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I just thought I'd post the headline so that Arrington would think I was stupid enough to fall for such a blatant April Fool's gag. I suppose he's going to name the new entity CrunchFuck.com.
Besides, this would be a great time to announce I'm pregnant.
Technorati Tags: techcrunch, aprilfool.
Boy 'tis a fine day for Citizen Journalism, for those of us who believe that's what we should call stuff like this. Scoble didn't have feet on the street, but his buttocks on a seat in an over-rated Half Moon Bay restaurant by the beach, when he spied an Apple executive walking on the beach with a device that his Geekiness did not recognize.
Well, Hell, let Robert tell you what happened...
Pat "Scoop" Phelan says he has multiple sources confirming that Jajah has purchased Vonage and will be creating a new Ireland-based company tat at the outset, will have four million users, making it, by far, the largest of the new telephony companies that I classify as "cheap talk."
I'm not so certain if the talk will remain as cheap as it has been for Jajah. The Mountain View-based privately held acquiring company is rumored to be losing significant money even as it continues to grow. Vonage, as you probably know, just got clobbered in a $200 million patent infringement suit. The publicly held company has been bleeding money throughout its history.
There are smart people behind this deal and I am not privy to what they are up to. At this point, in a fast-emerging disruptive industry, it is wisest to go for position over revenue.
At the same time, I'm reminded of an old Jewish joke about Abie, who owns a shoe store. His pal Hymie comes in to visit and asks how business is. "Awful," he says, "This price war with the guy across the street is killing me. Every time I sell a pair of shoes, I lose $10."
"So," Hymie asks, " Why don't you raise your prices by $15 a pair."
Abie stares at his friend in disbelief. "What, and lose the volume?"
The new company has volume, position and momentum. All it needs now is to determie a profitable business model.
Technorati Tags: roam4free, jajah, vonage
I am going to spend most of my week end doing something I love and something I hate.
First, I'll be watching the Final Four college basketball tournament, my favorite sports event of any year that the Red Sox fail to make the World Series. You can have your Super Bowl or whatever kind of football turns you on. You can have you NBA or Stanley Cup or whatever whatever they call the Cricket and Ruby championships. Me? I just love the passion and surprise of citizen hoopsters.
Second, alas, it is the time of my annual agony. It is tax time again here in the US of A. I have property taxes, state taxes and dreaded IRS taxes. I am an awful record keeper. All year long, I stuff things into a draw in my desk and ignore the contents. Today is the day I open it up and discover, in the contents that all this perfectly good money must go to the rogues and scoundrels who call themselves public servants.
The IRS might as well just simplify the system and save us taxpayers some time. They could boil it down to three parts:
A How much money did you make last year?
B. What do you have left?
C. Send "B."
There is nothing like a launch.
So much depends upon it. So much work goes into it. Their is nothing quite as lasting as a first impression, so the way a company launches, even in these days of perpetual betas and soft launches makes a great deal of difference.
The most important part is, of course, the product. It has to be remarkable and it has to be ready for people to have a good user experience.
I've been addicted to the roller coaster ride of first launches since about the time the wheel was launched. I wasn't involved and I like to think if I were, you'd know the developer's name.
Scrapblog has given me quite a rush over the past few days. I didn't mind the rolling and the coasting, but there were a couple of hairpin turns that scared Hell out of me. The worst was when the site went down for about five hours yesterday, as the phone company would say, "due to the unusually high volume" of bloggers trying to get in at the same time. This now seems to be fixed and we are reasonable certain it won't happen again.
There's also some sort of glitch with Wordpress. You cannot post directly from scrapblog.com. You have to grab the EMBED code and paste it into your blog editor. One irony is that Scrapblog’s blog is powered by Wordpress, and that they have to take this slightly cumbersome etra step themselves to post. Fixing this will require some help from the Wordpress folk and we are not sure just when we will be able to make the problem go away.
About 100 bloggers have posted about Scrapblog so far. They have pointed out several little anomolies, which the company has fixed. The general feedback is overwhelming and positive. The product is working as it should work. Bloggers are telling us they think it is as good as we think it is, and we are planning to go live to the general public in just a few days.
I am always surprised by the speed and zeal bloggers have in helping people. I have seen it work for helping Scoble and me write a better book, in reporting on tsunamis and terrorism, but particularly n helping companies like Riya and Scrapblog build better products.
In a week dominated by ugliness in the Blogosphere, it was nice to have such a positive experience in another end of the neighborhood.
I had almost lost track of my good friend, Ernie, [the Attorney] Swenson, who today reminds me of how my path into the Blogosphere had first been carved. It was at PopTech. It was at PopTech in Camden, Me, one of my favorite conferences. Buzz Bruggeman, invited me to join him at a table, where he was sitting with several people I had never met before. I immediately got into a passionate argument with some overly caffinated guy named David.
That was how I met David Weinberger, JD Lasica and Ernie. Ernie and I immediately hit it off. Ernie encouraged me to read the book of the guy I was arguing with, something called Cluetrain Manifesto. You never know when you are having a watershed moment in your life and it turned out I was having one.
David's book would inspire me more than any other I have read. Cluetrain, Buzz and Ernie would all be covered in Naked Conversations. Buzz would eventually introduce me to another guy named Scoble, and his friend Andy Ruff would suggest at that dinner meeting that Robert and I collaborate on a book.
To make it all go full circle, Ernie was writing about me today to help promote the upcoming WOMMA Conference being held in New Orleans Apr. 17-18. The last annual WOMMA Conference was held in San Francisco. Scoble and I were the co-keynotes at it.
I thought it was a fabulous conference, and if you should attend if you can. David is the best of us on the presentation circuit. Trust me on this.
Technorati Tags: WOMMA, ernietheattorney, jdlasica, davidweinberger, cluetrain, scoble, nakedconversations
TechCrunch just wrote a marvelous article about my client, Scrapblog except for one, itsy, bitsy correction. Scrapblog has almost gone live. We are offering, as of now, a Blogger Preview Edition. For the next few days, we ask all you bloggers out there to go to the Blogger Preview site and try out it's entirely cool online multimedia tools that let's ou use what you are doing with Flickr, YouTube and on your desktop in ways that are entirely new.
Please, go start your own Scrapblog, but be gentle. You are the first strangers to touch our baby and we are a bit nervous. Let us know what you think or blog about it, favorable or not.
Let us know if and when you think it's ready for the world, or if we need to go back to the coding room. You don't need to be gentle with the us, just the product.
Technorati Tags: scrapblog
Years ago, when my blog was still ItSeemstoMe, I wrote a piece cause-based ice cream brands. It was a fairly light essay, but it invoked a vitriolic, anti-Semetic comment from someone who demonstrated he or she knew where I lived, knew my wife's name and owned a gun. It scared me and for a long while I stopped mentioning Paula's name and that I live in San Carlos, CA. As it turned out, I never wrote about gun control again and I cannot tell you whether it is coincidence or not.
Kathy Sierra has suffered a great deal more than that, and apparently a good number of women have also suffered disturbing and outrageous offenses. I feel for her and I am saddened that what has occurred has done so. The fact that it occurred on the blogosphere is not a key point to this story. It just makes it more personal for me because the Blogosphere is one of my global neighborhoods.
It is the same as learning that something violent or criminal or ugly happened in my physical neighborhood, or that some women I knew in college was sexually assaulted. Maybe it shouldn't be this way. Maybe we should all focus on the more massive ugliness that takes place every day in places like Darfur.
But we don't. We ignite when something bad happens close to home, or to someone we know or knew.
I say all in response to the lead story in today's San Francisco Chronicle by Dan Forst entitled "Bad behavior in the blogosphere."
Forst, conducted some decent journalistic legwork, getting good quotes and providing a very clear chronology of the events leading up to this controversy. But what bothered me is that the useful and informative stuff was buried, after the story jumped inside the paper. The Page One sections seems to me dominated by Tabloid type inferences that exaggerate a serious and complicated issue.For example:
The Blogosphere is a pretty transparent place with very few curtains except maybe in Amanda Chapel's cross-dressing room. The more "outrageous comments" are regularly taken down by most bloggers and therefore they get no attention. Women have legitimate complaints about their treatment by some men in general. This is not unique to the blogosphere. Personal attacks are defended by free speech in general. it's a Constitutional thing. Personal threats is another story. They are illegal online or off and should be."The incident and its aftermath have drawn back the curtain on a computer
culture in which the more outrageous the comment, the more attention it gets.
It's a world that many women in particular see as still dominated by men and
where personal attacks often are defended on grounds of free speech.
In addition, many of the newest tools of the Internet are coming into
play. Blogs and online communities were supposed to herald an era in which "the
wisdom of crowds" guided online behavior to a higher plane. Instead, instances
of mob rule appear to be leading the discussion into the sewer."
Words mean a difference to me. I don't think it's just because I'm a writer.
I felt my feathers ruffle during an ICE 07 panel talk called, "Citizen Journalism: Weapon of Mass destruction?" when panelists agreed that the term "Citizen Journalist," was inaccurate. When I asked a floor question, that was a bit contentious," panelist Angus Frame, editor, of globeandmail.com, Canada's national newspaper retorted, "what difference does it make?
To me it makes a great deal of difference. To discount the term, implies we bloggers are somehow less. While a great deal has been said about the structural differences between professional news gatherers and bloggers, the word "citizen" is too often overlooked. We are volunteers, just like "citizen soldiers" were. We lack the training and discipline. We are often inaccurate, but we have a lot of feet on a lot of streets and we are changing what the public comes to know. Citizen Journalism predates blogging. Abraham Zapruder's film of the JFK assassination was a citizen journalist and so was George Holliday's video of the Rodney King's beating.
The whole experience got me to thinking how often many of us struggle with terms. Despite the impression that authors become fabulously wealthy, my primary source of revenue still comes from consulting. In the process of being selected, I have to struggle with the terminology surrounding just what it is I do.
For years, I was perfectly content to be called a "marketing consultant" or "PR executive." Less formally, you could call me a marketing or PR guy. It was what I did.
But it's not what I do anymore. When business prospects use those terms for me, I get uncomfortable. Yet I am well aware, Ican rarely get hired by telling people what I do not do.
A marketing guy figures out messages and the devises ways to insert them into people's foreheads, even people who do not wish to have them inserted. This is no longer what I do.
Lately, I’ve
started calling myself a “markets guy,” which is someone who finds markets relevant
to a business and joins or starts conversations that are useful or interesting
to those markets. If you think about it, this is very
different.
Yet I am all about public relations. The term literally implies developing relationships with your public. Social media makes it efficient, effective and scalable to have transparent relationships with verylarge numbers of people. If you think about it, these are public relationships.
Maybe in all cases, I'm just mincing words. But then, words are very important to most people.
Back in the early 90s, convergence conferences were the rage in California. The underlying theme was that Hollywood and Silicon Valley were going to have to work together moving forward and the two very different cultures would have to converge. The subsequent joke that emerged is, "we thought this would be like getting sheep and cattle to graze on the same pasture, but it was worse. It was like trying to get them to mate. If a child ever comes of the marriage it will be really, really ugly."
For the most part, Hollywood and Silicon Valley have not done much converging except where Steve Jobs is involved. The original animosity has increased for the most part and the two cultures have moved even further apart with Digital Rights Management serving as the barbed wire between them
It's now 15 years since those convergence attempts, and most people would agree that, when they're not playing hockey, Canada's culture is decidedly more polite and accommodating than either Hollywood or Silicon Valley. And ICE was certainly a very civil, well-produced event in a very pleasant venue, even serving tasty food at lunch.
It never claimed to be a convergence event, but it brought together over 400 executives from mainstream media, government-protected incumbent wireless, phone and cable providers, advertising,branding, film, mobile, broadcast and computer gaming technology, consumer technology, new media networks, government and a few others that I may have overlooked.
In fact ICE, represented one of the greatest potpourris of traditional and new media, top down-incumbents and bottom-up challengers that I have seen assembled in one place. The ICE producers had assembled approximately 120 speakers, most of them assembled into panels of 4-6 speakers, either in a general assembly room or in two large breakout rooms.
For me, the standout presentation was the opening keynote by Robert J. Sawyer, the prolific SciFi writer and blogger who sees the laws of Moore and Metcalfe causing an almost vertical growth path for computing power and social network growth. A couple of decades forward, he sees the actual computer, TV and perhaps movie screen becoming obsolete as implants let us watch our entertainments and get our information behind our eyeballs and directly into the brain.
Is this vision or hallucination? I really don't know. My guess is that his vision is right but the timing is overly optimistic. I believe there is a vanishing point to Moore's Law and we are arriving at it. But Hell, I wasn't the keynoter and I'm not a SciFi writer although I've occasionally been accused of being one. In any case, I thought Sawyer's quick sketch of a huge picture was the right way to start this group cogitating.
I sat on two panels, the first was called "New World Order," and the title made me wince a bit. My understanding of the term is that it refers to a conspiracy to create one world government and thus end wars. When George Bush,the elder, used the term it has been written this motivated a survivalist cult to blow up a hospital in Oklahoma City.
Mark Kuznicki gave a mixed and accurate review of our collective performance. I thought Brady Gilchrist of Fuel Industries showed the clearest vision for a new world order that I believe in, one in which the power moves from the top-down, government-backed incumbents into the hands of the communities they serve.
The panel had an interesting composition. There were six of us, three of us representing the disruptors and three representing the companies that we think should be disrupted. But few sparks flew. There was a slight bump over user-controlled TV site Joost, but I thought civility got in the way of the chasm of disagreement that sat on that panel.
Second, with six people, plus a moderator speaking, each speaker had only about eight moments to speak, forcing us to go broad and shallow, rather than narrow and deep.
I would give an equally mixed review to "Blogging for Dollars," my second panel, which was accurately reviewed by Joe Thornley. With the notable exception, of the passionate rising star Ryanne Hodson, co-author of The Secrets of Video blogging (and is also editor of The Scoble Show), I felt the remainder of us gave rather tepid performances.
I think we went off track at the beginning, when B5Media's Mark Evans noted accurately that to be a good blogger passion is more important than dollars, and I reiterated the point. This was accurate, and one that all panelists had figured out much earlier in our social media careers.
While the panel would have preferred discussing ethical issues related to money and social media, the audience had come to discuss monetization. I had decided the night before to give out some personal numbers on my own so that the audience understood how few people derive money directly from blogging and how many make it indirectly because they blog.
I should have noted that less than 100 people in the world make a living directly from blogging. Naked Conversations, the blog is among the 1100 most popular blogs in the world according to Technorati. But if you slice it into a business blog, it is considerably higher ranked. Make that a marketing blog and it is probably in the top 100 of the category. As a book blog, I'm certain we are in the Top 10.
Last year, Scoble and I divided less than $2000 between us in revenue directly from the blog. It was all from our Amazon.com affiliation, which gives us each about 60 cents, every time we sell a book through the blog. Because the keyword is "Naked," we cannot use Google AdSense without demeaning our brand, but I doubt that would bring in much more than another $2K.
However, the blog also served to draw attention to our book, and while we cannot declare what we made, we can say we did much better because through our blog, we got publisher to compete for rights to the book. Because of the blog, we got people all over the world to talk about the book and that proved to be more effective in generating sales than the extensive traditional marketing dollars invested when the book was launched. Because of the blog, Scoble got a cool job as a professional video blogger, and I have more than doubled my consulting fees. I also now make a fair amount of revenue from speaking fees where for the last 30 years, my total revenue in that department was zero.
My point to members of the audience should have been that blogs don't generate revenue, just like press releases, goodwill donations, great customer support do not generate revenue. Revenue is generated because a company does it. It's an indirect thing.
All in all, I thought ICE was a great attempt at achieving a difficult goal. But there were two problems. While I had a great time meeting people at the conference, I found myself graviating to people like me, people who are dedicated to social media as a disruptive force. Two of my favorite newly acquired friends are Michael Tippett, co-founder of NowPublic and Paul Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Orato, two Vancouver-based early phase companies offering fascinating forms of what I call Citizen Journalism they might use different terms).
The point is that people tend to hang out with others in their own culture. No one from Rogers, Canada's monopolistic cable, wireless and phone company came over to hang with us. The two cultures are as likely to meld as Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Our side of the barbed wire is dedicating to snipping down the barbed wire and setting all the people that incumbents treat like sheep and cattle free. There side is dedicated to preserving the barbed wire and using the twin tools of litigation and legislation to protect the livestock as if it they owned them (or us).
ICE also erred, I think, by providing too much of a good thing. 120 panelists in two days makes it tough to drill into controversial issues, letting what few attendee neutrals there were in the room, here the two sides to potentially volatile issues.
I think ICE next year would be wise to develop a very similar agenda. But this time, put just two speakers and a moderator on the dais to debate each of the conference issues. Let the moderator as more controversial questions. Let the panelist from either side, take off the gloves a bit and actually try to win a point.
And I'm willing to be one of those contenders. I do my best work without gloves on.
