Alec Saunders SquawkBox

My good friend Tom Howe is savage in his criticism of Ooma, and then, in Aspirin or Penicillin, follows up with a good generic post on pain points in business. I don't necessarily agree with all of Tom's criticisms, but given the veil of secrecy the company has thrown up about some aspects of its product, it's easy to see why bloggers have nearly universally thumbs-downed this product. 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. 

Vonage Communications and PR VP Karen Cleeve is probably kicking in-house flack Charlie Sahner under the table right now.  In yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle, Sahner was soundbited in the following gem:

Sahner said SunRocket failed because it couldn't meet its customer's needs for better features and strong customer support.

"We were the leader from the very beginning and we have that critical mass and the scale," Sahner said. "We helped put (SunRocket) out of business. They had a cheap product and they couldn't compete."

Given all the woes that Vonage has experienced over the last 12 months, this is a pretty hollow boast. 

Tivo continues to struggle, even as they roll out a new, lower cost, high definition unit.  For the legions of us stuck with boxes from our service providers (like the regrettably stupid Bell ExpressVu PVR), it's really too bad.  My advice to Tivo management?

• Go platform.  Tivo is a software play, not hardware.  If you can get $10 per box, that's a pretty healthy OEM margin to start. 
• Enlarge your markets.  Just a few hours north you will find 30 million Canadians.  We speak the same language as you, watch the same shows as you, and we buy the same products.  Your advertising models will work well here.  Cut a deal with Bell ExpressVu or Rogers Cable to get into their boxes. 
• Most importantly, steal a page from Microsoft's book.  Microsoft Office came to dominate the market for office applications because it offered more value at a lower price than any of their competitors. More importantly, it was tied to a cheap platform on every PC called Windows.  You have a burgeoning business in advertising, but need to get the platform into people's homes.  It's the same model.  Sacrifice profits now to do that.

Good luck.  And if you ever get Tivo on Expressvu, let me know.  I am dying to ditch the entirely unsatisfying boat anchor ExpressVu has sold me. 

In the category of good-ideas-but-dopey-implementations this morning we have BigString. The premise? There are lots of emails that you send that you simply don't want to hang around — time sensitive information that you would like to see auto-destruct, mails that you would like to recall, and the like. BigString solves that problem.

The way they've solved it, unfortunately, is a prime example of an engineering solution that doesn't take into account real world usage.  Messages are encoded as images, stored on a central server, and then links are emailed to the reader.  At a later time, the image can be removed, and presto… message contents gone. But:

• It leaves the message itself in the recipients mailbox. Recipients will know that you mailed the message, but won't know what it was about.  Highly annoying. 
• It renders the emails unsearchable.  That's a complete non-starter for me, especially since migrating to Outlook 2007 which indexes EVERYTHING. Even more annoying. 
• Many modern email systems either don't allow mail with embedded images to be delivered, flag them as unsafe, or automatically drop them into the spam filter. Yup… send me your time sensitive, self destructing email full of valuable information and… it's gonna go to the spam bucket.  Searching the spam filter for your important mail is Grossly annoying.

BigString's premise is a good one. It needs a different implementation to be useful.

via Ars Technica

That giant sucking sound many web properties feared as Facebook gobbled up their users may, in fact, be the sound of their own sites inhaling added revenues.  New data from Quantcast suggests that existing web properties who choose to build Facebook apps are seeing a spike in the traffic on their old sites.  Hmmm…. I guess the question of whether to view Facebook as competition or a partner has been answered for these folks.

It's not that surprising, though.  Given Facebook's undeniable popularity, viral distribution model, and high page rank it makes sense that anchors planted there would lead back to the host site.