Alec Saunders SquawkBox

More details of how Ooma works are coming to light.  Andy Abramson got part way through the install, and then chose to not continue because by agreeing to the Ooma terms, he was allowing Ooma to reconfigure his phone service.  A number of folks I've spoken with have also reported the same. During my conversation with Ooma founder Andrew Frame he mentioned that they "stripped away" all the phone company features, which I didn't dig into further at the time.  .

That reconfiguration may be a clue as to how Ooma provides some of it's capabilities.  Some of us, for instance, have wondered how they're able to correctly show caller ID on an outbound "shared termination" call from the Ooma device.  If Ooma were actually a carrier as well as a device manufacturer, that might answer the question.  Needing to keep a carrier network running might also explain why the price point of the device is $400.

Pure speculation, of course.  For now, the details of how Ooma works remain a mystery. 

Chris Pirillo has a beef with social networks.  It's called identity. A poseur on Pownce has snatched his identity, and started to sign up unwitting powncers as his friends.  People he doesn't know.  People who don't know him.

Virtually all social networks suffer from the same problem.  As networks proliferate, individuals can't be members of all networks, and are therefore vulnerable to having their identity spoofed on that network.  

The solution is OpenID.  Claim your identity once, and assert it on every site that supports OpenID. 

To make that work, of course, folks on Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, Pownce, Twitter, and so on would have to follow Plaxo's example, and support OpenID for login.  Even better than what Plaxo does (support OpenID or their proprietary login) would be to simply support OpenID.  Period. 

Speaking as a consumer, I have to respectfully disagree with some of Mark Goldberg's points in his latest posting about the Canadian wireless market.  He is reacting to a Montreal Gazette piece titled Canada's wireless policy is clueless.

Mark writes:

"More than one such device per person" makes no rational sense. It is a statistic driven by customers arbitraging aberrant pricing plans. Canada should not strive to have disfunctional European pricing models that lead to supra-normal penetration rates. The Gazette apparently thinks that it is good to have multiple phones so that when you call someone on the Bell network, you use a Bell phone; have another phone for your Rogers-based friends and a third for TELUS calls. That is one of the phenomena that drives European penetration in excess of 100%. People holding onto foreign country pre-paid SIM cards is another contributor.

Today I already carry two phones in Canada.  I'm a heavy business user and a heavy personal user of the telephone.  Carriers provide generous evening and weekend plans, but punch users in the pocketbook on daytime minutes.  A plan like Cingular's $99 / month with 1600 minutes of airtime plus evenings and weekends free would suit my needs very well.  Instead I carry a 1200 minute Blackberry plan ($150+$100 for data), plus a separate phone with an unlimited evening and weekend plan ($60 or thereabouts). I am paying 3x the price for less service than my American friends are.

In addition, I also buy pre-paid SIM cards to roam on the US networks because Rogers' $.95/minute roaming charge is so outrageous when I travel.  I travel just often enough to be outraged by their price, but too little to justify their $.22/minute North American roaming plan.

On the topic of phone subsidies, Mark writes:

Europeans typically receive no subsidy for their phones. Would the Gazette also want each of us to pay upwards of $150 more for our phones as well?

As the old commercial use to say, "you can pay me now, or pay me later." Canadians like to pay later. We also like to be able to call local numbers for free from our home phones. Europeans get gouged.

Give me the option Mark.  My current favorite phone is the Nokia N95 with it's 5 megapixel camera and fabulous media capabilities. Not available in Canada.   In fact, you can already buy unlocked phones (including the N95) without contracts from TigerDirect and other retailers.  It's just not widely known. Subsidized phones are the means that carriers drive greater penetration, and also the means by which they lock customers into long term service contracts.  This Canadian would prefer the freedom to cancel service without a contract penalty.  But you know what? When I activated that phone on the Rogers network they demanded a one year contract… because they can. I brought my own phone, and my own SIM card.  It cost Rogers absolutely nothing, except five minutes of a technicians time to get that service running. But I had no choice.

And on wireless data fees, Mark writes:

…blaming high data plan pricing for the delay in iPhone's launch is just not credible. The iPhone hasn't been launched in Germany or any country other than the US. Other countries are said to have better suited data prices; their markets are bigger. But no iPhone. Why is that?

Could it be that Apple is rolling out the product on their own schedule?

Canadians continue to buy the latest versions of Blackberry. Carriers have introduced special plans for Mobile TV that don't charge by the bit. Canadians are continuing to buy wireless services for the first time increasing our penetration rates, and add new enhanced multi-media features which speaks louder to affordable prices than repeated rantings from opinion pieces in papers.

I agree that Apple is rolling out on their own schedule.  However, it's still true that Canadian data rates are outrageously high.  Each and every time I take a photograph with the wonderful 5 megapixel camera on the N95 I want to immediately upload it to the internet.  Each picture is close to 1 megabyte in size because of the resolution.  However, with the consumer data package I have on that phone, I have a limit of 5 megabytes of data per month.  That's five photo uploads.  Thankfully the N95 has WiFi as well, which means I can upload from any hotspot. Now… I COULD upload those photos using MMS service, but how do I upload to my favorite photo sharing site, Flickr?  Can't.  They don't have an MMS interface.

Most of what I want is choice.  When carriers try to maximize their profits with new product offerings that constrain my choice, I get upset.  I don't want to pay them for their Mobile TV.  I want a decent price on a connection where I can choose the content — the Internet.  I don't want their phones.  I want the choice to use any phone that I desire.  And most of all I want all of this on terms and at prices that carriers in the rest of the industrialized world seem to have figured out how to deliver profitably.

Viewed through the lens of the telecom business, Mark is dead on when he writes about increasing market penetration, etc.  But viewed through the eyes of the consumer, the industry is out to lunch.  Most people hate the wireless industry's gouging contracts, would like to use more data services but are afraid of the prices, and want the cool and sexy handsets they see our US friends sporting. 

 I was very flattered, yesterday, to have Stuart Henshall hold me, this blog, and iotum, up as an example of folks living a social strategy in marketing. Didn't know quite how to respond, which is why I waited until today to write anything.   As hard as it is to believe, I am a little self conscious about public praise.  I guess it's a Canadian thing. 

When I began writing, almost five years ago and long before iotum existed, it was simply to have a voice in the conversation called the web. I wrote about politics (local, national and international), technology, and wine.  When Howard and I started our company, it was a natural to have some of what I wrote about here be reflective of what we were doing in the work place.  And along the way a small following (I get about 70,000 unique visitors per month) of people developed who read what's written here. Over the past 5 years the subject matter has become more industry focused than at the start… although you still get to hear about my vacations, political views and wine drinking occasionally.  That's the voice of this blog. 

Thank you for the recognition Stuart. 

The genesis for Stuart's post was that a couple of days ago, writing about the negative response of bloggers to the Ooma launch, I said:

That's a failure of the company's marketing programs, and nothing more.  An intelligent outreach program could have mitigated the negative sentiment which now has the potential to turn into an outright disaster for the company. 

Andy Abramson added:

I don't think though its simply a matter of "a good outreach" program. A lot of it has to do with telling people about a product versus giving them the product to try. This is called Hype.

Stuart chimed in with:

Where I want to pick a bone is on your perceptions that the PR and Marketing failed to have the right blogger outreach. While it may have helped the real problem is still the product and the price point. Still I think it goes further than just the product and there are lessons for hardware / physical product launches everywhere.

In a 2.0 world marketing is reframed; the consumer is dead, and the users are people. Every product requires a social strategy. Products like the message are inherently social. All media is now social. I know you know this. Iotum has a presence and SOCIAL standing way beyond it's footprint. This traces to trust, transparency and a sense that "we" know and understand what you and your team are trying to do. Most importantly Iotum seems communications as social.

The Ooma marketing failed on all these fronts. They are not transparent about the technology. The product suggests security compromises. They brought in an Actor and and that's supposed to make it cool. They thought they were in control of the "message". That's an old school thought and thinking that too many companies are continuing to make. Ooma is not a social product.

The brand manager cannot own the message. We the "people" are the message and collectively "place" the product. In many ways it's always been that way. Just in this case — no one seemed to ask… "what will the WOM (word of mouth) be?". Andy perhaps characterises this very well describing it as "Hype".

I agree with both positions.  What I casually called "marketing programs", and "outreach" is best exemplified by the kinds of programs that Andy Abramson's Comunicano runs, and it's the sort of thing that Stuart describes. At its best, PR is a series of engaged conversations with stakeholders in the market.  The worst, and today most easily recognized and dismantled by commentators on the internet, is old-style command and control messaging.  Hype and unsupportable statements are at most spin, and sometimes little more than bald-faced lies.  How do you build a relationship and trust with your customer in that environment?

Yesterday MySpace deleted the profiles of 29,000 sex offenders from the site.  It was a good PR move for the company, and more motivated by wanting to be seen to be "taking action" by politicians and the public than anything else.  After all, it would be a simple enough task to gain access to the registered sex offender database, compare emails to registered emails on MySpace, and then delete the accounts.  No doubt any real predators who want to target MySpace users will simply create another account.

It generated a fair amount of debate.  Stephanie Booth pointed out that prudish sex offender laws in many states lump acts between consenting adults into the same category as those preying on children.  You can read her full post, but let's just say that it's hard to imagine that most adults haven't, at one time or another, committed one of these acts.  That's why what MySpace and grandstanding Connecticut AG Richard Blumenthal have done is nothing more than a placebo perpetuated on an unsophisticated public that really just wants to protect kids.  Their actions are a fraud.

Brandon Watson, the CEO of IMSafer, wrote an impassioned and lengthy post also. His point? Predators go where they prey is.  He backs it up with some statistics designed to show that the incidence of predation on MySpace may be higher than in society at large.  Like Stephanie, he also notes that it's not the young kids that are vulnerable, but the teens, quoting University of New Hampshire's David Finkelhor:

So these are not mostly violence sex crimes, but they are criminal seductions that take advantage of teenage, common teenage vulnerabilities. The offenders lure teens after weeks of conversations with them, they play on teens’ desires for romance, adventure, sexual information, understanding, and they lure them to encounters that the teams know are sexual in nature with people who are considerably older than themselves.

Given the wide scope of definition around the term sex offender, it's nearly useless for identifying predators and for protecting the vulnerable in society.  Tools like the ones that Brandon's company, IMSafer, provides are whatreally help to keep kids safe.  IMSafer uses sophisticated pattern matching algorithms to look for text that might be considered dangerous in IM messages, and then alert parents to the conversations.  It goes right to the heart of the problem, which are conversations between our kids and strangers.  At the same time, it's not an intrusive or privacy busting solution because it only alerts parents when a potentially dangerous situation is occurring.  The rest of the time, kids privacy is preserved.

Brandon dropped me a note last week to say that since their launch they are now monitoring over 2,000,000 relationships, and have scanned 100 million messages.  What IMSafer is doing is far more meaningful than MySpace's decision to delete a few user accounts.  If you have reason to be concerned about your children's safety online, then you owe it to yourself to check out IMSafer.