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Charles Cooper, Executive Editor, CNET News.com spends two hours on hold with Symantec, and then is asked to pay for the call (and pay a price more than the original cost of the Norton Antivirus 2005 software). My favorite bit:

5:08 How long does it take to answer a telephone? If Clint wins best director, that would make my day.

5:12 Bored beyond belief. Starting to impersonate the Numa Numa guy. My two cats keep their distance.

5:15 How many miles does a phone connection span from San Francisco to India? Mind wandering. I’m picking Hilary Swank for best actress, but Annette Bening was pretty damn great in “Being Julia…

Read the whole thing.

This is the third time in a week someone has posted their experience on a call like this. Instant business plan, for the taking:

1) Set up a call center to call customer support lines on behalf of customers
2) Each person in the call center can be on hold with multiple vendors
3) The call center reps timestamp / document / record the time they’ve been on hold
4) When a live customer support person answers the call, the call center rep connects them with the “actual” end customer
5) The actual end customer has access to the notes made in (3), and further documents the rest of the call
6) There’s something very post-modern about this
7) The revenue model? Competitors can put their ads next to the transcripts of the calls.

(via TechDirt)

Way back when, I got to hear Doc Searls speak passionately about Identity Commons. Now, it looks like the folks in Boston are also taking a stab at this. The Berkman Center has paired up with a couple of technology providers to create SocialPhysics, “a new open source project” that aims to “acquire corporate and foundation sponsorship to undertak[e] a series of ‘experiments’ to explore models in digital self governance and alternative intellectual property regimes.”

Big plus: Love the fact that the customer/individual is at the center of this:

“As part of the SocialPhysics initiative we are developing both a software framework, and on top of it, an initial base application. The framework embodies a set of principles that govern natural, real-world relationships. It is based on the idea that a person should have full control over information about themselves and their relationships with others. People participate in multiple groups and systems, each with its own social protocol. Since what people are willing to share and say about themselves depends enormously on the context, there is a need for persons to be able to manage multiple versions of their identity. The framework makes it easy to create and join many different kinds of networks (e.g. groups, teams, and communities), each with its own rules for what is shared, what is private, and what is measured.”

Things to watch:

• This project was initiated by a stealth-mode startup that aims to “create the software platform and conduct the issues research upon which [the company] plans to base its products and services.” It’ll be interesting to see how they pull this off.
• Although “YOU” are in the center of the picture above, a deeper dive into the site gives a feeling that the project seems to be very technology-driven (lots of talk of “frameworks” and such). Hope this project doesn’t get too friggin’ “elegant,” if ya know what I mean…

Oh, man. Helluva week. After the new powder beginning of the week, the skies cleared and midweek was ridiculous…postcard-blue skies and springtime temps from first run to last. Tweaked a knee in a futile attempt to keep up with she who skis too fast on Silverado (what the hell was I thinking?), but other than that, no major injuries. The offspring all had fun. Many Cuba Libres were consumed. Aaaaah.

Now for the draining of the email / RSS / podcast queues…

Light blogging this week, ensconced up at 8200′ and all. Recommendations so far: Squaw‘s Granite Chief and KT-22. Snow’s been great in the mornings, turning to Sierra Cement in the afternoons. If anyone’s interested in getting together, there’s more snow on the way…

O no. A big miss on the new GM podcast. Representative excerpt:

“For the dreamer in all of us…(dramatic pause)…this is the 2006 Buick Lucerne.” (cue cheesy music, which sounds a little bit like Apocalyptica)

Ungood. Five minutes of corporate dronology. I much prefer Lutz’s blogging, which sounds human.

UPDATE:

Michael Wiley (GM Communications, Director, New Media) responds:

“Sorry you and Shel did not like the GM podcast. We understand that a press conference is not the ideal format for a podcast but we do have enthusiasts that want to hear these sorts of things. That is why we webcast them as well.

Also, since we’re in new territory, I don’t think there is a template of what is right or wrong, everything is niche oriented and this niche obviously wasn’t for you.

But, we are asking readers of FastLane what it is they would like to hear more of, and through constructive feedback we will hopefully produce something that appeals to you guys. We’re by no means limiting ourselves to press conferences.”

Conversation continues in the comments.

Yup, I’m hooked. Productivity: UPGRADED.

Yesterday, I had the absolute pleasure of sharing a malt-beverage or two with Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz, who were in the neighborhood for The New Communications Forum. (By the by, the Bombay Bomber IPA…delish.)

Neville and I had traded a few emails in the past few months, and I noticed on his blog that he was in from Amsterdam for a couple of days for the NCF conference. Shel and Neville have known each other for a decade. Two quick emails and 12 hours later, the three of us were shooting the breeze in person, without any of the typical awkwardness that comes when people meet for the first time. We already knew each other. It just so happened that, prior to yesterday, we’d never been on the same continent at the same time.

Reason #6537 why business folk should write, podcast, or otherwise communicate often, and in their own voice: your customers, vendors, and partners get to know you before they even meet you, so when you do get together, you already have shared context and can get things done 10x faster than you ever have in the past.

Although I’m not an MacHead, the iPod shuffle did push a couple of buttons for me, especially around the use case of having a device that was intended to be transient in nature and only store a few songs (or podcasts) for a limited amount of time. The capability to sync a podcast to a flash-based device with the intention of listening to it on a commute seemed like something that would be useful to have. So, I was thinking about getting one of the shuffles.

Before doing so, and just for giggles, I did a quick search on Froogle for USB flash-based MP3 players. Although the shuffle has a killer cost/MB, I found a flash-based device for about 25 bucks that I thought it would be fun to try this out with. Less memory (128MB), but cheap. Definitely in the “good enough for concept hacking” category.

Looking at the specs, I noticed that it was a pretty nifty little bit of engineering for 25 bucks. Not only could you explicitly use it as a low-end MP3 player, but it was also designed to be used as a general-purpose thumb drive. Since I’m on the road a lot, I figured hey…why not? It’d be good for the quick-storage of documents that I might need to move between machines, etc…the usual use case for a thumb drive.

Then I started thinking about it and realized…holy crap…this is an MP3 player and a storage device. That means that the system will recognize it as a storage device.

One can put applications on storage devices.

Epiphany time…what if we took this one step further? What if…in addition to the downloaded podcasts…we put the podcatching client on the device itself and set it up to auto-run every time the device was plugged in?

The first step was to find a small footprint podcatching client. Doppler fit the bill. Fully installed, it only takes up about 1.2MB. So, I installed Doppler on the flash drive itself.

The next step was to configure Doppler to write to the device itself. Piece of cake. Just specify the E: drive as where you want Doppler to store the podcasts.

Ok, cool. That seems to work so far. Let’s configure it with this feed. Fire it up and…holy crap…it works!

Let’s plug in the headphones. Yup. Works (note to self…since this cheapo device doesn’t have a volume control, ensure that all levels are normalized to 0db).

Let’s try it in the car. I use the Belkin Tunecast (kinda like an iTrip, but device-neutral). This would also work with a cassette adapter. In this configuration, total weight has got to be less than two ounces. Cool.

Next step. Set up Doppler to AutoRun. Everytime the thumb drive gets plugged into a machine, Doppler automatically starts and downloads the latest podcasts to the device itself. No setup for the user, no configuration, no nothing. Plug it in, it does it. Lights out. We now have a basic self-running, self updating, podcast listening device, that can be preconfigured and set up and handed to someone with no knowledge of podcasting, who can begin to listen to feeds. For a price point that’s low enough that even the most staid old company won’t even require an expense reciept.

Ok, this is pretty neat. So what?

So…here’s the business problem we can now solve. One of the things that my employer does is competitive intelligence. Up until now, we’ve always delivered this as an online document. But the actual end-users of this stuff (typically sales and marketing folks) don’t always have time to read the documents. They also can’t be sure that they are in possession of the latest update of the documents that we’ve delivered to them. However, as sales types, they are often in the car, or on a plane to see the client.

What we can now do:

• Preconfigure these dirt-cheap devices, one per sales rep, with a preinstalled version of a podcatching client that is preconfigured to subscribe to a tailored competitive intelligence podcast feed. We can do one “post” per competitor. This allows easy navigation inside the device. We set up the device, subscribe it to the feeds, and hand it to our customer.
• Prior to heading out to the client, the sales rep can plug the device into his or her machine, and within a couple of minutes the latest-and-greatest kill points will be automatically loaded to the device.
• In the car, on the train, on the plane, the rep can listen to what’s going on in the competitive landscape. And always have the most up-to-date information available.

This is cool. This has been a good day.

Caveats:

• AutoRun on WinXP is not natively enabled. Either it needs to be enabled on the destination machine, or the user may need to explicity run Doppler off the thumb drive when the device is plugged in.
• Doppler is still twitchy. I’m running on the 2.0RC, and it occassionally crashes.

Update:

I did find that this does indeed have a volume control, it’s just less intuitive than it could be.

Update 2:

Steve’s right…put an extra five-spot in the budget to do the right thing for whichever podcatching client you use.

(n.b. this is a continuation of this discussion)

Armstrong Williams and Ketchum (well commented on here). BzzAgent.

Any difference?

Both situations have an individual being compensated (or having the potential to be compensated) for talking about something. Both situations have a behind-the-scenes intermediary (Ketchum in the former, BzzAgent in the latter) that is itself compensated to have individuals start a conversation. These conversations take place in situations where the other parties in the conversation would typically feel that the commentator is speaking from the heart, and not as part of a part of a program (or under contract). In both cases, the others in the conversation feel duped afterwards, upon learning that an interaction that seemed genuine was actually staged and part of a program of payola.

Despite all the metrics and process, I still feel the BzzAgent model is broken. How to fix?

1) Explicity lose the incentives (per here). If only a small portion of the BzzAgents are redeeming them anyway, what’s the harm? Even if half the current participants drop out, there still are (if the claims are true) many tens of thousands of people who are participating.

2) Require disclosure. When BzzAgents are buzzing, anything less than stating (either verbally or in writing, if blogging, etc.) “By the way, I’m a volunteer part of an organization that’s getting compensated to promote this product, and I will be writing a report on it at some time in the future,” is disingenuous. Just say it. The Marqui people do. (I’m not thrilled with the Marqui model, but I do respect their upfrontedness about it.)

3) Aggressively change the meaning of the word “agent.” For this to work, “agent” needs to mean “agent, as in catalyst,” not “agent, as in shady operative.”

Communication is good. An increase in interpersonal interaction is good. Making money is good. But doing the first two as a means to the third without disclosing it is a good way to rile up a lot of hornets. And that’s not-so-good.

Mike Pusateri, the customer who is at the heart of the so-called wiki war nails it.

“The point isn’t what software we are using, but can we get people to use wikis at work? I tell ya folks, it ain’t easy to wean people off of email…”

90% of the time, the real “competitor” isn’t the company that just put out the press release. 90% of the time, the real competitor is inertia.