Alec Saunders SquawkBox

David Spark has a great piece up titled The worst product demonstration I’ve ever seen.  It’s full of good advice on fit and finish around demos.  I enjoyed his critique.  One of the things that I would add to his comments is that you have to focus on the architecture of your demo. If you treat your demo as an interactive product sheet, then you’ll have a good foundation for a truly effective pitch.

After winning a DEMOgod award in 2006, Howard and I built a slide presentation that we delivered at BarCamp Ottawa to describe that architecture.  Here’s how to knock your audience off their seats in 6 minutes or less (notes taken by Jay Goldman at BarCamp).

Architecture of a great demo

Hook

• 0:00 to 0:20
• State the problem (sometimes it feels like the whole world wants your attention)
• Engage the audience (we can’t help you with the co-worker who wants to sit in your office and chat)

Position

• 0:20 to 0:30
• My product is…

Prove

• 0:30 to 5:15
• Blow the crowd away with three big ideas
• Awesome! (killer feature 1)
• Awesome! (killer feature 2)
• Doesn’t suck (it’s easy, it’s inexpensive, etc.  remove the one big objection people might have)
• This has to be the main focus of the presentation - show the entire product in detail

Close

• 5:15 to 5:45
• Synchronized blast to phones throughout the audience
• Smart closing lines

Pitfalls

• Trying to be too funny
• Some company did a terrorist sketch that wasn’t funny and no one remembers who they were - just the dreadful sketch
• It’s not about you and it’s not about your company - it’s about the DEMO
  • One DEMO that could have been great was about an in-car entertainment centre but they spent the first three minutes on market position and on showing connectors on the back of the box
• Timing is everything
  • 5:45 is only a :15 second
• Listen to your advisors
  • Speed to cool is key - how quick can you get to the cool stuff?
• Practice, Practice, Practice
  • iotum practiced about four times a day for two weeks before to get it totally slick

This morning we talked about trust, in two different contexts.

First, yesterday AOL announced their AOL Open Voice API to allow software developers to be able to connect their applications to AOL’s network.  But given the disaster that the AIM Phoneline Developers program was, why should software developers trust AOL now?

Luckily, we had Dan York on the line.  He had spent the time to dig into the AOL Open Voice API, and discovered that it really wasn’t an API to speak of at all.  AOL has simply opened their SIP Proxy’s to 3rd party applications.  It’s in fact, no different than any of hundreds of other SIP termination services out there.  And as Ken Camp pointed out, because you can’t buy incoming service from them, what they’re offering is a half a phone service.

So if you’re a developer, here’s one more option for you for terminations.  It’s odd that AOL thinks this is newsworthy.

And the second trust topic was social media.  Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang published a piece titled Who do People Trust? It ain’t bloggers this morning, about the implications of social media for marketers.  Suffice it to say,  he thinks that most companies are focusing on the wrong thing.  We had a good discussion about trust in marketing, although prevailing opinion was that this is a topic that keeps coming up.  As one person said “it’s novel for Jeremiah because he wasn’t around the last 4 times this meme went around”.

On the line: Jim Courtney, Randall Howard, Dan York, Ken Camp, Jonathan Jensen, Mark Hewitt, Steve Sokol, Jeanette Fisher, David Spark, Moshe Maeir, Adam Somer, Ian Hood, Bill Volk, Mike Pruyn, Sheryl Breuker, Kyoko Kataoka, Andrew Hansen, and Linda Saytes.

Enjoy the podcast!

 

 Squawk Box April 30 [32:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

AOL announced Tuesday that it has opened the API to AIM Call Out, a move designed to let programmers more easily build products that tap into AIM for making calls over the net. The API is freely available, and applications built with it can let people call using AOL’s network to bypass the ordinary telephony infrastructure.

Anyone who knows me, knows how passionate I am about companies that build enabling technologies for developers. However, we haven’t looked at the AOL OpenVoice API that was announced yesterday, nor do we intend to.

May 5th, 2006 a program named AIM Phoneline was announced amid a volley of press reports. Offering a free incoming DID, and unlimited outgoing calls for $14.95 per month, AIM Phoneline promised integration with AIM and with AOL e-mail, plus a platform for integration that would allow new applications to be built.

At the time of the announcement, plans for a developer platform were hinted at. Subsequently, when we at iotum were approached to use the platform, we signed on as one of the premier developers. The many years of platform experience we brought to the table, and our willingness to work with early APIs were a benefit to AOL. Naturally, there was a huge benefit to us in being first on their platform as well. We agreed to be ready to demonstrate product on September 8th, 2006 and to be ready to launch product in their still-to-be-finished AIM Phoneline Storefront by November 30th, 2006.

The AIM Phoneline Developers program was announced September 7, 2006. A week later, iotum was one of three developers (the others were MyNumo and mVox) demonstrating early products at the AOL booth at VON. A whirlwind of promotional activity occurred. At the end of September, MyNumo’s Bill Volk, Andy Abramson and myself spent the day at AOL headquarters in Virginia recording podcasts with AOL VP’s Ragui Kamel and Alex Quilici, along with Sharon Kasimow, director of AOL Voice Services Product Management. At the Voice 2.0 conference in mid-October, AOL Senior VP Ragui Kamel was clearly one of the stars. AOL was lauded by the press and blogging community for the depth and breadth of their vision — America’s telephone company for the 21st century, they were called.

The program never launched. The official word was that the program was delayed to Q1 of 2007 because of AOL’s inability to get the storefront coded in time. Before the November 30th launch date, however, AOL announced massive layoffs. The VP’s we had been working with, as well as 2/3 of the AOL Voice staff, were gone within weeks. In late January we travelled to Halifax to meet with the new VP of AOL Voice, Mike Smith, and received assurances that AOL remained committed to AIM Phoneline, their ecosystem, partners and subscribers. Shortly after, Smith was gone as well, another victim of AOL’s downsizing.

Working with AOL was a disaster for us and nearly put us out of business.

• In order to handle the demand for our services that we expected the AOL agreement to generate, we had staffed up customer support people, and diverted resources from other projects.
• In January we were forced to go through our own layoffs, as we could not sustain the burn required to support AOL without a launch date in sight.
• We were forced to consider selling the company or to raise more capital on unfavourable terms as first the launch date extended and the program was then cancelled.
• We lost core development staff as their confidence in management’s ability to raise the capital required was shaken.
• The amount of capital we raised was insufficient to sustain the effort required to sell our applications to carriers, and so we shifted strategy to a downloadable application for the BlackBerry instead.

When we had the temerity to ask AOL to compensate us for the harm we had suffered because of their failure to live up to our agreement, we were rewarded with a legal letter pointing to the cancellation clause in our contract and a subsequent termination.

The lesson I learned? AOL seems to work like an old world media company where properties get cancelled at will when the ratings dip, not a technology company that’s willing to persist and refine until they’ve delighted customers. AOL appears to have a very different mentality from the software business, which we didn’t understand when we entered into business with them. I believe media is in their DNA, and that nothing will change that.

It’s two years later, and AOL is going to try again with AOL Open Voice. Speaking as a software developer I can’t imagine ever again choosing to make an important business or technical decision based on assurances from AOL.

So to AOL, I ask “what has changed that the development community should trust AOL again?” And to developers I say, “let the buyer beware”.

Today we talked with Jajah co-Founder Roman Scharf about their big announcements this morning.

We started by discussing the 10 million users that JAJAH announced.  It turned out that these were pure JAJAH users, and that buttons and other widgets comprise only a small portion of those 10 million.  According to Roman, growth in JAJAH Web and JAJAH Direct has been 600% over the last year.  Moreover, none of the users from their Jangl agreement, or other partner agreements were included.

We also discussed the Yahoo agreement and the managed services platform.  Dan York took the lead asking questions here, and did a great job.

Roman talked about the advantages of JAJAH owning its own network.  Among the many were lower costs, better quality control, and reduced fraud.  In my conversation with Daniel last week, one of the points he highlighted was that JAJAH had taken steps to deal with fraud. He highlighted it as industry leading fraud prevention.  Roman reinforced this discussing how fraud prevention has become one of the key selling points for the platform.

Finally, one of the frequent comparisons is between JAJAH and Skype,  a point which Roman was quick to shoot down.  JAJAH is not Skype, he said.  JAJAH users are primarily ordinary phone users — not headset users.

Enjoy the podcast.  See you tomorrow on the SquawkBox.

 

 Squawk Box April 29 [44:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Thought JAJAH was old news? Think again. Having attracted a whopping 10 million users in the last two years, up from 2 million just last year, they’re now expanding their business in dramatically new directions with the launch of JAJAH Managed Services. JAJAH co-founder Daniel Mattes explained it to me as a turnkey telephony service, with everything from network services to billing incorporated in the package. And their first customer? None other than Yahoo!, who will outsource voice services for their 97 million Yahoo IM users to JAJAH.

The completeness of the platform is apparent in the diagram below (click to enlarge). With services ranging from SMS to payments, to fraud detection, and IVR, JAJAH has provided a soup-to-nuts telecom service that can be delivered in part or as a complete solution.

When I compared JAJAH’s platform to Ribbit, asking if they were competitors, Mattes demurred. In keeping with how they are positioning JAJAH Managed Services as a suite of services that partners can pick and choose from according to their needs, he described Ribbit as a toolkit for creating front end systems, and invited the Ribbit team to use JAJAH’s network for their backend services.

JAJAH’s network now spans over 200 points of presence all knit together by a global VoIP backbone. Using a combination of industry standard codecs, a proprietary codec of their own creation, and automated quality measurement tools, Mattes claims quality indistinguishable from the PSTN. I’ve tried it myself, and the claim rings true.

Please join me on the SquawkBox at 11 AM today with JAJAH co-founder Roman Scharf to discuss todays news. It’s sure to be an interesting and engaging call.