Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Tonight was a new experiment for me.  I’ve never hosted a teleseminar before, but when Heather and Erik Olson asked if I would host their teleseminar 9 Simple Rules for Building a World-Class Business: How to get a Superior "Return on Life", I agreed.

Why?  The topic is personally appealing;  the idea that you should be measuring the value of your business based on not just ROI but also on the quality of life you can achieve with it seems like simple common sense.  So why is it so hard?  Lets face it, we’ve all sacrificed for our careers and businesses at one point or another in our lives. And we’ve also known people who’ve become trapped in that cycle of sacrifice and the result is often financial or personal disaster as friends, relationships and family suffer. Erik’s focus is helping the entrepreneur transform his or her business, and generate the quality of life that we, each and everyone of us who has started a business, aspire too.

The call was by turns informative and entertaining, funny and also very pointed. And if that wasn’t enough, at the end of it, Erik offered a free one hour strategy consultation to any listener, including folks listening to the podcast afterward. My advice? Take him up on it!

 

 Your "Return on Life" Transformation [79:26m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

To Erik and Heather, thank you for entrusting your online event to me, and to Calliflower.  I hope you’ll choose Calliflower for your next online event as well.

Image via CrunchBase

Today is Google Android day — the day that Google and T-Mobile unveiled the Android smartphone OS to the world.

We started off by talking about the device, the T-Mobile G1. With touchscreen, 3 megapixel camera, 3G, WiFi, and a slide out keyboard the specs make it look as if it’s targeted at iPhone AND Blackberry.  Jim Courtney points out that the most vulnerable target might be Windows Mobile.

One of the features touted in the T-Mobile offer was Free GMail.  my first thought was “isn’t Gmail already free?” T-Mobile is going to offer the GMail without any data plan, undercutting the $15 / month that is charged for Blackberry Mail.  We concluded it was a bit of a marketing gimmick, however, because email so often contains embedded HTML links.

Amazon Music Store will also be preloaded on the T-Mobile G1.  DRM free,128k rips sound good, but is this a real challenger to iTunes? With no desktop application, sideloading becomes the only option.  And what about the fact that Amazon Music is not offered anywhere outside the US.  It seemed to us as if the music store option was half baked.

And then there’s the issue of “open”.  Yes, Android is built on open source, but there are lots of non-Open elements.  Totally Google-centric, Android is built around GMail and Google contacts.  Apparently you have to really jump through hoops to make it synch with Outlook or the Mac address book.

At the other end of the spectrum, however, the Open Platform and Google Market are an applications marketplace with no App-Store style restrictions.  Google has just created a site where people can upload applications.  Is there a model for developers to monetize these apps?  Several people expressed strong opinions that Google ought to offer a service to bill customers for the application, as iTunes / Appstore does.

Priced at $180 with a 2 year contract and $35/month for unlimited data, we also felt that the pricing wasn’t aggressive enough to slow the Apple juggernaught.

On the Calliflower Conference Call:  Dan York, Hudson Barton, Jim Courtney, Ari Rabban, William Volk, Warren Bent, Jonathan Jensen, Dan Rockwell, Tom Orr, Sergio Meinardi, Michael Graves, Jeb Brilliant, Greg McQuay, Rob Nielsen, Andrew Hansen, Dan Lane

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 Squawk Box September 23 - Android [32:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A couple of weeks ago one of the routine automated searches I run on Twitter triggered on the term on Calliflower.  A new user named Steve was having a bad experience using our idiosyncratic PIN system.  Calliflower is a little different from every other conferencing system on the market because we assign a unique identity (via the PIN or a registered phone number) to every user.

In any case, I reached out to this Steve via Twitter. We exchanged phone numbers and I walked him through what we do and why Calliflower’s PIN model is a better system than the conferencing systems he was used to.

Steve was excited at the end of the call.  I didn’t really know how excited, until email arrived today with a pointer to a couple of sites that he runs, and a blog posting he had made about his experience with Calliflower — including 3 training videos so that others wouldn’t have the same issues.

The lesson here is pretty simple.  In today’s world of social media, news travels near instantaneously. And in the world of twitter, an idea can propagate and mutate at unbelievable rates.  Steve wasn’t asking for help, but by offering it I turned what was a bad experience for him into a very positive experience.  He rewarded that effort with something special.

As Chris Locke, Doc Searls and Dave Weinberger said in the The Cluetrain Manifesto, markets are conversations.  The only question you need to ask yourself is what kind of conversation you want to have with your market.