- Posts tagged Communications
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6 Masks to Avoid Data Smog
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Keep it Simple, Stupid"]
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I've been accused of being over wordy. In fact, one of my new years resolutions will be to bring more brevity into my speech and my writing. I believe that it stems from being both in sales and addicted to information. I try to jam a lot into a little. It is why I love Twitter so much. It forces to to be brief.
Part of being brief is understanding where it all comes from and trying to clean up some of that mess before you have a chance to regurgitate it again.
Here are 6 ways you can avoid adding to the data smog:
1.) Know the difference between data and information. 2.) You can get addicted to your favorite communications device. 3.) Don't be a pack-rat, you can find anything. 4.) Most things aren't as urgent as the sender believes - prioritize appropriately 5.) Always separate the urgent from the non-urgent 6.) Respond briefly and to the point. Don't add to the noise.These ideas, and many others, come from a great book I'm reading right now, The Power of Simplicity by Jack Trout. Tell me, what do you do to avoid adding to the mass of data smog?
Who Invented Dial '9' To Get Out
D'oh, in trying to dial 9-1-then my number, I accidentally dialed 911.
I would say that whoever invented the idea of dialing '9' to get out of a PBX system made a huge design flaw.
Have we really been dialing 9 to get an external line longer than we've had 911?
Enough people make this mistake that there is a Wiki article on it.
I'm really surprised that this hasn't been changed yet.
Our Menus Have Changed
There's a Fine Line Between Stalking and Social Networking
Lycos is Still in Business, Who Knew???
Apparently Marshall Kirkpatrick at TechCruch since he reported today that Lycos Mail is now offering 3GB of storage space, compared to Yahoo's 2GB, GMail's 2.75GB and Hotmail's 2.5GB. Seriously, I forgot that Lycos was still around.
While I think that this is a really nice thing for the good folks over at Lycos to do for their 310,000 Lycos Mail users, I don't really get it. Perhaps, like GOOG's 2GB mail changing announcement a year and a half ago, they are hoping that this will be a competitive landscape changing event. It won't be. I'd be surprised if anyone other than TechCrunch picks this up for the simple reason that mailbox size doesn't generate audience (size doesn't matter, right?).
In looking at the latest ComScore numbers, Yahoo! Mail (go Blake!) is still the largest mail provider in the US with just over 76 million monthly users. At a distant second, is HotMail with 46MM users and a very distant third is GMail with 8.6MM users. When Google announced that they would give away 2GB mailboxes, the world gasped and thought that it would be the end of the Y! Mail and HotMail. This has been far from the case and in fact, since everyone went from 100MB to 2+GB, it has probably helped Yahoo and MSN more than it has helped Google acquire users. Some might say that the only thing that Google did for Yahoo & MSN was provide a data management headache. Think about managing 2GB for 76MM users.
The Lycos announcement is a non-event. It probably will make their 310K users happy, but that is about it.
Genius Sales Contest
Psst, buddy, want to win $500 in AMEX gift cards? Come on, sure you do, we all do and all of your friends are doing it.
Here's what you need to do. A few weeks ago, I wrote about my friend David's company, Genius. Well, David wants to make your life as a sales person easier by offering Genius. When you use Genius properly, your prospects are a little bit warmer and thus, when you make a cold call, it is actually a warm call because you are focusing on the people who are interested in what you have to say. Ideally, Genius should make your cold calling a whole lot better then meeting Mr. Click.
Now, here is where the contest comes in, you need to go to WorstColdCall.com and enter in the contest. Don't enter with some lame ass, I called a guy and he called me mother f'er and hung up on me. Think long and hard about the absolute worst cold call that you have ever taken part in. Some of the current entries are going to be hard to beat.
New Yahoo! Messenger with Voice - Finally!!! Go call someone
I've been holding my tounge about the new Yahoo! Messenger since I got the alpha version back in November. Fortunately for me we launched alpha the week before Holly went to Europe. I was using Skype prior to her leaving, but switched over to try out Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. The alpha version, the pre-alpha version, even, was incredible. This service sounds so good, it is amazing. Bye bye Skype for the Schnaars family.
Yahoo! Messenger with Voice beta launched tonight and it is still too early to call anyone in Europe and I don't have any reason to call Asia as all my friends are back in the US right now. I am very excited to try it out tomorrow, though. If the alpha is any indication as to how good this is, it is going to be revolutionary.
Aside from the totally rockin voice codec that is part of the new Messenger, there are some other pretty slick features that may have been overlooked in the last version. The most noticable is the drag and drop photo and file sharing. If, like me, you do a lot of file transfers, you will find this to be a much faster and friendlier experience.
It seems like there are search windows everywhere in the new client. An effort to make search more prevelant within all of our products.
Hint: If you want to search within the message window, you can use the 's:' command. For example: 's:red shoes' returns the results of red shoes to both users. A word of caution, if you are trying to send a link from a shared drive 'S', as in s://documents... our service will search for whatever the drive is called. It has caused some headaches in the past for a few users.Like the old version, there is a Vicky Pollard audible. No but, yeah, but no, but yeah, but I think that she is hysterical. Graeme is working on a couple of really cool things including press to call HTML buttons (like the presence icons we have now) and some better tabs. More on that later. Finally, there is the ad unit. I fought tooth and nail to get that thing put in there and, beautifully, 2 weeks after I leave the team, this gets approved. I am glad that it is there, but it is a bitter sweet victory for me. I don't think that it is nearly as intrusive as the AIM ad unit, but it will also impact users as we have become accustomed to Yahoo Messenger not having an ad unit in the client. The new version of Messenger is incredible even for a beta (and what isn't beta in this Web 2.0 world). Go download here and see for yourself. Call me.
Snow & VoIP
I spoke to my dad over the weekend. He said that he got just over a foot of snow in the Nor' Easter that ripped through the East Coast.
I went out and took this picture. This should be the final nail in the coffin of me ever moving back to that region of the world. It is hard to see, but there were throngs of people hanging out on the Embarcadero. The guy on the left was juggling, fairly poorly, I might add, for tips.
Since the old man was bored (what else can you do when you have a foot of snow on the ground), he finally succumbed to 3+ years of nagging and downloaded Yahoo Messenger. My younger brother got him a webcam for Christmas and set it all up for him when he was out there recently. To my knowledge, though, I don't think that he ever played with it until Old Man Winter twisted Old Man Schnaars' arm with a 48 hour lock down. Football season is over (it never really started this year in Philadelphia), so with nothing else to do on a Sunday, I get a ping: hey scott, its dad.
He had my brother in another session and wanted to set up a conference call with the two of us, plus run webcam so that he can see and talk to my kids. It was the perfect, 'Wow, this is really here' moment. If we can get this going, this will be great.
My folks aren't technophobes. My mom is addicted to her crackberry. My dad drives a CAD/CAM system that will rival anything out there. Like a lot of people in his generation, it is my opinion that a lot of them simply don't adopt technology that they view as redundant. IM is redundant to email, VOIP is redundant to just picking up the phone. In a lot of cases, I get it. Less is more.
Cory Treffiletti, SVP at Carat wrote last month (Reg Req) that 2006 is the year that everyone finally 'Get's it'. His feeling about 'getting it' came about during Christmas dinner when the conversation turns to Google Earth. Then, aunts, uncles and cousins all chime in to provide their two cents on Google Earth. Then the conversation turned to a recent story in the news about the FBI cookieing users machines and how this technology works. Not your typical holiday dinner conversation, at least if you are anywhere but the Bay Area.
While I think that 'getting it' is coming, I am still not seeing it. Google Earth is a cool, and very well written software application, but once you look at your house, the house you grew up in and some tourist destinations, it really serves no value whatsoever. It is a toy. It is no different then going online and reading the news or looking at photos of your grandkids. It is cool, but it isn't really getting it.
My feelings were punctuated when my friend Tom and I were having a post bike ride coffee and a man, probably in his early 60's came in with Motorola RAZR in hand. Attached to his ear was my least favorite fashion accessory, the Bluetooth headset. We both commented on this and I mentioned the article. Tom and I chatted about the devices that our respective parents have and how maybe, 2006 really is the year that people 'Get it'. Then Mr. Bluetooth's phone started to ring. "Hello", ring (add annoying ring tone too), "Hello", ring, "Hello", ring. "This damn thing doesn't work.", opening the phone, "hello".
I'd like to think that this is the year that old people (old being anyone 15 years older then you), get technology. It is still early in the year, but I don't think that it is going to happen. IM is cool, Blackberrys are cool (as long as they still work), VoIP is cool and Bluetooth is cool, but they are all still toys for the masses (Yes, we lived before the era of Blackberrys). Until there is a compelling event for people, not in the technology industry, over the age of 50 to adopt technology, the year that people 'get it' is still many years away.
As for my VoIP experience with my dad, let's just say that I am looking forward to his phone calls.
Selling Blackerrys
If you are down on your sales job and think that selling whatever goods or services you have is a hard gig, take a couple of minutes to reflect on what the sales guys at RiM are going through.
On one hand, these guys have a product that almost every Global 2000 company has implemented in some way or another and they are spending a lot of their time doing upsells of more units and services.
On the other hand, every call that these guys get and make has to be met with the same question: Are you guys going to be around in 6 months? This isn't the 'are you going to be around in 6 months' that clients were asking asking sales reps of start-ups in 2001. This is a serious, we just read in Fortune that you guys are getting shut down, kind of question.
Even on days of positive press, like today, this still has to loom on both their attitudes and their sales calls. Unfortunately, I have to think that these guys spend more time defending their position in the market, the patent suit and questionable future of the product than selling the merits of their products and services.
Despite the big win today and the bump in the stock price, how do you invest in a company, whether it be its stock or its product, when the company has such an uncertain future?
Meebo and the Beginning of the End of Web 2.0
Played with Meebo a bit this morning. I tooled around with it a few months ago when the product launched and my feelings haven't changed. It is a bit slow. As a long time IM user, I have become accustomed to swapping to the actual IM client to send messages versus managing everything from a browser window.
For the most part, though, it is a fine 4-headed IM product. 99% of my contacts are on Yahoo, so I don't really need access to the other clients. It is not feature rich, but at least it sends messages which is really what anyone needs.
interestingly enough, they got a round of funding recently, which is why I went back to check it out. The have no revenue and only 500,000 users, yet I heard a rumor that this was valued at $10MM. Riddle me that one, Batman.
If Meebo becomes too large, they will have to pay Yahoo!, MSN, & AOL for access to the networks. This will not come cheap, even with Sequoia on board to help grease the skids at Google and Yahoo. In order to cover the costs of that, they will need to figure out how to make money. As AdSense becomes less and less an alternative to building a business (though for 3 employees, this may work), the only thing for Meebo to do is to charge for the service. Voice maybe, but the margins are so low and competing against Skype, Yahoo, Google, & MSN is generally a losing proposition.
So, is this what we have gone back to? After 5 years of pain and anguish over poor investments on the VC community, we are back to investing in companies with no users, no revenue and no business model. Great. The Meebo announcement is the beginning of the end of Web 2.0. It was fun while it lasted.
