Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Bogging has been a little slow today. The reason? Last night, after the Digium party, I returned to my room, grabbed a glass of water, and sat down at the PC to check the hockey scores. The Sens were playing the Leafs and I wanted to know if they had repeated last Tuesday’s victory.

You can guess what happened next.

So I’m blow drying my passport. And my keyboard. The passport pages aren’t sticking together anymore, so they might let me back in the country tomorrow. However, I’m not sure the x key and the space bar on my keyboard will ever work again. Thank goodness this is a tablet PC, and comes equipped with a pen.

The Sens won, 7 to 2.

 

This morning I had a chance to chat with Tim and Dean of Mexuar about Corraleta, their new Java based SDK for click to call.  As Dean explained, Corraleta is the world’s first Java based click to call solution.  Other solutions, like eStara, require an activeX control to work, locking the customer into the Windows platform.  Corraleta, because it’s Java, is platform independent, but more importantly, it’s just 25K of code.  It’s as small as an ordinary image file.

The cool thing about Corraleta is that it’s a small addition to your web server, and then enables click to call on Asterisk.  Delivered as an SDK, it’s skinnable and customizable.  It can do click to call to a desktop softphone, or call back.  It can also be embedded in a web page, or be part of a pop-up. 

Licensed per server, it’s also very competitively priced when compared to Flash, or other solutions.

It’s cool!  Go check it out.

An hour or so ago, the official announcement of the iotum Relevance Enabled channel partner program hit the wires.  For system integrators, VARs and Service Providers, the program has a pretty simple premise.  Add iotum to your customer offerings, and we’ll share the revenue with you. 

Programs aren’t worth much, though, without customers for those programs.  The best news about today’s announcement is the great group of partners who’ve signed on to use them, including Angel.com, Core Telecom Innovations Inc, ESCAUX, The Flat Planet Phone Company, Integrics Limited, and Nufone Incorporated. More information on each of these partners can be found at www.iotum.com/partners.php.

Here at Astricon, iotum is continuing to generate interest, and we hope to be able to announce more new relationships in the future. 

More than a partner announcement, though, for me this is a validation of the use of XML based web services to connect up new communications applications.  This idea is a foundation of the Voice 2.0 platform, and these companies are living breathing proof points for that concept.

… and how do I measure it?

It’s time for some Marketing Metrics 101, kids.  I offer this quick tutorial, inspired by Jeneane Sessum’s call for a likeability measure, and Robert Scoble’s call for an engagement measure.

Way back in the bad old days of marketing boxes of bits on shelves at retail, the good folks at Microsoft used to measure a secured customer metric.  The objective was to come up with a numerical value that could be used to determine how likely a customer would be to switch from Microsoft to someone else.  It was a pretty good metric, too.  We used it to determine which of WordPerfect’s verticals would be vulnerable to a switching campaign, for instance.

A customer was said to be secured if they rated the product highly, would repeat the purchase if given a chance, and would recommend that product to others.  You would measure each rating on a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 highest, and then take the subset of customers who scored 4 or 5 in every category as your secured customer base.  Compare that percentage to the overall customer base, and you would have a measure of the percentage of your customer base that was secured — ie. not likely to switch from Microsoft.

That’s an awful lot like what Jeneane and Robert are proposing, isn’t it?  For Ze vs Rocketbom, you want to know how many people think it’s great, how many people would return again, and how many would recommend it to their friends.  I put it to you that the top scorers in all three are engaged readers.

Here’s the rub — we used to gather this information using random digit dial surveys; telemarketing. You need to measure either a statistically significant random sample, or the whole survey set. I’m not sure you could automate this process and still get a meaningful result. 

Not letting the grass grow underfoot, Fonality has used Astricon to make their first tangible announcements around their latest acquisition, Trixbox.  Just three weeks after the announcement of the acquisition, Trixbox 2.0 beta, available today, sports a new “point and click” interface, a GUI package manager, Sangoma drivers, and integration with Lumenvox. 

Chatting with Fonality CEO Chris Lyman yesterday afternoon, he revealed that Fonality has been applying resources to Trixbox since long before the acquisition was announced.  Fonality views this release as their first opportunity to show that they mean to “do good” for the community.  With it, the process of configuring Asterisk has gone from being “super geeky” to “kind of geeky”. Fonality’s goal is that an ordinary IT consultant should be able to roll a PBX for a customer with just an hour or two of work.  With the addition of the new package manager, they claim you don’t need to go to the CLI to configure Asterisk based systems any more.  If true, that’s a great step forward.

There’s a very interesting story developing here.  At the initial announcement, I mused that Digium should have acquired Trixbox themselves.  Lyman volunteered that the Digium community was primarily focused on plumbing issues, while the Trixbox community has been focused on applications. He compares Digium Asterisk to the old CLI world of DOS, and is very focused on making Trixbox easy for mere mortals to configure and use. Naturally, these are two different models altogether.  When I pressed him, and asked if didn’t see Digium moving in that direction, he said that he saw the Asterisk appliance as a step toward an easier to use Asterisk, but he also noted that for 1/3 the cost of the Asterisk appliance, he could supply 3 times the power on a PC platform.  So far as Fonality is concerned, Digium’s appliance puts them in competition with Linksys, not Fonality.

I also took the opportunity to ask Chris how he planned to make money with Trixbox.  His answer was two parts: first, Trixbox has a great brand, and to the extent that it can court a large developer community, that’s a brand that Fonality would like to be associated with.  And secondly, Chris has observed that Trixbox is the first choice for IT managers wanting to prototype an application before asking for funds to deploy that application.  When they go for full deployment though, he believes that they will want a hardened platform, like Fonality’s commercial offering.

I speculated that they might be looking to the Trixbox community for new applications to commercialize on Fonality as well, but he demurred on that point, only saying that it was too early to contemplate a move like that. 

Tom Keating has some more perspectives here.