Communications and Technology Blog - Tehrani.com - Social Networking Archives

NextPrinciples Looks to Simplify Social Customer Interactions

2013-04-10T22:52:58Z

Love it or hate it, social media has to be embraced by companies who are interested in communicating with their customers where they spend an increasing amount of their time. Yet scaling social media interactions is truly challenging. A company called NextPrinciples is looking to simplify the complexity of integrating social into your company with its Insight-To-Action Platform.

When I asked Ted Sapountzis Head of Marketing & Product Management with the company what pains they eliminate for customers he told me his company provides them with a unique platform which integrates analytics, listening, monitoring and engagement together. Moreover he explained that customers can learn the system in one hour. He then walked me through how it works and it is certainly a powerful solution with lots of functionality. Let’s just say I’d allocate a bit more than sixty minutes for training to be safe.

The company was founded in 2010 and has eight employees – many who worked at SAP.

Moreover, the platform integrates with Salesforce, Sugar CRM, Microsoft in the CRM space. The goal of the offering is to allow companies to provide their customers a consistent cross-channel experience.

One area of differentiation is the product can tell you how many leads from social networks are actually converting into sales. One wonders in amazement at organizations who spend large amounts of money to generate Facebook likes. Do they have software which shows them that likes turn into sales? Perhaps they are using Insight-To-Action.

An interesting feature on the company's road map is predictive analytics which can be used to determine a product's success in the market based on the social love it receives. This seems like a fantastic way to test-market new product launches without actually even having to manufacture a product or develop a service.

Such testing is done at car shows when Ford, GM or others launch a concept vehicle and gauge reaction. At some, point every company can do the same thing.

NextPrinciples is focusing on socially mature companies and has a focus on the following scenarios:

Crisis management
Management of large numbers of accounts through a simple interface
Marketing events.

Ted took me through a demo of how a company could track keywords and conversations relating to an event like a conference and then delve into what is being said and by whom. The system can further add the new contacts into your CRM system. From there you can create CRM service tickets and assign tasks to teams and monitor workflow.

As social interactions become more important and scaling to meet the needs of large numbers of customers becomes more important, solutions like the Insight-To-Action Platform from NextPrinciples seem to make a lot of sense.

The company tells me the platform offers user-based pricing determined by features and data volume.

In the progressive screens below you can see how a company can get a summary of social activity and drill down to see individual conversations and then take action based on business needs

Has the SEC killed the Press Release?

2013-04-04T20:17:55Z

Has the SEC just signed the death warrant for the press release market? Possibly. Standard operating procedure today is to distribute press releases through established services like Business Wire and PR Newswire but thanks to the SEC, you can post your news on social sites – as long as users are told where to look.

Reed Hastings accelerated this move by posting materially important information about his company to his Facebook page. This set off a fire storm regarding whether this action was proper or not based on current investment rules. It seems the SEC does think the behavior was OK as he is not being prosecuted.

This gets us to the news made today by Business Wire in the form of, you guessed it – a press release, where they explain social can be one form of full and fair disclosure and offers but “Business Wire believes that a broadly disseminated news release -- distributed simultaneously and in real-time via a legitimate news wire service -- is still the most effective way to maximize investor outreach, and to inclusively serve the needs of all market participants.”

The release goes on to explain how it is a more suitable platform than social because it protects its clients security and also ensures there is an audit trail in the case of a regulatory investigation.

Here is the reality… Companies can easily host their news on their own sites and tweet it, use Google+ or whichever services they desire. Yes, press release distribution is important but it is less so as search engines have lessened their importance in results.

I do see this move by the SEC as a major blow to Business Wire and the whole industry – that is exactly why they put out the release… To counteract the damage.

The winner here is all the social platforms you know and love and Bloomberg for its part has announced tweets will now be integrated into its terminals.

“When important news is shared on Twitter, traders and investors need to be able to access it, and validate its importance in order to incorporate that information into their decision making process,” said Jean-Paul Zammitt, head of sales and product development for the Bloomberg Professional service. “Bloomberg’s platform now provides this ability, along with the high-quality news, data and analytics our users need and have come to expect from us.”

Chorus.im Reduces IM Islands with HTML5

2013-04-02T16:27:46Z

With the billions of messages sent each year it is tough to come to the conclusion that messaging is broken but it is. If I send an SMS from a cell phone for example it typically goes to another cell phone. Lets say I am on a PC and want to communicate via SMS - I can use an email gateway but I would have to know which carrier first before I choose a gateway. For example Vodafone in western Japan uses the following gateway address: number@n.vodafone.ne.jp while Vodafone in Okinawa uses the following slightly different address: number@q.vodafone.ne.jp.

Likewise for iMessage, it works great until you want to communicate outside the Apple ecosystem. Skype works great but requires downloads to all of your devices - of course we expect tighter integration into all Microsoft products over time.

This leaves an opening for Chorus.im which recently launched an HTML5-based messaging solution which works across platforms without the need for downloading plugins, software or anything.

Certainly, there is a need for such a solution since I do beleive messaging is broken but inertia is a powerful force and it remains to be seen how quickly people jump off their current messaging systems and embrace this new solution. One benefit of course to Chorus is it allows messaging without identities needing to be shared meaning it can be used as a communications medium for online dating or transactions where you don't want to give your email address. This reminds us of SnapChat - the service which allows a user to send messages which quickly auto-destruct. Chorus.im could be an enabler for a web-based version of such a solution and it could in-turn be embraced by people who gravitate to services like Facebook's Poke.

Microsoft, Facebook, Apple and Google: France's War With US Tech Firms

2013-03-13T17:45:27Z

Ten years ago the people of France had to deal with a major challenge – English tech words were beginning to become more popular than baguettes. As a result, the country’s Culture Ministry banned the term e-mail and replaced it with the term Courriel. A decade later, the country decreed the word hashtag shouldn’t be used but instead they suggested 'mot-dièse' which we believe may be French for “too much time on our hands due to overly generous government handouts.”

The country’s battle against tech terms coming from the US is dwarfed only by the country’s attack on US tech corporations. Most recently, Apple was fined 10,000 euros for having its workers work past 9:00 p.m. in retail stores. The French ban working between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. unless it is required. Now the country is after Skype – France isn’t happy the free service hasn’t registered as a telecoms operator.

Last week I pointed out the irony in the delayed EU fine of Microsoft after it didn’t give users an option to install competitive browsers. The point is by the time the company got fined, it had lost a good deal of marketshare because the internet itself allowed the competition to bypass the installed browser default which Microsoft provided in its OS.

Facebook too has had to deal with EU regulators on privacy issues – in 2011 the EU started to look at how the service tagged photos using facial recognition and over a year later the social networking giant removed all the facial recognition data from the EU.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of French and EU conflicts with tech companies – many know Google has had a number of back-and-forth legal challenges relating to advertising and newspapers.

It’s worth pointing out in many of these cases I am sure the companies in question were on the wrong side of the law and did need to be slapped on the wrist in court, through fines, etc to bring them in line.

It is however worth considering the German and French governments came together in 2008 to build a competitor to Google called Quaero. The plan was scrapped after the Germans pulled out but the project was slated to be massive – up to $2.6B was to be spent on it over five years.

This isn’t to say the US government hasn’t at times made life difficult for tech companies. The FTC for example just decided that social media like Facebook and Twitter need to have the same consumer protection disclaimers as other forms of advertising. While this makes sense from a fairness perspective, how you put a disclaimer and a message in 140 characters has yet to be determined.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see a pattern emerging here. First the French go after the terms, then the business models and finally the companies themselves.

IPgallery Helps Carriers Become Social Hub and More

2013-03-01T19:57:11Z

Communications service providers once the center of the customer's world have awoken to the new reality - social and apps are the new hub. In fact, Facebook, Twitter and a wave of other social networks have fully overtaken the telephone number as the primary method of communicating among many - especially younger users. Then there are the the OTT VoIP and video vendors such as Skype. The telephone number has gone from being a protected client relationship to an afterthought. Even the bright spot related to phone numbers - massive texting revenue has recently been eroded by OTT apps like WhatsApp and even iOS messaging which seamlessly takes text messages off the operator network.

Enter IPgallery, a company playing in the IP communications carrier space for over a decade who wants to help service providers become the focal point of this brave new world of social and apps. Their suggestion is to provide customers with a social communications and hosted-PBX solution which integrates so seamlessly with popular web-based servies that users will rarely need to leave the comfort of the environment. An HTML5 interface allows a cloud-based service to tap into APIs of a slew of other companies to provide social, mapping and just about anything else a user can think of.

Just like a person might use HootSuite as a central hub to interface with numerous social networks, IPgallery helps carriers provide customized user interfaces which they believe are captivating enough to keep consumers living inside them.

Consumers for their part have shown a willingness to spend huge amounts off time interfacing with specific services such as Facebook. In fact, companies are tripping over themselves to have users interact with them on the world's most-popular social network. Carriers have a shot to get control back by providing customers with a user interface worth "living in."

In addition, they can add services such as shopping and entertainment and even combine location information to provide compelling applications which rival those of the OTT world. As carrier information is even richer than what is available to typical smart phone applications, they can actually provide better services than consumers can get elsewhere.

At Mobile World Congress in 2013 the Israeli company showed me an app they wrote which accesses Facebook and Maps and provides the photos of friends on their actual locations on a map. A user can select one or more friends and start a group communication, complete with file sharing and collaboration.

There is a great deal more - such as integrated e-learning, a hosted PBX with separate skins and functionality broken out by department such as accounting or sales. Finally, operators can add functionality by providing cloud-storage which could be used to hold content which is shared between users on the system.

IPgallery functions as part software/integration vendor and part systems-integrator, working with carriers the world-over to develop solutions which they need in their particular markets. This allows carriers to focus on their core competency while taking advantage of best-practices being developed by other service providers.

We often hear of discussion revolving around whether carriers are ok just being "dumb pipe" providers and regardless of the answer, there is definite value in owning the home page of the customer's world. Amazon has used this prime real estate to successfully push Kindle devices and Google uses it to push its Chrome OS, tablets and other devices.

Perhaps the better question is - what are the benefits from being the gateway to your customer's online activities including social, commerce and shopping? The answer of course is increased revenue and flexibility. And as service providers grapple with stagnant to lower ARPU and increasing network costs as they upgrade to 4G and beyond, exploring new revenue opportunities which could also reduce churn seems to make a lot of sense.

Comverse Gets Social at MWC2013

2013-02-28T17:49:07Z

Comverse showed me their Share solution at Mobile World Congress 2013 which allows carriers to deliver a Facebook app giving the user a portal into their subscriber account. Once you enter the app, you are prompted to enter a phone number and are subsequently sent a text message allowing you to get a code which enables authentication.

At this point you can check your account balance, send notes to customer care and more. The operator benefits as well because they can mine the user likes and preferences allowing them to determine for example if they may be a candidate for a bundle or special offering.

Moreover by integrating the traditional knowledge a carrier has about a customer, for example what device they use, they can offered targeted ads. For example if they are an Android user with a Samsung device near contract-end, they may be interested and likely to click on an ad for an HTC One.

In addition, Alice Bartram, AVP Portfolio Marketing told me there is a strong push into the cloud, allowing a service provider to outsource their MMS to the company and thus minimize CAPEX spending. Moreover, there is a focus here at the show on telling operators that Comverse is the right partner to bring them into the world of new services. This is done by first bringing existing services into the world of IMS and then enabling new next-gen IP services to be rolled out quickly.

Point being, we aren't moving to an all-IP world tomorrow but that is the destination. As we travel down the road, carriers need to be able to provide new as well as legacy services to their diverse subscriber base.

Verizon MiFi and Boingo Indispensable

2013-02-08T23:36:05Z

Some time back Verizon Wireless sent me a MiFi device to test and I have used it as a long-term review unit and am blown away at how useful it has become. Recently at ITEXPO in Miami I was able to use it instead of hotel WiFi which often can cost $15/day. Moreover, there was one hotel I stayed at this past month where the position of the hotel meant 4G didn't work from any provider - and it turns out I paid through the nose for hotel WiFi. I happened to use three devices and I got charged for each one (almost daily) for seven days. I didn't notice that there was a per-device charge as typically this isn't the case at the hotels I use.

Although I didn't get charged $315, that is what I would have paid had I used each device each day and the hotel didn't take some of the charges off my bill. The point is, your workers could save a bundle over the hotel WiFi charge with a single MiFi device.

Moreover, at the Gym at ITEXPO in Miami there was poor connectivity and no WiFi. What I ended up doing was placing the MiFi device on top of the hand sanitizer dispenser which was about six feet high or so. Up there it was able to receive a 4G signal.

This allowed me to have great connectivity through my workouts - I could tweet, stream music and keep in touch with my team the entire time I was down there.

In fact whenever I am in a location where connectivity is poor I look for a high place to put the MiFi device to maximize broadband supplied to my devices.

I also have to give a hats off to Boingo Wireless - thanks to them I was able to stay connected in the convention center, at airports and on my flight home from the show. Even better - their new iOS app makes it far easier to find networks which work with the service. It's worth pointing out that devices using WiFi use far less battery power than on a 3G or 4G network meaning when you are a conference you want to use WiFi as much as possible to conserve the battery on your devices.

Blind Dates: Online Dating Comes Full-Circle

2013-01-22T23:18:42Z

Before online dating some of us remember a time when we had blind dates. I, like some of you who dated before Match.com became popular, may remember a simpler time when we couldn’t Google every bit of information about a person and actually had to get to know them, the old fashioned way… By speaking with them.

As I often tell people who have spent much of their adult lives on these services with no success, it seems a person we wouldn’t expect to like based on their profile, could sometimes be the best match of all. After going through all the form-filling of many online dating sites with their scores of questions and complicated computer algorithms which attempt to align Venus and Mars, it seems many just can’t find the right match.

And this is the reasoning behind the success of dating site OkCupid’s new Crazy Blind Date app which basically just connects you with a nearby member of the opposite sex after showing you a picture of you which is perhaps best described as discombobulated. Take a look at these pics to see what they did to me. Signing up takes a few moments and after you take a picture and enter your date of birth, you are presented with a few places nearby in which to meet.

Here are the before and after shots of me

In my case it suggested a number of donut shops which I tried not to take as an insult. Perhaps I thought – this isn’t a jab by the programmers hinting at my weakness for these delicious artery-clogging, saturated fat soaked rings of the devil. But I digress. Once you enter this info you are brought to a matching screen which looks for others to connect you with. You can also scroll through to see people nearby who would like to meet in places of their choice. Oddly, it seems the women presented all were able to choose restaurants and not donut shops but I’ll once again try to stay focused.

Technology and life in general has a funny way of repeating itself. Skinny ties, fat ties, skinny ties. Short skirts, long skirts, short skirts and now it seems the blind date is in vogue. The good news is the odds are the people you meet on such a service have at least one thing in common – they don’t like to fill out long and complex dating enrollment forms either.

Happy dating and good luck.

Read more on TMCnet sister site TechZone360 and/orMarketWatch.

Miss America to Drive Fitness App Adoption

2013-01-18T11:28:45Z

Remember yesterday when senior editor here at TMC Peter Bernstein said fitness apps would be a fad? Well he may be dead right but he may be surprised to learn that Miss America used a fitness app and social platform called Fitocracy to get in shape. I must admit Business Insider describes it far more effectively than I do when they call it “Top Bikini Shape.”

Although Peter could be right – part of his point was that downloading a fitness app is like joining a gym – it’s using the fitness app which becomes more challenging over time.

If you’re a Seinfeld fan it’s like the episode which outlines the difference between taking the reservation and hooolding the reservation.

One point which is worth explaining is the media and word of mouth is driving the spread of these apps like wildfire.

Some years back when I joined the Atkins bandwagon I knew we were at the peak of the craze when a waitress told me each day at lunch she throws away 50 buns.

Likewise with fitness apps – if Peter is right we are likely near the peak of the craze. Either that or there is a lifestyle change taking place where people will use technology on an increasing basis to help them look and feel better. Certainly there can be few more influential people than Miss America to convince the masses to start downloading and trying health-boosting apps for themselves.

What to Make of Facebook's Search Announcement

2013-01-15T19:32:55Z

According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, graph search is another pillar of the Facebook ecosystem along with news feed and timeline. The idea behind this initiative is to allow easy access to the massive store of big data Facebook has amassed about so many people. Using the new search feature a user can search for friends of friends who are male who live in New York or for all the photos they have liked. The free form query-based system is the secret sauce here. A demo video of the new service shows you can search simply by entering a query similar to "my friends who like trail running."

The good news here is the article Allison Boccamazzo yesterday was right on – her piece talked about the rumors regarding today’s news and a new search engine was at the top of the list.

COBOL allowed computer programs to be understood by business people and subsequently meant it was easier for changes to be made to code and for businesses to get a handle on what programs were doing. 4GL allowed programmers a very powerful way to merge programming and database access meaning it became far easier to write programs which efficiently accessed large amounts of data. Facebook’s new graph search will give hundreds of millions of users the ability to search for custom answers to questions they may have about their social circle as well as the social circle of their friends. By custom I mean your search for “my friend’s favorite restaurants” will be different than most everyone else’s.

For Facebook, this feature means people will spend more time on their platform and potentially equates to more pages where purchase intent can be gleaned. One of the powerful aspects of Google’s search is the fact that when someone searches for “iPhone cases” they are likely thinking about purchasing one. The same is not the case with Facebook. If you post a status update about going to sleep for example, you haven’t given an advertiser any clue about your immediate intent to purchase.

Graph search could change this by allowing the company to insert relevant ads in a query about “friend’s favorite places to eat in Cleveland.”

Will this new feature be an immediate game-changer for Facebook? Nope. It could bring in a nice revenue stream from partner Bing who will field all the queries which the social network can’t answer on its own. But it will take some time for it to catch and on and for the company to figure out how to monetize it effectively.

In a way, the ability to find things more easily may make people more likely to share. People may start using the social site as a repository as much as they do as a communications medium. And if this is the case, the company gains more valuable data to parse through and show ads against.

See also Facebook Announces Graph Search - The New Way to Find 'The' Answer by TMC's Tony Rizzo.

Flexible Samsung Screens and Jim Cramer's Mistake Round Out Tech News

2012-12-20T19:17:13Z

Samsung to show flexible screens are coming
Apple's patent on 'Pinch-to-Zoom' feature invalidated
Facebook may force you to watch video ads to boost sales
The US is getting serious about child online privacy
Securing mobile devices is more important than ever
Jim Cramer makes a huge mistake

Samsung to show flexible screens are coming to a smartphone and tablet near you but what still needs to be worked out is how to get multicore processors and batteries to bend along with them. Moreover, what happens when you bend them too far – do they just snap, pouring the guts of the battery onto your lap or dinner plate? We still have some time on this tech but the progress is promising. Can’t wait to see it (and bend it) at CES.

Apple's Patent on 'Pinch-to-Zoom' Feature Invalidated meaning other tablet and smartphone makers can breathe easily for now. This may be the most important feature on a touchscreen device and Apple would wield tremendous power if it could deny others access to this technology or extract painfrul royalties for its use.

Facebook Plans Auto-Play Video Ads and users are not happy. No big surprise here but someone has to pay for all that data the company stores. If they can find a way to pull this off without retracting the idea as a result of backlash, it could be a big threat not only to YouTube but television advertising.

The US is getting serious about child online privacy and as a result, the Federal Trade Commission said it would change how it implements the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, or Coppa, to reflect the growth of social networks and smartphone apps among children. The result of this new push will be increasing the challenge when providing service or apps to this demographic.

Securing mobile devices is more important than ever and if you arent familiar with a term like SMiShing, you have to read this articleto get prepared for the onslaught of mobile hackers looking to steal your data.

Jim Cramer makes a huge mistake as he didn’t think through his reasoning regarding Intel, ARM Holdings and McAfee where he reasoned the processor giant was better off buying its small soon-to-be rival as opposed to a company which would have positioned it as a leader in mobile security.

Important Tech News of the Day Dec 14, 2012

2012-12-14T20:34:59Z

Amazon Prime Instant Video app for iOS is out
Alcatel Lucent says providing video to devices is a great new revenue opportunity for carriers
Google Just Settled a Six-Year Dispute with Belgian Publishers
IT spending will pick up in 2013
Mobile data growth is booming
Apple lost patent litigation to MobileMedia
Easilydo is an app which aims to become a personal assistant
There are some good apps to help manage your holiday shopping
A win for the free market in the EU
There’s an app to measure skin health
Social is playing a major role in news dissemination in tragedies as
Sprint’s Clearwire bid will help it deliver true unlimited and unthrottled data plans
Small business hopes for better 2013
Cities are cutting out ISPs
We are actively trading privacy for security
But at least the government wants to make it tougher for apps to share our private location data
Comcast now allows video downloads
Social media has destroyed the web
If mobile payments are booming why is Verifone telling us it is an unprofitable market?
China will be less restrictive with their Internet censorship

Amazon Prime Instant Video app for iOS is out and in my testing on a 4^th generation iPad it worked well. Some complaints remain that for non-Prime users the experience isn’t that great. I for one would like to be able to download video on the app – there is a download area but no instructions as to what is downloadable or how to download.

Alcatel Lucent says providing video to devices is a great new revenue opportunity for carriers. According to Marcus Weldon, chief technology officer, “Left unmanaged, the rapid growth in video traffic can turn into a deluge and spell disaster. It is important to look at where service providers’ investments can have the most impact, and this research makes clear that the IP edge of both wireline and wireless networks – which are increasingly becoming one and the same - offers the greatest opportunity to improve network performance.”

It is undeniable that video streaming will grow in popularity – the war between cable providers and companies working with Roku, Apple TV, Google and others will only continue with the goal being to keep the viewer watching as much content as possible on your service(s).

Google Just Settled a Six-Year Dispute with Belgian Publishers and must pay them for their legal fees and in the form of advertising in the newspapers whose content was used by the search giant. Some say the settlement totals $6M. Moreover, there will be an ongoing advertising partnership between the news outlets and Google. The challenge for the search leader who profits handsomely from content on the web is if this case could set a precedent allowing many other companies to sue for damages because their content too is being used without permission.

IT spending will pick up in 2013 which is great news for the tech market which has had to deal with numerous ups and downs since the dotcom bubble burst over a decade ago. Gartner recently noted that “most enterprises have already significantly cut discretionary IT spending growth over the past several years,” and that “they have little room to reduce IT spending further over the long run.”

Mobile data growth is booming and has seen a compound annual growth rate of 25.4% between 2006 and 2011. Interestingly only in United States, Japan and Australia does mobile data revenue exceed fixed broadband revenues. No surprise here but voice revenue is declining in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Poland, Brazil, Russia, India and China in 2011 according to Ofcom.

Apple lost patent litigation to MobileMedia and this is the danger of the patent wars – even if you were smart enough to invent lots of cool new ideas, there will always be some people somewhere who thought of some things before you did. This is why the tech patent wars may on the surface seem like a smart way for a company to protect their intellectual property but in reality, when defending your inventions in every country you are bound to lose sometimes.

All of this litigation hurts consumers at the end of the day.

Of course I am referring primarily to Apple and Samsung, in the case of MobileMedia, they are a patent troll (but owned by Nokia, Sony and MPEG LA) so there isn’t much of a defense when you lose. Moreover, you are generally a sitting duck, waiting for these companies to come after you. Especially when you become successful in the market.

Easilydo is an app which aims to become a personal assistant of sorts by managing friend’s birthdays, your schedule and more. It offers you time to leave alerts based on your schedule, can track packages and more. It can notify you of based weather the night before and can jump into conference calls for you three minutes before they start. I just downloaded it on iOS and will post further if it is as great as it seems. I set it to remind me of free songs to download each week and to remind me once-a-month which apps are accessing my personal info.

There are some good apps to help manage your holiday shopping and TMC’s Brooke Neuman details them for you. Gilte Groupe and others make the list.

A win for the free market in the EU as Apple and four other publishers have made an offer to ease price restrictions against Amazon in the book market as a response to an anti-trust investigation.

There’s an app to measure skin health – just take well-lit pictures of yourself and receive a personal beauty number which the company, Own says is 95% accurate.

Social is playing a major role in news dissemination in tragedies as the dreadful Newtown Sandy Hook, CT Elementary School shootings remind us. Trending topics on Twitter include #Connecticut, #Newtown, #PrayForNewtown, 27 Dead and Sandy Hook.

Sprint’s Clearwire bid will help it deliver true unlimited and unthrottled data plans, especially to its iPhone customers according to TMC’s Senior Editor, Tony Rizzo.

Small business hopes for better 2013 but don’t expect them to hire more according to a study by IP communications, data and cloud provider Cbeyond. Other important parts from the survery: 83 percent of cloud users said it made them "more flexible," 78 percent said it made them "more productive," and 71 percent said it was actually saving them money to use the cloud that they wouldn't have saved without.

Cities are cutting out ISPs to get high-speed networks to their citizens and Seattle is the latest city to do so.

We are actively trading privacy for security in the US and terrorism has definitely eroded many of our freedoms. A sense that citizens are presumed innocent seems to be slowly eroding.

But at least the government wants to make it tougher for apps to share our private location data. A new bill would require companies to get a customer's consent before collecting or sharing mobile location data. It would also ban mobile applications that secretly monitor the user's location — a feature that Senator Al Franken said allows for stalking and enables domestic violence.

Comcast now allows video downloads – this may mark the first time a cable company is doing so and is a great help to people who don’t always have fast and cheap broadband access. Airline passengers are an obvious beneficiary.

Social media has destroyed the web – it’s brought in hundreds of millions of new users but has locked us in, taken over our online identities and made it more difficult to share our information from one service to the next.

If mobile payments are booming why is Verifone telling us it is an unprofitable market? Moreover, why is it pulling out?

China will be less restrictive with their Internet censorship and has already ublocked searches for the names of many top political leaders in a possible sign of looser controls a month after new senior officials were named to head the ruling party.

FakeFollowers: What is your Net Twitter Following?

2012-12-06T20:03:39Z

A new service called Fakefollowers allows Twitter users to see how many of their followers are of high quality or “real.”

Consider this service to be lumped in with other social tools like Klout which is used to measure social influence. I can already see the fights starting. “Hey, I have more Twitter followers than you.” “Oh yeah? Well 20% of yours are fake. Mine are almost all legit!”

What is considered fake? Well according to the company this is the current criteria and since the service is in Beta, we can expect them to change:

The Following / Followers ratio is less than 50 Following / 1 Follower
They repeat spam phrases like “diet,” “make money,” and “work from home”
Tweets are repeated more than three times
More than 90% of the account´s tweets are retweets
More than 90% of tweets are links and the profile has a following: followers ratio of 7 : 1 or more. This means, for example, that the profile is following 7 others while only being followed by 1.
The account has never tweeted

I checked some popular sites like TechCrunch which has almost 2.5 million followers and 18% of them are fake. Huffington Post has almost 2.4 million followers and 15% are fake. Robert Scoble at over 300,000 followers has a low fake percentage of 8%. Tom Keating and I have under 10,000 followers each but our fake scores are also very low at 4% and 1% respectively.

What does all this mean? According to the company, if your percentage falls within these ranges:

0–10% Your Followers are legitimate and alright.
10-20% You may have some fake or inactive Followers, but you probably have nothing to worry about.
20-50% Be cautious. If you have a large number of Followers, it is expected that some will be inactive or fake.
50-70% Now this is a red flag! Check your Followers and look at who they are.
70-100% Your account is practically made out of fake Followers. Take action immediately!

There is no word on what action to take if you fall into the latter categories but starting over may be the way to go.

I'm Too Sexy For Consumers: B2B Tech IPOs Are Hot

2012-09-24T21:06:36Z

B2B Tech is hot once again thanks to a string of consumer social IPO losses and B2B successes

In the fickle world of consumer purchasing behavior it is tough to predict what trends will last. Few things seem to be predictable in the market beyond their desire to amass more devices powered by Apple's iOS.

There are spectacular examples of consumer companies which were here today and gone tomorrow – perhaps AOL, Yahoo and MySpace are the best examples of entities that rapidly became irrelevant because consumers moved on.

And while Facebook has done an infinitely better job than MySpace of keeping its social network sticky and relevant, it still has become a textbook definition of investor loss and IPO blowup.

And this gets us back to the business market where there are long-term contracts and revenue is predictable. It is certainly a less viral market but what you lose in free marketing from your community, you make up for with customers who have budgets.

How novel.

To get a sense of how you can generate a successful social networking IPO consider LinkedIn is trading at above $120 almost three times its IPO price of $45 while Facebook is trading at around $20 less than half of its $45 IPO price. The percentage charts below say it all. LinkedIn’s secret? Appealing to business users.

The chart below shows LinkedIn is up almost 30% since its IPO while Facebook is down greater than 40%. In reality the Linked IPO price was $45 while this chart shows its starting price at $93.09 (click to enlarge)

Recently, while much of the tech and business media was focusing on the negative Zynga and Facebook IPOS a few B2B tech companies had successful IPOs including Palo Alto Networks and Splunk.

As I mentioned at the start of this entry – predictability is important to investors. Sure business spending will decline when there are shocks to the system or economic downturns but a slight drop in earnings seems preferable to business models which are fueled by the hope of consumer stickiness turning into some sort of wealth-creating ad-supported model.

I am not saying the consumer tech IPO is dead mind you and companies like Pandora certainly show this area can yield positive surprises for investors. I am pointing out that investors seem to be waking up to the reality that the B2B space is hot once again and an important place to be.

VCs disrupted by Angels thanks to Cloud, Apple, Google and Facebook

2012-08-23T15:08:13Z

How too many investors can lead us to irrational exuberance 2.0

Fred Wilson, managing partner at Union Square Ventures is one of the most well-respected VCs around and does an amazing job with his AVC blog – it is in many ways a blueprint to starting a company. He has had so many good posts over the years it is tough to count.

In a recent interview with Technology Review he made some alarming comments which you should be aware of. He says VC firms are having a tough time raising money because returns have been mediocre. Amazingly, he describes “mediocre” as anything less than three times your money in a ten-year period which seems like an incredible return to anyone who hasn’t put all their investment dollars in Apple or Priceline.

He goes on to say venture capital is the best place to get money where a company has high risk but a large upside. He continues by saying that many IT companies can get going nowadays with money from Angel investors without the need for VC investments. This is exactly what David Rose alluded to when he keynoted the DevCon5 HTML5 conference last year in New York. The reality is the cloud is making it really easy to launch new companies.

Moreover, it is worth pointing out that ecosystems built by Apple, Google and Facebook make it infinitely easier to launch successful products as you can piggyback and augment products and services and instantly have access to hundreds of millions of potential users and customers.

Consider also that the freemium concept has allowed companies to instantly become juggernauts in their spaces. Skype is a great example of a multibillion dollar valuation put on a freemium service. LinkedIn at over $11B in market cap is another.

He continues to say one of the problems the industry faces is that there are a lot of people chasing a few big-name firms and moreover most of the money is tied up by “six white guys” who control two-and-a-half billion dollars. He feels this money would be better allocated to 25 firms where each has $100 million.

My thought process on the matter is the advent of cloud and ecosystems allows so much more innovation that the VCs are being disrupted by the angels. It is unclear if the market would be better served with more wealthy investors because it requires a tremendous amount of restraint to be a good investor in a heated market.

How many people went out and purchased homes which were larger or newer than they really could afford because everyone else was? How many of the smartest people on Wall Street bet their futures on complex derivatives that even Warren Buffet said he didn’t understand – because, everyone else was doing it? How many people invested in numerous CLECs, fiber and Internet companies in the nineties because everyone else was doing it?

From what I am seeing in the market the competent people are getting money and the ones who have less competence are struggling. I don’t mean this to be declarative – there are always exceptions but in general, there seems to be a balance of good ideas and people getting dollars to start and grow their companies.

So I do have to disagree with Fred a bit on this last point – if only because I don’t trust a plethora of VC firms to not lead us to irrational exuberance 2.0.