Alec Saunders SquawkBox

UPDATE: This story actually has a very happy ending. Fred contacted me in September and apologized. He turned out to be a wonderful guy, and generously offered to write and produce a video for us, which we released in December to promote our New Years call.

—————————-

I had a tough decision to make this afternoon.  I pulled our iotum Talk-Now demo videos down from YouTube. 

All week long some friends of mine have been telling me that the video I built showing the iotum Talk-Now application looked amateur.  Well, it did.  It looked really amateur.  That’s because it was.  I shot it with some help from some of the guys in the office, on a Sony Camcorder I bought for my wife for Christmas.  I edited it on some really inexpensive software from a company called AVC Media in the UK.  Then I posted it on YouTube and Google. It was only the second video I’ve made in my life.

Nevertheless, I was pretty pleased with it. Yes, it was long.  But I thought it important to show people a demo of the product.  Yes, I’m not the best voice for video.  I thought it important to tell people what it was about in our own voices.  And yes, the screen jiggled and shook.  That’s because we were shooting video of real Blackberries in use by real people.  I thought it important that people see the product in action, rather than a Flash demo. 

My friends warned me that because it was amateur looking, it could be subject to ridicule.  If it were ridiculed, the ridicule might become bigger than the message that the video was trying to convey.  And if that happened, iotum would be associated with that ridicule rather than the cool new product we’re trying to promote.

I chose to take the risk, believing that the benefits of actually showing Talk-Now outweighed the risk.  I was wrong.

The ridicule that my friends predicted might happen, did.  Fred Graver slammed it on his blog.  Now, Fred’s a nobody in the blogosphere.  Bloglines says that 5, yes, count ‘em 5, people subscribe to his feed. Technorati ranks him 347,247, and Alexa ranks him 906,171.  Judging by his Wikipedia vanity piece (mostly edited by himself, it turns out), he has a Hollywood-size ego. He seems to be trying to make a name for himself by “routinely pissing people off”, to quote from his site.  An old media VH-1 video producer, he’s trying to break into new media by writing a blog.

What are the odds that anybody reads this guy?  Not much. Nevertheless, satire and ridicule go viral, which made the risk too great to leave the videos up there any longer.  So I pulled them, and we’ll replace them with some professionally produced ones at some point in the future.  (sigh) The last thing a start-up needs to do is spend a bunch of money doing expensive video production.  Thanks to Fred, however, it appears that we have no choice.

You win Fred.  And by extension, the net loses. 

If the only kind of video that can be shown is highly produced soundbites of material, then internet video is nothing more than television extended to a new medium. Isn’t that the television industry’s agenda, anyway?  Oh yeah, I forgot, Fred’s a producer for VH-1… his agenda and the television industry’s agenda would be the same, wouldn’t they?  That would explain the tagline on his blog (”Same idiots.  New idiot boxes.”). 

Enough about Fred and his idiot box. 

We’re still open for people to test-drive the iotum Talk-Now application.  We have a few hundred folks using it now, but more would be even better.  If you’ve got a Blackberry 8700, a Pearl, or a late model 7200 series device running OS 4.1 or better, you can register to use iotum Talk-Now at http://www.iotum.com/blackberry.  And if you’d just like to know more, there’s a user guide and FAQ available also.

If you want to see an example of masterful interview skills, check out the following video of Steve Ballmer being interviewed about Apple’s iPhone strategy.  He starts off with: “$500! Fully subsidized! With a plan. That’s the most expensive phone in the world. And it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine.” Then he moves to a discussion of all the things that the Windows Smartphone can do, notes that you can buy the Motorola Q for $99, that Microsoft is shipping millions of phones today, and concludes “I like our strategy”.

The interviewer has another try.  Undaunted he tees up a question about the success of the iPhone launch, and asks “How do you compete with that?”.  Ballmer steers the interview right back to “We’re shipping millions of phones today, and Apple is shipping none.  In six months time, they’ll be in the market with the most expensive phone ever.”

His messaging is so clear — iPhone doesn’t appeal to our customer base, it’s too expensive, and by the way we’re shipping millions of phones today already — and he doesn’t deviate one iota.  Bam bam bam. 

Calling all codec geeks! 

Ever wondered what the difference in true bandwidth requirements, latency, and so on is between G.729a 8k and G.711 48k (for example)?  Check out the bandwidth calculator to find out. It provides full details on latency, bandwidth requirements, packets per second and so on.

Cool!

I got the following mail in my inbox this morning from Bluehost:

Dear Bluehost.com Customer,

We finally have some good news to report. After literally months of research into
system performance techniques and I/O tuning we have rolled out a series of changes
to our servers that have immediate and beneficial effects. By the time you read this
the server that hosts your website should have a decreased server load of between
100-300%. This means that for those users that experienced constant performance
problems with our server speeds that your problems should be significantly reduced.

Of course this isn’t a magic bullet, and we still have servers that have load spikes and
other various problems and issues that go hand in hand with providing shared hosting
services. We should have more good news to report in the coming weeks and there
is still much to be done to provide better uptime with fewer interruptions to critical services.

Also, as many of you may know a few months back we leased a new datacenter that is
solely for our use and is only 200 yards from our offices. It will allow us to grow to nearly
2,000 servers before requiring additional space. This is a huge long term benefit for us
as almost all hosting companies outsource their servers to a datacenter that is not under
their control. The downside is that it has been painful as we move all our servers to this
location. Downtime and unforeseen problems have been a big part of this migration process.
I wanted to let you know that the end is in sight. Most of the servers have been moved,
and all of the mission critical portions of our network have now been moved. Most of our
intermittent downtime has been because of this enormous move.

Things are improving and long term problems are starting to subside. Thanks for sticking
with us as we look forward to the continuation of improvements that are sure to come!

Thanks,
Matt Heaton / President Bluehost.com

Unfortunately for Matt, just yesterday I completed a move to IISNet Networks.  After months of poor service from Bluehost, I was at my wits end.  Not getting any satisfaction from tech support, I believed that I had simply outgrown Bluehosts offering.  So, after a quick series of email exchanges, IISNet set up a trial account at no charge to me, and transferred my site from Bluehost to their servers. The whole move was done in less than 6 hours.  My site runs faster, and features that were formerly broken (like Feedburner redirect) work again.  I like what I see.

In a crafty piece of marketing yesterday, Skype actually announced that they were raising their prices (yes, indeed!), while positioning this new pricing plan as disruptive. 

1. They’ve rolled out a new SkypePro plan, which allows unlimited local calling, and includes Skype VoiceMail.  You used to pay 15 euros annually for Skype VoiceMail, and most people use Skype for long distance calling. SkypePro is 2 euros per month. 
2. They’ve introduced a new “connection fee” at the beginning of every call to the PSTN.  Common in the prepaid phone card industry, this 3.9 eurocent fee guarantees a (small) minimum revenue for every call, even those very short calls that end in voice mail. 

Madame Meg must be putting some pressure on Niklas and his team to make a contribution to the bottom line.