Alec Saunders SquawkBox

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SMS email provider Teleflip is shutting down their Flipmail service on Friday.  When they premiered at DEMO in 2007, the premise was that everyone could have email on their mobile phone, without having to buy a smart phone.  The company burst onto the scene with a coast-to-coast PR blitz resulting in breathless headlines with the message that any cellphone could act like a BlackBerry.  Now that smartphones have reached the tipping point, driven by red hot products from Apple and RIM, it’s easy to see how Teleflip would have come under increasing pressure.

And so, in a manner befitting Teleflip’s business, just a few minutes ago I received the final Flipmail from the team.  Delivered by SMS in three pieces it reads:

Subj: Important Note From Teleflip

Dear Teleflip Beta User: Thanks for being part of the beta testing group using our Flipmail service, however, we are now ending this service.  We’ve gone as far as we can with our financial sources, and the piggy bank is empty.  Effective Friday August 15, 2008 at 9:00AM Pacific Daylight Time,

Ex-employees I spoke with spoke of budgetary cuts, and that most employees, excepting the C-Suite, had been laid off in January to reduce burn in an effort to conserve cash while raising additional capital.  None could confirm that the company was indeed winding up, however, and suggested I reach out to CEO Tony Davis.  We’ll see what he has to say.

Judging by the fact that their website security certificate expired 4 days ago, I would say that things don’t look promising.

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This morning’s guest was Andrew Mahon of Nokia, who was here to chat with us about Nokia Email.  You may be wondering, as I was, why Nokia is getting into the email game.  Rest assured, you’re not getting another email inbox.  What Nokia has done is to “mobilize” your existing mailbox.  Nokia Email is a service that integrates tightly with your existing mailbox (POP and IMAP supported) and then “pushes” updates from those mailboxes to your supported Nokia handset. So far as I’m concerned, it’s Nokia’s answer to Blackberry’s push services and Apple’s planned push services, although you won’t hear Andrew say that on the call.

The service is in beta today.  Andrew was kind enough to give us the broad strokes of what the service is, to talk about the relationships Nokia will cultivate with carriers, and also to answer some fairly specific technical questions from some of the folks on the line.

On the Calliflower conference call this morning: Kendra Petrone, Andrew Mahon, Adam Somer, Jonathan Jensen, Kevin Restivo, Jim Courtney, Jeb Brilliant, and Bill Volk.

 

 Squawk Box August 12 [44:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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A must read for any aspiring product demonstrators, Jason Calacanis’ latest missive on How to Demo Your Startup is right on the money.  Howard and I put the same advice to good use when we won DEMOgod in 2006.  Afterward, we built a presentation that we gave at a local BarCamp which outlined the architecture of that demo, and the essential elements to get your product message across in 6 minutes or less.  The formula is pretty simple:

Recently I’ve had the misfortune to be shopping for a car.  A loathsome experience at the best of times, automobile shopping drives home the value of the demo.

At 4:30 one Saturday afternoon we dropped into the Ottawa Honda to test drive a couple of vehicles on our list.  When we arrived, a chatty sales person took us out to the lot to see the vehicles he had. First black mark: automatic transmissions only, rather than the standard I was looking for.  Second black mark: although it was 4:30, it was too late in the day to test drive a vehicle.  Third black mark: no demonstration of the features of the vehicle at all.  Just chat chat chat.  Fourth black mark: being regaled with a 30 minute history of Honda, the uniqueness of the Honda engine, and how happy Honda customers are.  I just wanted to drive the car.  We left, and didn’t return.

Bank Street Mazda next door was only too happy to show us his vehicles, but completely screwed up on the “engage your customer” piece.  Why?  I  wore pretty casual clothes, and showed up driving a beater.  From the start, he had me pegged for a super low cost buyer, and kept pushing me toward bare bones vehicles.  And with no brochures (they had run out for the 2008 model year), my only recourse was to extract information from a sales person who didn’t understand his customer.  Painful, to say the least.

Best demos?  Mercedes gave a dazzling demonstration of the features of the car and left us for three hours to drive various models. He didn’t close, however. Toyota also gave a great demo, and did close. Unfortunately, I wanted to shop more.

In the end I settled on a Mazda.  It took the sales person three times as long as it needed for him to close the business because there were so many unanswered questions.  Nevertheless, it was the right combination of features at the right price.  If the Toyota had been a few thousand dollars cheaper, I wouldn’t have endured that sales person, however.

When delivered effectively, demos are your most valuable sales tool.

For some time now I’ve been watching a steady stream of press releases come through my mailbox from IfByPhone.  A new iPhone app, a store locator, and a virtual call center have all been announced in the last few weeks. There’s a constant hum of activity coming from these folks.

So I chatted with CEO Irv Shapiro late last week to find out what all the excitement was about, and I loved what I heard.  IfByPhone’s philosophy is that building telephony applications should be no more difficult than building web applications.  Their business is about enabling businesses with creative and useful additions to businesses web sites (like the Store Locator) that any web developer can deploy.

And what about that iPhone application?  Called Voice Broadcast, it allows users to send a recorded phone message to a group of people at a specific time.  For example, a manager needing to travel early in the morning could record a message to his or her team, that would be delivered during the day.  According to Shapiro, Voice Broadcast was intended to be a technology demonstration.  Even so, thousands have downloaded it from the Apple store, and more than 1,000 people have signed up for IfByPhone’s commercial service as a result.

Looking for creative and advanced voice applications?  Perhaps checking out IfByPhone would be a smart place to start.