Alec Saunders SquawkBox

We'll be doing a little load testing on the iotum FREE Conference Call application tomorrow afternoon.  I've invited 39 of my friends to join me on a test call.   With a little luck, the facebook viral gods will turn my 39 friends into 390 or so as they each tell two friends and so on and so on and so on… We'll be paying homage to the Breck Girls, if you're old enough to remember them. 

So, if you would like to join us, and you're on Facebook, please feel free to add the following conference call to your schedule.  Invite two friends too!  It promises to be fun, and it should only take 10 or 15 minutes. 

Montreal's Mobivox is making news again this morning, with the appointment of Nitzan Shaer as COO.  Shaer will also join the Mobivox board.

Shaer's background?

• EIR at IDG Ventures in Boston
• Head of Skype Mobile, where he led development and marketing efforts that made Skype available on leading mobile phone platforms, including Nokia, Motorola and Windows Mobile.
• Product management at Microsoft where he managed development of three emerging businesses in the company's embedded and mobile division.

Does this presage marketing agreements with handset manufacturers?  Perhaps.  Mobivox is somewhat unique in that it requires no cooperation from handset manufacturers to go to market.  Or possibly  Mobivox is trying to forge a stronger relationship with Skype as they begin their push into the handset space. 

Either way, it will certainly be interesting to see how this plays out. 

Rapid development tools like Ruby on Rails are enabling development teams to crank out code at phenomenal speeds these days.  Case in point: iotum itself.  We had built the iotum Relevance Engine using Python, which had been a tremendous productivity improvement over prior generations of tools.  When it came time to build our Facebook FREE Conference Call application, the team suggested Ruby on Rails.  The entire application was built in record speed, and we are now able to crank out significant improvements on a bi-weekly schedule in response to user requests.

The fevered pace of development in the Facebook community gives one the sense that most of the Facebook development community has adopted these tools.  Of course, rapid development does have pitfalls. You have to pay attention to quality all the time.   Yesterday I received an invitation to try an application on Facebook that had me stymied during the install process when I reached this screen:

News leaked out yesterday that Facebook had added keyword targeting to Facebook Flyers.  This is a welcome step.  Like Lee Aase, I started experimenting with them to see what kind of results could be achieved.  I targeted a couple of flyers to people who said they were interested in Business or Networking, which dramatically narrows the potential audience.

Although many are touting this as a Google Adwords' competitor, one thing is quite different from Google.  Because Google adwords are driven by search, there is more likely to be an intent to buy already.  That may bias advertisers in favour of Google Adwords rather than Facebook flyers. 

You know an event is well loved when it dies, but won't stay dead.  Etel is one such event.  Lee Dryburgh grabbed the bull by the horns after Etel 2008 died, promptly started a movement to launch an EComm 2008 event, and now has significant backing from the (former) Etel community, plus a nicely growing Facebook group to accompany it. 

The EComm Event (humorously dubbed ETel Uncancelled) will take place March 12, somewhere in Silicon Valley.  Location hasn't been announced yet.