Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Michael Geist’s column in the paper this morning highlights how government is attempting to re-introduce internet surveillance legislation by splitting opposition from privacy advocates and civil society advocates.  His blog entry covers the same ground as the paper, so if you can’t read the Toronto Star, or Ottawa Citizen, you can read his point of view online.

He quotes from a Department of Justice Memorandum:

A Department of Justice memorandum candidly notes that “current privacy laws may not be sufficient to protect Canadians’ personal information,” acknowledging that “federal privacy legislation is not responsive to new technologies, including the Internet, biometrics, data matching and data mining, video and infrared surveillance, the decoding of the human genome, the need for protection of genetic information and the ability to store and manipulate large personal data banks.” Officials are open to reform, stating that “as the privacy and personal information of citizens and businesses is increasingly vulnerable in the online environment, substantive measures to protect personal information need to be considered.” Potential solutions apparently considered by the Department of Justice include the establishment of a new Task Force on online privacy.

His conclusion is to call for the Department of Justice to work with privacy advocates, rather than seeking to diminish their influence. 

Last week Cisco bought Orative for $31 million, and it barely raised an eyebrow.  Russell Shaw wants to know why!  He rightly points out that Orative has some very cool features, and it’s a nice addition to Cisco’s bag of tricks.

So why did so many not comment?

From the publicly available data (and I will caveat this that there may be something I don’t know about here), for entrepreneurs, this looks like a sad story. The company raised a $6 million A round in 2003, and a $12 million B round in 2004.  That means that the company was probably valued at $12 million in 2003, and in the neighborhood of $30 million in 2004.  It looks like Orative sold for not much more than it was valued at 30 months ago.

For the employees, this is a possible scenario: the investors likely owned participating preferred shares, which means that they get to take their $18 million out first, leaving $13 million behind.  Again, I’m speculating, but it’s likely the investors own 65% of the company, the employee stock option pool is another 20% and the founders stake is the remaining 15%.  So the investors got another $8.45 million, all the employees split another $2.6 million, and the founders, after 5 years, receive a little under $2 million.

Not exactly a roaring success. The VC’s earned 46% in 5 years, which is about the rate that mutual funds pay.  The average employee probably earned a down-payment on a house.  And the founders made the equivalent of 5 years of salary at a larger organization.

Orative’s key capability was pushing Cisco PBX features to RIM handsets.  Orative, with a single strong partner in Cisco was a bit of a one trick pony. RIM’s acquisition of Ascendant earlier this year probably forced some soul searching at Orative.   RIM, via Ascendent, will be pushing Orative-like features to every PBX manufacturer.  The writing was on the wall.

And that kids, is a lesson on why it pays to have a broad partnering strategy. 

Mobile VoIP plays are the rage at the moment.  According to Om Malik, this morning, Voice 2.0 player TalkPlus will unveil their first offering, and announce a $5.5 million series A financing from Menlo Ventures.

TalkPlus is certainly interesting.  Unlike Jajah, T@lkster, or Rebtel, all of which you’ve read about here in the past, TalkPlus is leading with features, rather than cheap minutes, which is a welcome shift to the next phase in the VoIP market.  TalkPlus is offering a second number for your mobile phone, to allow people to better manage their personal and work lives, but from a single handset.  Unlike offerings from handset vendors that have been around for some time, albeit used only by a small number of people, the TalkPlus solution doesn’t require an additional SIM.  Simply sign up for the service, and the TalkPlus platform takes care of the rest.

Their market entry strategy is to focus on people with privacy needs — in this case, dating.  Talkplus gives subscribers a unique TalkPlus number for placing and receving dating-related calls, as well as a contact center for better managing those relationships.

Coming this winter, TalkPlus will add the ability to have multiple TalkPlus numbers on a single handset, plus the ability to select outbound numbers to present, including landline numbers, for an additional layer of privacy.  Oh… and cheap international calling minutes.

Fundamentally, TalkPlus is an identity play that leverages an idiom we’re all familiar with — the telephone number.  By giving you unique telephone numbers which you can hand out for specific purposes, TalkPlus gives you more control over how and which callers can reach you. It’s a real need, as has been noted repeatedly on these very pages.  TalkPlus offers the same capabilities as having multiple email addresses, all reaching the same inbox, or multiple IM identities terminating on a single multi-headed IM client. 

The metaphor is understandable, but the real magic may be in presenting a single identity from any handset.  With a single contact point presented to the world, the value of one-number solutions is dramatically multiplied.  Certainly that’s an issue we’ve wrestled with at iotum.  TalkPlus is a welcome and complementary solution. 

In New Technology Takes Mental Toll on Workers, Kevin Coughlin writes about the impact of cell phones, email, text messaging, and so on, on productivity.

E-mails, instant messages, cell phone calls, text messages, RSS feeds, Weblog updates, hundreds of TV channels, satellite radio, electronic billboards, even bottle caps — the information seems to come from every direction.

. . .

The technology market research firm International Data estimates 22.3 trillion e-mails will be sent this year. On average, workers must wade through about 40 every day.

That isn’t counting at least 3 billion instant messages relayed daily by America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft, says analyst Samir Sakpal of Frost & Sullivan international industry consultants. Another 81.2 billion text messages flashed onto Americans’ mobile phones last year, Sakpal says.

The numbers add up to a productivity paradox.

Electronic interruptions waste 28 billion man-hours per year in this country, at a cost of $588 billion, concludes a survey of more than 1,000 information workers by the consulting firm Basex.

He talks about a productivity paradox, but let’s take that one step further. Today’s information driven workplace and the attendant technology, is a fundamentally disempowering environment. How is it reasonable to expect any work of consequence to be accomplished in that environment?

Speaking from personal experience, my highest productivity is on airplanes — no internet, no cell phones, no text messages.

Our industry’s business model — the metering of minutes of usage — exacerbates the problem. In an environment where the model is to charge the customer for usage, there is no incentive to help the customer curb usage.

Friday afternoon, here in Dallas, I was sitting in the final session of the Astricon show. Nine folks from the Digium engineering team were crammed on stage and answering questions from probably 100 of the hardcore faithful, ranging from basic technical questions to futures to investments.

It was awesome. Sessions like this are where the good stuff comes out. For instance, we heard that there is an SS7 stack in the works, which is something that a lot of people have been asking for..

Astricon has been three days of frenetic activity. Between the meetings, sessions, and my talk, the whole thing has been a bit of a blur. Most gratifying, however, has been the recognition and response to iotum. People understand the need, especially those thinking about presence, and are responding with enthusiasm and interest.

The show had about 700 attendees. The format was a small exhibit hall and a lot of talks. Coupled with plenty of networking opportunities, it made for a great opportunity to get some serious networking done.

I didn’t see many of the talks, unfortunately. Caught part of Ed Guy and James Body’s talk on Truphone, which was excellent. Not only did we learn about their RAAMPS (redundant array of asterisk media processors) architecture, we also learned that Truphone is now available for the Nokia N91. I’ll be installing it posthaste.

The impression I was left with at the end of the show was simply that here is a community passionate about this technology, and ready todo business.

Kudos to the Sokol team for having put on such a great event.