Image by thomcochrane via Flickr

The popular Israeli Mobile IM/VoIP service Fring is slowly introducing banner Ads inside their mobile clients. It seems not all the users are affected, but only a selected group. 

I don’t really know if it will work, anyway praises to Fring to be one of the first players to introduce this approach in the mobile VoIP space. However Fring is not alone since Talkster is another player which announced a similar strategy at the beginning of this year, despite the approach is different (ads into the call stream).

I think 2009 will be a “show me the money” year so I bet many players in this space will launch similar or alternative initiatives pretty soon.

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Technorati Tags: Advertising, fring, luca filigheddu, mobile voip, talkster

Image by Quang Minh (YILKA) via Flickr

Since the death of my faithful Nokia N95, I was wondering whether an iPhone 3G could be both a replacement and a good companion when it comes to use it for business.

When I say for business, I mean full access to email everywhere and a deep usage of voice calls. At the same time, the BlackBerry Bold is a smartphone I saw the first time in the US thanks to Jim Courtney who showed it to me during one of the famous wine dinners organized by pal Andy Abramson.

My experience with the iPhone is limited to the 2G version I gave to my wife a couple of months ago, bought in Cupertino. That model is not bad, battery duration is enough and overall experience is not bad. On the contrary, feedbacks I got from iPhone 3G users are not that great, aside from Dan York who seems much satisfied about that (his company, Voxeo, replaced Blackberries with iPhones).

The question is: what’s a better choice for business usage? Honestly, I never had a Blackberry myself but the feedbacks I’m getting everywhere is that those are solid and fully functional devices which make your business day really effective, regardless the location you are staying in. The new Bold seems to be a major upgrade of previous models and with a high definition display, 3G and Wifi included it offers you a wide range of possibilities when it comes to manage your business life on the go.

The new Storm, at a higher price, offers you an iPhone-like experience too, with a touch screen in place of the standard qwerty keyboard. Jim Courtney pointed out that a BlackBerry App Store will be available in March ‘09, making the gap between RIM smartphones and the iPhone even smaller.

What do you think? For business, BlackBerry Bold/Storm or iPhone3G? 

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Technorati Tags: App Store, BlackBerry App Store, BlackBerry Bold, iphone, luca filigheddu, Nokia N95, Smartphone, Storm

Technorati Tags: jeff pulver, luca filigheddu

Lee Dryburgh, man behind the eComm conferences, hosts a private dinner for everyone involved in this space, a sort of kick-off meeting for the upcoming eComm Conference taking place on March 3-5 2009 at the San Francisco Airport Marriot.

Only 80 seats are available and 50 are taken already. If you want to attend, please get in touch with Lee through the eComm Facebook group.

The aim of the dinner is to simply be a light-weight social-networking
gathering of those interested in emerging communications. By
light-weight I mean zero organisation except for lets meet at this
time and place for dinner. The hotel informs me that the charge for
the three course meal including two alcoholic beverages will be 75.00
USD/head. It’s cash only but the hotel have informed me they can
provide individual receipts.

The room is booked for 7pm.

Unfortunately I cannot make it this time (next trip to the Bay Area should be in January), but I wish all the friends and colleagues attending a pleasant and enjoyable time together.

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Technorati Tags: dinner, ecomm, lee dryburgh, luca filigheddu

I’m a Linkedin power user and I’ve been using it effectively during the past two years in order to talk directly to top levels executives of companies which could be potential customers of my company.

One of the services they provide is InMail, an easy way to send a direct message to a contact which is not directly connected to you.

I never sent spam, of course, but personal emails to try to engage a potential customer and discuss about the benefits of this or that product we provide. Private, personal, friendly messages.

That said, the worst answer you can get is shown in the box above. It’s not a reply, it’s not a “I’m not interested, thanks”, it’s something like people who hang up as soon as they hear your voice on the phone or people who close the door as soon as they see you outside.

This is not a polite way to use a great and powerful service as Linkedin is. I fortunately received just five of these out of over hundreds InMails sent so far. My recommendation, if you receive an InMail which is not interesting for you, reply to the message or ignore it, but not “decline” it, unless it is really spam. But I bet no one sends spam over Linkedin since it’s a “protected” and trusted environment.

My two cents

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Technorati Tags: Customer, inmail, linkedin, luca filigheddu, Message

Image via CrunchBase

This news this morning makes me really happy. Peter Csathy’s SightSpeed, a high quality video call/conferencing service, is going to be acquired by a very big name in the computer market, Logitech, very popular, among the other things, for their high quality webcams.

I blogged so many times about SightSpeed and I really love that service, reason why I’m very happy for Peter and his team in San Diego. This is a great deal for both, since Logitech can now provide an effective way to give more value to their webcams, for both the consumer and business market. And it seems that SightSpeed is the 3rd company Peter succesfully sold.

Moreover, I really would like to congratulate Andy “everything I touch becomes gold” Abramson, since SightSpeed is the Nth company he’s involved with in terms of PR or in terms of board of directors which has been sold recently. Wow.

Details of the deals are summarized below.

Logitech International (SIX: LOGN) (Nasdaq: LOGI) today announced that the company has agreed to acquire privately held SightSpeed Inc. of Berkeley, Calif. for approximately $30 million in cash. SightSpeed is an award-winning provider of high-quality Internet video communications services. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in early November.

The acquisition of SightSpeed will provide Logitech with video calling technology and a software and services development team that can be focused on future video calling initiatives that can enable cross-platform video communications with an intuitive, lifelike experience, for people sitting in front of a personal computer or with their family in a living room.

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Technorati Tags: andy abramson, Business, Logitech, luca filigheddu, peter csathy, sightspeed, Video

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A couple of days ago I blogged about Qwitter, a service which informs you when someone quit following you on Twitter.

In the last week I received five emails, where Qwitter informed me about people no more following me.

You know what? All of them started “following” me just not long ago, maybe “waiting” for me to follow them back. Since this hasn’t happened, they unfollowed me. The point is that their only aim was to increse their followers’ number, without really caring of my tweets. Their only aim was to catch my attention and to make me follow them back.

Unfortunately, as stated many times, I follow people I really care about. If you follow me but I don’t think I can be interested in what you write on twitter (with all my respect, of course) I will never follow you back. At the same time, if I follow you it’s because: 1) we know each other personally (well, in that case I would appreciate if you follow me as well) - 2) I care about your thoughts and I don’t care if you follow me back.

It’s great how Qwitter gives me a confirmation about this bad behavior by “marketing-only” twitter accounts. Here is an example for all, Mr iphone reviews unfollowed me after just a couple of days he started (on October 21st) following me, “much interested” in my thoughts and opinions:

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In a period when everyone is talking about financial meltdown, crisis, layoffs and how to deal with the upcoming bad times, it’s very important not to forget that customers are the “food” for any company.

While many startups don’t have customers yet so they face other types of problems, well extablished businesses can face a significant contraction of their sales because of a general feeling of “fear” by their customers. This feeling is due to different reasons: will your company be alive tomorrow? is your product essential for my life or is it better to save money to pass the winter?

One of the most important (and priority) ways to handle this situation is to create a direct line with your customers in order to make them comfortable while buying from you. This is essential and strategic for the future of any company because customers need to hear you, need to hear your voice and to be reassured they can trust you and keep buying your products and services.

Companies which undervalue this aspect and  keep thinking of making their websites more and more self-service oriented are likely to fail and this is even more true in times like this. Giving the right answer at the right time is crucial for any business, in order to take customers and prospects and guide them straight to the end of the purchase process, preventing them to quit as soon as they face a problem.

All that said, don’t hesitate and act now: engage your customers, make them feel your are there, ready to help them to take decisions faster and to make them happy buyers. Your customers are your life: in difficult times, do everything you can to prevent them from going away.

In conclusion, I’d like to share a quote from Sitofono’s website (disclosure: Sitofono is a service from my company):

e-commerce companies have constantly to deal with this paradox: a growing number of contacts, low conversion rates and an high abandonment rate.

The lack of real time interaction between the customer and the vendor, besides being a cause of dissatisfaction of the potential customer, is, for sure, one of the main reasons of missed opportunities to close a deal in a big number of online transactions.

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It basically puts together a couple of parameters from which it calculates your “reach“, “velocity” and “social capital“. Here is adescription of these attributes, taken from their website:

Reach is a measurement of potential audience and listeners, a best estimate of the number of people that a given Twitterer could quickly get a message to.

Velocity merely averages the number of first- and second-order followers attracted per day since the Twitterer first established their account. The larger the number is, the faster that Twitterer has accumulated their influence.

Social Capital: It’s essentially a measure of how influential are a twitterer’s followers. A high value indicates that most of that Twitterer’s followers have a lot of followers themselves.

The last one in particular, Social Capital, could potentially be a very interesting way to measure if someone’s followers are just, let’s say, unknown Twitterers with a couple of followers or “important” influencers and opinion leader themselves. Unfortunately, at first sight, it’s not working very well because some users on top of the list looks like anonymous and not certainly “famous” twitterers.

In the Top 5 - Reach we found some well known names:

1) Jason Calcanis

2) Ewan Williams (Twitter’s CEO)

3) Chris Brogan

4) TechCrunch

5) Guy Kawasaki

Other famous bloggers / internet opinion leaders can be easily found in the Top 50, like Loic Le Meur (7), Robert Scoble (10), Mashable (11), Kevin Rose (14), Jeff Pulver (20). There are many others, you can take a look by yourself at this link.

Ok, what about me (I don’t consider myself a heavy Twitter user) ?

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Aside from the great innovations introduced with these new products, far ahead from the competition, it’s pretty clear that Apple computers are still targeted to a niche, not for everyone.

Despite the reduction of the entry price for the Macbook line, $999 Is still a lot of money if compared to the entry level models from other brands (priced in the range $400-$600).

Moreover, the new stunning 24” Cinema Display is priced twice a direct competitor, like models from HP, Dell or Acer, undoubtely great monitors as well.

So what? Is Apple still not for everyone? Well, from a certain standpoint (price) I would say it’s not for everyone. On the other hand, Apple is a marketing leader and innovator. People are willing to spend that amount of money for Apple products because Apple is a king in telling you why their products are better than the competition. For example, today Jobs has been (as usual) a marketing guru by explaining why Apple’s notebooks are better and why consumers should choose them in place of other available alternatives.

In conclusion, despite it is evident to everyone that Apple is definitely MORE expensive than the competition, the truth is that their products are better, they are presented as MUCH better than any other product coming from the competition and consumers FEEL they are really better.

The result? They are worth their price. Period.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple Cinema Display, dell, luca filigheddu, macbook, MacBook Air, Macbook Pro, Steve Jobs