Alec Saunders SquawkBox

If you were one of the many people who lost BlackBerry service earlier this week, RIM has offered an explanation.  Apparently an insufficiently tested storage software upgrade was the root cause.  The good news, presumably, is that when they get it right increased storage will allow us all access to more features and of course, more email. 

Joost Exec VP David Clark recently gave an interview to CBS TV showing off Joost.  He started by describing the quality of the picture, and the universe of channels, and then headed off (at the end) into the hinterland of interactive TV by showing a bunch of features that would allow you to get more information about a television show, and interact with other users.  Hmmm, said the skeptical interviewer, how is this different from the webTV efforts of the past.  Clark's answer was, essentially, "I don't know why they didn't succeed but ours is really really cool".

There have been huge investments made in the past by various companies. At Microsoft we built a very elegant framework for adding interactive content to television shows, and pioneered a whole bunch of interactive shows with various studios like NBC. We built delivery mechanisms as well that allowed that content to be delivered by satellite, or even as a slow speed forward-error-corrected bit stream in the unseen portions of a broadcast signal.  We also acquired WebTV for over $400 million to bring internet content directly to television.    These efforts failed because they really didn't understand how users watched TV.    By focusing on bringing PC like features to the big screen, they misunderstood that for most television viewers, TV is a passive experience – a "10 foot" versus "2 foot", or "lean back" vs "lean forward" experience.  Most TV users wanted a better picture (bigger and clearer), and more shows to watch.

Since the late 90's, many more people watch television on PC's, internet based social networks have entered the mainstream, and streaming video is now mainstream.  Interactive TV's time may be here finally, and Joost may be the company that finally succeeds with it.  However, the road is littered with the corpses of those who've tried and failed along the way.

In the context of Vonage's woes, Telco 2.0 offers the following 8 part recipe for "better telephony", arguing that if Vonage wanted to differentiate themselves in the market, they would build a better communications experience.  Hear hear!

• Available everywhere, for everyone, in any situation. You might think that mobile telephony is the last word in spreading talk into every corner of our lives, but it’s not. Vonage need to make their experience:
  • Reach new outlets. You should be able to initiate a Vonage click-to-call from any web site, do callback from any phone (as with Jajah, for example) and avoid bill international calls to your Vonage account.
  • Reach new users. Vonage could have offered high-margin devices for kids, who are today excluded from telephony because you’re afraid what will happen when your three year old starts pressing the buttons. Why can’t my kids call their grandparents whenever the latter are online?
• Socially aware. This means allowing users to have roles and multiple personas — the “business” me, the “personal” me and the “private” me. The last may offer anonymous calling, for example, with disposable time-limited numbers for dating or auction site use. Another example might be iotum’s smart routing that understands the difference between a client calling you and a colleague.
• The ultimate directory. Use caller name databases, automatically fill in my address book, let me search my social network as well as “friends of friends”.
• Presence-enhanced to help users time their calls. If you knew someone was on a call already, would you have called? If you knew they were on a business trip to China and it’s 3am there, would you have called? If you knew they were in a meeting… you get the idea.
• Enhanced privacy and security. Encrypt on-net calls. Gather data on rejected calls, unreturned voicemails, and work out who needs to be excluded from bothering users and when.
• Improved media experience. We’re seeing BT position themselves here as the “premium audio” player with their hi-ds branding. Other examples might include audio tones (whacky noises to play during calls), ringback tones, and enhanced conference calling where you can tell who is speaking (Skype does this). Build cameras into every Vonage phone, and make “see what I see” a core feature. Press the shutter button briefly, it shares the snapshot; hold it down, we’ve got shared video. Just don’t call it a video call — let the users add or subtract pictures and video as appropriate during the conversation.
• Integrated payment and data transfer. Partner with merchants to make the “Vonage-enhanced” calling experience a truly wonderful one, free from annoying IVRs and dictation of personal profile and payment details. (eBay might be able to execute on this with Skype and Paypal, Vonage alone would need partners). It’s like Adobe’s acrobat and your tax return: you can print it out and manually fill it in, or you can enter the details electonically into the form. Make Vonage telephony multi-modal from the start, keep the devices with a common, simple UI that avoids the fragmentation of Java mobile handsets.
• Perfect the user interface. Make voicemail as easy to use as the iPod is. Make conference calling simple and intuitive.

Manage teams?  Anne Zelenka's piece Busyness vs Burst is a good read.  It explains why software developers keep odd hours, and how that drives managers crazy, amongst other things.

Ian Telfer is one of the most successful businessman in Canada.  A self admitted screw-up, he chairs Vancouver's Goldcorp, the largest publicly traded company in British Columbia, and the second largest gold mining company in the world (by market capitalization).  He offered 12 lessons for people starting their careers, and for people in the middle part of their careers at a recent speech to the Vancouver Board of Trade.

Read the whole piece. My favorites? 

"People are prepared to charge up a hill behind a competent leader, even if it's the wrong hill. Many of the times, the wrong hill is better than no hill at all."

 and…

"You're screwing up when you're not screwing up."

 To which I would add "learn to fail, fast."