of $40 million dollars in terminations.  That’s $20 million more than Google… so long as EBay can sustain 4 cents per minute, and that’s the rub.

EBay will argue that those clicks should be at a premium to non-voice enabled clicks.  Is that really such a good assumption though?  Google’s clicks are already among the cheapest in the industry.  Their appeal to advertisers is that they deliver volume.  Google could charge more, but would then risk losing market share. I’ll bet they follow the same strategy with Click-to-Call.

Incidentally, you can extend this reasoning one step further, and figure out why a strictly ad-funded telecom service may never be a reality.  If, instead of assuming that you’re paying termination charges for each click, but rather for each impression (as might be reasonable, if people are viewing ads while making telephone calls), then you could expect to be paying out hundreds of millions of dollars in termination costs in order to realize perhaps one hundred million dollars in revenues.

Aren’t spreadsheets the cat’s meow?

For a contrary view, read Peter Cohan.