Alec Saunders SquawkBox

People keep sending me interesting new blogs.  Take ThreeDimensionalPeople, for instance.  Authored by Stephen Johnston, a London based Nokia employee, it's got all kinds of nifty stuff to read.

Presence: A Red Herring? is a rant on the idea of "just adding presence" to mobile phones.  Stephen points out a bunch of the problems associated with today's presence implementations, and proposes to solve them by limiting the data made available, making it effortless to use, and making updates asynchronous (ie. when the publisher chooses, as opposed to context change).  That's essentially what iotum has done with Talk-Now — we've limited the data by confining it to a business application space, and made it effortless by driving everything from context.  Context updates do need to be recorded in real time, however, even if the presence information isn't published in real time. 

It's a big day for the Jajah team.  12 months after launch, they have:

• passed 2 million subscribers.  Those are Vonage-like numbers, folks.  Viral marketing has helped them do that without a Vonage-like expenditure. 
• announced the appointment of a new CEO, Trevor Healy, formerly VP at Paypal. 

Congratulations!

In The Magic of Presence, Chris Gare has popped out a nice overview of some of the innovative presence companies out there today.  I gave him a call this morning, and we chatted for 30 minutes.  Nice guy.

For me, the call illustrated neatly the spectrum of opinion that exists around presence, especially in the mobile space.  For example, I've had several conversations recently with individuals in large companies who have made statements like "mobile presence? isn't that just (pick your favorite) Google Talk / MSN Messenger / AIM on a handset?".  At the other extreme, there are guys like Chris who really understand the boundaries and complexities of presence.

The challenge, for all those who would sell presence to ordinary people, is to describe it in terms that the average person can understand.  For example, when we began describing iotum Talk-Now, we talked about a new application that would help you see who was available to talk, be notified when the people you needed to speak with were available, and share your availability with others.  See, be notified, share.  Those are the key concepts — not 'presence'.

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