Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Ooma’s PR failure

by alec on July 24, 2007

My good friend Tom Howe is savage in his criticism of Ooma, and then, in Aspirin or Penicillin, follows up with a good generic post on pain points in business. I don't necessarily agree with all of Tom's criticisms, but given the veil of secrecy the company has thrown up about some aspects of its product, it's easy to see why bloggers have nearly universally thumbs-downed this product. That's a failure of the company's marketing programs, and nothing more. An intelligent outreach program could have mitigated the negative sentiment which now has the potential to turn into an outright disaster for the company.

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VONAGE: We put SunRocket out of business

by alec on July 24, 2007

Vonage Communications and PR VP Karen Cleeve is probably kicking in-house flack Charlie Sahner under the table right now. In yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle, Sahner was soundbited in the following gem:

Sahner said SunRocket failed because it couldn't meet its customer's needs for better features and strong customer support.

"We were the leader from the very beginning and we have that critical mass and the scale," Sahner said. "We helped put (SunRocket) out of business. They had a cheap product and they couldn't compete."

Given all the woes that Vonage has experienced over the last 12 months, this is a pretty hollow boast.

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Advice to Tivo

July 24, 2007

Tivo continues to struggle, even as they roll out a new, lower cost, high definition unit. For the legions of us stuck with boxes from our service providers (like the regrettably stupid Bell ExpressVu PVR), it's really too bad. My advice to Tivo management? Go platform. Tivo is a software play, not hardware. If you can [...]

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How to make a good idea unusable

July 24, 2007

In the category of good-ideas-but-dopey-implementations this morning we have BigString. The premise? There are lots of emails that you send that you simply don't want to hang around — time sensitive information that you would like to see auto-destruct, mails that you would like to recall, and the like. BigString solves that problem. The way they've solved [...]

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Sucked into the Facebook vortex isn’t such a bad thing

July 24, 2007

That giant sucking sound many web properties feared as Facebook gobbled up their users may, in fact, be the sound of their own sites inhaling added revenues. New data from Quantcast suggests that existing web properties who choose to build Facebook apps are seeing a spike in the traffic on their old sites. Hmmm…. I guess the [...]

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What about Google?

July 24, 2007

On VentureBeat this morning Jeremy Liew compares the value of targeted advertising via ad networks and "synthetic channels" to untargeted advertising. Naturally, more targeted readers mean higher value eyeballs. But what about organically organizing "networks", like the Google adsense model. These use context to construct and reconstruct synthetic channels over and over. For those running blogs, like [...]

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