Alec Saunders SquawkBox

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing with the Yamaha SoundGadget PSG-01S – a Skype-certified speakerphone provided to me for evaluation. This pint-sized device provides business travellers with a high quality portable alternative to the conference phones that can be found in boardrooms everywhere.

The SoundGadget packs an array of four microphones and two speakers into a tiny rectangular pillar standing less than 5 inches tall.  The speakers support frequencies from 300 Hz to 20 KHz, making them an excellent alternative to the cheap units in most laptops, especially for casual music, video and podcast audio.  The microphones are arranged in a 360 degree array at the top of the unit, with internal echo cancellation and noise reduction firmware.  It’s intended to be used at a table for meetings, but it also worked incredibly well for me as I walked around my office.  The extra microphones apparently made a huge difference.

Windows 7 recognizes the SoundGadget as a simple USB microphone and speaker combo.  To the operating system, it’s little more than a USB headset.  However, with the addition of the convenient utility packaged with the SoundGadget, the row of buttons on the side of the device are now activated.  You can now answer and hang up calls with the touch of a button rather than searching the desktop for Skype.  That’s a nice usability improvement, albeit not completely necessary.

If this were just a speakerphone it would be a handy gadget.  However, recognizing that road warriors prefer to be economical about weight and baggage (see Jim Courtney’s comments about his recent experiences flying to Europe with the SoundGadget), Yamaha has added a couple of extra features to expand the SoundGadget’s appeal.

• When turned on its side, the SoundGadget converts from a mono speakerphone into a tiny set of stereo speakers.  In my use, it was a nice improvement over the speakers in my HP laptop.
• Coupled with the software utility included, the SoundGadget can also function as a high quality microphone for recording podcasts or even music. 

Until December 31, 2009 the SoundGadget is available at $199.90 at any Skype Store.  In fact, the price is my only reservation about this device. To ameliorate that, it’s being offered with a full money back guarantee during this promotional period.  If you don’t like it, just ship it back at their expense before January 31, 2010 for a full refund.

We hosted Lee Dryburgh, the organizer of eComm, on the January 26th SquawkBox conference call.  A wide ranging and well attended conference call, we discussed the origins of the eComm Conference, what to expect from this year’s conference, and highlights of previous years.

Along the way, we also managed to talk about Open networks, telecom and Skype, whether interoperability really matters at all, and the communications continuum idea that folks like Jeff Pulver have been actively promoting. And we managed to convince lee to dust off his crystal ball, and prognosticate on the future of telecommunications. 

eComm will be March 3-5 in San Francisco.  Early bird registrations are open for just two more days – until January 30th.  If you’re in the communications industry, you owe it to yourself to attend this event.

On the Calliflower Conference Call: Jonathan Jensen, Dan York, Jim Courtney, Lee dryburgh, Martyn Davies, Mark Hewitt, Mike Pruyn, Brad Jones, James Body, Ken Camp, Sheryl Breuker, Warren Bent, Todd Spraggins, Jeanette Fisher, TJ Snell, Sergio Meinardi, and Tim Panton.

 

 Squawk Box January 26, Guest Lee Dryburgh [57:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Facebook Polls launched on Friday night to much fanfare on the web.  TechCrunch called it a market research paradise, and various others commented in a similar positive vein. 

A Facebook Poll costs $5 to set up, and then between $.10 and $1.00 per response, depending on how quickly you want the results.  For that, you get to ask one question, up to 60 words in length. You can choose to finish the poll at 50, 100, or more responses, depending on how accurate you need the results to be.  You can also target the poll to specific interest groups, demographics, and geographies.  When purchased, the poll invitation shows up in users news feed depending on the target demographic selected.

I took it for a test drive this morning.  As you know, I'm interested in the potential of Facebook for business users, and Friday created a Facebook group (requires a valid Facebook membership to participate) to discuss this topic .  So, I constructed two quick polls around this topic. 

First I asked people to categorize their Facebook friends as business, personal, or both. I paid $.25/response, and asked for 50 responses, which Facebook estimated would take 4 hours.  In actual fact, the 50 responses were collected in about 90 minutes.

Facebook presents the results as a series of graphs, or if you wish, you may download the raw data as a CSV file. 

The results suggest that most Facebook users view Facebook as a personal tool only, and that nobody uses it exclusively for business.  Still, 40% of people have some number of business associates amongst their Facebook friends.

Facebook also gives you the ability to break this data down further by demographic.  Admittedly, the segmented results should be taken rather lightly given the size of the sample, but they still pointed to some interesting possibilities.

Among younger people, and among women, Facebook is predominantly a personal tool.  Men are more likely to use it for personal and business, and  greater than 60% of people age 25 or older are likely to have business contacts included in their Facebook friends.

I did a little more digging, and ran a second poll asking people to estimate how many business related Facebook friends they had.  This time I around, based on the results of the previous poll, I only targeted Facebook users in the 25 to 34 years age bracket.  I would have targeted all users older than 25 but Facebook Polls doesn't permit you to choose multiple age brackets.

Again, the poll completed in well under the 4 hours estimated, and this time (at 1:15 minutes) faster than the first poll.  More middle aged people use Facebook on Sunday mornings?  Perhaps a topic for another Facebook poll…

The results are a little hard to read, because Facebook uses some kind of strange ordering (20 comes before 10, and 30 after 50…).  However, they're unmistakeable.  The vast majority of Facebook users count only a small number of business contacts among their friends.  2/3 say fewer than 10% of their Facebook friends are work related, although 20% say that 40% or more of their Facebook friends are work related.  It appears that users are quite polarized, and either view Facebook as a potential business tool, or not.

Again, digging deeper reveals more insight.  Men and women clearly see Facebook differently, with men much more likely to include business contacts among their Facebook friends.

Although Facebook Polls shows a lot of promise, it's a long way from the market researchers paradise that TechCrunch's Mike Arrington describes.  As a market research tool, it's primitive.  It needs:

• Finer demographic targeting capabilities.
• The ability to deliver a multi-part questionnaire.  One 60 word question is simply not enough. 
• The ability to handle multiple response questions, and open ended questions.
• Better analytical tools including distributions, and cluster analyses.

For quick polls it's not bad.  However, to do any detailed market research, better results could likely be had by building a SurveyMonkey questionnaire, and assembling a panel of respondents using the Facebook share feature.

Build a business, not an acquisition target.  The world has changed since 2002.