Blogging Companies Beginning To Specialize – 24H Laundry

Interesting development in the blogging world (hat tip to Om). New venture (by Marc Andressen, co-founder of Netscape) in the video blogging space called 24H Laundry (answering the question whether bloggers do work in their underwear). At this time of night, I should be. The name reminds me of White Pajama, the venture for virtual call centers (that is, providing technology where people could work from home in the their white pajamas).

Out-of-the-Box Sales CRM Tool Shortcomings

Today at The CIO Weblog I posted about shortcomings in some of the popular, new generation Sales CRM tools. My post is from the perspective of a practitioner and someone who has spent time using and implementing these systems (from various angles such as data definition, configuration, process flow, and requirements).  I highlight this not necessarily for the Sales CRM product vendors themselves but because managers need to make up for such shortcomings manually. Perhaps you can see why I chose a picture of short putting (a golf term) as my gripe of the day.

Service Activation On Vonage Pretty Instantaneous

Today I placed an order for Vonage VoIP service as another line for my home office. I was pretty impressed that 20-some seconds after entering in my credit card, I got a confirmation email with dial-in numbers to set up my voice mail and greetings (note that I did not port a prior telephone number [which would likely create a whole bunch of other business & technical process flows to kick in]). I was able to dial from my normal landline and start configuring the voice mail box even without having the VoIP gear that Vonage is planning to send me via snail mail. I presume instant activation means that Vonage already has blocks of numbers already allocated to them so that there’s not any crazy network configuration/re-configuration for fresh, new telephone numbers. I have to admit that Vonage has a pretty snazzy service activation process compared to what I’ve seen for plain old telephone service from traditional carriers and despite my prior post saying quality of service (QoS) is not the same.

Although I can’t make or receive calls without the VoIP gear (which should arrive in two weeks from Vonage?), I’m now wondering whether Vonage is equally aggressive about billing me for service … not to mention that after I receive the gear it may take me two weeks to figure out how to reconnect my home network …

Update (6/6/05): I like how when you get Vonage voice mail, you get an email message indicating the caller ID and the time of the call. Of course my first few email message alerts were lagged about 3 days, but they seem to be coming in on a timely basis now (e.g., within one hour of the message).

Update (6/8/05): Pretty slick service. Got the new Linksys router yesterday and hooked it up my existing wireless network today (DSL to the home). Went much easier than I expected although I had to go hardwired Ethernet for a moment to configure the new router. Got a Uniden 5.8Ghz cordless phone to go with the setup (best phone I’ve ever had – highly recommend this line of phone from Office Depot). There is an interesting feature that Vonage has called "Network Availability Number". Basically if your Internet connection is disrupted, you can automatically have calls forwarded elsewhere. If anyone wants a free month of service (*) with Vonage, feel free to contact me via email, and I can use Vonage’s refer a friend program. No warranties from me – I’d just be using Vonage’s interface. *FREE month refers to a credit of up to $49.99 towards the second month of service based on the plan the referral selects.

Update (6/9/05): Well, I’m getting some feedback from folks that the voice transmitted from my VoIP line sounds a little bit computerized (not bad) even though the inbound sound that I hear is excellent. Perhaps it’s a difference between using DSL (which I have) and cable. People ought to do some due diligence there as I don’t have enough data points.

Interesting Article On The Future Of PayPal

PayPal is a phenomena we’ve seen in the fairly recent past, but it’s interesting to think about the possibilities of significantly challenging Visa or MasterCard and moving beyond the traditional eBay markets. If one does a very crude compounded annual growth rate comparison using info in the attached BusinessWeek article, PayPal gets to be about 20% of the size (payment volume) of Visa in 15 years. From BW,

And more than ever,
PayPal is knocking elbows with Visa, MasterCard, and the banks that
issue their cards. It just passed American Express, the leading bank
card issuer. PayPal now has 72 million worldwide accounts, compared
with AmEx’s 65 million. Yet that pales next to card associations Visa
International and MasterCard International Inc., with 1 billion and 680
million cardholders, respectively. Likewise, PayPal’s $19 billion in
total payment volume last year falls far short of Visa’s $3 trillion
from all of its member banks. PayPal, however, is expanding much faster
— 44% last year, to Visa’s 14%.

Sure folks at Visa can claim that (per the article) "consumers want to put as much of their purchases [as they can] on the payment vehicle they know and trust." That said, PayPal is kind of different animal. In some ways, the PayPal vehicle can be thought of being beyond convenience. There’s some other key psychological marketing and use factors in play beyond just trust. Like the casino chips one gets in Las Vegas, people can both receive PayPal payments and make PayPal payments like it it is just funny money (or email). And there’s no negative association with credit card debt and high plastic fees with PayPal. I bet the marginal propensity to spend PayPal dollars could be much higher than Visa in some sectors … not that we want to increasing spending … but that is yet another story.

Creative Weblogging Launches Fastsupplier.com

Torsten Jacobi points out that Creative Weblogging has launched Fastsupplier.com, a "Yellow Pages" for reaching suppliers around the world. I’ve pointed out before that orchestrating supply chains may be a core competency that business people need to master. Well, perhaps this is a starting point for letting your "fingers do the walking" (so to speak).

Disclosure: I am compensated by Creative Weblogging for authoring at The CIO Weblog.

Nivi On Greasemonkey

Nivi has a great post on Greasemonkey, a Firefox browser extension which lets users add “user scripts” to any web page. The first example Nivi cites where prices from competitive booksellers can be introduced as pop-ups right into the Amazon.com shopping experience – this is a case that grabbed my attention.

Here’s a good paragraph that sums up Nivi’s analysis of the technical implications:

Greasemonkey lets you mash-up websites. It lets you extend and script websites and integrate that script right into the original site as if the designers had intended it to be there. It lets you use their web site, their data, their servers, their work to serve your purpose and function. There will soon be an army of hackers enhancing every site you use. Whether that site likes it or not.

Nivi points out some items that affect the ability of Greasemonkey to scale up (e.g., support for other browsers). I also imagine that given general spyware concerns within the industry, trust will be a factor that affects adoption. Finding the killer website extensions (e.g., for eBay, Amazon, news, blogs) may help Greasemonkey to penetrate beyond the early adopter and Firefox market. In any case, it will be interesting to see how Greasemonkey plays out over time.

Interesting Analogy Between ESBs and Human Body

In a prior life, I followed the enterprise service bus (ESB) and messaging markets pretty closely. Graham Glass (CTO of webMethods) has an interesting post that draws an analogy between the ESB and mechanisms of the human body (bold type added by me to highlight two key underlying capabilities):

The equivalent of an ESB in animals is the nervous system combined with
the circulatory system. When an organ needs to communicate with another
specific organ, it uses the nervous system to send a point-to-point
message
. When an organ needs to broadcast a message to other organs
that might be interested, it releases a hormone into the bloodstream to
send a multicast message.

Update (5/9/05): As additional background, an ESB is often used to connect software services (e.g., coarsely-grained software components, for lack of a better word) in a such a way that they can communicate with one another via the backbone network provided by the ESB.