Google Android Developer Challenge not for Italians

You know the news about Android, don't you?
Check the android developers blog

We're really looking forward to seeing all the amazing applications that developers will create on an open mobile phone platform. In fact, you may even want to enter your application into the Android Developer Challenge -- a USD$10 million challenge sponsored by Google to support and recognize developers who build great applications for the Android platform

Nice, I want to participate. Because Italians do it better.

Yes, Italians do it better, and the original way. When there is a competition on innovative products, we are able to cut ourselves out in a sweep. The ADC FAQ page states that:

The Android Developer Challenge is open to individuals, teams of individuals, and business entities. While we seek to make the Challenge open worldwide, we cannot open the Challenge to residents of Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, and Myanmar (Burma) because of U.S. laws. In addition, the Challenge is not open to residents of Italy or Quebec because of local restrictions.

Local restrictions for challenges and prizes are mainly bureaucratic:

• Register your prize challenge to three public administrations. You've to fill up a separate form for each one
• You need a notary. Well, in Italy you needed a notary even to sell your bike, recently this procedure has been simplified.
• Just to let you know, prize challenges cannot damage Italian government's monopoly on ability games and gambling.
• Last but not least: you need to give a cautionary 20% of total prizes to Italy's government. It's called "to bail out", it translates "I do not trust you've got that much", doesn't it?
  

More information on this thread

Technorati Tags: cernio, android, google, local restrictions,

Italians do it better. But via e-mail!

I am not talking about the sexual performances of Italians (at least, those self-proclamated latin-lovers that tell tales of great effort and sacrification), but the customer attitudes at calling a call center, help desk, or something that keeps you "holdin'on a sec".

According to this report (ItNews, Italian), people prefer e-mail offline contact when engaging with a potential seller, or when they are asking for support or assistance.

Alternatively, they'll consider the possibility of being recalled in ten minutes, but they are fed up with long queues in the jungle trees of IVRs.

The key point is: if somebody wants to talk with you, it's because he/she wants immediate contact. If you cannot engage him/her instantly, better say "I'm sorry, I'll call you back in a while". And recall him with a smiling tone!

Technorati Tags: cernio, click-to-call, CRM, helpdesk,

VoIP as emerging technology-AGAIN?

Hey, VoIP is going to be the technology behind Unified Communication, one of the 10 emerging technologies to keep monitored -AGAIN!

I've been playing working with VoIP since 2001 and each year was the year of VoIP. Now journalists cannot use it once more, so they changed the term in "Unified Communication".

Well, the best unifying communication device is still the telephone. It's working well and it does all it's needed to communicate.

Why should I change it? Why do I have to install a new box, new power plug, new wires, new installation problems?

Why should I bother with instant messaging? Why should I write messages when I can talk?

Why should I be blamed by an acquaintance for not disclosing my "online status" to everybody but only to some friends? Why do I need to state "hey I am here" and "hey I am disconnected". If I am always connected, why do I have to say that I am "disconnected" or "away from pc"?

Why do I have to trust your VoIP thing is the data network (on which the VoIP service is based) is not sufficiently reliable?

Please answer these questions before thinking of crossing the chasm.

Technorati Tags: cernio, innovation, voip, unified communications,

Irrelevant corporate websites

Giacomo Vacca found an earth-shaking article on traditional SEO and Google ranking:
How to evolve your irrelevant corporate website

They use instant messaging, facebook, (and other social networks) and rarely directly type in a domain name to corporate website. If this holds true, then it’s assumed that prospects make decisions on other websites BEFORE they come to the corporate website to get factual information.

This is clearly true. Before going to visit the official website of a product I am interested into (let assume a digital camera), I'd go on a product-review website (just as an example, Revoo) and select the most appropriate comments to have a quick glance about the available products.
When I go to the official website, I already know nearly everything. In few occasions, I found a n official support forum that made me choose for that product: online support and general good feedback from users are key points in my consumer habits.

You’ll no longer only be the only one publishing to your website, customers, prospects, and other members of the community will have direct access to publish on your website.

To summarize: customer feedback and engagement. That's what Sitofono is meant for.
What if you can even talk to a customer? What if you can call him free and ask him a general review of the product?
Do you think letting visitors call other consumers is a valuable feature? Since it can be done as a special adaptation of Sitofono, my company product for customer engagement, I'd like to discuss with you the feasibility and the scenarios.

Technorati Tags: cernio,
sitofono, ugc, customer, feedback, engagement,

FR33 53X

It seems that even VoIP services follow the fad of fiddle with product and brand names. Here are few examples of product names that were given birth as a pun or a similar sounding word>

• Twitter was Twttr, internet ages ago, just recalling the "twitter" name
• ICQ means I seek You
• CUSeeme was See You See me
• Italian chat program "C6" by tin.it meant "are you there?"

The last application, the mentioned VoIP application, is called 3CX Phone System (a free, upgradable software IP-PBX, check out the review from Luca Filigheddu ).

3 C X
||
V
Three See Ex
||
V
Free Sex
, to me.

Was it intentional or am I just too pervert to see free sex everywhere? ;-)


Technorati Tags: cernio,
3cx, free sex, pun,

Truphone on iPhone: call setup time too long?

Take a look at the Truphone on iPhone video on Andy Abramson log: do you consider 20" call setup a reasonable waiting time?

I do not. Most of you do not. And the poor man's thought is: "Truphone is no good, I want to call and instantly be connected, this does not happen with traditional telephony! Truphone service is bad".
But the truth is that Truphone is not the real culprit. Its only fault is that it relies upon a VoIP wholesale carrier, whose service is usually offered as "best effort".
Therefore there is no guarantee, no performance metrics, no quality figures: no way to assess the overall quality of phone calls.

As Luca already stated, VoIP service providers are subject to slavery by wholesale carriers.

On a Porterian point of view, the VoIP market was born in danger due to

• the high rivalry from other competitors,
  
• the lack of customer lock in (except for Skype, standard SIP means no lock in),
  
• the easeness of new player entrance.

Now, the VoIP market situation is aggravated by the enormous power of suppliers, which can decide the destiny of a service by simply providing (or not providing) a sufficient quality of phone termination.

Trying to explain your customers that the fault is on your service provider is not wise: on the contrary, giving such an excuse yields the customer the impression that you are just a cockdodger.

Technorati Tags: cernio, truphone, iphone, voip, carriers, cockdodging,

Push or pull?

Seth Godin talks about push and pull methodologies. Apart from the marketing considerations, I see that push and pull are fundamental tasks in the work process and both have to be balanced well. But what captured my attention is this sentence:

I can't use internal wikis. "It's on the wiki" is a dumb thing to say to me.

I expect my team to check on the wiki because it's not useful to broadcast each information to everybody. Except when needed, information has to be stored on a "pull" mechanism. Luckily, most of the wikis provide a RSS feed on the latest changes.

Usually we forgive someone's lack of discipline if the element has some creative behaviour, in this case we justify everything with a sentence: "he's a genious, you cannot trap his mind in this or that process". Most of the creative people I've met are totally inept at managing simple tasks like:

• retrieve a document previously stored in the document management system, however it is categorized or tagged, even by means of the custom search engine
  
• complete tasks in an ordered way and notify the rest of the team
• remember decisions and keep coherent behavior when analyzing scenarios. If you've changed your mind, notify others that you've changed your mind and why
  
• before answering "it's not my duty" think. re-think and be completely sure that it' not your duty
  
• make a move before someone asks you about the status of a project,
  
• avoid replying that you're waiting for X or Y to complete a task when somebody questions about the task status you're responsible of (That's what I call cockdodging!)

That's something that you can balance with a smart, ingenious mind, charisma and a really good idea that makes the rest of the team happy to work with...
But if you're not that kind of person and you just behave as "creative", you're just a dead corpse on the boat.

Since good ideas do not happen here and there, I advise the reader to do the best to behave well in a team, be cooperative, and organized.

Technorati Tags: cernio, creative, push-or-pull,
cockdodging,

Sitofono at the EADP Paris Congress

We are presenting the Sitòfono product at the EADP Congress, the international conference on Phone Directories and Yellow Pages, held in Paris at the Westin Hotel.

The place is fantastic, luxurious furniture and great staff.
I've taken some pictures, have a look on my Flickr EADP tagset

Just a note: yesterday we were looking for a good, cheap restaurant. We looked at the Pages Jaunes, the printed version. As an "always connected" person (sort of), I've missed several things:

• Customer rating: how can I judge the quality of the restaurant? At last, we had to personally check with a stroll to the place
• Enhanced details: opening hours? Available places? Does it provide vegetarian diet?
• Promptness: look for the street address in the list of streets, get the map page number, x and y coordinates, look for the street in the square, elaborate directions
• Check with a phone call: in this case, since I don't speak french I hadn't called but I usually call the restaurant and ask few questions if I cannot get all the information presented above, and eventually I book a table.

What if all this happens in a single web page?


Technorati Tags: cernio, eadp, yellow pages, directory

Call me free, Call me free, Call me free...

In implicit reply to Imran Ali's article "Phone from HERE", Luca Filigheddu presents a practical use of Sitòfono in the two most active social networks: LinkedIn and Facebook.
I've posted a comment on Imran Ali's article, but it's still under approval, and it says something like this: I do not see anything new in the Corraleta move, since Sitòfono (and other web based click-to-call services, to be honest) can be embedded in every HTML page by following few, simple instructions. I mean, it's good that "Phone from Here" provides a link to be placed on LinkedIn, but to be honest I see that as a "me too" move, something like "jump on the social network hype".

Besides, Jaxtr, which just raised 10M$ of funds, is providing a call me free button that clearly aims at social networks and which targets people with low or zero knowledge of HTML. Indeed, Jaxtr provides a "wizard" to ease the publishing procedure for the most famous web sites and applications, like:

• Facebook
• Orkut
• MySpace
• Hi5
• LinkedIn
• Blogger
• LiveJournal
• Xanga
• Flickr
• Craigslist
• eBay
• AIM (away screen)

Moreover, it presents a simple step-by-step instruction to embed the "call me" code in your e-mail client. That is really a fantastic user experience!

What's different in the Jaxtr move? They are targeting the community users, the millions of users that cannot speak HTML, by providing an it-cannot-be-easier procedure that hides all the techie stuff.

I consider it a really good move, as far as the quality of user experience is concerned. However, I pose a question: what will be the "returning value" for such a nice feature? Will it be money (it actually captures paying customers), reputation (it strengthens the corporate identity), experience (it's the starting point for future, better services)?

Other thoughtful questions are hidden in Luca's comment on the Jaxtr funding in his article "Challenge: make pay for a valuable service"



Technorati Tags: cernio, jaxtr, venture, capital, VC, sitofono,

Evaluating a software start-up

Following my previous post on "The Business of Software", I would like to introduce an interesting "checklist" that helps evaluate the potential of a software start-up, from a VC's point of view.
A good start up should be measured on these points

1. Management Team: they should be competent and experienced professionals with sufficient background on the technology/product to be marketed
   
2. Market Attractiveness: high entry barriers to keeps out competitors, negotiation power for suppliers/buyers, no good substitutes, could be a complement to dominant products
   
3. Compelling offering: it has to be a "must have" product, service, or solution
   
4. Customer interest: evidence of a large willing-to-pay user base
   
5. Credibility: a case history, a reference client, a testimonial gives credibility to the product and the technology
   
6. Business model: VCs want early growth, rapid break-even
   
7. Flexibility: strategy and product offering must be adaptable to new inputs from competitors, new technologies, new user needs
   
8. Payoff potential: the ROI must be high (>25%). It usually forces the start-up to develop a product, which could be risky but more profitable than providing solutions and software services.
   

The author, Michael A. Cusumano, explains the meaning of each point and applies them systematically on real-world companies like Numega, Cybergnostic, firstRain.
Even if it is an a posteriori analysis, it gives a clue on how to evaluate a potentially explosive startup.


Needless to say, I suggest a deep and reasoned reading of his book.

Technorati Tags: cernio, cusumano, startup, innovation, product

The business of software, Harry Potter and the Iron Maiden

It's curious how certain terms are used in completely different context and topics.
The kiss of death is the dreadful spell cast by dementors in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

But the kiss of death is also the more dreadful action undertaken by VCs when financing a startup, as described by Michael A. Cusumano in The Business of Software: as the author explains during the book, the Kiss Of Death consists in the irresistible desire of VCs to maximize the investment, by pushing the company to build a product at any cost.
This usually means, to the average startup, to open new offices or refurbish the existing with luxury furniture, hire new people with different skills, spend into great marketing campaigns, target the broadest market ever (USA), put enormous efforts (both technical and financial) into risky and unpredictable paths.

All this usually translates into a Flight of Icarus:

His eyes seem so glazed
As he flies on the wings of a dream
Now he knows his father betrayed
Now his wings burn to ashes to ashes his grave

Cusumano has no quick-and-dirty recipe to build a successful company, but he gives the reader interesting thoughts and some rough checklists to evaluate the wealth of your company: if I were you, I'd buy a copy of his book.


Technorati Tags: cernio, Cusumano, microsoft, netscape, business, venture,

Italian ex-president uses Sitòfono

As you probably noticed by my low posting activity, we are rolling out a lot of new things, and one of which I am particularly proud of is that Francesco Cossiga, a well known ex President of the republic of Italy, is using Sitofono.
His Sitofono is hosted here: www.francesco-cossiga.sitofono.it

What makes me even more proud, is that Francesco Cossiga is Sardinian, as well as me and most of the people in the company I work for, Abbeynet.

If you can read italian, check this article on Mytech.


Technorati Tags: cernio, Cossiga, Sitofono,

Joost

I've been trying Joost yesterday night for the first time, after a really busy period.

Here are few "raw" comments, I'll give more detailed in the future:

• Quality: decent, sometimes good. Few glitches are not a problem on a documentary or "easy watching" tv. But I'll become berserk if I see glitches while watching a horror movie!


• Quantity: lots of theme-oriented videos (extreme sports, jackass, music), but which I qualify as: if-I-have-nothing-to-do-Ill-watch-it or good-to-watch-while-cooking-dinner


• User experience: impressive! The control panel is something really worth seeing, the channel navigation experience is lightweight, slender

Ah, if you want an account (unless they unlocked the closed beta program) just contact me via sitofono or via Hictu (nickname: cerion)


Technorati Tags: cernio, joost, iptv, hictu,

Nokia on mobile advertising: next google?

Nokia announced recently on its forum developer network that two new mobile advertising services are available for developers.

Learn how to implement targeted mobile advertising

Programming for Nokia devices is changing the mediascape. Two new mobile advertising services are transforming the way people use their phones: Nokia Ad Service and Nokia Advertising Connector. Nokia Ad Service is a fully managed service for advertisers to conduct targeted advertising on mobile services and applications. It consists of a group of mobile publishers forming a mobile ad network and a platform to deploy, manage and optimize mobile advertising campaigns. The other service, Nokia Advertising Connector, accommodates third-party publishers and advertising aggregator companies that want to extend to relevant mobile advertising. Nokia Advertising Connector operates as an intelligent switch, selecting between text, visual, audio, and video ads — depending on the user's context — and feeding the ad to the device.

For more information, check the official nokia press releases

Is Nokia going to compete with Google in what has been the only steadily growing revenue stream after the dotcom bubble?



Technorati Tags: cernio, nokia, ads, mobile

We're Pulver100!

As Luca announced today, Abbeynet, the company I work for, has been awarded with the presence on the Pulver 100 listing 2007

The Pulver 100 is the first and foremost listing of privately held growth companies that represent the future of IP communications. Originally introduced in 2002, the pulver 100 recognizes companies that have substantial real-world deployments and enjoy significant growth rates. The pulver 100 has become an indicator of the leading edge in IP communications, and the companies named to the 2007 Pulver 100 represent the future of the IP communications industry.

One more thing is worth to be mentioned. Luca notices there is a big name that is missing:

The big absence ? Skype. Skype is not a Pulver 100 company this year.

This fact confirms, somehow, the idea that Skype(1) is not(2) doing(3) innovation(4)

Technorati Tags: cernio, pulver100, Luca Filigheddu, skype, innovation, voice20,

Fast Second: book review

On the verge of writing my previous post I started writing a review on a very interesting book. I was "frightened" of being rough, impolite, offensive somehow to the readers or to the authors.
Then, I had the occasion to read a really crude and earth-shattering review by Joel Spolsky on "Dreaming in Code" (Yep, I read his blog).
All of a sudden, my worries vanished :)

So, here is

My personal review of Fast Second (by C. C. Markides, P. A. Geroski)

It is a really interesting book, where "interesting" is twofold: the ideas expressed are interesting, and the writing style is interesting too, for it provides information by repeating the same concept in different ways. It seems to me that the most interesting thing in this book is the repetition scheme in itself.

In fact, it helps the reader by just writing the concepts twice or more, in order that the reader doesn't need to re-read the same sentence more than once. Memorization is easier because information is redundant and presented from different viewpoints (like 2D and 3D representation).

That is to say, it could have been written in half the paper, but it wouldn't have been such a light reading on such a complex matter. Books like this can be read on a noisy flight near the turbines, with a crying baby on your side, without the need to concentrate on the topic.

Uhmmm, what's missing here?

Oh yeah, I forgot the topic on which this book is focused on! The book is about competitive innovation in the mass market, it clearly advocates the strategy of waiting for a settlement of the technology evolution, then enter the mass market (well, actually it is "build a rather inexistent one") just before (or shortly after) a dominant design appears, and when most of Startups are running out of fuel.

What I don't understand is how such an ecosystem can sustain itself, and how can I estimate such a high risk (technical and financial) of entering in a typically narrow time window with big investments, which are needed to consolidate the product and create the market.

My Advice

Similar "redundant" books have been written and edited by Kathy Sierra and are called "Head First": they are far more capturing and interesting than Fast Second, and I advice to buy them if you want to stuff more things in your brain with lesser effort.

Technorati Tags: cernio, fast second,
Joel Spolsky, Kathy Sierra,