Alec Saunders SquawkBox

It's no secret that Facebook users are increasingly adopting mobile technologies.  Just recently, for example, Facebook announced mobile API's, and native Facebook implementations on BlackBerry and iPhone smartphone devices became available. Since the summer, Facebook mobile users have surged to 27% of the Facebook community as well.   

Microsoft may have trumped everyone with the announcement of a Facebook SDK for Windows mobile.  The SDK is available online, and allows developers full integration between the Facebook platform and native Windows mobile services, like Pocket Outlook.  Now your social network on Facebook, and your mobile address book can be… one and the same.

I wonder who has the best prices on Windows mobile devices in Canada?

Auto manufacturers in Canada are clearly getting desperate.  This morning's Globe and Mail came with an 8 page propaganda piece advertising supplement to explain why Canadians pay more for cars than Americans do. With headlines like The pitfalls of price matching and Why things cost more in Canada, this piece was a regular comedy festival.  Some of the chestnuts include:

• lower prices would ruin the Canadian used car market.
• wages, rent and property taxes are different in Canada.
• the cost of operating a business in Canada is different from the US.
• the cost of marketing is higher in Canada because materials have to be produced in both official languages.
• taxes are higher in Canada.

According to this piece, what we Canadians really want is equivalent monthly payments.  Change the interest rates, or stretch out the payment schedule, and we should be happy to pay more. 

I wonder if these guys have any bridges for sale?

Now, I don't know what it costs to run an auto business in Canada.  However, a common feature of pricing algorithms used by all businesses to convert US prices into Canadian prices is a small line item called "uplift". It varies from as little as one or two percent into the double digits.  That's the extra we pay, on top of our already higher taxes, for the privilege of living in Canada and buying goods here.   When consumers shop across a border in order to obtain a better price, businesses refer to this as the "grey market".  The challenge companies have when pricing products is to maximize the "uplift" without increasing the "grey market".  That's called maximizing profits.

The car manufacturers have a grey market issue. So does every other industry out there.  For example, I was pricing the new Panasonic TH-42PZ77U 42" plasma TV yesterday. It's $1,999 at BestBuy in Canada, and $1,499 at BestBuy in Watertown, NY – a two hour drive from my door. Or, I can buy it from a Florida company on EBay for $1,000 plus shipping.  Most electronics are duty free, to boot.  Where do you think I'm planning to buy my TV?  I bought our new Sony HD camcorder in Florida last year too.

That's the nature of the market in an age where anyone can comparison shop for any product in any part of the globe.  Suck it up Auto Manufacturers and give us a real break at home, rather than whining about the cost of doing business. 

Oh, and by the way, if anybody in Oshawa is listening, I'll be in the market for a new car in the near future as well.

I got up yesterday morning to the announcement that Janice was going to paint the family room.  My typically male response was, "Why? I like the paint in the family room."  After all, there was no structural or mechanical reason to change the paint…   Within a very short time it was clear that I wasn't going to dissuade her.  She was tired of the old paint job, and by late in the afternoon our walls were sporting a new blue hue.

This morning my feed reader surfaced a piece from Omfut's Latest Geek Stuff titled Mobile VoIP, Who Will Win.  He's speculating about operator reaction to VoIP on 3G and WiFi.  My first thought? For most people, isn't VoIP just the "new blue hue" on mobile?   On POTS, VoIP was a major disruptor, shaking up moribund incumbents grown fat on comfortable monopoly profits.  VoIP did what regulators couldn't do, which was to bring competition and new services to the landline space. Vonage, for instance, is the reason that today I can buy a $25/month unlimited calling plan from Bell Canada.   On mobile, however, most jurisdictions have multiple competing service providers.  Prices are already falling in most of the world (even Canada, it seems), and innovative services and devices are being delivered on a constant basis.  Becuase of a competitive market, VoIP on mobile is different from VoIP on POTS. 

Omfut cites Mig33, Truphone, and Fring in his piece, to which I will add TalkPlus and MobiVox.  None of these are pure VoIP plays.  Mig33, for example, is a social network with VoIP.  MobiVox is a voice activated personal assistant, plus VoIP.  The value is in the application, and tellingly none of these are implementing VoIP on 3G.  It's all VoIP on the back end.  With the exception of Truphone, which consumes no minutes on the handset when used in WiFi mode, all of these applications work in concert with the carrier, rather than against the carrier.

As a consumer, I'm not so sure I care about VoIP on the handset. What I do care about, however, is new services.  That's where mobile VoIP will have an impact.  That's where the mobile carriers and mobile VoIP players are getting it right, and where Vonage and the now defunct SunRocket got it so horribly wrong.

Over the last week I've published a number of different demographic slices of the Facebook Market.  Facebook makes it easy to do this.  You don't need to buy data from Comscore or Nielsen.  You can simply collect the segment data you need directly from Facebook.

Here's how to do this, using the Facebook Advertising Platform.

Step 1.  At the bottom of every Facebook page you will see a standard set of links.  Click on the link labeled Advertisers.

Step 2. Click the big green Get Started button to start creating advertisements.

Step 3. Pick something to advertise.  Anything will do, since we're not actually going to create an advertisement.  We're just going to mine the demographic data.  So put the name of a random web site or blog into the web page field and proceed to the next step.

Step 4. This is where we get to the gold.  Simply enter the demographic characteristics you are looking for, and Facebook will tell you how many people match those characteristics.  For example, maybe you'd like to know how many single US men use Facebook.  Choose United States for country, Male for sex, and Single for Relationship Status. Presto, Facebook's ad engine tells you that there are 4,074,700 people in that demographic.

Perhaps your interest is in reaching single men attending college in the Boston area.  Choose In College for education status.  A box will appear allowing you to enter the colleges of your choice.  Next visit Wikipedia and enter the query Boston Colleges.  Enter the resulting list into the Facebook form.  Et voila, there are 20,420 single male members of Facebook attending college in the Boston area. 

Segmenting data by country, relationship status, gender, workplace and education can yield very good results.  Keywords, unfortunately, are much less valuable. Because users self identify there isn't a consistent taxonomy one can use for mining keywords, which leads to very questionable results.  For instance, using the keyword "Heavy Metal", or "Led Zeppelin", or "Metallica" yields fewer than 20 US single males who list these keywords.  It's inconceivable that there are fewer than 20 fans out there, even on Facebook.

Getting raw data out of Facebook is dead simple.  The big tracking houses, like Comscore and Nielsen want to sell you this data.  But with a little legwork, you can easily collect the data you need yourself.  Moreover, if you're interested in tracking the evolution of a segment, with a little discipline you could simply run the same query on a monthly basis to see how your segment is evolving.

Happy data mining!

A few days ago I wrote about Voxalot's new VoxCall application for Facebook. Since then, a number of people have contacted me using VoxCall.  Invariably, the quality has been superb.  For example:

• Yesterday, Andy Abramson called me.  He called from the Nokia N810 via WiFi.  WiFi SIP to VoxCall SIP to Truphone SIP and then onto the cellular network.
• The day after I wrote my original piece, Dan York called.  He called from a Polycom IP Phone to Asterisk to VoxCall SIP to Truphone SIP and then onto the cellular network. 

Despite the convoluted routing, the calls were of excellent quality. 

The real value in VoxCall, however, may be something more subtle.  None of us actually knew where the others were.  SIP registration took care of attaching each of us to the network, and then IP took care of the rest.  For all the fuss that gets made about find-me / follow-me services, it's nothing special in the IP world.  In IP, identity is separated from the address space, which makes find-me / follow-me a happy incidental rather than a service that a telco can charge big dollars for.