Alec Saunders SquawkBox

This morning’s call was pretty animated.

A discussion, of Skype’s new pricing, which quickly delved into how much of an impact the pricing might have on their market share.  Consensus: not much.

And then a discussion of Twitter’s outage, and who it impacted.  Outside the Silicon Valley echo chamber, we thought most people wouldn’t likely know.

On the call: Alec Saunders, Jim Courtney, Dan York, James Body, Jonathan Jensen, Dave Brown, Wilhelm Wimmreuter, Moshe Maeir, Adam Somer, Ian Hood, Cece Salomon-Lee

 

 Squawk Box April 22 [37:24m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Sound quality was less than stellar for me.  Unfortunately, Windows Vista insists on restoring input levels to defaults (which are too high) on reboot.  My microphone clipped the whole call.

Every so often a company really blunders.  Boxbe has done it in spades with their release over the weekend.  It was obectionable the first time it sent email to everyone in my address book.  And yes, I didn’t read the text closely enough to see that that was the case.  I simply loaded my address book and assumed it was filtering incoming mail based on who I knew.

First it spammed my friends. Mea culpe.  I should have read the directions.

This morning though, it spammed them again.  My email box is jammed with people saying “can you make this thing stop”, “you gotta make this stop”, “I’m really pissed”.  Twitter is burning up with Boxbe messages.  And those are the people that care enough.  I don’t know how many people have just added me to their spam list.

The worst part?  There’s no way to opt-out of the service once you’ve signed up.  I can’t tell it to stop.  I can’t tell it to cancel my account.  And I have no way of knowing when it will spam my friends again.

Talk about unfriendly.  Talk about being held hostage.  Talk about a massive, reputation damaging screw-up, both for the company and me.

I’ve got mail in to the product manager, Randy Stewart, as well as their press line.  My next step is to escalate to their management team and board of directors.  Email addresses were kindly provided on their web site.

Imagine a group of carrier executives and a group of web 2.0 upstarts at a conference together.  Now imagine that during the presentations the conference organizers provided a small terminal at each table that allowed attendees to submit feedback and questions, in real time, and anonymously.

Such was the scene in London last week at STL Partners Telco 2.0 brainstorm.  On this morning’s SquawkBox we got a debrief from Thomas Howe on what he saw and experienced there. More than ever, it sounds as if the gulf between the carriers and the disruptors isn’t closing any time soon.

Technical difficulties resulted in the last 8 minutes of the recording being lost, but please enjoy the first 30 minutes.

 

 Squawk Box April 21 [30:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The Economist article on Mobile Nomadism continues to generate comment throughout the blogging world. After the discussion on the SquawkBox call last week, Sheryl Breuker and Ken Camp discussed it on their Idea Incubators call. Later in the week, Dan York wrote calling the article a “must read”, and Randall Howard contributed some of his own thinking reflecting on two decades of nomadic workstyle. The photograph of the Hayes modem in Randall’s piece brings back memories.

If you’d like to join another interesting discussion on this topic, consider Jerry Michalski’s weekly Yi-Tan call happening today at 1:30 EDT. Jerry will have the author of the report as his guest. If I have time, I plan to join in.

Boxbe is one of those really appealing ideas that I’ve been wishing for a very long time someone would get right. Boxbe filters incoming mail based on the relationship that you have with the mailer. People who are on the boxbe “guest list” can mail you. People who aren’t are either trapped for you to consider later, or blocked.

Now, I’ve been doing this for some time already with Outlook. I have rules set up that filter mail into a lower priority bucket if the mailer is someone who isn’t in my address book. But the Outlook approach only works in certain circumstances, and doesn’t handle mail from my pop3 and gmail accounts at all. Nevertheless, I’ve found it to be an efficient way to organize email, even with it’s imperfections.

When I received an invitation to try about boxbe this morning, it seemed like my wishes might finally have been answered. However, I can’t recommend it at this point, as I haven’t actually been able to use it yet. The Outlook plug-in will only run on Windows XP (this despite Vista having been in the market for over 18 months now).

And, ironically, the first thing that this anti-spam tool did when I enabled everyone in my address book was… spam my address book.

If you download it, and try it yourself please do let know what your experience is like.