Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Interested in un-conferences? Telephony?  At Spring VON we'll be doing another of these events.  Tomorrow at 10 AM, Pulvermedia is hosting an "Agenda Bash" with Tom Howe, myself, Carl Ford and Brough Turner.  If you'd like to participate, then please visit this webinar page to join us!

And if you don't know what an un-conference is…

• At a conference, conversations are typically one way : the speaker speaks and the audience listens. At an un-conference, audience members are expected to participate and help lead discussions.
• At a conference, the agenda is set before the event, and typically negotiated between show producers, sponsors and industry experts. At an un-confernece, the agenda is set by the audience the day of the event.
• At a conference, the focus is on the sponsors and vendors. At an un-conference, the focus is on the individual attending the event.

It's been a crazy couple of weeks, as we've been jamming new features into the iotum FREE Conference Call application for Facebook.  We've reached an inflection point where usage is really starting to ramp, and feature requests are beginning to pour in.  That's meant lots of work, especially in support of teleseminars, where a number of seminar leaders are now starting to use the FREE Conference Call application.

Last night I demo'd our latest release for the Ottawa DemoCamp crowd.  It went live just a few hours before the event, and it was chock full of new features and enhancements that people had been asking for.  Here are just a few.

The live wall.   In real time, the information you type into the wall is displayed on the screen. This is particularly useful as a back channel for conversations that are occurring during the call. Participants can put questions on the wall, or add URL’s or other information that might be talked about during the call.  We knew this was going to be big, and it's already getting rave reviews.  This feels like a Facebook first.

A waiting to talk queue. We've had the ability for participants to "raise hands" for a while, but it's been difficult to know who raised their hand first.  Now, as participants raise hands, they are automatically moved to the front of the list of people who are on the call. This allows a host to know exactly which participants want to talk, and in what order they requested. As more and more people start to use the FREE Conference Call application for multi-party podcasts (we call them con-casts), this feature will allow people to run talk-radio style call-in shows and more.  For an example of how this works, tune into the SquawkBox at 11 AM this morning. 

In addition, all of the elements on the page are now collapsible, so that you can get unwanted items like invite information out of the way during the live call. All of the non-attending participants are now located at the bottom of the page also, so that anyone who has RSVP’d, but doesn’t show up, doesn’t clutter the call window.

There are numerous other minor enhancements as well, such as the way that the application rearranges windows depending on whether it's before, during or after the call; or the new layout of the windows that allow you to more easily find the recordings and get help on the application. 

All in all, Howard and I are very proud of what the iotum team has accomplished.  Go check out the application and let us know what you think.  

We had another great SquawkBox session this morning, discussing:

The issue of forced invites on Facebook applications. Some of the fastest growing Facebook applications of late have been those that require users to invite other users PRIOR to installing the application.  It's provoking a small backlash on Facebook. There's now a group called "No, I will NOT invite 20 friends just to add your application!",  that has compile a list of badly behaved applications, and are circulating a petition to Facebook asking that this practice be banned.  On the other side of the fence are Facebook developers, who seem to be quite divided about the practice.  Some defend it, arguing that bad applications will die anyway.  Others argue that it's damaging the facebook ecosystem by giving all applications a bad name.  From where I sit, wearing my marketers hat, it certainly looks to me as if at the very least it breaks the agreement among friends that Facebook exploits — that when i forward an invite, I'm recommending it.  It was a very interesting discussion, including some novel ideas for how to handle those invites from iotum's very own Julien Raynal.

TheFunded's invitation for entrepreneurs to share term sheets.   theFunded is a site that launched last March that lets entrepreneurs post stories about how they've been treated during the fund raising process.  It's a giant database that covers virtually every VC, and has all kinds of feedback on the individual VCs.  Needless to say, it's not that well liked by the VC community.  Now they're encouraging entrepreneurs (anonymously, of course) to upload term sheets so that people can compare and contrast individual terms from each VC.  We offer some advice for those entrepreneurs.

DEMO 2008.  What should we be watching for?

Enjoy! 

 

 January 28 Squawk Box [19:55m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

That's right - the annual new products show is kicking off today.  Over the weekend, Ribbit VP Don Thorson pinged me to tell me that they would be showing.  TechCrunch and GigaOm are both giving previews of the Ribbit offering.  In addition, Montreal-based StandOut Jobs will also be debuting.  I plan to keep an eye on both demos.  I'm sure both will be worth seeing!

It's tonight!  There will be some very interesting demos too, as always.  I'm looking forward to JohnnyVoIP, myself.  We'll also be demoing our new FREE Conference Call release (big changes!) which should be out later today.

See you there.