Ori Weinroth

Office 2.0 companies can leverage the Microsoft platform

Ori Weinroth — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 11:01:00 GMT

In a number of recent conversations I’ve heard the viewpoint that the market for Collaboration software is going to owned by either Microsoft or IBM. The reference was both to the enterprise and SMB segments. What was surprising to me is that this view was held by Office 2.0 startups – that is startups offering SaaS collaboration applications. What then was the point of their existence, I pressed?

The clarification was that certain collaboration functionality could be viewed as a platform – basic, well understood, and readily available to integrate with. Examples given were document libraries and instant messaging. My conversation partners felt that these functions, unless core to their business, was not worth re-building.

Of course, not all Office 2.0 startups feel this way. Many do go to the trouble of building from scratch, or modifying and improving available open source applications. For others, use of Microsoft’s or IBM’s collaboration software as a platform for additional innovation may make sense.

An example of such a startup is Clarizen. This SaaS project-management company has recently launched in beta and is receiving its first orders from paying customers. While in alpha, feedback from customers showed a demand for functionality like document libraries, document-oriented workflow, and instant messaging. As a developer of a collaborative project management solution, Clarizen views this functionality as an important part of its offering, and decided to check what elements of Microsoft platform could be utilized. At this point, a good portion of the Microsoft collaboration platform is not geared for hosted multi-tenant deployment. Windows SharePoint Services is an exception that, if chosen by Clarizen, may allow them to easily add document management and wikis to complement its service.

Decoupling VoIP brings significant advantages

Ori Weinroth — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 07:01:00 GMT

I’ve spent some time recently working with an interesting company called RingCentral.

RingCentral has a host of telephony services aimed at very small businesses. RingCentral can provision a small business with a toll-free or vanity number, any number of extensions radiating from that number, an IVR (basically the system where you punch “1” for sales, “2” for marketing), voice mail, call forwarding rules including simultaneous or synchronous ringing, click-to-call, fax receipt and transmission, call records etc.

Unlike almost all telephony providers to small businesses (Accessline, CallTower, cBeyond, Covad etc.), RingCentral does not bundle a VoiP telephone service with its other offerings. That means that a business does not need to “go VoIP” or purchase new telephones in order to use RingCentral’s services. This turns out to be important to RingCentral’s ability to efficiently service its customers.

In fact, what is special and disruptive about RingCentral are not the services it provides, but the manner in which it provides them. The company has an entirely automatic, instant, and touch-less provisioning system. The business provides a credit card number to get access to the online administrative interface. The interface is very simple to understand, so that non-technical small business owners can easily configure the extensions they want, the call forwarding rules, voice mail greetings etc. When the purchase button is pushed, the service (dial tone and all) is instantly activated.

Consider this – to “go VoiP” a small business needs to check whether its internet infrastructure is up to the task of handling the additional volume, and typically wait while the IP phones or ATAs (adapters for regular phones) are delivered by mail. That would take out the “instant gratification” that is so trademark of RingCentral’s offering.

RingCentral is also a poster child for the way a startup should approach Microsoft seeking partnership. The RingCentral folk had a wish-list prepared, showing good understanding of the MSFT product groups, tradeshows that MSFT participates in etc. It made my team’s work on their behalf a whole lot easier.

What has Google acquired in Tonic Systems?

Ori Weinroth — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 16:38:00 GMT

Google announced yesterday that it will be launching a PowerPoint competitor, and that the product would be based in part on technology acquired from Tonic Systems. I had been watching Tonic Systems and had written down a bit of information about the company, which may come in useful now that its website has been taken down.

Tonic Systems had been selling four products that aimed to enhance the usability of PowerPoint:

1. TonicPoint Filter - a Java library that extracts all text from PowerPoint presentations

2.TonicPoint Transformer - a modular Java library that converts PowerPoint presentations into images (e.g. PNG, BMP and JPEG), PDF documents, Macromedia Flash (SWF) and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)

3. TonicPoint Viewer - a Java application that allows opening and viewing PowerPoint presentations on any platform.

4. TonicPoint Builder - a library that provides a 100% Java API to read, create and manipulate PowerPoint presentations (this includes the Filter and Viewer apps). Features include populating Powerpoint template slides with data from a database.

When I looked at the website, these products were being priced at an astonishing $995-$3000/user for a perpetual license. The TonicPoint Viewer was being offered for free, because Microsoft itself offers such a viewer free of charge.

In addition to these products, Tonic was working on an online PowerPoint editor. At the time, it was running in restricted private beta so I couldn’t get in to fool around with it. The editor was described on their site as implemented using JavaScript and SVG (no plugins), and at the time was only available on Firefox. Features supported included working with groups, resizing, inserting and formatting shapes, uploading files from PP, exporting files as PDF and initiating conferencing sessions around a presentation.

Tonic System’s point of pride was having the best third-party PowerPoint API out there – I assume Google acquired them for this API. There’s been a lot of hype around online collaboration scenarios and SaaS personal productivity applications, but this shows yet again how important the offline scenario. For virtually all users today, exporting to PowerPoint is the best and most natural offline scenario. Google is right in trying to ensure that the PP export-import functionality works as smoothly as possible.

Dream Mining

Ori Weinroth — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 23:50:00 GMT

Any web business with an advertising or transaction monetization model is supremely interested in knowing one thing – “what do my users really want?” One can divine desire from search queries and from the context of a page the user is viewing. Companies have been doing both successfully, Google being the most prominent success story.

I’ve recently noticed a number of companies trying a new approach for mining user desire. They’re asking users to define their dreams outright. “Tell me what it is you most desire, and preferably how much you’d be willing to pay for it”, they’re saying, “and then I’ll try to sell it to you or otherwise capitalize on the transaction”.

Here are some examples:

Zillow

The famed real-estate valuation site launched a “Make Me Move” feature. Users can go up to the site, and post a valuation for their property which, if paid, would induce them to sell. Mind you – these are not users that are actively looking to sell their property. The price they are listing is their dream of the ideal transaction. And buyers are sometimes willing to pay these prices – take the experience of Jeffrey O’Brien as an example.

How Zillow monetizes: the feature drives more traffic to the site, and Zillow serves more ads, although the ads are not specific to the dream. In the future, Zillow may be able to monetize transactions.

43Things

The company’s frontpage is a searchbox that says “What do you want to do with your life?” People actually spend time building pages with a list of things they want to do. 43Things turns this into a community, grouping people who want to accomplish the same goals

How 43things monetizes: serving appropriate advertising that targets the dream, e.g. “Want to learn 3 languages – here are organizations that will teach you”.

QuietAgent

You are an employee that’s not necessarily looking to change jobs, but wouldn’t you change jobs in a heartbeat for your dream job? Tell QuietAgent a bit about yourself and what your dream job consists of, and QuietAgent will broker that information anonymously to recruiters.

How QuietAgent monetizes: via a transaction business model.

Why do I find this interesting?

For one, being able to distinguish between dreams and run-of-the-mill needs (I need to buy a book) is intriguing. Dream fulfillment is likely to have a higher value than simple desire fulfillment, no matter which way you monetize it.

Second, dreams are by definition something that is currently out of reach, so many people do not actively pursue their dreams. Thus, monetization of dream fulfillment may not be currently captured by search or other click-stream businesses.

Last, I am intrigued by the demographic aspect in Zillow’s case. We all know that 14-19 year olds live their lives publicly online, and are less concerned with privacy. This makes them early adopters of new products that require privacy to be compromised (social networking, anybody). But in Zillow’s case, I am assuming the home-owning demographic is not 14-19 years old. Yet, these older users are perfectly willing to post their dream online for the world to see. Does this mean the older segment is now more willing to participate in other privacy-breaching online activities? Anybody know the demographic for 43things users?

Hum

Ori Weinroth — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 08:27:00 GMT

Midomi launched their music recognition service today - hum into your computer's microphone and the service will try to recognize the song. Add words to the tune and it does even better. People have been having mixed results, which is no surprise considering both the complexity of the problem and the fact that many people are somewhat tone deaf. I haven't done so hot myself.

The blogosphere is full of comments about the lack of business model, how could a company like this get funding, the bubble is back etc. I'm not so sure. First, it would depend on how much money they got (anyone know - it's not on Venture Source yet).

Second, maybe it is just me but there have been numerous times when I would have paid to have a song identified. Sometimes, a tune gets stuck in my head and I desperately have to know what it is to buy it.

Third - if this works well, it is the way all music search should be conducted. Even if you know the name of the song and the artist, singing a 10-second snippet would probably be an easier way to bring it up. With all the music stores trying to differentiate themselves - wouldn't acquiring this technology be the perfect way?

Last, if the people at Midomi manage to solve this problem, what other speech recognition problems can they solve?

“This Call will be Recorded for Advertising Purposes”

Ori Weinroth — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 05:54:00 GMT

In a review of CallMiner, the 451 Group reported that CallMiner seeks to expand into “analysis of calls made on Internet telephony networks”. That was a little mystifying to me at first, since CallMiner was already handling VoIP in the contact center. The explanation was forthcoming - CallMiner would use its audio mining tools to pick up on the context of the call and push the caller targeted advertising.

A few months later CallMiner’s website does not indicate that this new product is available from the company. However, a rumor that Google is working on something similar and Jajah’s announcement about switching to an ad-based model got me thinking.

Ad-funded VoIP service is not a new concept (Chocophone, Lycos phone), but in the past it has often failed. Lack of contextually appropriate advertising and the penchant for intrusively serving the ads in the middle of the call contributed to the failures. The consensus around Jajah’s announcement is also that without contextually targeted advertising they cannot break even on the cost of their terminates-at-the-PSTN VoIP calls.

Contextually targeted advertising should be sufficient, however, to subsidize free VoIP. Speech recognition technology, key to recognizing the context of the call, is improving year over year. Microsoft is one of the biggest investors in speech recognition.

With speech technology coming along nicely, and some common sense in serving the ad, ad-based VoIP might come of age.

Of course, there remains the question of who would agree to have their privacy invaded in such a brutal manner. Recall the debate following the launch of gMail. Google was first to announce scanning the content of the user’s emails to serve contextual advertising. I anticipate that VoIP mining for contextual ads would spur a far more furious debate than email mining. For many, the phone is not only the most emotional means of communication, but also a bastion of privacy when other communications modes have been compromised.

It could be that the very young/poor would be interested in such a service, but their limited purchasing power does not make them a good candidate for targeted advertising.

Still, it may be that some bets in this direction are being made. Jaxtr recently got funding from some very high quality funds. The company allows users of social networking sites (i.e mostly young/poor) to embed click-to-call links in their personal profiles. Click on the link, enter your phone number, and you are connected through free VoIP. Jaxtr CEO Konstantin Guericke has been quoted as considering of monetizing Jaxtr through selling services to lawyers and real-estate agents as well as extra minutes. Take a look at Jaxtr’s home page and tell me if this is a product targeted at SMBs. I would be surprised if an ad-based model is not on Guericke’s mind.

The polar bear and Kyle, Texas

Ori Weinroth — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 18:32:00 GMT

A friend recently advised me to buy a house for investment purposes in Kyle, Texas. Having never heard of the place, I looked it up on the web. In the City of Kyle's website I learned two things:

Kyle's aquifers are at record lows, causing the city to declare Stage 2 water restrictions - A Kyle resident may now only water the garden once a week. Hello global warming!
The Kyle community pool-club is called "the Polar Bear Club". Consider the irony - this week the government brought out a plan to put the polar bear on the list of endangered species, mainly due to global warming decimating its habitat.

Investing in Kyle (and Austin and surrounding areas) may be the same as investing in the polar bear. I fear this area is going to get harder and harder to live in unless something is done about global warming.

It was somewhat comforting to hear this week that clean tech was the third-largest investment sector for VCs in Q3 2006. Will the gods of capitalism save us where common sense won't?

For the record, I own a Prius and recycle, which is what allows me to rant about this topic.

Scrapblog

Ori Weinroth — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 01:54:00 GMT

I spoke today with Carlos Garcia, CEO of Scrapblog. I was intrigued by their product ever since having seen the DemoFall demo. Basically, Scrapblog gives you tools to make an online scrapbook. You can combine and artfully arrange photos, graphics, text, video and audio narration. The scrapblog can then be shared online (with some community tools being built around that) privately or publicly, and it can be printed. The prints are how Scrapblog aims to cash in.

The current beta version has 25,000 testers. Only when the full version launches will the rich media tools be available to test. This is due in January 2007.

Scrapblog is noteworthy for a few reasons. First, a beautiful and intuitive user interface. Carlos is a partner at an interactive marketing agency Nobox, whose partners are funding the development of Scrapblog. In developing the product they have drawn on the expertise of the Nobox team for designing the UI, and it shows.

Second, if Scrapblog manages to make rich media insertion easy and intuitive (I reserve judgment until I can play around with it in January), it will be a first, and I think a real draw. When my family goes on trips these days, we use the same camera to generate short video clips as well as photos. If we want to share them with family and friends, it makes perfect sense to do so in the same space.

Last, with support for audio narration, text insertion and manipulation, and slide transitions, is Scrapblog your new Office 2.0 presentation application? While Scrapblog’s potential as a competitor to social networking sites like MySpace has been mentioned by blogosphere greats, it has never been mentioned it in the same breath as ZohoShow, Empressr, or Thumbstacks. I think it should be. Each scrapblog page is really a slide, to which the user can bring text, images, and video. You can share these slides and, most importantly, you will be able to narrate them. We all know that slides alone don’t really convey the content of a presentation. The voice-over is very important, and none of the current players enable that.

Of course, to be a true Office 2.0 contender, Scrapblog will have to beef up its offline capabilities – exporting is a must. The ability for a third party to remix/edit content is also important. Not that I recommend that Scrapblog make a conscious effort to go this route. I don’t believe it is a good idea for a startup to divide its efforts in this way, and the consumer photo-sharing/social-networking world is very different from the small-business productivity world that is Office 2.0.

BTW - Empressr is also the creation of an interactive marketing agency, although comparing the Empressr UI to Scrapblog’s leaves a lot to be desired.

Another BTW – Scrapblog has Flash on the front, but .NET and SQL server behind.

Is IT the enemy of Office 2.0?

admin — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 16:21:00 GMT

There has been an interesting ongoing discussion at the Office 2.0 conference whether or not the IT department is the enemy of Office 2.0 vendors. What role can IT play in the enterprise adoption of Office 2.0 applications.

Some of the speakers (Ivan Koon of Yousendit and Rod Boothby author of Innovation Creators) felt that the only way to get IT to approve enterprise deployments is to first have substantial “covert” adoption of the application by business users, in the way that IM sneaked into the enterprise. They held that the IT departments are too slow and incapable of change to match the rate of innovation in the market.

Speakers who held this view advocated a “taxi-fare” pricing model. Price the product so that if the user submits a receipt for it within the enterprise no one will ask questions.

On the other side of the conversation panelists felt that forcing enterprise deployment through business-user adoption was a bad idea, for the following reasons:

1. IT departments are not as inflexible as that. There have been a number of cases where IT departments have been proactive, initiating and closing Office 2.0 deployments. The inflexibity of IT departments in not an inherent mindset, but rather something forced upon them by the business-end with all the recent compliance requirements.

2. Trying to go around the IT department and viewing them as “the Enemy” angers them and can cause repercussions down the road.

3. Fortune 5000 companies are not democracies –it just doesn’t happen that if a bunch of information workers utilize a piece of software the IT department will get together and say “now we have to consider this software”.

4. The IT department is where the geeks are, and they are using Office 2.0 apps such as blogs and wikis internally. They understand how good these tools are.

5. IT support affects the business-value of your software – how easy and reliable it is for the end-user. You need IT to provide backup, to provide directory and single sign-on.

Speakers who supported this view were Adina Levin of Social Text, Anil Dash of Six Apart, Craig Remy of Intact , and Ted Rudin of Lucidera.

Office 2.0: Post #2 - Document? What document?

admin — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 22:07:00 GMT

One of the advantages touted by proponents of Office 2.0 (=pure online collaboration and productivity applications) is that you never have to worry about losing your data, because the company who provides the storage will also provide backup. I agree that this sounds like a great proposition. I am terrible at backing-up my data on a regular basis, and I assume that a company providing data storage services would do a better job of it than I would.

But this is only an assumption - how will I KNOW they are doing it? I recently spoke with some Microsoft Research folk about the Skype protocol, and they raised an interesting point. When someone uses Skype would s/he really know how well it worked? Would the user notice if 10% of the time his contacts were actually on-line when they appeared off-line or vice-versa?

How does this relate to my question of knowing that my documents are being backed up?

With data storage, I’m sure we all have a big chunk of stuff we save “in case we ever need it”, but we never get around to using it or don’t get back to it for a very long while. What if that stuff disappeared – I’m not sure I would even notice. Even if I started looking for a file 2 years down the road and couldn’t find it, I’m not sure I would my own memory that it had ever existed.

What’s more, if I’m ever sure that a document I had saved online, how would I be able to prove it?

One way that comes to mind is printing out a list of your files once in a while, but if I can remember to do that I can certainly remember to back up my data myself.

What does the consumer SLA look like for data-storage services? I'm sure enterprises will be able to get reasonable SLAs in place with auditing mechanisms, but what does the conversation with the consumer look like? Will we see data-storage vendors offering consumers a monthly email with a list of their stored documents, in the way that credit card companies periodically report transactions ?

Office 2.0 conference - post #1: Connectivity Issues

admin — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 18:18:00 GMT

I'm posting from the Office 2.0 conference in SF. So far I've found it very interesting and a good value, especially considering that all attendees received a 2 Gig iPod Nano as a gift.

Just finished viewing the iNetOffice demo . One of the criticisms of the new Office 2.0 apps as an alternative to Microsoft's Office products is that these apps are silos - they do not interconnect. What I like about iNetOffice is that they're focusing on breaking down these silos. They seek to do that through standardizing the mashup methodology through what they call SAM (Simple Ajax Mashup techniques). They're thinking about standards that will enable single sign-on, single search across documents you may have saved with different online services etc.

The iNetOffice demo was of a mashup with ShareMethods and SalesForce.com, and walked through the life of a sales person and a marketing person needing to accomplish various tasks. It seemed to work to accomplish tasks you can easily do through Word and Sharepoint, like use a template to create a marketing newsletter.

Having seen the demo, it was still pretty difficult for me to see businesses adopting this instead of the Microsoft solutions. In particular, the demo was painfully slow - the imaginary sales rep had to wait for over 30 seconds for his template to load. I understand how people may be willing to go to the trouble of learning new apps if there is significant price reduction, but will they be willing to put up with this productivity-reducing slowness?

This was not the only connectivity problem during the demos - the ThinkFree demonstration started up with the imaginary sales person logging into gMail to check their mail, but the gMail server was down.

This is not to disrespect the concept of the all-online Office 2.0 at all, but rather to point out that we are a long way away from when connectivity is strong and ubiquitous enough to make the all-online experience reasonable. Speakers earlier in the day such as Esther Dyson and the conference organizer Ismael Ghalimi seemed to agree that all-online is not a desirable reality. They all conceded that some sort of hybrid model (the very same model that Microsoft is committed to) will probably be the best for the end-user and thus the winning model.

Consumer mobile to international calling - are Rebtel and Jajah the answer?

admin — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 19:43:00 GMT

Last week, Rebtel announced a $20m funding from Benchmark and Index, and Jajah presented its new mobile clients. Both these companies try to tackle the same problem – the high rates paid by people making international calls on their cell phones.

My husband and I have lots of family in Israel. My husband is one of those “Starbucks is my office” type of people. While sipping Starbucks tea, he racks up huge phone bills calling his family on his mobile phone. There’s not a good enough connection for SkypeOut at the Starbucks he frequents. I was immediately excited at the prospect of lowering our cell phone bill and considered both Rebtel and Jajah’s solutions.

Rebtel

Rebtel works on any cell phone. They set up a local number for you to call your international contacts on, and set up a local number for your international contacts to call you. You sign up, coordinate these numbers, have your contact sign up, call the local number provided for your contact, hang-up, your contact calls you back on the local number Rebtel provided, and voilà, you’re making an international call while only paying your communications provider for the price of a local call. This is called a “RebIn” call.

Did you think that was simple? If so, Rebtel’s pricing scheme is set to test your wits. It takes a good while to figure out whether they are cheaper than simply making a regular call overseas on your cell phone. An example:

1. When we call our family/friends, we care about the expenses they have using Rebtel’s system. Rebtel has set up a mobile number in Israel for our relatives to call us on (“Reb-in” calls). This mobile number costs quite a lot for Israelis to call.

2. We subscribe to Cingular, but not with an unlimited minutes plan. My husband often goes over the minute-limit in his plan, incurring the 45 cent/minute for the extra minutes. I figure that his cost of placing the call to the local Rebtel number is somewhere between 0 and 45 cents/minute.

3. In addition to the two fees above, Rebtel charges $1/week for every week that you make a Rebtel call. You have to figure how much that is per minute based on how many minutes you expect to be talking that week. WHY make it this complicated?

All this is required to calculate the savings for the “RebIn” method. Rebtel also offers “RebOut”, where your contact does not call you back, but then there is another per-minute fee that you pay Rebtel for connecting the call.

For my husband, Rebtel probably ends up saving money. For my friend Vered, who doesn’t own a landline, subscribes to the Metro-PCS all-you-can-eat for $35 plan, and has family in Israel as well, Rebtel is a slam-dunk.

Jajah

From their website Jajah appears to be simpler to use, and their rates appear to be cheaper on a per minute basis (free or 2.5 cents to Israel). However, they don’t work on our simple Nokia phones, so the question is moot. The website claims that they are regularly adding more supported phones – I eagerly await support for ours.

These companies are vying for a huge consumer market that doesn’t yet have a winning solution. I wish them the best of luck in making life easier and less expensive for all of us.