Alec Saunders SquawkBox

What do you get when you extend the idea of the US secondary mortgage crisis into the venture markets?  Ask the 210 dot-com era VC funds that have been struggling to raise new funds since the year 2000.  The VC market is going through it's own financing crisis at the moment, and it smells suspiciously like what's happening in the housing market.  Funds are liquidating portfolio companies at firesale prices, buying LP's out at steep discounts, and adding on new LP's with hugely dilutive new money. Some general partners are even selling their own stakes.

It ain't pretty. Says Kelly Deponte of Probitas Partners, who places some of these funds "Throw these firms a lifeline? I’m more of a mind to shoot the wounded."

We had a great SquawkBox today with Marc Gingras of Tungle. 

Tungle, if you don't know it, makes organizing meetings easy.  Whether you're in the same organization, or different organizations (imagine, for instance, trying to organize a meeting with your financial advisor), Tungle can tell you who's available, when, and then allow you to schedule the meeting using the calendar of your choice.

They're currently in closed beta, but Marc revealed to us on the call that Tungle will be in open beta starting April 16th.  Get ready!

Enjoy the call! 

 

 Squawk Box April 2 - Marc Gingras Guest [30:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

David Spark of The Spark Minute and Spark Media Solutions will be sub hosting for Alec Saunders for Thursday’s Squawk Box (April 3rd) at 11am Eastern/8am Pacific. Our guest is Sam Levin, the on-air/podcast host/technologist for Cool Mac/Tech Picks, Inside Mac Radio/TV and he’s also a consultant in the emerging technology industry. We’ve got three great subjects:

1. Capitalizing on Twitter. Twittertising, TwitterCoupons, and TweetDeals. These are deals and advertising that can only be found in your Twittersphere.
2. Which online social networks make sense for your organization? David Spark just finished up a story for PCWorld.com entitled “Ten Steps to Getting you Up and Running with Business Social Networking.” One of the issues is finding those communities that are right for your sphere. What works for you?
3. GetSatisfaction.com – It appears that getsatisfaction.com is a great community site revolving around products people care about. It involves users and employees that work at the company whose product or service you’re using.

Join us for the conversation on Thursday at 11am Eastern/8am Pacific. Make sure you install the Free Conference Calling Facebook application first.

Let's say for the sake of argument that you didn't believe my assertion on Monday that reasonably priced data plans would lead to higher revenues in the mobile world.  Or maybe you're a business analyst at one of Rogers, Telus, or Bell looking for proof that a cut in rates will increase your bottom line.  If either of those is the case, check out Rubicon Consulting's study on iPhone, released at the beginning of this week.   Among the many gems is this piece of analysis:

Based on the findings of the study, AT&T is probably getting about $2 billion in incremental yearly service revenue due to the iPhone deal, and that figure will increase as more iPhones are sold.

Here’s how the $2 billion figure was calculated:

Total number of iPhones activated by AT&T to date:	3,000,000
Number switching from other operators (47%):	1,410,000
Annual revenue increase from switchers (@ $97/month):	$1.64 billion
Number upgrading current AT&T accounts (53%):	1,590,000
Annual revenue increase from upgraders (@ $19/month):	$360 million
Total revenue increase per year:	$2 billion

An unannounced part of that revenue gets shared with Apple, so not all of it goes to the bottom line for AT&T. But it is still a substantial source of growth in a US mobile phone market that is saturating, and doesn’t have many new users available.

Another gem in this report: the most heavily used functions on the iPhone were email, text messaging and web browsing.  Music was #4.  

People switched from other carriers to use iPhone and its flat rate data.  Moreover, AT&T customers traded up to plans that included data, in order to use iPhone.  Rubicon estimates a 24% increase in ARPU as a result of AT&T's choice to deploy iPhone. 

And to think that the critics thought that AT&T gave too many concessions to Apple when the deal was announced. 

For Canadians, the conclusion is inescapable:  A reduction in Canadian data rates would be good for consumers, enterprise, and the carriers shareholders.   

Mobivox continues to crank out useful new features for their handsfree VoIP service.  The latest two? 

• A call me button, that can be embedded in any web site or email.  It has some basic routing and presence capabilities as well, so that the call can be routed to wherever the recipient is.
• A voice driven SMS service that allows you to send a text message to any mobile phone simply by speaking the text of the message.

If you haven't tried Mobivox before, give it a shot.  VOXGirl, their voice activated assistant, makes it super easy to initiate a call from your mobile phone, and the rates are very low.  I save tons of money every month with a Rogers MyFive plan, and Mobivox.   Plus, it's safer when driving. 

We'll be speaking with Mobivox's Darren Yaphe on Friday on the SquawkBox.