Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Irish telecom entrepreneur Pat Phelan has just announced a raise of 5 million euros.  You can read the whole press release on Pat's blog, but I think the opening paragraph sums it up nicely.

Cubic Telecom, the innovative international telecommunications operator, today announced plans to become the world’s first truly global mobile service provider. Cubic Telecom’s service aims to eliminate the high cost of international roaming charges by focusing on introducing simple, high-quality telecommunications services. Their breakthrough technology intelligently uses existing mobile phone network resources to drive down costs. Its core target market is aggrieved customers across the globe who don’t understand why they can’t get value for money when making international calls and roaming. Cubic is working towards free speech.

Congratulations, Pat!

Coincident with my note to Microsoft about Windows Vista quality yesterday, Microsoft let it be known that Vista SP1 would be going into beta in a couple of weeks, and surprise surprise, a substantial focus is on quality. 

Following the email I sent, two Microsoft senior execs responded yesterday — Steven Sinofsky who runs with the Windows platform organization, and Jeff Raikes, President of the Business Division.  Among the many things in Raikes' mails was a question about how well I liked Office 2007, a product that I absolutely love.  When I told him that, he observed that Sinofsky was the VP in charge of shipping Office 2007, and that he was applying many of the same methodologies to Windows Vista. 

Sinofsky gently chided me for having rose colored glasses, observing that PnP in Windows 95 routinely fried his network cards.  Perhaps, he was saying, Windows Vista isn't as bad as I've described it.  Nonetheless, he acknowledged that two key areas of focus for his team right now are application compatibility, and the video subsystem. Many of the Windows updates that go out are focused on these two areas, and that seems to be a good chunk of the focus in SP1 as well.

Time will tell.  As John McKinley pointed out, this is a franchise issue for them.  They have to get it right.

Facebook made the announced metric change to "application engagement" from "application install" yesterday.  As Fred Wilson noted, they reacted quickly to the market need for real information about the number of users as opposed to installs. 

Facebook has two new metrics — daily active users, and most active applications.  Daily active users is the raw data — how many users actually use the application.  Most active applications is a percentage metric — the percentage of users who have installed it, who are using it today.  Inside Facebook notes that the two most active applications are games.

This is a good change.  It will:

• Discourage the development of silly one-use widgets like Vampires and encourage the development of applications that people find genuinely useful.  I myself have tons of those silly apps installed… it's a defensive mechanism to ensure that they don't fill my notifications queue with garbage.
• Favour applications that produce engagement — productivity, entertainment and games, for example.

One metric that is missing is a duration metric.  If a meaningful advertising model is to be developed for facebook, a valuable piece of information would be how long the user uses the application.