My friend John Dennehy, another Irish entrepreneur, subscribes to the OED’s word-of-the-day email. Yesterday’s word was founder:
the other founder.
"The damoiseau Jason..began thenne to foundre in teeris right
habondantly."
I would link back to the source, but it is subscription only. Thanks John.
Seen in the wild in the US
For the first time in my life I am planning to buy a car.
When I was 17 my parents gave me one, a hand-me down Ford Fiesta that my friends fondly recall as ‘Old Red’, a car that was herself 16 years old when I left Ireland and gave her away for scrap.
I moved to London and later to New York, two cities so well-served by public transport and so choked with traffic that I saw owning a car as a liability. But now Summer and I have moved to San Francisco and, while there are some deeply committed pedestrians and cyclists who live and work in the city, my new company will probably be based in the Valley, and so our carbon footprint will soon expand.
I am not sure that we have the strength of character to buy a Smart car though. I saw this one last night outside Terminal 1 at Oakland airport. A man standing next to me broke off his cellphone conversation and said "I don’t believe it, it’s a Smart car!"; a woman walking by said "Ohmygodasmartcarthat’ssocuuuuute!"; and another woman stared after it, looking very confused, and said to me "what kind of a car is that?" I told her that it was European. "Ah," she said, this being the only explanation she needed.
There may be more ivory-billed woodpeckers than Smart cars in America. The exclusive dealer, Zap, had sold just 300 of them as of September last year. (Note that they are the least odd-looking cars sold by Zap.) Perhaps SmartUSA will have more luck.
In Europe they are everywhere of course. In Barcelona last month I saw a convoy.
The Ghost Freeway
My first company, Vindigo, is still best known for its mobile city guide. (We released almost twenty other applications, some of which made far more money, but like actors companies get typecast.) Consequently a lot of people ask my advice about how to deliver local content online as well as on mobile phones. I tell them all the same thing: it doesn’t matter how good your UI is or how many great ideas you have, the biggest problem in local content is the data. There are no reliable sources of local content. I was reminded of this at least four times in the last two months.
1) A breakfast meeting at BOCA in San Francisco. My friend Steve sends me a link to a site I’d never heard of, Ovahere. I double-checked with Yelp. BOCA has closed down. No problem, we reschedule.
2) A lunch meeting at the Penn Club in the New York. I check Yelp again, which sends me here. No sign of any business called the Penn Club. Silly me, I should have looked for the Penn Club of New York. This time I am thirty minutes late for my meeting.
3) We are staying in Hayes Valley in San Francisco. Our rental car has a Garmin navigation system. But the system doesn’t know that a large section of the Central Freeway was demolished four years ago and that there is a celebrated new Boulevard in Hayes Valley that leads directly to 101. As we enter the freeway, a robotic female voice keeps telling me to do a U-turn.
4) To get another perspective on our new home town, I fire up Google Earth. But though Google seems to have up to date images of sensitive military installations all over the world, here in San Francisco the Hayes Valley section of the Central Freeway is still standing, and still filled with cars.
Believe me, I understand the problems that these companies face. For example, restaurant chains like McDonald’s or Subway may open a new branch somewhere in America every few days. (At its peak rate of growth, McDs was opening a new branch somewhere in the world every five hours.) The yellow pages data that most web sites ultimately rely on is updated once a year.
My point is, don’t tell me that you have a great idea for how to deliver local content online or on the phone. Tell me how you are going to fix the data.
Guy Kawasaki calls Spinvox "utterly indispensable." Fred Wilson calls Simulscribe "life-changing." David Pogue says that about both of them. So why have so few people heard of them?
I’ve been using Spinvox for two months. Spinvox replaces my carrier’s voicemail system. For callers there is no change, but Spinvox converts their voice messages from speech to text and sends the transcript to me via email and SMS. It is so good that I haven’t listened to a voicemail since and with any luck I never will again. Now it takes seconds to check my voicemail, I can do so during a meeting, I know which messages are important, and if the caller leaves a number I can just click on it instead of scrambling for pen and paper and then typing it in. If voicemail is a big part of your life, then Spinvox is indeed life-changing.
So much for the iPhone’s ‘visual voicemail’, the feature that allows you to see who has left voicemail messages and to listen to them separately. Steve Jobs claimed that this required tight
integration with a network operator, justifying Apple’s
exclusive relationship with Cingular. Spinvox is far better than random
access to your regular voicemail and far more deserving of the name
visual voicemail. And like every other great idea online, it works just
fine at the edge of the network.
Spinvox was founded in 2003, won several awards in 2005, and won a major innovation award at 3GSM last year. But they did not announce their first carrier customer - Vodafone - until 3GSM this year. Why aren’t they bigger than Elvis?
The problem is that carriers charge us for voicemail by the minute. Lots of companies waste our time. It usually costs them money. Only mobile carriers charge us for wasting our time. In the US we spend almost 100 billion minutes each year leaving or listening to voicemail.
The European market is more complicated. Charges for voicemail vary from one carrier and country to the next. On average mobile phone calls are much more expensive. Only the calling party pays: incoming phone calls are free. Since it costs nothing to receive a call, but it costs
money to return a voicemail, a lot of people would rather
miss a call - betting that the caller will try again if it’s
important - than activate their voicemail and be expected to return messages. Hence fewer than 50% of subscribers activate voicemail.
It never seems to occur to zero-sum minute-pinching carriers that if voicemail were more efficient, we might make more phone calls.
Since I started using Spinvox I return voicemail messages more often
because I get to check them before they’re stale. If everyone else had
Spinvox, I would be more inclined to leave voicemail messages,
confident that they were going to be returned. (Today when I
reach voicemail I usually hang up and write an email instead. You pay
to listen to the date and time that I called, a click, nothing, and
then the sound of me hanging up.)
Maybe carriers won’t make
back from increased call and text message volume what they give up in
voicemail minutes. Here’s another idea: they should adopt
Spinvox just to make their customers happy.
Sadly, that is not how the telecom industry works. Mobile carriers have no idea how to retain subscribers: they grew so fast that they didn’t need to worry about it. If a new service doesn’t pay for itself, it
doesn’t get launched. Don’t expect your carrier to launch Spinvox or Simulscribe anytime soon. But you can sign up for either at the companies’ web sites. Spinvox is offering a free trial in the US; Simulscribe charges $9.95 per month for 40 messages and $0.25 per message after that.
Your carrier will happily charge you for forwarding your calls.
