Archive for August, 2007|Monthly archive page
RingCentral
If you find this writeup helpful, you can use this number as a RingCentral referral code: 8005764104. I’ll get some free minutes if you use it. Also hit this link for $10 off RingCentral and this one for 10% off.
I’ve been playing around with a service called RingCentral over the last few days. RingCentral subscribers get dedicated 800 or local numbers with set minutes per month for set prices. Packages start at $15 for 100 minutes. Nothing crazy, right? Well, check out the functionality they offer on top of the number. Not only can you route your RingCentral number to any other number (like a cell phone), you can:
- route outgoing calls through your RingCentral number so it shows up on recipient caller ID
- receive faxes via email
- send faxes directly from email
- receive voicemail audio files via email
- configure virtual a PBX switchboard (5 extensions for the $15 packages)
- configure separate voicemail boxes for virtual extensions
- drop a pre-configured click-to-call widget onto a website
Additionally, you can load rules on top of the number based on time and caller ID, so can easily do things like route calls directly to voicemail after business hours or block calls from specific callers. I’ve had the number for a bit more than a week and haven’t yet to received a spam fax and have been blown away by their customer service. I had an extensive chat with a salesperson who talked me through the product and have called tech support several times since I signed up to figure out features. I reached helpful people on the phone extremely quickly. This is more than I can say for eFax: terrible customer support and tons of spam. It was even an ordeal to cancel my account with them. Leave a comment if you’re thinking about signing up with RingCentral and I’ll give you a referral code (edit: see bottom of this writeup for a code). Thus far I highly recommend the service.
GrandCentral (who I’ve written about before) offers similar services but is targeted towards personal use and has been closed to new users since they were acquired by Goooooogle. Interestingly, according to GigaOm, their pricing plan was nearly identical to what RingCentral currently offers ($15/100 minutes/month). However, GrandCentral recently changed ~400 subscriber numbers, which is illustrative of the dangers involved in using a service like this – the number you get is not technically yours. GrandCentral stated that they had to change the numbers because a “pre-acquisition underlying carrier stopped providing services to certain areas”. It’s unclear which providers are underneath GrandCentral, but I’m pretty sure Ingenio is under RingCentral.
RingCentral has an interesting background to say the least. They were founded in 1991, were part of Motorola from ’98 – ’99, and raised a $6.25m A round in January ’07 from Khosla and Sequoia. There are no typos in that sentence. They went 16 years from founding to Series A, with a corporate acquisition in between. So Sequoia and Khlosa put $6m into a 16 year old RingCentral in January and Google bought nearly identical GrandCentral for ~$50m in June. I’ve already written about my theory on the GrandCentral aquisition. Maybe I’m right on that, maybe I’m wrong. Either way there is some interesting stuff going on in this space. Of course I could be way off and GrandCentral could have been bought so every GPhone user has a GNumber…
Green tech in the White Mountains
We spent some time earlier this 
week hiking up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and took advantage of the very cool Appalachian Mountain Club hut system, which gives hikers the option to reserve/pay for beds and meals. We started out from Pinkham Notch and scaled up the Madison Gulf Trail to the Madison Hut where we spent our first night. On Day 2 we did the whole Presidential Traverse and stayed at the Mizpah Hut our second night, waking up early enough the next day to get out of the woods and back down to Boston to catch an afternoon Red Sox game at Fenway.
The weather started foggy, cold, and windy (it was 36 degrees w/+50 mph winds on the top of Washington when we left the Madison Hut) but we were later rewarded with great views of the endless green mountains of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine.
In the few minutes I spent at the huts not eating or sleeping, it was really cool to check out the green tech that powers their systems and reduces the huts’ impact on the land that surrounds them. The huts are extremely isolated – generally several miles from any roads. All of the food and related guest amenities are packed in by the hut staff and all related waste is packed out by them as well. Guests are 
expected to pack out what they pack in. The huts all have electric lighting and full kitchens. Stoves are powered by propane and electricity is generated through a combination of mini-windmills, solar panels, and hydroelectric pumps. The pictures here are of the Madison Hut, which has solar panels that produce 1.8 megawatts and a windmill that produces .9 megawatts, the majority of which is used for powering the pumps which fuel the hut’s flush toilets. Most of the huts have composting toilets, which smell worse but consume far less energy and push out far less water into the septic field.
The huts are completely off the grid and can support +50 people night after night. Pretty cool stuff.
Cramer on Colbert
This is worth watching. Sorry it’s not embedded.
Google v. Yelp: Future of local = trackable calls
I posted a while back about the backstory to Google’s acquisition of Grand Central being the need to create a artificial clickstream for non-PPC advertising. Another move was made in that space today. TechCrunch is reporting that local advertiser Marchex purchased VoiceStar for $28m. This stuff is so straightforward to do and makes so much sense, it may be that in the near future most local ads have advertisement specific phone numbers. The only downside is that the advertiser has lots of phone numbers floating around in the ether, but the upside for them could be tremendous. The challenges presented are the same as always for local: innumerable small business owners to reach out to who are very set in their ways and are very busy.
It’s surprising to me that Yelp.com is not in the PPC space yet. Google’s announcement earlier this week that they’re going to pay Joe Citizen $10 per local business profile formally threw down the gauntlet with Yelp, and we know Google is getting Grand Central ready…
Corporate branding: The Bloomberg B-Unit
Filed under: Bloomberg, brand strategy, information, markets |
Leave a Comment I’ve written a little about corporate branding in the past, but I recently stumbled upon a real gem. The Bloomberg B-Unit.
The BLOOMBERG B-UNIT™ is a state-of-the-art biometric security device that provides BLOOMBERG ANYWHERE™ subscribers with enhanced identity protection and gives access to the BLOOMBERG PROFESSIONAL service.
How awesome is that. A state-of-the-art biometric security device to see commodity prices? What about logins and passwords? Or if you want to get really crazy, digital tokens? This thing is pure branding, and I’m sure it works. Give a B-Unit to a commodities trader and he’ll instantly think more highly of the info he accesses with it.
Bloomberg is not new to the corporate branding game, and in some ways they may have even fallen prey to being too progressive with corporate branding…if such a thing is possible. Bloomberg terminals have rocked the colored keyboard since the company’s founding in the early ’80s. They’ve stuck with it, and to this day Bloomberg keyboards are lit up like Christmas trees. Meanwhile in 2007, no one else on the planet needs a colored keyboard except your kid cousin that is learning to play their new synthesizer. Not even the craziest ninja programmers need colored keys to keep their heads straight. But bond traders? They need a colored keyboards “to save time”. I’m sure the colored keyboard was the coolest thing since sliced bread when it hit the market in ’82…and the cutting edge bond traders that started using them back then still want the colored keys today. And get this…some of the keyboards even have thumbprint sensors too:
The BLOOMBERG® keyboard conserves desk space while providing extra functionality and it empowers the user with time-saving, customized keys. The integrated sensor utilizing biometric technology provides an added level of security.
Of course at the end of the day, the Bloomberg hardware and UI may look ridiculous, but they’re still able to charge $1,500 a month per user. However, that’s a huge pricetag to be paying for data. If I were Bloomberg I would ditch the colored keyboard, grab as many of those fat fees as you can, and keep on the lookout for competition moving in on your turf.
New look, new platform, same blog
So I finally made the switch over to WordPress from Blogger. Blogger served me well, but WordPress has features and flexibility that Blogger doesn’t have. It’s a lot easier to change the design and it generally functions much smoother. Blogger is actually a bit better with embedding videos, widgets, etc. but WordPress ironically has built in analytics that run on Urchin…which was bought by Google…who owns Blogger. Maybe someday Google will integrate all of the stuff they’ve bought and reclaim control of the internet. I’ll be here for the time being though. The conversion was generally painless, but I need to go back through my posts at some point and brush things up a bit. Also, it maybe worth noting that the tag links associated my posts go to “global” WordPress tags. The “categories” tags on the right side filter the stuff on this blog by tag. Not sure if anyone clicks those.
Thus far, WordPress seems great. Also, I highly recommend domain purchasing and management provider One and One. Everyone says that blogging platforms and domain providers are the same, but they really aren’t. Thanks to Joe for perfecting the CSS here and Chad for the One and One heads up a long ways back. I haven’t seen much of Chad since he started running with the horses in the hills west of San Diego a few years back though.
Let me know what you think. Your comment will show up in my new super sweet “recent comments” section..
