Alec Saunders SquawkBox

It must suck to be Bay Partners or Altura right now.  After tons of great press about their new Facebook specific venture funds, along come Facebook, Accel and Founders fund with a $10 million pot of gold for grants to founders.  That's right, if you're a worthy founder you can get up to $250K from fbFund provided you give Accel and Founders first right on your next round.

As a founder, of course, it's terrific.  You can keep all those small pre-seed investments (which tend to be very expensive) off the books, and relieves you of the need to set valuation or raise funds on a convertible note.  What's not to like?

With $10 million in grant money available from Facebook, Accel and Founders to skim La Creme, the teams at Bay and Altura are no doubt asking themselves if their funds are large enough. After all, they've just been repositioned as later stage funders.

I've been chatting with Pat Phelan about Cubic Telecom's MaxRoam SIM and phones, which which were launched yesterday at TC40, for a while.  Pat says "it's a game changer", and I tend to believe him.  The offer is pretty compelling.

The phones are 99 euros (or 159 euros for the Windows Mobile version), with all the usual accessories - headsets, chargers, synch cables and so on.  Dual mode WiFi / GSM phones, they can be used in any of thousands of hotspots worldwide, and Cubic has been busily cutting access deals everywhere in order to ensure that you have access everywhere. Calls from one Cubic subscriber to another are free when used in a hotspot. They also come with a MaxRoam SIM with 5 euros of credit. That's the kicker, frankly.  The MaxRoam LD rates will make anyone turn their head sharply… for instance, calls in Canada cost .0063 euros.  In the US, .0131 euros.  In the UK… .011 euros. In addition, you can get a local number wherever you're going, so that when you travel others can call you cheaply as well.  Each MaxRoam SIM can be provisioned with up to 50 numbers. 

As Pat said to me last Friday: "All we want is a world where anyone, anywhere can use a mobile phone to call anyone in any country for as long as he or she wants without worrying about the price."

I can hardly wait to try it out. 

"It's done!  The circle is complete.  The monster lives!"

I suppose if I was a mad scientist I might say something like that. But I'm not, so I'll just welcome the team at InMedia to the blogosphere.  Francis Moran, the big cheese at InMedia, blames it all on me… and I suppose I might have had something to do with it.  Francis and I sat down over coffee about a year ago, and I encouraged him to write a blog. I happen to think that Francis is a pretty effective writer, and he can be very provocative.  Those are great traits if you want to build a highly trafficked blog.  I also thought him an old-skool journo-skeptic.  Not so.  He just didn't want to write another PR blog.  He was looking for a unique voice.  

Choose your metaphor — he dove off the cliff, jumped in with both feet… whatever suits you.  InMedialog launched yesterday, nearly a year after that fateful coffee chat.  It's conceived as a topical periodical, with an editorial strategy, staff and benchmarks for ROI.  Did you notice, by the way, that the name of the blog is InMeDIALOG?  I have a feeling that there will be lots of dialog about the things Francis has to say.  He gives a hint about some of what he will be writing about at the end of his inaugural post with this sentence.

Bottom line: Blogs may be a new form of communications. But many of the oldest rules still apply. You’ll see a lot from me on this issue. 

Francis brings the abilities of a journalist, and the sensibility of a publisher to this new medium.  That's very cool.

Andy Abramson published a piece over the weekend offering some suggestions for FWD's new Facebook voicemail application.  His comments are dead-on for all VoIP applications today, suggesting that integration with the customers existing services is critical to success, and I am sure that the FWD team must be already planning to do some of these.  I was particularly pleased at the way that he highlighted the iotum FREE Conference Call application on Facebook as an example for others.  We built it to work with any phone, to notify people of calls using a common and widely deployed technology (SMS), and to be a tightly integrated part of a popular portal.

One of our goals in building FREE Conference Call was to provide a great Facebook experience.  Conference calling is one of those services that, increasingly, people are expecting to have as an integrated part of other services which they already use.  We didn't want to download a Java client, or do something else that felt like a bolt-on to Facebook.  We thought it was super important that the experience be as natural an experience as possible, within the Facebook metaphor.  And it turns out that there are lots of Facebook experiences that we can exploit, so expect to see more Facebook integration in an upcoming release.

And, speaking of integration, one of the most requested features after we launched was for better calendar integration.  On Friday, the dev team snuck a button labelled Export onto the call page.  After you RSVP you can press that button, and an iCal calendar entry will be mailed to your email address.  Invitees that aren't Facebook users receive the iCal request by email.

Is Vonage's day finally done?  It certainly seems that it might be the case. 

Over the weekend a good friend phoned me about his home office.  He does three or four hours of business calling per day, and wants to start doing more of it from home. He wanted to know what the best choice for phone service for him might be. "What about Vonage?  Skype?  How's the Quality?"

I suggested he try Skype and something pretty radical…  "How about just going with the phone company?", I suggested.  Bell Canada has a $25 / month add-on which gives unlimited North American calling.  Add that to Bell's $35 / month and for $60/month you have the same services that Vonage supplies.

Now, I can just hear you all clamouring "Vonage is $20 cheaper!".  True.  My experience with Vonage on DSL, which is what my friend is using for broadband, isn't one that I'd recommend for business calls.

So he's going to try SkypeOut to see if he can live with the quality and likely he will also get that second Bell line.

Bell has demonstrated that they can match the pricing of VoIP services like Vonage, and they can do it on high quality PSTN circuits.  So where does that leave VoIP?  What about Vonage? Well, it's time to evolve.  Applications and other value added services have to become the new money makers.  We've been talking about these services for years, but it seems as if 2007 is the year they must become reality. 

And here's some historical perspective.

• I penned a little ditty called the Voice 2.0 Manifesto a couple of years back suggesting some directions. 
• The spiritual godfather of the VoIP industry, Jeff Pulver, has been writing about Purple Minutes since at least 2000.
• Andy Abramson has been theming his talks Me Too, Me Also, Me Different for some time as well. 
• And the grand man of disruptive voice services, Martin Geddes, explains why he has gone cold on VoIP.