September 2008

Squawk Box Sept 22 – Slot Music and Social Network Marketing

September 22, 2008

Sandisk has announced a new initiative called Slot Music. It’s music purchased on an SD card. It’s going to be available in Walmart and Bestbuy; you buy a 1G MicroSD card, and simply plug it into your phone or PC, and play the music.

We also discuss a new study by Universal McCann which says that consumers now trust social networks and strangers more than brands. The survey covered 17,000 internet users from 29 countries.

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Twitter drives referral traffic

September 22, 2008

Ever wonder about the impact of Twitter on your business?  The WebGuild has written a small case study of a business called Coverity which used Twitter as one of their marketing tools.  You can read the full piece on their web site.  The key takeaway is in this graph: Overall, Coverity saw a 40% increase [...]

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Get more from your business!

September 21, 2008

Lets face it, we’ve all sacrificed for our careers and businesses at one point or another in our lives. We’ve also known people who’ve become trapped in that cycle of sacrifice and the result is often financial or personal disaster as friends, relationships and family suffer. Tuesday evening I’ll be hosting a teleclass on Calliflower [...]

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Squawk Box September 19 – Skype and SIP peering

September 19, 2008

On Friday we usually try to wrap up a few of the stories from the week with a discussion. Yesterday was no exception, as I had a large list of topics. We began with the relatively easy discussion around Skype’s Jonathan Christensen’s assertion that VoIP is dead, from ITEXPO, and then moved on to Michael Robertson’s letter to Skype. Robertson is accusing Skype of hypocrisy when Skype demands that the carriers open their networks to Skype, but in turn refuse to open Skype to SIP providers. Naturally, it’s controversial. His letter attracted a strongly worded response from Skype Journal, and an equally passionate response from Michael again.

Michael Robertson himself joined our call, and a ferocious debate ensued among the participants. Needless to say, we didn’t get through the rest of the list of topics I had.

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Thomas Howe Company takes first!

September 18, 2008

Thomas Howe may have lost his bet with Dean Collins over the survival of Ooma (at least that’s the way that this judge sees it), but he won something much bigger today.  Taking first place in the Broadsoft Xtended Voice Mashup contest for his Disaster Dispatcher, he also takes home a $5,000 cash prize.  From [...]

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Three ways to tweet later

September 18, 2008

A while back I discovered a service called TweetLater.  It lets you schedule and send a twitter message at a later time, when you might not be able to do so.  I use it for reminders, and to send notifications out about the SquawkBox.  I literally cue up two or three tweets for the SquawkBox [...]

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Squawk Box September 17: Live from ITEXPO with Dan York.

September 17, 2008

Dan York guest-hosted the Squawk Box live from the Los Angeles Convention Center this morning where the Communications Developer Conference is co-located with the ITEXPO West show. With one day of the show behind, discussion ranged from SIP Servlets, to the integration of the web and VoIP, to small PBX systems from Microsoft, Jazinga, and [...]

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A Hypnotist on the Loose?

September 17, 2008

Nokia launches their Nokia Legends campaign today.   A quirky mix of urban legend film vignettes told by veteran character actor and author Ron McClarty, it consists of a series of oddball stories with a distinctly Twilight Zone feel about them in a clever interactive site designed to look like a newspaper.  The stories cleverly mix [...]

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Squawk Box September 16: Beyond PR with guest host Robyn Tippins

September 16, 2008

Beyond PR: Can social media actually impact the regular customer? Robyn Tippins talks about some recent customer service horror stories of her own, how her blog attracted executive attention and got results. One, Comcast, came via the Comcastcares twitter account. The other came from Capitol One patrolling mentions of their name. Both resulted in mostly [...]

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Thanks for the memories, Zone5!

September 16, 2008

During my time at Microsoft presentation scores were a kind of blood sport — a source of pride after a particularly good presentation, and one that conferred bragging rights.  Presentations delivered at the Executive Briefing Center or other functions were graded on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the best and then [...]

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