Alec Saunders SquawkBox

SightSpeed’s Eric Quanstrom gave us the low-down on SightSpeed Light for MySpace this morning — what it does, how it works, why MySpace, what the experience of developing for MySpace was like, and a whole bunch more.

Embedded in user’s profiles, Sightspeed Light lets users talk in real time, or with threaded video conversations. Although it’s separate from SightSpeed currently, Eric told us that an upcoming release would allow SightSpeed Light users to connect with SightSpeed users who aren’t on MySpace. Eric also revealed that SightSpeed is likely to take SightSpeed Light to another OpenSocial platform in the near future, and that the company may also release plug-in’s for popular blogging platforms.

With us on the call: Alec Saunders, Neal Saferstein, Randall howard, Dan York, Jeanette Fisher, Aaron Huslage, Adam Somer, Ian Hood, Jim Byrnes, Mike Pruyn, and of course, Eric Quanstrom.

 

 Squawk Box April 24 [30:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

By now you’ve heard about my frustrations with BoxBe earlier this week.  As irritating as the initial experience was, it was impressive how they handled the mistake and there’s some good learning for all startups.

To re-cap, BoxBe’s sign up process encourages users to add their address book to the application so that email can be filtered on the basis of who you know.  Several people, including me, did this. None of us read the remainder of the text on that page, which also let you know that the application would also email everyone that you added to your BoxBe address book to invite them as well.  And nowhere did the application inform you that two days later, those folks would be sent a reminder.

On Saturday, I uploaded my entire address book (thousands of entries) to the application, and unintentionally spammed them.  Two days later (on Monday) Twitter was alive with furious messages from folks that had done the same, and were now (as I was about to a couple of hours later) discovering that BoxBe was spamming their email addresses a second time.

Not good.

To BoxBe’s credit, though, Product Manager Randy Stewart responded to my emails, and:

1. Deleted my account so no more spam would go to my contacts.
2. Explained what they were doing to correct the problem.  They will limit the number of emails that can be sent to any user, and separate the sign-up and invite pages so it’s clear when people are inviting others to join.
3. Created a BoxBe twitter account so that anyone who wants to contact the company can.

Nicely done.  I’ll give BoxBe another try in the future when they’ve delivered a version that works with Outlook 2007 and Windows Vista.

You’ve all heard about the rig I’ve got at home now.  Quad-core pentium, dual monitors, big disk, and so on.  Well, I’m upset.  I’m running out of memory.  Windows keeps telling me to shut down apps.

Why?  Windows Vista 32 bit.  It has a cap of 3G of memory.  Actually, it’s 4G, but that includes the address space on the video card, for you technically precise folks. Practically that means that with a 512M video card, I’m stuck at 3G of memory.

Now, I could upgrade to Windows Vista 64bit and break that limitation, but then several key pieces of software I use wouldn’t be available.  Like the Windows Home Server connector.

As much as I would like to think it, it doesn’t seem as if the industry is ready for 64 bit yet.

This morning’s call was all about the Microsoft Live Mesh platform, announced yesterday.  Announced at 9 PM last night, Live Mesh is Microsoft’s platform for synchronization and storage on the web. The promise of the Mesh is that you won’t have to care where you are or which device you’re using - your data will always be there. You’ll only have to care about which data you want to share with whom.

#1 It’s a set of applications for synchronizing and storing data in the cloud.  You’ll be able to access your data from anywhere.  Share it with anyone.  And it combines some very cool features of the web (like feeds) to notify you when stuff you care about has been updated. It’s what you’d get if you combined foldershare with an RSS feed in each direction.

#2 It’s a platform for synchronizing and storing data.  Or at least that’s how it’s been presented to the outside world. It works with Windows today, but Microsoft promises it will work with everything in the future.

We had a good time picking mesh apart and comparing it to previous Microsoft offerings and to Google’s vision of the world.

Conclusion?  While everyone agreed that the vision is compelling, the end user services promising, and the platform expansive, there was still significant mistrust of Microsoft, dating right back to the Passport / Hailstorm days.

On the call: Alec Saunders, Jim Courtney, Randall Howard, Dan York, Neal Saferstein, Jeanette Fisher, Frank Abrams, Brad Jones, Wilhelm Wimmreuter, Adam Somer, and Ian Hood

 

 Squawk Box April 23 [38:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The team at Sightspeed upped the ante on video chat yesterday, announcing Sightspeed Light, for MySpace. They’re offering video mail, public video posting, and video chat to MySpace users.  And in a move reminiscent of some other startups, like Seesmic and Hictu, they’re offering threaded video conversations as well.  Record a short video, post it to your page, and wait for a reply.

Sightspeed’s move is smart for two reasons:

1. It takes video directly to a youth audience in the environment that they’re comfortable with. Expect to see lots of creative uses for video coming from the MySpace audience.
2. It backfill’s the MySpace feature set, making the service more competitive against Facebook, which already has the video messaging feature being supplied by SightSpeed.