On June 9, I will be presenting to Silicon Valley’s “A-list” investor crowd at an event in Mountain View, CA. For a list of the other start-ups presenting or to buy a ticket click here.
Fonolo presenting at "Launch Silicon Valley" next week
Published June 4th, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments
On June 2, Rogers will begin selling two phones powered by Android, Google’s mobile OS, the first such phones in Canada. The HTC Dream (pictured below) will be the first Android phone available in Canada.
Rogers will also be launching the HTC Magic which, like the iPhone, has no physical keyboard and, like the Blackberry, has a trackball for navigation.
Both phones will run on Rogers’ 3.5G, 7.2 Mbps High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) network.
Mobile Fonolo for Canadians!
Of course, the first thing I thought about was that Canadians can now use Fonolo on their mobile devices! (Read more here.)
Does Google forbid Exchange compatibility?
So far, the only other mass market Android phone has been the "G1" from T-Mobile (which is also an HTC Dream under the covers).
Key difference between the two: The one from Rogers is an Android phone but not a Google phone. One of the implications of that difference — and probably the reason for Rogers’ decision — is support for Microsoft Exchange.
Engadget says this makes the Rogers offering: "a whole hell of a lot more useful to business users than the G1s down in the States, and going forward, this is an issue T-Mobile probably wants to think about."
IntoMobile reports: "[the phones] will not feature the Google logo on the back [because] … such devices (the G1) … must to adhere to a certain set of standards… [which] currently do not allow for Exchange support."
I haven’t dug into this issue any deeper than today’s reading, but one has to wonder if Google is using Android as a way to push GMail (and its other offerings) over Microsoft’s Exchange.
Is VC investment plummeting? Yes, but it’s not as bad as it looks
Published April 23rd, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 CommentsIn the wake of a report (pdf) on venture capital activity, a number of industry watchers are pondering the crisis in funding. The press release announcing the report set the tone for the coverage by proclaiming "VC Investment plummets to 12 year low". The New York Times said investment rates have "dropped to lows not seen since before the dot-com bubble".
In the first quarter of this year, VCs invested $3b, which is down by about half what they invested in the previous quarter and down by 61% from Q1 of 2008. That’s pretty scary drop. But it’s hardly a surprise. This trend was apparent the day Sequoia released its now infamous "RIP Good Times" slideshow in October, which struck fear in the hearts of every VC firm. (Did it discourage any entrepreneurs? Probably not, we’re a pathologically optimistic breed.)
It’s also no surprise that money available for early stage deals is disappearing the fastest. Stacey Higginbotham writes: "…it’s looking especially bad for early-stage companies, with only $900 million invested in early-stage deals this quarter, and the rest going to follow-on rounds and later-stage deals. In the last year, almost three-quarters of the total capital has gone into later stage-deals as VCs continue to fund their older portfolio companies while they wait for an exit." I commented on that trend in December.
So where is the good news promised by this post’s headline?
Factor out regional trends…
Fred Wilson, VC and uber-blogger, dove deeper into the numbers and saw some interesting regional trends. Silicon Valley firms ramped up their investment the most in ‘06 and ‘07 and so their pendulum is swinging further back now. That impact is exaggerating the industry-wide average. He writes:
What you see is that the total amount raised in Silicon Valley … dropped to an annualized rate of less than $5bn, a 50% reduction. At the same time, the total amount raised in New England… dropped to an annualized rate of below $2bn, a drop of 1/3. And in the NY Metro market, we saw a small decline, but nothing to get excited about…
.. and factor out sector trends…
Aside from the regional trend, there’s a strong sector trend. According to that report, clean tech investments dropped 84% but Internet investment saw only a 31% decline. The key: Internet investments are capital efficient, meaning it takes less money to get a new product to market. That’s what VCs are looking for in difficult times.
Another data point comes from David Shore, head of the Technology group at Research Capital Corporation. He said, if you carve out green tech, biotech and hardware, you see very little decline in both number of deals and amount of money. Here’s a chart drawn from their database of "Web 2.0" investments over the last year:
Certainly you can see a big drop in Oct’08, but it seems like a strong recovery so far for 2009. (Keep in mind that April isn’t done yet, so that last bar on the right is still going to grow.)
… and it’s not so bad.
Going back to Fred Wilson, he concludes: "So while the data doesn’t lie, it also doesn’t tell the full story. There is money out there for good ideas, particularly ones that are capital efficient and located somewhere other than Silicon Valley."
Good news for Android fans: You can now use Fonolo as a native app on your handset!
With the Fonolo4Android app, you can browse through the phone menus of the 500 North American companies in the Fonolo database, and Deep Dial to any point. The service and application are free so the only cost is the (small) data transfer to your phone and the talk time (if you don’t have an unlimited talk plan). You’ll need an Android phone of course (such as T-Mobile’s G1) with a data connection. You’ll also need to create an account at fonolo.com, if you don’t already have one.
Some screen shots:
The application was written using the Fonolo API by a group of students led by John St. John. More about them here. They’ve also made the code available, so you can modify the application, or take inspiration on writing your own Fonolo app. It’s actually been available for a couple months now so I should have posted earlier. Thanks guys!
Not all of the functionality available through our web interface is available through the Android app – for example, you won’t be able to do call recording, or add notes to your calls. This is a limitation of the current API that we hope to fix in the next version.
Fonolo Named One of “Top 25 Canadian IT Up and Comers”
Published April 7th, 2009 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment
I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Fonolo has been included as one of the “Top 25 Canadian IT Up and Comers”. This was part of the recently announced Branham300 list of top Canadian technology companies. The Branham300—the most comprehensive listing of publicly traded and privately held IT companies in Canada—is published annually by the Branham Group, a leading “Go to Market” consultancy exclusively focused on the technology sector. Thanks!
GrandCentral is now "Google Voice". Spam calls to my GrandCentral number continue.
Published March 12th, 2009 in Uncategorized. 7 CommentsLots of excitement as Google finally unveiled the new version of GrandCentral, a company they bought almost 2 years ago. A number of people were starting to wonder if anything would become of the service that gained rapid popularity and rave reviews prior to the Google acquisition. Well, it looks like the wait was worth it. Techcrunch gushes: “It’s Very, Very Good.”
I absolutely love the concept and I was an early user (and managed to get a coveted “415″ area code number). Grandcentral stopped handing out new numbers after the acquisition, and still hasn’t resumed. TechCrunch reports that people have bidding up to $650 on eBay for GrandCentral numbers.
It’s still in transition
I just logged in at the grandcentral.com and it looks exactly the same:
At voice.google.com today you see:
But you can’t actually sign-in. They have quite a few new features coming which you can read about here. I’m definitely excited and looking forward to using it.
Why I’m not a user
Grandcentral did everything it claimed but I never became a regular user because: 1) I can’t get a Canadian number, and I don’t want to impose long distance charges on my Canadian contacts to reach me. 2) When I call, the outbound number displayed doesn’t match my GrandCentral number.
On the first item, this problem is not unique. Many similar services don’t extend into Canada. It’s still hard to get an Canadian Skype-In number for example. Ooma has the same problem and when I spoke to some senior people at Ooma last year they cited complicated regulatory issues (including a word I hadn’t heard before: “homologation“. Always like learning a new word). I don’t expect Grandcentral/Google Voice to address this any time soon and I don’t hold it against them — the extra hassle is probably not worth it in the early stage of the game.
That 2nd item is a bigger issue because it effects everyone, not just Canadians. Our mental model for interacting with phones is that “if you called me from number X” I can hit redial to call you back. (Or I can store that number in my address book for later.) To fix this we either have to change user behavior (tough) or spoof the caller-ID (technically doable but quasi-legal). The only Voice 2.0 company I know of that has solved this problem is Truphone, which does transmit your Truphone number as to the destination.
Spam Call Blocking
One of GrandCentrals’ features is blocking spam calls, which takes me to the second half of this post’s headline. Below is the first page of my current GrandCentral inbox. Every single one of those calls is spam (something about a car warranty), so that’s one feature that definitely needs some tuning. [Update: Consumerist has some coverage on the “car warranty robocalls” here.]
Adopting a new number is still the big barrier
I’m sure Google will tune and polish that feature as well as the others. But regardless, one barrier to adoption that will remain: you will have to adopt a new phone number, and train everyone you know to start calling you on that number.
Another approach to getting GrandCentral-like features that does not require a new number, is being pioneered by Skydeck. They’ve built some very impressive technology which lives both in the cloud and on your mobile device (also, sadly, not available in Canada).
On a closing note, people often ask me about how Fonolo compares to GrandCentral, er, Google Voice. Simple: Google Voice is about managing your inbound calls. Fonolo is about smarter outbound calls. In that sense they are very complimentary.
I just returned from a trip to California that included attending and presenting at the Emerging Communications Conference. I’ve hyped up this conference a few times on this blog, and I can say without hesitation that the show delivered on every level. Hats off to organizers!
One my favorite parts of the conference was the very active "back-channel" (powered by Twitter) that sizzled with comments, questions, jokes and tangential topics throughout each session. And it makes for a good read now, as well. After my presentation, I immediately checked the comments there and was pleased to find them very positive. What a great way to get immediate feedback to a speaker. (I will post my slides here shortly.)
Unfortunately, I only got to see a small sample of the presentations because of other meetings I had while in California. Hopefully, the videos will be available shortly. Some notes from sessions I did attend:
Phweet
Stuart Henshall showed off Phweet and positioned it as an alternate way to connect with someone via voice spontaneously. I like to think of a contact list as ranked by "strength", i.e. how well do you know each other / how often have you spoken. For contacts who are strong connections, you typically just pick up the phone and dial. For medium connections, you might IM first: "Want to talk?". Its with the far end of that range: new or very weak connections, where you find room for innovation. The "call me" badges from Jaxtr, GrandCentral, etc were one attempt at this. (Anyone have data on whether that approach has seen real traction? I’ve never clicked one.) Phweet is an attempt to leverage Twitter to answer this challenge. As Stuart said: "The value is before the call." Consider: Both Phweet and Fonolo are alternate ways to start a call, and don’t involve dialing a phone number.
Phonetag launched Grid.com
The guys from Phonetag launched a "developer environment" for voice apps called Grid.com. James Siminoff: "What’s stopping us all from innovating is the contracting process with vendors… too much friction in the supply chain." They are offering "wholesale pricing" on SMS, VoIP, Whitepage look-ups, billing and (their personal specialty) voice transcription. They are partnering with Voxeo (for the IVR hosting I presume). Voice transcription is still one of the pricier building blocks in the Voice 2.0 toolset. It’s the main reasons services like PhoneTag, GotVoice, SpinVox and Jott can’t be offered for free (at scale) or ad-supported. I wrote about Jott’s transition away from "freemium" here.
Voxeo launched Tropo.com
Jonathan Taylor, CEO of Voxeo, showcased their own "developer environment", but this one more focused on hosted IVR. Tropo lets you build voice apps in Javascript, PHP, Ruby, Python or Groovy. (I hadn’t even heard of that last one, but my programming days are long behind me. Fonolo is mainly PHP, by the way.) Pricing is dead simple: 3 cents/minute, with no up front commitment. At lunch, Jonathan assured me that they are not competitive with Grid.com at all, but rather complimentary.
Ditech launched TokTok
Todd Simpson from Ditech networks showed off a service that gives callers a wide range of voice-activated features. According to the demo video, you can conference in a friend to the current call by saying ("Toktok, conference in Jim"). Toktok will pull appropriate phone numbers from your online address book to do that. You can also create and modify events in your Google Calendar through verbal commands. Very interesting on a number of levels. I think I’ll write a follow-up post.
Mobivox launched "CRM over Voice" product
Fellow Canadian start-up Mobivox unveiled a new stage of their platform strategy. Mobivox started off several years ago as a consumer-focused calling service (i.e. discount long distance) and has since successfully transitioned into a platform-for-carriers company. Alec Saunders described this latest addition by saying "it’s about the idea that carriers should host users address books, and watch to see what they do with those address books. Over time, as behavior is tracked, a CRM over Voice application would automatically start to initiate up-sell behaviours with the customer."
CEO Peter Deitrich wrote in the company blog how this is all about reducing customer churn: "Every time end users – whether our own or those of our partners – access our platform, they ‘talk’ with a personalized and provider-branded voice assistant. In essence, a natural dialogue with the customer… [and] an opportunity to deliver tailored, non-intrusive messages – for example, thanking users for or making payments, highlighting new features or offers, even doing short and simple customer satisfaction surveys… "
Skype makes their "SILK" voice codec royalty free
Jonathan Christensen made an announcement that was received very enthusiastically by the crowd. In fact, many of the questions were of the flavor: "Really? What’s the catch?" because it sounded to good to be true. Skype has put very generous licensing terms around their new "superwideband" voice codec, which is the default codec in the new Skype client. Some coverage here.
Calliflower update
Calliflower founder Alec Saunders gave an update on their very slick and forward-thinking conferencing application. He also looked back at his very prescient 2005 post "Voice 2.0 Manifesto" and compared it to where we are today.
Some other coverage
As I mentioned, I saw only a fraction of the sessions. Here are posts from other attendees that will fill in some the blanks:
Alan Quayle: Emerging Communications Conference 2009.
Dean Bubley: Thoughts from eComm.
Andy Abramson: eComm Was A Hit.
Jim Courtney: eComm 2009: An Outstanding Primer in Emerging Communications
Jon Arnold led a panel discussion that was then covered in the Wall Street Journal. Jon’s thoughts are here.
[Update: Martin Geddes, Head of Strategy for BT Design, and a well-known industry analyst, gave a presentation by video which is now available here. He discusses Fonolo starting at the 8:00 mark.]
Come to eComm and see speakers from Google, Nokia, BT, Skype, T-Mobile, Sprint, Adobe, Cisco… and Fonolo!
Published February 15th, 2009 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment
I just booked my hotel and airfare for the Emerging Communications Conference (Mar 3-5, San Francisco). I decided to drop by their site and see how the speaker list has developed… Wow! Keynotes from Google, Nokia, BT, Skype, T-Mobile, Sprint, Adobe and Cisco. Hats off to organizer Lee Dryburgh for pulling together so many industry heavyweights.
But eComm isn’t just about hearing from the titans. As the title suggests, the focus is on exciting new developments in the telco, voice and communications world. As I wrote in December (link) eComm will be featuring “…established disruptors (Skype, Digium, Voxeo), disruptors-in-progress (PhoneTag, IfByPhone, Iotum) and big picture thinkers (Martin Geddes, Dean Bubley, Alan Quayle).”
I will be presenting on Tuesday, March 3, at 5:45pm. Here’s my talk title:
At last year’s eComm, Fonolo unveiled its online service for visually navigating IVR systems (phone menus). Fonolo’s online service (now in public beta) allows anyone to browse the phone menus of over 300 companies and “deep dial” into any point in that menu. In order to provide this service, Fonolo developed a system that “spiders” phone menus, much like Google spiders web sites.
A year later, the resulting data set, combined with the usage statistics collected from thousands of calls, provides a snapshot of the IVR world as it has never been seen before. In this session, CEO and co-founder Shai Berger will talk about the trends that Fonolo has observed. He will also unveil new features that continue Fonolo’s mission to alleviate the frustration of dealing with large companies over the phone.
Kicking yourself that you didn’t buy a ticket? Turns out there are still a few left AND you can still use my discount code (”Fonolo”) for 20% off. If you are involved in the voice or telco industry, you will be kicking yourself if you don’t go.
Flat Planet Phone introducing innovative mobile calling solution
Published January 30th, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments
My friend Moshe Maeir just let me know that his company has something special to announce at next week’s ITExpo in Miami.
[We will] be introducing a unique LCR (low cost routing) engine for the mobile market … this solution together with our successful hosted VoIP platform for resellers (set up your own phone company in an hour) will be a great solution to sell to businesses.
…It works on all cellphones even those that are not smartphones. The account manager defines on the LCR server his costs when dialing direct and when using cost saving options such as callthru, callback, SIP over wifi/3G etc. Then all his users receive a SMS text message and synchronize their contact list with the server. The server automatically configures each contact on the contact list to dial in the most cost effective way. The process is invisible to the user. The dialing method is the same. Pick out a contact and dial. [more]
But is there still room to make money on “cheap calls”?
A recent GigaOm post declared that mobile VoIP startups need to “look beyond cheap calls”, saying:
These startups are realizing that in order to make real money they would need to create billions of minutes in calls to off-net services…even then, making profits isn’t all that easy.
(Some commented on that post here: Truphone and iSkoot - AppStores of the future?.)
I agree with the sentence above: In North America, calling costs (both fixed and mobile) are already below the “threshold of caring” for most consumers. Meaning that if you want to sell an alternative phone service, you not only have to beat an already low price, but the inconvenience that users are willing to tolerate for your “work-around” is very minimal.
However, in the world of international mobile calls, there still is a lot of room to save consumers money. It’s no surprise that the companies targeting this space are based outside the US (Truphone: UK, MaxRoam: Ireland, Flat Planet Phone & Fring: Israel, Jajah: Luxembourg). There are numerous solutions out there, including mobile apps, local access numbers and sim card tricks but none are truly transparent to the user. If Moshe’s figured out a way to do, there’s huge potential here.
EComm’09
I’m looking forward to seeing Moshe at the Emerging Communications Conference along with many of the other start-ups at the leading edge of telephony. (I’ve raved about this show before.) You can still get 20% off the registration using promotional code “Fonolo”.
