Some of you already know the good news, but we finaly have a press release.
I'm glad to let you know that Dr. Behzad Nadji, an icon in the world of voice technologies and network infrastructure, has joined Frucall as our new CEO. Behzad was the Sr VP of network operations at AT&T, AT&T's chief architect, and the head of AT&T labs. His experience and vision in building world-class, next-generation telephony networks and applications will take Frucall to a whole new level.
Behzad's decision to join us also gives us great validation on the viability of Frucall as a service and its business plan, as well as the long term vision that we have for the service, which started with "listening to online prices". Web 2.0 will bring more to one's cell phone through Frucall :-)
I attended the Social Search seminar, presented by WebGuild, at Google. The seminar was done by a panel of:
Kevin Rose, Founder & Chief Architect, Digg
Michael Tanne, Founder & CEO, Wink
Joshua Schachter, Founder, Del.icio.us
Garrett Camp, Co-Founder & Chief Architect, StumbleUpon
Moderated by: Matt Marshall, VentureBeat
(Some facts: Digg is now worth about $200M and Kevin still owns between 30-40% of it. Delicious was bought by Yahoo! before they had any revenue, at about 300K users, for about 30M. StumbleUpon is profitable)
It was a good seminar and a lot of interesting things were discussed. Specially, there was some interesting numbers that the panel shared with the audience. Here's a summary from my notes for those who are interested:
- Statistically, 5% of the user community actively contribute, 95% only use. The more you make it easy for people to contribute, the more they do so.
- Quality of the content contributed is mostly due to "satisfaction", and not monetary reasons. Contributors enjoy the credibility and reputation.
- StumbleUpon has 1.25M users, and they are handling about 2.7M stumbles a day.
- Digg is currently at 500K users with 10M page views a day served by 90+ Linux servers.
- Wink was in private beta for six months and went public last week. They are in "tens of thousands" users now (no exact number).
- Everybody was agreeing that the site UI is extremely important, and is one of the factors that heavily impacts your number of users.
- Neither Kevin nor Joshua have spent money on advertising. It's been pure word of mouth.
- The key thing in word-of-mouth for them has been to:
o Make it as easy as possible to use the service, one-click
o Each feature should have a clear value, so that people want to use it
o Each feature should be valuable enough for people to want to mention to others
- Joshua was very keen on running your UI by actual users. He said instead of spending money on expensive user groups, go to a starbucks, buy people lattes, and ask them to spend a few minutes on your site with you watching in exchange for the free drink. You have to really tune the UI to make it dead easy.
- Also, use analytics to distinguish between people who have not visited your site, people who have visited only the home page, people who have played around a little bit, people who have returned, and people who are regulars. Create reasons and incentives for each tier to convert into the next tier.
- For scaling, all of the larger sites have run into limitations with SQL databases that they have had to deal with. Look at:
http://danga.com/words/2005_oscon/oscon-2005.pdf
http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/uploads/flickr_php.pdf
http://jeff-kubina.blogspot.com/2006/03/etech-2006-session-scaling-fast-and.html
Brian Smith of Comparison Engines has written an - as always detailed and accurate - update on Mobile Commerce covering a few players including us. Brian, thanks a lot for the kind words!
I usually follow Brian's posts because he has a great eye for catching the details and a very sharp, analytic mind to figure out what makes sense and what not. So when he brings up an issue, I listen and think.
Brian warns Frucall on the group messaging functionality, since it's not part of our core competency. And he is right, we do not want to de-focus the team and the product.
However, group messaging (or in general what we call the "social networking" features of Frucall) serve a very specific purpose: They provide alternative ways for our users to get the word out on Frucall. Anybody who has built a consumer service knows that getting heard and acquiring users is the biggest chanllenge they face. It is easy to spend marketing dollors without getting tangible results.
One way of getting the word out is to build self-promoting components into the service. Group messaging is one such feature - when I use it to leave a message for a group of people, in effect I'm letting them know that there's this thing called Frucall. Hopefully some of them will check it out and will use it.
I can't talk about the effectiveness of the approach, it's too early. But I can tell you that user acquisition is not as easy as it seams, and one needs multiple ways to go about it.
So in short, Brian is right and we should not forget about our core competency. However, group messaging is not part of our core services. It's a means towards a bigger goal.
I'd like to hear back what you think. Comments are blocked here, so please feel free to drop me an email at "nasser" -at- "frucall.com".
It's funny how many times we get the question "Wow, wouldn't it be nicer if you could scan the barcode using the cell phone and find the product?", and our answer is "Oh, ScanBuy does just that, however..."
Every once in a while we also run into somebody who has heard about ScanBuy and asks if we compete. And again the answer is "in a way yes, however..."
It's the "however" part that makes it really interesting: ScanBuy and other similar services address about 6-8% of the market that we cover. We do everything with a phone call, accessible to anybody with a phone, while they require software download to the cell phone, data connectivity, etc.
Adoption of data plans and using EDGE or similar technologies has been very very slow in the US. WAP applications are not user friendly, are slow, and people are not willing to pay for the data connectivity. In my mind that has a lot to do with the way carriers try to charge for such services. Out of 207.9 million active subscribers in the US, less than 8% use data plans and data services on a regular basis. So that is *not* the market we are interested in. We are after the mass market of cell phone users, people who have made phone calls to automated systems such as their bank or school, and are comfortable with using such services. Most of these people are not comfortable with downloading software to their cell phone, or connecting to the Internet from their cell phone.
What reminded me of all this was a very interesting blog post I saw today, Online Price Comparisons in the Offline World by Sanjay Parekh. His take about the whole data plan issue is exactly what I was talking about.
Thanks Sanjay, and we constantly work on improving the quality of voice. We believe voice is a very underused user interface, and we are committed to create a great voice experience for our users.