in the vein of chartreuse, “or why vonage sucks, and you should short it all the way to zero”
Skype, a division of eBay, recently announced free calling to anyone in the US. What does this mean? Well it means that one company has just changed the face of an entire industry by giving away something that costs them maybe a penny or two to provide (remember they were charging 2cents a minute before hand). Skype has just done for communication what email did to snail mail, it shrank the market.
Now the cost of adding a phoneline to your business is $30/year (for a skypein number), and you get unlimited calling in the US. What does this mean? Your infrastructure costs for running a call center/tech support line are dropping down to little more than the cost of the host computer and internet access. Leasing both, and your costs could be $50/person (leasing a cheapo computer – $30+skype # $3+ portion of internet access) + salary (excluding space, of course). That means the barriers to entry are getting even lower now. Skype hasn’t just shrunken the voip/telephony market, they’ve shrunk hundreds of phone based markets.
Skype is changing the game folks, and if you aren’t keeping up with this, then you need to get off your ass and adapt.
The cost of calling someone is now as low as the cost of email, and we all know a voice is more effective than something that might be filtered out as spam. So get calling everyone.
Oh yeah, vonage = money losing potential (the market they were supposed to be defining, just got pulled out from under them).
This is more of a addendum to the previous post, rather than a self-standing post. So if you didn't read the earlier treatise on podcast advertising figures, then check that entry first.While i thought i had carefully crafted my logical fiscal analysis of the podcasting issue earlier, i realized one thing I had missed while talking to a fellow entrepreneur about the concept of file serving and storage mechanisms for consumers. The cost is not in the storage, its in the ... Continue reading
So its been quite a while since i talked about podcast advertising here (mainly because I've been so busy, and also nothing new was being talked about in this market).Well today we're going to look at how the numbers break down in podcast advertising (now remember, this is based on pre-launch figures). The basic premise of podcast advertising as I see it now is something similar to radio and tv ads, in which they are passive audiences that are reached by the thousands. Unlike radio and tv, where there is no way of selling your ads to an exact num ... Continue reading
Google announced Trends today, which lets people perform a hybrid google ego battle so to speak between two or more topics over time. Now this might not seem like much to you right now, but what it really means is that marketers can now precisely measure the popularity of certain topics in relation to others.Have you ever wondered if Bush was more popular than god? Well now you know that for a time, people were in fact Continue reading
Don't be paralyzed by the fear of risk taking and/or change. If you believe in evolution, (which I hope you do) you should realize that businesses must evolve too. If you aren't evolving with your business, then your business will never compete. natural selection.
or - why your business needs to embrace multiple languagesAs trendy as it seems this week to talk about immigration, and certain songs being sung in other languages, the real reason i'm writing this today is because today is a day of festivities. On cinco de mayo everyone is "mexican", just like on St. Patrick's day everyone is "irish." So what if its really an excuse for us to drink coronas or dos equis all night long? Its really an excuse to drop our pretenses and unite in our universal passion: ... Continue reading
