Ooma

Squawk Box April 10

by alec on April 10, 2008

Are you a developer? Ever been frustrated by the availability of data needed to run your application? Think white pages directories, maps, navigation, or CD song and album art info. This morning we debate the merits of Bret Taylor’s notion that we need a Wikipedia for Data — a commons, equivalent to open source software, but for user contributed data.

Next we dismissed the idea that Apple might be gearing up for a unified communications play, as speculated upon by TG Daily. Sorry guys! We don’t think it’s in the cards.

And finally, Valleywag is spreading a rumour that OOMA is failing. We picked the bones of that corpse, and discussed where they went wrong… starting with a $400 retail ATA. Enjoy!

Squawk Box April 10 [ 30:57 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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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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Jajah opens Indian market. Promises free calls by year end.

July 19, 2007

Team Jajah is nothing short of amazing these days. Barely on the heels of their eHarmony announcement comes the announcement that they've opened service to India. For 3Rs, callers can now call to and from the US. Perhaps more interesting even than the new service were Jajah founder Roman Scharf's comments: “By October, we will [...]

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Ooma? Oh my…

July 19, 2007

People have been pinging me all morning about Ooma, the new hardware based peer-to-peer VoIP solution that was announced today. Caveat: I haven't yet used the product, or talked with the founders, so folks like Walt Mossberg, Om Malik, and Michael Arrington have an advantage over me. Ooma is a line of innovative new hardware products [...]

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