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 bandwidth. The bandwidth was a factor I considered from the getgo, but had always attributed storage costs to each individually delivered podcast, when in fact its a declining cost.Think of it in basic accounting terms, if you’re going to ammortize the cost of the land (the hard drive space), you can do so over the lifespan of the property (each podcast). So instead of factoring a fraction of a cent per download ($.15/GB storage on amazon S3), you are really looking at it as a declining cost. So the initial podcast serving is the most expensive one, but everyone thereafter is subsequently cheaper to deliver (note these calculations do not account for CPU cycles or stuff like that, as I’m not even sure how to measure those).So as a result of these amortizations of costs, the storage costs are spread out across each delivery, so your costs per might go from $.005 to $.003 to $.002, which may seem like a whole lotta argument over nothing, but in fact adds up (think a million times). With these renewed figures in hand, podcasting becomes a more appealing medium for a broadcaster as his/her costs are no longer fixed at a certain fee per ad (which would’ve necessitated the CPM to be high to profit).Stay tuned for more posts this week as I will be opening up more of the details on castvertising.com, and maybe giving you guys a peek behind the curtains.

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 number of people (you have to hope the ads you bought months prior will reach as many as the network claims), podcasting offers precision download statistics, thus making a CPM (cost per thousand) model the ideal way to go.Using a CPM model we can effectively compute the revenue we generate per podcast. So for simplicity sake, lets assume a cost per thousand of $10 (which is probably at the low end of the scale). This means for every podcast downloaded, we are charging $0.01. 1 cent folks, this is a rounding error for most people, but here it isn’t about the pennies, its about the aggregate.So now that we’ve got our income, how much does it cost to host a podcast? Well if you were to use your run of the mill shared hosting, and figured for $20/month you can host 1000 podcasts (1000 x 10MB each = 10GB of traffic), then it is effectively costing you $.02 per podcast to run this show (all other costs excluded for this argument). By using the scale we’re looking to provide at castvertising.com, you effectively group the buying power and scale advantages that large scale webhosting has to offer. So with that in mind, we can effectively lower the distribution costs to a fraction of a cent. Only through use of economies of scale can the podcast advertising be both cost effective to advertisers (you don’t want them priced out of the equation), and profitable to the podcaster himself.Got any thoughts? discuss!

With the embedding of video increasingly easy to do (with flash’s near universal support), and the availability of content growing every day, it seems as if every website will become its own lineup of video. So on that note, I’m embedding video here today.

Ok so anyone have any idea why wordpress keeps fucking my embedded videos up? HTML mode, WYSIWYG mode, it doesn’t matter!

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 more curious about him than the All Mighty.How does this affect you, the small business owner? Well now you can access mounds of data that was previously unavailable to you for free. This is the data that some SEO analysts or interactive marketing firms were able to get for you in the past, but required alot of data crunching and analysis.Interestingly, they are also referencing news events in the timelines (take this comparison of amazon to web2.0, techcrunch, and startups).

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.

no, not the comedy, the actual space where you work.

Lots of startups debate whether or not to venture out of the home office, they ask themselves, will this be too expensive? Will it be worth it? Well for everyone this depends, it depends on how self-motivated you are, and how often you’ll be meeting with clients in person. Personally I couldn’t take working from home after 6 months.
Now depending on where you live, you can get affordable office space, Miami and san fran are not affordable (at least desirable places) for class A or B spaces. Even New York is cheaper! Ok ranting aside, look at it this way, if you are spending 10% of your revenue on office space, but feel you are getting 10% more done, then the gain in productivity is worth it, why? because growth is key. if you save yourself 10% now, but grow at only 5% a year, you’re making alot less money than if you spent the 10% and grew at 10%. Think of it as an investment in yourself and your company.

Now as far as finding office space, that is tough, with some markets having a 90+% occupancy, you might need to get creative. Lots of older towns have old reconditioned factories and warehouses, which make for very neat and creative spaces. One advantage of a warehouse is the super low rent, you might be able to find warehouse spaces in the $10-14/sq foot range (cheaper in some other parts), whereas class A office space will run $28-35/sq foot (miami examples people, bear with me).

In addition to the fact you might gain a great deal of efficiency, you also give off the air of stability more, which is also key in finding new clientele.

I’m going to post pictures of my office space in the next few days to give you guys an idea of how i work. Why don’t you share pics of your office?

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: booze.Ok, enough of the booze/partying, cinco de mayo and this whole week should make you realize that there are more and more non-english speaking people moving to this country every day. So it makes perfect sense for you as an entrepreneur to start looking at this untapped market as one that deserves a look. Now if you’re a software developer, or a programmer, you’re thinking “but creating a spanish version would take forever, and slow everything down.” Now this is a fair assumption, but in the meantime, have you ever thought of merely providing spanish documentation on your english language site? This would go a long way towards attracting more customers. There are hundreds of millions of spanish speaking people in our hemisphere alone, all waiting for the chance to use your company’s products.If you don’t make the effort, you can be assured that someone else will. There are legions of programmers at low wages throughout south america who you can hire to either translate your programs/sites, or develop documentation/aids to help your new customers.So take this advice, as someone who lives in the cauldron of latin america (miami), there is alot of money to be made south of the border, you just have to want it.

aka why YouTube won’t kill tv anytime soon

Lately all the uproar over the web has been that it is turning into nothing more than TV, and supposedly thats a shame. But in reality, all those people who thought the web was the thinking man’s medium have obviously been avoiding mySpace (no offense to myspace, but c’mon, its not like its pages are filled with prose), and need to realize that the web is just like every other entertainment medium we have. Just like TV, Film, Radio, etc. the internet is 90% entertainment, 10% value. So the fact that all these mediums are becoming eerily similar should be of no surprise to anyone.

Its been years since people have been proclaiming video to be the big thing coming to the web, and it wasn’t until recently that bandwidth and compatible platforms were available for this. So to those who think this is ruining the internet, they need to realize that “the internet is for porn.”

Originally the point of this article was going to be how the new video services are killing tv, and tv stations aren’t really getting the whole picture. Turns out today ABC announced full streaming video for free of their top shows. So that kinda kills my argument, but I felt I had to write this today anyway. TV still has alot to learn from the internet, but I’m too lazy to repeat everyone else’s arguments on microcontent, microchunking, and the new media platforms. Eventually everyone of the major networks will catch up to ABC, and TV will change. TV will not be a seperate medium from the internet, but rather a browser to various content channels. Now its just a matter of time before the alacarte cable tv idea is dead in favor of a network based system that aggregates people’s favorite shows, favorite web media, and delivers recommendations based on it all. oh wait, maybe its already here…

I’ll be reworking this site a little bit over the next few hours, this is going to be a reboot in 1 day type of affair (i just decided at 10:30 am I was doing this). Haven’t even mockedup a sketch in photoshop yet. So if you follow the site today, there might be some dust.