IFBYPHONE SECURES $4.6 MILLION IN NEW ROUND OF FUNDING
Infusion of Venture Capital Insures Continued Expansion Despite Economic Downturn

CHICAGO–Nov. 18, 2008—In the middle of an economic slowdown and a drought in venture capital funding, Ifbyphone said today it has secured $4.6 million in a second round of institutional funding from five venture capital firms.
Ifbyphone is a hosted telephone application platform company that provides small and medium-sized businesses with telephony features that enable them to create phone solutions that enhance customer conversations, increase sales and lower costs.
The funding round was jointly led by Apex Venture Partners and Origin Ventures, who also invested in Ifbyphone’s first round of institutional funding. They were joined by Spring Mill Venture Partners, i2A and Blue Crest Capital Finance, L.P.
“We view this new round of funding as a strong endorsement of our growth and expansion strategy,” said Ifbyphone founder and CEO Irv Shapiro. “It positions us extremely well to continue our expansion during these complex economic times.”

“We are very excited to be a part of the Ifbyphone investor group,” said Ken Green, co-founder and managing partner at Spring Mill Venture Partners. “We believe that Ifbyphone represents the next great wave of Internet-enabled business services, allowing small and medium-sized businesses access to capabilities previously only available to their larger competitors. This kind of service offers an opportunity to level the competitive playing field.”

To learn more about Ifbyphone’s affordable suite of online telephony applications, such as voice broadcasting, Smart Toll Free Numbers, Google Analytics Call Integration and interactive voice response (IVR), visit  http://www.ifbyphone.com.

# # #
About Ifbyphone
Ifbyphone is a hosted telephone application platform company that provides small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with tools to enhance customer conversations, drive sales, and lower costs. Leveraging Ifbyphone’s extreme usability, developers and marketers can quickly create solutions ranging from simple click-to-call links to sophisticated call-routing and interactive-marketing systems. Ifbyphone’s solutions are available directly to SMBs and through a network of resellers. For more information, click to speak to a sales professional or visit the Ifbyphone Web site.

About Origin Ventures
Origin Ventures is a venture capital firm investing in early-stage companies. The firm invests capital and leverages its entrepreneurial, marketing and management expertise to help facilitate the growth of early-stage companies. The principals of Origin Ventures have been involved in successful entrepreneurial activities since the mid 1980s.

About Apex Venture Partners
Apex Venture Partners is a national venture capital firm based in Chicago. With more than 20 years’ experience financing early stage IT businesses, Apex has invested in more than 140 companies since inception. The partners at Apex look for companies that have unique products or services that address large potential markets in which customer needs are not being addressed.

About Spring Mill Venture Partners
Spring Mill Venture Partners is an early stage venture capital firm focused on investing in strong management teams in high-growth information technology and life sciences companies located in the Midwest region. We take an active role by providing the strategic and tactical assistance that early stage companies need to grow and prosper. More information is available at www.springmillvp.com.

About i2A
The Illinois Innovation Accelerator Fund (i²A) is an innovative $10 million early-stage investment fund which invests in companies primarily in technology-enabled products and services, new media and education products and services, and consumer and retail products.  The fund’s goal is to provide the first external professional capital raised by companiesand nurture them through their early stages of growth. Visit www.i2afund.com for more information.

About BlueCrest Capital Finance, L.P.
BlueCrest Capital Finance, L.P., a U.S.-based commercial finance company, provides debt-financing solutions to development-stage companies in a broad range of industry sectors including IT, Communications, Hardware, Software, Semi-Conductor, Electronics, Energy, Medical Device and Life Science. The team, which has been together continuously since 1998, pursues debt transactions in the $1 million-$25 million range and has consummated approximately 900 transactions with total commitments in excess of $1.9 billion.

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The University of Chicago Booth School of business, formerly Chicago GSB

The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, formerly The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business sent this note earlier this month.

I am very pleased to announce a remarkable gift of $300 million to the University of Chicago for the benefit of the Graduate School of Business by University Trustee and alumnus David G. Booth, MBA ‘71, his wife Suzanne Booth, and their children, Erin and Chandler Booth. This is the largest donation in the University’s history and the largest gift ever in support of any business school. In recognition of the Booth family’s extraordinary generosity, the Board of Trustees has voted unanimously to name the school the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

I don’t have any comment on this at this time other than Ted Snyder would be wise to take action on the issues in this blog post about business school rankings in determining how to use these funds and needs a multi-million dollar communication plan for the world’s experienced recruiting community so that this brand does not cause alumni great harm.

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Forget about monetization, can Facebook survive without any useful customer service improvements? While 98% of the service works great on autopilot, there is absolutely zero customer service for the things where you do need help. I don’t mean bad customer service, I mean there is absolutely no customer service for certain issues.

Case #1 - Last month, I created a group called Interactive, Search Marketing and Social Media Change Managment in my haste to leave for a conference, you can see that I mispelled Management in the group name. This field is not editable by the group owner and after 7 weeks, I have had zero professional response from a real human at Facebook to resolve the issue.

Case #2 - Lack of ability to add Networks of former employers properly. As more people are using Facebook as a sourcing tool, the inability to update this for historical employers, in my case BlackRock, is not just an inconvenience, it could be costing me opportunities and monetization due to the lack of focus on data integrity of my profile to the level I’d like. On this matter I reached out to an executive of Facebook directly - they said they were sending it to customer service as “they should be able to rectify your issues”. Ten more days have passed without correction of my two data problems. I’m putting a deadline of October 30th on this for Facebook to fix this as this is a more than reasonable amount of time to do so.

Lastly, a necessary enhancement. How about a button on people’s profiles that says, take me to all the messages I have exchanged with this person? Thank you.

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Hurricane Ike’s larger than category 2 impact suggests need to modify Saffir-Simpson Scale hurricane measurement and communication metrics. It is heartbreaking to see and hear the stories of people who wouldn’t evacuate before the areas on the Texas coast because Hurricane Ike was “only a category 2 hurricane”. The reports and pictures from airborne helicopters indicate massive hurricane property damage and, unfortunately, loss of life from Hurricane Ike. I dedicate this post to these victims.

This begs the question, could this loss of life been reduced with better communication of risk to the people in the areas of projected impact, causing them to evacuate?

Places like Galveston, Bolivar, Crystal Beach, Gilchrest, High Island, etc. had lower evacuation rates than during Hurricane Rita. This could have been much, much worse if it hit a more densely populated area. But the loss of any life is undesirable (and potentially is preventable).

A friend of mine who lives on the Gulf Coast has repeatedly suggested to me that there is a need to have “less media hype” and “more factual metrics” when hurricanes approach. As you know I think about metrics a lot in terms of the Internet and business processes and I started thinking about this issue and the implications of it.

The last National Hurricane Center report before Hurricane Ike made landfall in Texas contains the following two paragraphs:

DATA FROM NOAA DOPPLER WEATHER RADARS AND RECONNAISSANCE AIRCRAFT
INDICATE MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS ARE NEAR 110 MPH…175 KM/HR…
WITH HIGHER GUSTS. IKE IS A STRONG CATEGORY TWO HURRICANE ON THE
SAFFIR-SIMPSON SCALE AND COULD REACH THE TEXAS COAST AS A CATEGORY
THREE…MAJOR HURRICANE…JUST BEFORE LANDFALL. STRONGER WINDS…
AS MUCH AS 30 MPH HIGHER THAN AT THE SURFACE…COULD OCCUR ON HIGH
RISE BUILDINGS.

IKE REMAINS A VERY LARGE HURRICANE AND HURRICANE FORCE WINDS EXTEND
OUTWARD UP TO 120 MILES…195 KM…FROM THE CENTER…AND TROPICAL
STORM FORCE WINDS EXTEND OUTWARD UP TO 275 MILES…445 KM. DURING
THE PAST HOUR…HURRICANE FORCE WIND GUSTS HAVE BEEN REPORTED ON
GALVESTON ISLAND AND REPORTS FROM NOAA AND AIR FORCE RECONNAISSANCE
AIRCRAFT INDICATE SUSTAINED HURRICANE FORCE WINDS ARE JUST OFFSHORE
GALVESTON ISLAND.

I’m not certain how many years ago the National Hurricane Center started reporting Hurricanes in this format with the “hurricane force winds extend outward from the center ### miles” and “tropical force winds extend outward ### miles”, but I find that information useful as there is a significant correlation to size of the hurricane and the impact of the storm surge and geographic area that are affected. This is therefore extremely useful data, but it’s locked up in giant blobs of text that don’t allow it to be communicated effectively.

I’d like to therefore propose and suggest that the National Hurricane Center make the following modification the to Saffir-Simpson scale to the following new format:

Saffir-Simpson Scale number – hurricane force wind miles from center number – tropical storm force wind miles from center number

Hurricane Ike would have therefore been the following at landfall:
2-120-275

It is my opinion that this would be a much more useful as the overall radius of the hurricane force and tropical force wind fields would be communicated effectively and consistently instead of in inconsistent references. One could argue that you should use the circumference to make it more dramatic, but not all tropical cyclones are perfectly symmetric so I prefer usage of the existing communicated metric radius.

This humble blog post is clearly just the first of many conversations to openly discuss hurricane scale and metrics and creating this needed reform. The reform itself is more important than the exact final form of this reform prior to the start of the 2009 hurricane scale and metrics season. I look forward to seeing comments and other blog posts.

I look forward to someday having a clearer metric that can save more lives. Thank you for your participation in making this a reality!

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However, high rankings on entrepreneurship education alone is not sufficient, the next steps are:
1) To build a transparent, quick and efficient marketplace for entrepreneurs, experienced and passionate management teams and startup capital.

2) Modify the focus toward commercialization of businesses in the model outlined above, ultimately success is measured by the number and quantity of companies that they’ve enabled to scalable, not just lifestyle growth curves. I look forward to participating in this journey.

Here’s the full announcement…

DePaul University’s entrepreneurship program opened the new academic year on a high note Sept. 10 with news that it has again been recognized among the finest in the United States in Entrepreneur magazine/Princeton Review’s annual “Best Schools for Entrepreneurs” ranking.

DePaul moved up three places to second on the list of best rated graduate entrepreneur programs in the national rankings, which are posted on Entrepreneur’s Web site and will appear in the October issue of the magazine. The university placed seventh in the undergraduate entrepreneur education category and was the only Illinois university ranked in that category.

“DePaul offers students exposure to thousands of successful entrepreneurs in a large urban setting with sophisticated financing services available,” the magazine noted. “Entrepreneurial supporters are extremely active in sharing knowledge, resources, contacts and expertise. The program provides very supportive administration and infrastructure through the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center.”

Entrepreneur partnered with the Princeton Review, a leading educational services provider, to solicit surveys from 2,300 undergraduate and graduate program administrators to determine the rankings. The survey covered three areas: academic offerings and requirements; student enrollment and faculty quality; and “outside the classroom,” which examined student organization, mentorship and scholarship opportunities. An advisory board of entrepreneurship educators also provided evaluations of the surveyed programs. Based on the data and review, a total of 50 programs (25 undergraduate and 25 graduate programs) made the list of the best.

“DePaul’s rankings are a tribute to the academic excellence of our program and the quality of our faculty,” said Harold Welsch, Coleman Entrepreneurship Chair at DePaul, who founded the program. “Using their education and start-up experiences, faculty members help students look to the future and identify viable business opportunities. They share their experiences with the students willingly and with great enthusiasm.”

Founded in 1982 at the College of Commerce, DePaul’s entrepreneurship program has grown to encompass 12 undergraduate and graduate courses taught by 16 faculty members. The faculty represents a mix of distinguished scholars of entrepreneurship and successful entrepreneurs.

Courses cover business plan development, entrepreneurial strategy and management, new venture financing, business growth, creativity, innovation and technological change, among other topics. More than 600 students take undergraduate and graduate courses in the program annually. Students have opportunities to participate in a number of mentorship and internship programs, as well as entrepreneur organizations, including Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization, MBA Entrepreneurs Club, Social Entrepreneurship Club and Students for Entrepreneurs.

The program is supported by the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center, which manages education and outreach programs designed to stimulate the start-up and growth of entrepreneurial firms. The center also sponsors Launch DePaul, an annual year-long business plan competition that awards cash prizes and business start-up services for the most promising business plans submitted by students and alumni.

“We believe that today’s students need practical learning opportunities that extend beyond the classroom,” said Raman Chadha, director of the center and a member of the entrepreneurship program faculty. “The Coleman Center creates these opportunities by working with faculty to connect DePaul students with successful entrepreneurs, help them launch ventures and provide real-world experiences. Students are able to immediately apply what they learn in the classroom, acquiring wisdom that only comes with these opportunities. The entrepreneurial spirit at DePaul has never been stronger.”

The magazine’s “Best Schools for Entrepreneurs” top 10 graduate programs were:

1. Babson College
2. DePaul University
3. University of Southern California
4. The University of Arizona
5. University of South Florida
6. University of Illinois, Chicago
7. University of California, Los Angeles 8. Drexel University 9. Chapman University 10. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The top undergraduate entrepreneur programs were:

1. University of Houston
2. Babson College
3. Drexel University
4. University of Dayton
5. University of Arizona
6. Temple University
7. DePaul University
8. University of Oklahoma
9. University of Southern California
10. Chapman University

To view the full rankings, go to: http://www.entrepreneur.com/topcolleges/.

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So this could mean one of a few things are the culprit here…

1. Barack Obama Google Link Bomb - While it doesn’t rank #1, the fact that there is an indent entry after the Barack Obama entry is an indication that Google is seeing that page as important or having a link spike. Recently, Barack Obama had also recently been ranking highly for the term “Linkedin” so it appears that the Obama campaign is trying to utilize search engine optimization techniques on social media sites to compete with John McCain and Sarah Palin.

2. The www.new.facebook.com pages when mixed with old Facebook pages is confusing the Googlebot? - It wouldn’t be out of the question. It could be that it looks like a regular domain and a subdomain.

3. Other parts of Facebook are being opened up to search and these pages are causing issues somehow - several sites reported this. Facebook’s continuing inconsistently about what is public and not public to search is frustrating and is inviting an unnecessary future firestorm. They should really be more clear and communicative, have they forgot the previous lessons of the past?

4. None of the above - What is your theory?

While I’m at it - Dear Facebook - you have not solved the problem I submitted in August to your help desk. After waiting a week you sent me a message which did not even address the issue or indicate that a human has read it. I’d appreciate professional resolution of this request.

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However, her assertion that Jason Calacanis has “retired from blogging” is utter complete nonsense (some would say bullshit) that indicates a lack of research into the issue that distracts from an otherwise excellent article.

As you likely know, Jason Calacanis now has an email newsletter that seems to have a rather well organized “guest blogger” distribution network associated with it. Though Jason will likely never admit it publicly, it appears this was his plan all along. I have to tip my hat to him in as much as it actually increases his overall distribution network. Jason (and his “dogs”) also use Twitter which is called micro-blogging. Wikipedia defines it this way (as of this writing)

“Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.”

So to say Jason has retired from blogging is, in reality at this time, factually inaccurate. But a simple reaching out to other bloggers and sources by the Washington Post could have easily revealed this issue. This is important as others may misinterpret “Jason’s retirement” and it could adversely affect someone’s blogging strategy due to such misinformation.

Sarah - could you please check out the situation a little deeper in the future so that thousands of people aren’t misinformed?

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Please feel free to comment or reply if you have figured this arena out yet. As Facebook continues to grow in usage this is an area I’m seeking out information. Thanks.

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It’s a kinda different show this year in both the crowd and some of the content type.

Already have had great meeting with Jim Hedger, Bryan Eisenberg and many others. Bryan has a new book, Always Be Testing, which just came out. I can’t wait to read it!

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During Cluecon, I was able to drop in and catch Irv Shaprio’s speech, what follows are my live blogging notes of the session:

What does ifbyphone provide? Phone mashups – combine data from the world wide web with phone inputs and conversations.

ifbyphone goals:
- Technology Agnostic API – any language, host, data or location
- Dialog Support – Voice Forms (IVR), DTMF, Text to Speech, Automated Speech Recognition
- Call Management – outbound (termination), inbound (origination), Scheduling API, Broadcast API, Call Completion API
- Support Services – documentation, blog, user support forum, free development accounts and live support people

Lots of documentation is available, telephone scale

Phone mashup example – getting request from a form

Build a Voice Form Setup Form
Built in grammar allow branching of questions (Survo voice form setup)
ifbyphone uses forms instead of selectors for 100% reliability

Check out phonemashup.com for more examples.

Marketing people are using this to put the telephone into the existing treatment processes.

———————

Analysis: ifbyphone is enabling a bridge between web 2.0 and the phone. What I love about this is I think it’s part of a trend, removing silos to create effective solutions for companies and their customers. It’s small space with the potential to have large business impacts in terms of efficiency and customer satisfaction that will be fun to watch develop and watch who steps up to implement the solutions rapidly.

A recent interview of Irv can be found here. I certainly look forward to seeing and learning more about how ifbyphone will be impacting business results shortly.

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After this exercise, I now think there are groups of Digg users with different tendencies. I’ll tentatively entitle these tendencies Super Socialites and Relevants - users who wait for can’t miss content. These users fall into two subcategories - High Submit Success and Infrequent Participation. Check out the wide variations in these new metrics sources, which are agnostic as to the tenure of the Digg  user:

Digg User   # Popular
MrBabyMan 2644
msaleem 1681
zaibatsu 1410
supernova17 1210
MakiMaki 1046
mklopez 913
skored 842
tomboy501 563
IvanB 485
pizzler 459

Digg User   High Submit Success Ratio
kevinrose 97.105%
FirstDigg 80.180%
haxr 63.095%
diggboss 61.184%
sepultura 60.773%
macbot 55.556%
openthink 52.301%
lazycat 50.314%
supernova17 49.187%

Digg User   Diggs per Popular  (lowest voting participation)
normalkid 7.373
tarkullu 15.327
macbot 19.133
lnfiniteLoop 20.118
mklopez 24.648
Vinvin 25.163
kevinrose 27.827
MrEMan 27.909
MrBabyMan 36.769

Digg User  Diggs per Popular (highest voting participation)
ShuTian 1025.769
numberneal 901.385
maxyRO 820.896
zoomtechtv 767.209
emberjohn 713.982
FamilyGuyFan 711.771
lekahe 679.068
vroom101 675.685
iching 563.242
Konstantino 554.347

While every change of the Digg algorithm, these rankings shift anew in unpredictable ways.  These new metrics show some clear differences in the tendencies of some Digg users. It would be be wise to pause and analyze these different types of Digg users and how their mixture of roles create value on Digg.

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If I were the lead product manager at Twitter, I’d be setting up two primary screens:

1) Keywords across the entire network overall which toggle switches for the frequency compared to normal (it would be cool if this was somehow “normalized” so that less frequent words with huge percentage increases actually got noticed - so that everything wasn’t Angelina Jolie, Barack Obama, Brad Pitt, Michael Arrington, Jason Calacanis, Fred Wilson, etc).

2) Graphs and/or alert spikes of user defined keywords - ie ones that are important to oneself personally or to one’s business or clients. I would dare to say this might actually be a business model that could lead to meaningful monetization - I think alot of web services haven’t thought this through nearly enough. Organizing real-time data for useful decision making as a business model worked out OK for Michael Bloomberg if I recall correctly. Some might say Google Trends does this already from a search perspective, but it doesn’t break down the word clusters to core words with “sidekicks” and is not the leading indicator that Twitter is by an uncertain but definite time margin.

Before I’d get to this though, Twitter would have to become stable and Twitter would have to fix the AIM problem I posted about on June 1 and have not gotten a response to yet. Good luck on getting those items in order first, then feel free to give me a shout Biz.

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Let’s start an exploration of these issues in more detail:

- There is an almost total lack of imagination regarding potential emerging revenue streams - When I attend search engine conferences, I hear over and over how “63% of transactions occur offline after an online search (comScore 2006).” Tying together that transaction with it’s higher relevancy holds the key to a revenue stream potentially larger than Google’s Adwords product. Having once spent 6 months of my life trying to raise capital for a search advertising concept, I have to agree with Robert that there is lack of willingness to engage in serious funding conversations of this type - until half a dozen other people do it…that’s messed up!

- In large businesses, there is an obsession with basing business cases on expense savings rather than the potential for new revenue streams- Going back to that example above, financial services institutions could play a large role in this. However due to the lack of risk management processes that caused the housing crisis, they are risk adverse at this moment and risk removing themselves from this once in a lifetime opportunity. I saw 4 companies give presentations on their business cases on mobile retail banking and they all focused on the reduction of call center costs! Think about that a second, moving things from a PC to a phone will reduce call center volumes? Highly questionable at best form cost savings perspective, certainly missing the revenue opportunities completely.

- Everything in the world is converging, yet most companies have silos and are hiring specialists (set up for failure) - When banks are trying to become relevant in mobile and mobile is trying to get into advertising and payments, can you afford to hire people with one dimensional skill sets? The answer is no, not if you want to win.

- With increasingly rapid cycle times in technology, competitive benchmarking is becoming less useful - If none of your competitors has made a tough decision to reorganize a department, shift financial resources to new ways of doing things in marketing or customer service, how can you improve via benchmarking? Stated a different way, if your process is broken and all of your competitor’s processes are broken, you can’t possibly create market leadership by benchmarking. You have to hire the best and most brilliant people who hold little if any limiting beliefs and give them the authority to innovate based on what customers want. Serving those needs in the Peter Drucker fashion is the only way to create true market leadership. This does not mean that competitive analysis is dead. It does mean that the benchmarks you need to pay attention to are the breakthroughs regardless of industry.

- Existing legacy cost centers in large corporations are creating barriers to innovation and efficiency both internally and externally - These cost centers prevent reallocation of budgets to adopting usage of superior and more efficient technology or Internet/mobile advertising due to their all or nothing nature - smooth and frequent shifting to most economical resources is the unfortunate rarity. There is a large number of reasons for this and this topic is worthy of a post of it’s own (please submit suggestions). Cost centers make the silo problem worse and hard to solve.

- Traditional management consulting needs to acknowledge proprietary technology and data models as strategic and gain an implementation focus - If you come in for 6 months and never implement anything and nobody does any of the suggestions, your net present value is actually negative.

- We need to take back control of companies to focus on the customer as priority #1 - 5 year plans with a stack of initiatives in year 4 are interesting, but no longer practical. Notice I say take back control. This is the way the world used to work before endless Powerpoint and overly large bureaucracy like 18 month committee approval cycles. In fact Tom Peters stated on February 3, 1998 on Charlie Rose show as saying “I got tired of the McKinsey bureaucracy”

- C-level management and boards of directors treat social media, search marketing and Internet advertising like an island instead of integrating it into one’s culture and redesigning processes from scratch to support it - This is disruptive to companies using these products and companies that provide these products alike due to the lack of growth and monetization. But guess what? You can’t redesign these processes without bringing in people with a combination of skills that include both traditional management and the new tools. Right now we have people at the extremes. This doesn’t work.

Carolyn Shelby and I will be giving a talk to c-level executives on these an other related subjects this Wednesday at the Gleacher Center in Chicago. You may RSVP here. It is my first in a series of talks I hope to engage the world in over the coming years as we embrace this great challenge together! I need everyone’s help to help shape this vision and create this reality and maybe some famous quotes around the way. It is the furthering of a conversation that started with my appearance discussing these issues on SEO 101 - it starts at the 13:30 mark. Brian Mark said he’d love to see a Search Engine Strategies session on this, we are still working on fulfilling Brian Mark’s dream (24 minute mark).

I’d like to hear others like John Furrier, Fred Wilson, Dick Costolo and Don Dodge to chime in on this issues first chapter…

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A few weeks ago I was sent a Nokia N81 8GB mobile phone. This post will contrast it with Nokia N73 it replaced.

Image by tnkgrl via Flickr

Positives of the Nokia N81 8GB:

- The first thing you notice is new radically different navigation on N-series phones. The green and red call and hang up buttons are on the edges of larger buttons - it takes a few phone calls to get used to the new placement!

- I love the one click swipe to lock or unlock on the top of the phone!

- Now 1 click to writing a text message

- Battery life is really long, especially considering the extremely well lit back keys

- WIFI connection works well, I’ve been able to surf and test mobile web sites much more clearly.

Areas to improve on the next version:

- The Nokia N81 8GB is black background with white text - this can be hard to read in bright sunlight situations.

This phone should definitely serve me quite well until US version of 3G comes out.

I’d also like to give Andy Abramson special props for getting me in touch with someone at Tmobile regarding a coverage problem I’ve been having. Much appreciated.

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I’d acknowledge the relevancy of Sara’s nomination of Dan Rosenweig but will dismiss Marc Cuban as he’s more focused on acquiring the Chicago Cubs at present.

I’d like to nominate my own slate of nominees all would bring dramatic culture change and growth rather than an expense cutting mantra and I’d enjoy being a part of their team if asked:

Dick Costolo - Yahoo! arguably has the world’s largest mountain of content. Dick is one of the world’s thought leaders on distributing and monetizing content. He is also well qualified to build a culture of customer responsiveness. He also might have played a lead role in the recent Yahoo!/Google monetization deal.

Rich Skrenta - His knowledge of search is highly regarded. His new startup could also be lifted out to build a new company to replace many parts of the old one.

Brad Garlinghouse - Many would argue he understands and communicated the challenges to execution that Yahoo! faces better than anyone and is willing to make his case about it as he did in the peanut butter memo.

Jim Lanzone - If given the chance, it would be fascinating to see him have the resources to execute some of the lofty things he tried at Ask on a shoestring budget.

Those come to mind first, am I missing anyone? I’m certain I’ve missed some people out west that should be considered.

I’ll Tag:

Fred Wilson

Michael Arrington (via Crunchnotes)

John Battelle

Carl Icahn (please give me a shout if you read this)

UPDATE: Michael correctly points out that he’s already written this post…my bad…

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Skype: Enabling Conversations

If you put all of the time spent talking on Skype put end to end you would end up going back to the start of human species.

Skype is a thriving ecosystem 190+ hardware devices, 10,000 developers, partnership with world class companies.

Skype Developer Program (SDP) Vision:
More delighted users doing more with Skype
A vibrant ecosystem of external innovators
Supporting the long tail or outside innovation on the Skype platform
Growing selection of SDKs
Clear route to market

Where We Are Today:
Public Client API
Skype Extras Framework
Support Resources
Software Certification

Next Step: Software Certification Update
Focusing on a few really important issues
Much easier to understand and follow
Shorter test rounds

Coming Up: Next Version of Skype for Windows
Redesigned user interface
User and partner feedback is important
Extended beta program
API overhaul will follow

Later On: API & Extras Program
- Multi-Layer API
Core Functionality (cross-platform)
UI integration (platform-specific)
- Distribution and Management:
Extras Gallery
Extras Manager
Blacklist and Whitelist
- Backward and forward compatibility

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New Ebay API Calls released today
- most watched items
- deals
- related category items
- top-selling products

This uses eBay’s New Services Framework! This is an API upgrade…

Cross Merchandising
- sell products using the brand
- promote contextually relevant market

Merchandising in Action at Ebay.com - Buyer behavior, interests are now creating personalization based on past purchase behavior

Visit developer.ebay.com for access to tools…

SDK upgrades and SDK/JDK for Java…

Many Large Seller Improvements
- Batch upgrades
- Easier variant listing
- Feedback automation
- ASQ: Redirection to CS email
- Invoices: Invoices to A/P email

Making eBay Better
- Create a first-class buyer experience
- Create a trusted marketplace

Improving Buyer Experience:
- Number of recent policy changes improve buyer experience
- Mandating “critical item information”
- Previously optional items, will be mandatory

Shipping
- All items must specify at least one domestic shipping service
- Suggest passing, weight info to auction, suggest passing tracking info back for my eBay…

Return Policy Needs to be Transparent

Paymentsb - Paypal required in most countries…Paypal only in limited markets

Anonymous Member Email Address:
- Anonymous until sale is complete
- Protect buyers from fraud during eBay purchase

New Links Policy:
- Generally speaking, no link off eBay, whether or not an item is being for sale on that site
- Not a comprehensive list, more specifics to come…

Verification of new sellers is occurring

Trusted Selling With Identity Confirmation

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• Ebay Store Fee Changes and Town Meeting