Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Want a branded RSS reader for your audience?  Get the new Custom Snarfer from Snarfware.  Marketed as a reader loyalty tool, the company says that it provides the following benefits:

• Keeps your website in front of readers via a default tabbed window users see on startup. This enables you to generate more page views and insure your web presence/branding along with promoting your RSS feeds. This tab is “locked” and cannot be closed. When users enter new URL’s the sponsored tab is left intact and new tabs open beside it.
• Publishers decide which RSS feeds are added automatically, silently when the custom reader is installed with those feeds always sorted to the top of folder tree. At the first startup the user is presented with a dialog box from which they can choose from 100s of optional feeds to install.
• Provides publishers a direct channel to communicate with users without using email via your RSS feeds. RSS feeds are the #1 way to eliminate spam emails and insure reader loyalty.
• "Powered by Snarfer" provides technological advantages and delivers innovation to your users based on the award winning technology at no cost to publishers or their readers.
• Great software comes in small packages. Our installer is less than 450kb which means it’s smaller than many flash animations on some web pages.

Cool idea.  It’s just the sort of white label opportunity that companies with extensive sales channels, or large support organizations ought to jump on. Besides, Snarfer is a pretty good RSS reader to boot, with built in search and eBay integration.

I may just get me one of these. Saunderslog RSS reader anyone?

This morning Martin Dufort announced that Kakiloc, the location-based service that he and Alain Lavoie built, is closed.  From the mail he sent:

Alain Lavoie and I (Martin Dufort) started the service as an experiment in mapping your physical location while on the move in December 2005. We quickly recognize the need to deal and put extra emphasis on supporting mobile technologies because we knew this was the direction the industry was going into. Now look at all the initiatives out there : Google Android, Nokia’s new handsets, SkyHook Wireless, etc etc So we work for 2 years (full-time and part-time) refining the service and adding functionalities to both the web site and the mobile applications we were supporting. But in the end, the fierce competition within the social networking space and the service’s generic nature prevented us from actually gaining a sustainable user base. On November 6 th , I decided to close down the service. Now the servers are actually off-line.  I would like to thank all our members for registering and helping out and providing feedback about the service. But a big thanks goes out to Alain for sticking with me and my crazy ideas and trying to push this further. Your partnership was invaluable. Thanks a lot.  The Kakiloc core technology is still alive and is being evaluated for inclusion in a new service but nothing concrete yet.  In the mean time, I’ve renamed the company’s blog to:     The Mobile Location-Based Informant  which is available at:       http://location-based.blogspot.com

Please come and visit as I will continue to cover the mobile and location-based world both from the software and the hardware perspective.

We'll see more of you in the future, I am sure. 

I'll be speaking next week at the Canadian Institute's Conference on Social Media.  Chaired by my friend Joe Thornley, this event is a how-to for businesses wanting to employ social media tools as part of their strategy.  My talk is on thought leadership strategies and blogging.

Dean Elwood has finally let the rest of the world know that he's now a Truphoner.  I knew in October, at VON, but he's only now chosen to make the news public.  Congratulations to Dean, and also to the Truphone team.

The other thing that slipped out yesterday was Truphone's new Facebook application.  Dean says:

There are several click to call/callback/speak type applications already on Facebook. The differentiator here, and the interesting part about this application (and also the hardest part) is that we’ve embedded a JAVA based softphone right into the heart of Facebook. This makes the experience from a user point of view seamless with the Facebook environment. The user never leaves Facebook, they speak into Facebook. Additionally, the "call me" button for this application is not restricted to your own profile page - it functions as a Facebook attachment, which means it can be dropped onto a friends Wall, or added to a Facebook mail message or any other attachment-accepting application which exists on Facebook now or might do in the future.

Try it.  Head to my Facebook profile, and click the green Call Me For Free button.

Germany-based iPoque has recently published an internet traffic study covering everything from file sharing networks to streaming video and voice.  According to iPoque, any discussion of VoIP protocols is probably moot.  While VoIP itself accounts for just 1% of internet traffic, the vast majority of that traffic (a 30:1 ratio in Germany) is Skype. Standards based systems are simply too hard to configure. 

Voice over IP and Skype

Internet telephony – or Voice over IP (VoIP) – has become a commodity application, not least based on the enormous success of Skype with its ease of use and resilience to restrictive network environments due to widespread firewalling and network address translation (NAT). While standards-based VoIP systems using SIP, H.323 and IAX require manual configuration to get around the resulting limitations, Skype has many built-in mechanisms to automatically deal with such network conditions and to offer an as seamless as possible operation in most environments.

The success of this strategy is reflected in the analysis results. They show that 30% of all monitored Internet users in Germany use Skype. In the Middle East, the number is with only 7% much lower. SIP follows far behind with only 1% users in Germany and in the Middle East. The user numbers for H.323 and IAX are negligible.