Alec Saunders SquawkBox

I got a note in my mailbox about Voxalot's launch of their Voxcall service.  They now have a Facebook Voxcall application as well.

It's a dead simple service — combine a SIP URI with a click to call application, and now you can call anyone in the world.  I popped my Truphone SIP URI into the appplication, and was receiving calls in seconds on my mobile phone.

Voxalot's pitch is that VoxCall is self-organizing and enables anonymity. If your VoxCall friend changes his contact phone number, you don't have to be notified. VoxCall will use whatever number your friend has registered so you no longer need to remember his number, just his Facebook ID. In addition, VoxCall also offers both public and private chat rooms where VoxCall friends can congregate. 

While it works well, there's a lot of click-to-call competition out there.  Perhaps the biggest differentiator for Voxcall is simply that it hooks into a directory that a lot of people know and use.

Friends Mark Goldberg, Jon Arnold, and Mark Evans have all written about the One Laptop Per Child initiative, and their current promotion.  Basically, if you spend $399 on an OLPC for a child before the end of day November 26, they will ship you a laptop, a $200 tax receipt, AND they will send another to a child in a developing country.  It's a good cause.  If you can afford the $399, please consider doing it. 

I was really quite surprised two weeks ago at VON to find myself in a room full of Facebook skeptics.  These folks were no luddites either.  They were "la creme" of the technology industry.  The vast majority of them, however, expressed disbelief at the value of Facebook in a business setting, and concern over privacy.

Fast forward to today, where I've received email from John Reid, President of CataAlliance, the Canadian Technology Association.  In it John writes:

We have a team integrating “conversational networks” such as Facebook, Plaxo and LinkedIn, into the CATA B2B Platform as part of expanding our business networking and outreach capabilities. Some of the largest work networks on Facebook (www.facebook.com) now include: Ernst & Young, Johnson & Johnson, Morgan Stanley, British Telecommunications, Sun Microsystems, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Shell Oil, Bank One, and National Health Service.

One of our selection criteria for choosing third party Networks is Privacy. Note that Facebook leads the industry in giving people tools to control the information they share and with whom they choose to share it. Facebook is TrustE certified.

He then goes on to encourage CATA members to join the CATAAlliance Facebook group.

What a dramatic difference from my experience in Boston a few weeks ago.  Why?

Just before VON I wrote about how Canadian Facebook penetration is dramatically higher than US.  Nearly one in four Canadians use Facebook, versus just 7.3% of folks south of the border.  The differences become even more dramatic, however, when you map penetration to specific age demographics, as the chart below shows.

In the core Facebook age demographic — 15 to 24 — over 80% of Canadians are Facebook users, versus just 39.7% of Americans.  More tellingly, however, that core group accounts for 76% of US Facebook users, but in Canada it's less than half.  More Canadians in more age categories use Facebook, proportionally, than in the US.  51.1% of young workers have a Facebook account in Canada, versus just 8.5% in the US.  19% of Canadians in the mid-career age bracket - 35 to 44 - are Facebook users versus 1.6% of Americans in the same age bracket.

Facebook is ubiquitous here, and has started to weave itself into the fabric of our society.  It hasn't yet reached the same level in the United States yet, which explains the reaction I experienced at VON.  Where Canadian business people are increasingly inclined to view Facebook as a valid part of their workplace toolkit, Americans aren't yet ready to do so. 

It's fascinating.  If I were the Facebook team, I'd be looking for as many ways as possible to understand what's going on in Canada.  It's likely a predictor for how US adoption will go.

Data compiled from Facebook Ad platform and cross referenced to standard US Census groupings.

Among the legions of legitimate domain holders on the internet are a band of squatters that make a living from holding corporate trademarks hostage.  These folks look to snatch the identities of companies by registering domain names that use or mimic that corporations trademarks.  Then they ransom these names back to the owner of that identity, sometimes for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. 

That's what we thought had happened last week when we discovered that someone had claimed iotum.mobi.  Because the domain was anonymously registered, Howard asked the .mobi registrar to send email to the owner, which they did.  Shortly after, he got a reply.

The owner, it turns out, was a "wannabe geek" (in his own words) named Kevin Billingsly.  An Indiana steel worker, he also runs several small businesses on the side, including a PC repair business and a promotional products company called ePowerServe, LLC that does embroidery, screen printing, vinyl prints, and other kinds of graphic arts products.  Kevin had a vision for a mobile search engine — a small lightweight application which would be the single place for people to search from mobile devices.  He thought iotum might be a good name for such an engine, and registered it… in October.

He could have held us hostage.  He could have forced us to jump through hoops with the registrar, in hopes that the registrar might agree that we did, in fact, own the iotum name.  He could have done a lot of things to make life difficult.  Instead, he simply asked where he should transfer the name, and by way of explanation added that he didn't think he had any right to it given how long we had been in business.  What an incredible act of honesty, integrity and generosity! 

From the team at iotum: Thank you, Kevin Billingsly.  And if we need any graphics work done, we'll be sure to give you a call. 

Has anyone noticed that the Jajah PR machine seems to have suddenly come back to life?  From late May of last year, when they announced their $20 million series B financing, the company has been silent.  Now, suddenly, in the last week we have:

1. A strategic relationship with Jangl, where Jangl taps into Jajah's global network, and pushes Jajah advertising.
2. A new Jajah Direct product, which allows them to compete with services like TalkPlus and Mobivox.

It's good to see one of the original Voice 2.0 companies wake up again after such a prolonged silence.