Alec Saunders SquawkBox

How do you politely tell someone that they're working in a dying industry?

Yesterday a rep from Meltwater, a media monitoring company, nabbed me on the telephone for 30 seconds and convinced me to let him send me a media tracking report so I could see how valuable Meltwater's services would be to us at iotum.  So I said yes.  What he sent me was a report that contained five references to iotum in the media from last week, of which four were Nick Hoover's piece telling people that I would be speaking at Enterprise 2.0.  Now, I happen to know that there were more, because I have a Google search set to send me a piece of email anytime there's a mention of iotum anywhere.  I didn't think too much of what he sent. 

So I wrote him back as follows:

XXX, I’m a web 2.0 savvy guy.  Whenever anyone mentions iotum, or any of a list of our competitors, or my name, or links to any of our sites, or writes about any of a series of topics that I care about on the web, Google sends me a report – either instantly, or daily, depending on what I am interested in.  In addition, I use Illumio to sift through a further 900 feeds for topics that might be of interest to me.  AND, my PR agency compiles a weekly media report which they mail to me.

It’s all pretty automated, and it all works pretty well.

What will this do that I can’t handle using one of the techniques I already have?  Because (and I’m trying to be gentle) what you’ve sent me doesn’t seem valuable.  Four publications ran Nick Hoovers story where we were mentioned… I knew that last week when it happened.  Where are the mentions of us this week?

I’m not trying to piss in your pool.  Just want to know whether your service is for a company like ours, or for a more traditional company that needs help with the basics of media monitoring.

So he sent me another report.  This one tabulated mentions of iotum by publication for the past 14 weeks.  It was basically a spreadsheet, counting articles and mentions, by publication.  He described it as a "small sample" of their capabilities, but it was pretty underwhelming.  I wrote him back once more, as follows:

Vis a vis your spreadsheet below – I get the same thing from my agency each week, and they relate the coverage back to each individual news event that we create together so we can measure ROI.  Frankly, it’s better data than what you’re providing and the analysis they provide makes it more valuable. 

Tell you what … since I’ve been doing PR and ROI measurement on PR for nearly two decades now, why don’t you blow my socks off rather than providing “small samples”.  If you can wow me… show me something I don’t already know about my company… then it might be valuable to talk again.  From what I’ve seen so far, I don’t believe I need what you’re selling. 

I think you’re going to be challenged, though, by the fact that we’re a small company generating small amounts of news.  Our needs are very adequately met with the tools we have now.  We just don’t have the same needs as a fortune 1000 company.

The real issue is simply this.  Monkeys can do the monitoring today.  Just set up a few Google searches, and specify when you want the results sent.  Anybody solely in the monitoring business is going to be displaced by Web 2.0 technologies like search. 

No, the value that these services might be able to provide is in the analytics.  How many mentions are positive vs negative?  What is the reach of each article, BPA audited and otherwise?  How many conversations did it start?  What's the link count in from elsewhere? 

If you're in the monitoring business, think about that rather than trying to sell me what Google gives me for free. 

Brian McConnell dropped me a line a couple of days ago to talk about the new Wordpress Plug-in for WorldWide Lexicon, his project to translate the web using human volunteers.  Toward the end of the conversation he also let me know that OCS (the company behind Radio Handi) would soon be acquired, but that he couldn't let me know who the mystery acquirer was… just yet!

The news is out this morning.  Radio Handi has been bought in a cash and royalties deal by hosted PBX provider Virtual PBX.  From the press release:

With this acquisition, Virtual PBX gains access to OCS' cross-platform telecommunications environment and expertise. This platform will add a wide range of VoIP, mobile, text, and mixed-media communication services to the Virtual PBX product line. By combining technologies from the two companies, Virtual PBX plans to provide a suite of virtual office telecommunications services that can be purchased separately or together, expanding existing markets for the company and enabling new market penetration. New offerings
based on this infrastructure will begin to appear by the fourth quarter of this year.

It makes sense.  Much of what OCS built could be very effectively targeted into the enterprise space, even though their focus with Radio Handi was consumer. 

Congratulations!

Things are getting a little frothy for JAJAH on the investment front.  With investments from Intel Capital and Deutsche Telekom, they're flush with capital.  Scanning the blogs yesterday, I came across this piece from Markus Göbel highlighting that Swiss investment firm Qino Flagship has increased their investment in JAJAH by another $1 million as well.  Most interesting was the quoted research from Austrian investment firm RRS Capital Strategies valuing JAJAH at $2.9 billion, based on comparatives with Skype at the time of the EBay acquisition of Skype.  That caused me to raise my eyebrows, I admit.

According to Google's mangled translation of the piece that Markus originally quoted:

RRS calculated now on basis of the user data and that multiple, to which the VoIP offerer Skype at the end of on of 2005 was sold ebay, for one fair VALUE of approximately 2.9 billion dollar for jajah.

It sure would be interesting to know how RRS arrived at this figure, given how different the companies are.  For example:

• Skype has 10's of millions of free users who never pay for anything.  Every JAJAH user is a paying customer, even if they don't pay a lot.   JAJAH ought to be much more profitable than Skype on a per user basis. 
• Skype makes a significant amount of revenue from royalties on hardware devices that incorporate Skype.  JAJAH has no such play, as Aswath Rao pointed out yesterday.

Even so, co-Founder Daniel Mattes claims the company is on a steep revenue ramp, and would be profitable today if they cut back their marketing.  He is even talking about an IPO. That would certainly turn heads, were it to occur.

The Air Canada lounge at Logan airport is a regrettably grubby little hole.  It's not the sort of place one wants to spend long periods of time in.  Still, as I sit here, stuffed full of expensive flavorless "cobb salad", it gives me an opportunity to reflect a little on what I've learned at the Enterprise 2.0 conference these last few days.

First, business recognizes that knowledge (and indeed business itself) is social.  The predominant focus of this conference was on social media.  Whether that manifested itself in discussion of social knowledge management tools like wiki's and blogs, or social networking tools provided by IBM, Microsoft and countless other small startups, or collaboration and sharing tools, the belief system in enterprise has shifted dramatically in the last 24 months.  Information is for sharing, not hording.  Groups are smarter than individuals.  And paradoxically, the problem of information overload is solved by… more information.

On my way here, I chatted with my good friend Tom Howe in the cab.  He asked what did I learn?  I answered that two weeks ago I had observed that business is social — that we socialize in business all the time, but for different reasons than we socialize personally.  I thought that was a pretty profound observation, personally, since social networks (for example) are usually niched as consumer items.  But then, I said to Tom, my "grand insight" turned out to be not very original at all, as I observed at least a half dozen startups building Facebook-like products for enterprise, as well as IBM and Microsoft.

Second, the culture of business is changing dramatically.  For instance, 95% of Microsoft employees use "personal profile" pages online, which perform substantially the same function as a Facebook application, but with a business focus.  It lets everyone know your background, education, what you're working on, and most importantly, who you know in the organization.  Need to find an expert? Forget the corporate directory.  Consult your network.  Need a question answered?  Consult your network.  And so on… the hierarchical command and control structure of enterprise has been under attack for some time, but never before have the core IT assets that run the entire industry been so widely ignored.

Third, the business of being an enterprise solution provider just got a lot harder.  Over and over we heard repeated that the young bring their own networks and applications to business.  And because these are mostly web based applications, not much can be done to contain them.  Within a short period of time, we should expect millions upon millions of GMail, facebook, and Skype users within every enterprise globally.  The conference even ran a well attended panel on Skype as a platform for  business!

Speaker Don Tapscott (one of the best at the show) characterizes the shift in business processes and culture as one of the most profound in the history of business.  He says:

Today people cannot only socially gather, they can socially produce. Peers outside the boundaries of corporations or corporations acting as peers or peers within the boundaries of a hierarchy can collaborate across boundaries.

Business is social.  The customers own the business, not the shareholders.  Knowledge is collaborative, multiplicative and shared.  And we've only just gotten started. 

From the Labs is one of those sessions that I just love to see.  Researchers from Brightcom, IBM and SAP were on stage showing their "experiments" — technologies that they've got in the labs, that they agreed to come and show.

Brightcom's research project was about future generations of telepresence.  Rather than focus on high definition video, their assertion is that the future will be telepresence delivered via immersive worlds (like Second Life).  They showed some mock-ups of that hyper realistic immersive world, and then… ran a little "experiment" within second life. 

IBM's Many-Eyes is a tool for data visualization.  You can use it to easily visualize and manipulate huge data sets… and use social tools to comment on it.

SAP showed a widget set and tools that they're building to allow companies to deploy business data directly to the desktop.  They propose to build a distribution mechanism like Facebook's feed which will surface which users in the organization are using which widgets.